Nailed It!

by Mel Campbell

  ‘So,’ the producer said to Rose, her arms folded, looking up at her from under the brim of her baseball cap, ‘I’ve been told you want the back balcony to come down.’

  ‘It’s unsafe,’ Rose said. ‘There’s no way anyone can stand on it.’

  ‘And you decided this without standing on it yourself?’

  ‘It’s being held up by support beams glued to the windows,’ Rose said, unable to keep a note of incredulity out of her voice. ‘It’s an accident waiting to happen.’

  Behind her Dave made a small sighing sound. Rose didn’t have to turn to know his expression, and her heart suddenly ached. He meant well, but this show was letting his worst impulses run free. He wanted to show everyone he’d changed, but the path to change was small steps, not big gestures – especially not when those big gestures were dangerous.

  ‘But still, you didn’t test it in any way? Nothing we could have got on camera?’

  ‘You can film the supports all you like from the ground, but nobody should stand on that balcony.’

  ‘Come here a minute,’ the producer said, walking away from everyone else. Rose followed her into the downstairs office. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘we all want this to be a safe workplace. If you say nobody should stand on that balcony, then nobody is going out on that balcony.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But this is also a television show, and that means we have to have things happening that people will want to watch. Again, I want to be clear, we don’t want to put anyone in any real danger. But would you be okay if we had you outside and we filmed Dave walking out on the balcony, and then you told him everything you’ve just told us about not going out there and how unsafe it is?’

  ‘No,’ Rose said. ‘No way.’

  The producer looked annoyed. ‘He would only be out there for a few seconds at most. You could check the supports and make sure they’d hold that long.’

  ‘Look, I’m happy to point out to your camera crew why the supports are dangerous and the balcony will collapse, but there’s no way anyone is stepping on there while I’m here.’

  ‘Hmm,’ the producer said. ‘Okay, we’ll use the footage we have.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But the next time you see anything unsafe, you tell me first and then we’ll decide what to do about it.’

  ‘Okay,’ Rose said.

  ‘You go back out,’ the producer said, ‘I’ve got to let the site office know you want the balcony taken down.’

  Rose went out to the hall. ‘I can’t believe someone signed off on that in the first place,’ she said to one of the cameramen.

  ‘Hey, we just film what happens,’ he said. ‘We don’t get involved.’

  ‘We follow the contestants’ lead,’ the producer said, appearing behind Rose. The camera crews lifted their cameras up as she entered. ‘And we’re back to filming.’

  ‘Before we get started, I need a bathroom break,’ Rose said heading for the front door. ‘Back in five.’

  ‘Hurry back,’ Michelle said. ‘I’d hate for your usefulness to come to an end.’

  Walking across the court towards the portaloos, she took out her phone. There were at least twenty messages there, half of them from Nicola – but also messages from Renton, Old Steve, Young Steve, Alistair, her parents, Dan from The Dock, Simon from high school, Marco from overseas, and Tania and Nita from the make-up trailer. At least half of them called her the ‘Save Dave girl’. What was going on?

  The first message from Nicola was a link with the message OMG!! Rose clicked on it. It was a YouTube video that clearly showed Dave and Michelle’s kitchen. With a sinking heart, she opened it.

  All things considered, it could have been worse. For a fan video it was in focus, and reasonably well framed, too. There was no sound, obviously, but you could clearly see Dave’s mouth moving as his hand moved towards the switch that would turn on the fan, and Rose’s shout of alarm as she tried to stop him. The picture pulled back slightly to get the ceiling fan in shot once its blades started snapping off, but everyone ducking down – and Rose diving onto Dave to save him – was still perfectly clear.

  The clip kept going until Rose and Dave stood up; it was maybe a minute in all. It already had over fifteen thousand views, and the comments quickly linked her to the dog rescue from The Dock. I wonder if an even bigger reality show will poach me now, Rose thought.

  The rest of Nicola’s messages were links to various other news stories. It looked like the clip had already gone viral, and some mainstream news services – though none with any official connection to Mansions in the Sky – were already running the story. Everyone else was just messaging her to congratulate her on saving Dave, being the ‘Save Dave’ girl, calling her the bravest person they knew, making sure she was all right, and, in the case of Renton, asking her to bring home Thai for dinner.

  ‘Taking a break,’ a voice said behind her. It wasn’t a question. She turned; it was Leary, slowly crossing the court towards her.

  ‘Just heading to the bathroom,’ she said, walking away from him.

  ‘Stay a minute,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a chat.’

  Rose stopped. He walked up beside her. ‘Going by the way you were checking your phone, I take it you know that clip of you is very popular already. We’ll have a promo based around it on air by tonight.’

  ‘I was just doing my job.’

  ‘Yes, yes you were. And that’s why we brought you on here – because people love to see you saving things. Makes the heart flutter and the tears flow.’ Leary tilted his head, like a dog looking at a card trick. ‘But I was also talking to your field producer Bec just then, and she was telling me that you have some other problems with the house. You’ve spotted some other danger points?’

  Rose nodded. ‘The back balcony, for starters. It’ll have to come down. It’s unsafe.’

  ‘It’s good that you spotted that. But Bec tells me that you want it to come down now. Before anyone puts themselves in danger.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Leary laughed. ‘Of course! I love how sure you are. But as you well know, people love watching you rescue poor helpless animals. So what if we, say, put a dog up there and had you walk past just as the supports started to give way?’

  Rose gasped. ‘What? No! I’d never do that.’

  ‘Say, then, if you did a safety audit, let us know all the dangerous elements around the house, and then we all kept an eye on them to make sure if anything bad did happen, we were able to get a record of it for the show?’

  ‘If I see something dangerous, I’m going to have it removed,’ Rose said firmly. ‘I don’t want there to be any accidents while I’m around.’

  Leary looked over his shoulder to see if anyone was watching. ‘Look,’ he said, in a sly, confiding manner. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I trust you.’

  ‘Go on,’ Rose said warily.

  ‘As far as ratings go,’ he said, ‘Mansions in the Sky is struggling. We’re losing sponsors, this year’s contestants are not the cream of the crop, and we have fans lining the fence, filming everything they can and putting it online a week before our episodes go to air. So we need to find a way to get people to watch.’

  He grinned. ‘Obviously we don’t want anyone to get hurt. Did you even go and look under the balcony? We’ve got three mattresses piled under there in case it came down. The power point that Gino and George installed in the shower so they can use an electric razor while they wash? It’s not connected. The Muellers have installed a giant statement fish tank wall in their lounge room and the seals keep leaking, which is why we disconnected all the power points around it. And we don’t stop it from leaking because they didn’t reinforce the floor to hold its weight, and if it really was full of water it would crash through down into the wine cellar. Sure, the fish keep dying, but that’s television.’

 
Rose could see through his salesman act, but what he was selling made sense. ‘I understand you have to make a show,’ Rose said. ‘And I’ve seen the promos, so I get that you have to manufacture drama to keep people watching. So you’re saying these situations are also manufactured? They’re fake?’

  Leary gave her a thumbs-up.

  ‘And you’ll have people watching them all the time so if something does start to go wrong –’

  Leary was watching her intently now. ‘They’ll do what’s right, of course.’

  ‘Look, I still don’t know,’ she said warily. ‘It’s your show and I’m sure you know how to make it, but this really feels –’

  The was a shout from behind the Morgans’ house. Rose and Leary turned in time to see a skinny young man come running around the back of the house. He was clearly a fan; his clothes were dusty and he was waving his arms around with the kind of excitement nobody working on Mansions could have mustered at this stage of the season.

  ‘I made it!’ he shouted as he ran along the side of the house between the outer wall and the fence, ‘I’m on Mansions in –’

  He tripped and suddenly toppled onto his face, hitting the dirt with a thud. Then a shutter broke away from the window above him and fell flat on him with a solid whack. ‘Owww,’ he groaned.

  ‘You were saying …?’ Rose said.

  ‘He’s not a contestant,’ Leary said. A security guard who must have been chasing the fan appeared huffing and puffing around the side of the Muellers’ house; he pushed the shutter off the fan and lifted him up.

  ‘Whooooo!’ the fan said in a dazed voice. ‘Made it, Ma – top of the world!’ The guard dragged him away.

  ‘That didn’t look safe to me,’ Rose said. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Okay,’ Leary said, more sharply. ‘Are you willing to just keep your head down, stay out of sight, do your job and leave the safety issues to the people whose job it is to worry about such things?’

  Rose turned back to face him. ‘Worrying about safety is part of my job.’

  ‘No, that’s the producers’ job,’ he said. His genial expression had vanished. ‘Your job is to help the contestants realise their dreams. If you don’t want to take on a more active role when it comes to rescuing those contestants, then your job is just to follow their requests and keep as low a profile as possible. And that means leaving the safety side of things to other people.’

  Her face was stubborn. ‘If I see an unsafe situation, I’m shutting it down.’

  ‘I’m telling you, there are no unsafe situations on my show.’

  Rose shook her head. ‘Michelle sure ran out of the house like she was worried things were unsafe. Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on here.’

  That seemed to rattle Leary. ‘There’s nothing going on here,’ he said, his voice wavering. ‘Just do your job.’

  He started walking away, then called out over his shoulder. ‘Just do your job or you’ll be fired.’

  Rose had never written a love letter before. The closest she’d come was a string of eggplant emojis during some late-night texting sessions. And her handwriting wasn’t the best, either; she’d hardly written more than a sentence or two by hand since she left high school, and not much more than that before then. But she wanted to do things properly, and tonight she was going to write a love letter, not a love printout.

  It had been a weird day. After her chat with Leary, she’d returned to Dave and Michelle’s house and pushed herself to be a model tradie for them. It had helped that there hadn’t been any more dangerous situations around the house, and she’d been able to steer Dave away from some of his more unsafe ideas. He’d wanted to save space in the downstairs bathroom by moving the toilet into the laundry, and then he’d wanted to save space in the laundry by mounting the washing machine on the wall directly above the toilet. She’d eventually persuaded him to go with a smaller shower in the bathroom instead, but it had been close – and Michelle had been somewhere else during all of it.

  When Rose had finally made it home, her family had been out of their rooms waiting for her. For once it wasn’t just because she’d bought home Thai; they wanted to find out more about her action-packed day on set. Renton had only surfaced long enough to collect his food, but he mumbled something about being glad she was okay before he darted back into his room.

  ‘I’m so pleased to see you’re taking control of the meaning-making assemblage of television,’ Sarah had said delightedly. ‘Those videos of you saving Dave are really disrupting the narrative of neoliberal competence that those shows are trying to project.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum,’ Rose said.

  Alan, however, looked troubled. ‘I’m still struggling with the whole reality television matrix,’ he said. ‘I’m proud of you, because I didn’t raise you to be a heartless killer. But on the other hand, if people are foolish enough to compete on one of these shows, then they deserve to face the full consequences of their foolishness. But if their foolishness causes suffering for others, then it’s your moral duty to save those fools from themselves. It’s a conundrum.’

  Rose kissed him on the cheek. ‘I’m going to eat dinner in my room,’ she said. She was touched that her parents were even following a reality show. It was nice to be reminded that their love for her ran deeper than their snobbery.

  Now Rose was staring at a blank page. Maybe, she thought idly, I could ask Renton? Sarah had said she thought he had an online girlfriend: his downloading habit had dwindled; they constantly heard him talking to someone in his room; and when her mum had said the word ‘sexting’, Rose had stuffed her fingers in her ears. Now, she winced, dismissing the thought of her brother’s romantic expertise. A love letter from Renton would be like a spam email saying, ‘Renton69 sent u his latest s3xy video!’

  It took a few false starts, but soon her writing was … well, it was readable, and it was hers. Dave would understand.

  She had so much to tell him. She wanted to tell him about her day, about how she was feeling, what she was thinking, how it felt like he was at the centre of her life even though they’d barely exchanged more than a few honest sentences the whole time they’d been together. It helped when she thought of words as being like pieces of wood she was working with: she constructed her sentences piece by piece, like she was putting together a cabinet. And when she thought of Dave the words came so easily.

  Eventually she ended up spending more time cutting things out than writing things down; it was meant to be a letter, not a novel. And after all, they’d be writing back and forth for weeks. There was plenty of time to let him know everything she felt.

  Driving to work the next morning, she was the happiest she’d felt in a long time. The blue of the sky seemed softer today; and rather than its usual glare, the sun glowed with a friendly warmth. Even the long, boring drive out to the court flew by; after a fortnight she didn’t have to concentrate on remembering which turns to take on the endless curving roads, and when she saw the PENIS sign on the horizon it was like greeting an old friend.

  When she pulled into the car park there was no sign of the fans. They were still there, but during the night someone on the Mansions production crew had put up thick woven plastic sheeting on this side of the chain-link fence blocking the view. Rose wasn’t sure how long the plastic would last – she could already see dents where the fans on the other side had tried to poke holes in it – but at the very least it would reduce the problem of fan filming. Which was definitely a good thing: she noticed that some time the previous night someone had scrawled I WISH MY WIFE WAS THIS DIRTY in the dust on the bonnet of her ute.

  If only you knew, she thought with a smile.

  She nodded to Daryl the security guard as she headed to the site office; they’d chatted briefly on her way out last night. He was a big fan of Grim Designs.

  When Rose entered the site office through the back door, there was
no one around – just a sheet of paper on the kitchen table that said STAFF MEETING IN MARQUEE. They’d never had a staff meeting before. Maybe the new tradies Donald had mentioned had finally arrived?

  Just about everyone was already waiting out in the marquee by the food truck – maybe a dozen tradies plus Cody. Donald was there too, but there was no sign of Lightning Rod; presumably he was one of the ones they were waiting for.

  ‘Any idea what this is about?’ Rose asked Donald, sitting down next to him at one of the tables.

  ‘No idea,’ he said, looking around. ‘They’ve never had a big meeting mid-season before.’

  ‘While we’re waiting, I’m going to make a quick dash to the bathroom,’ Rose said, standing back up. ‘Don’t let them start without me.’

  The portaloos were all empty. Rose patted the letter in her back pocket; maybe she should try and arrange a meeting with Dave here? But it was too risky for them both to be absent at the same time; maybe they could arrange something next week, when she was bound to be back working on someone else’s house. Plus the toilets were, quite frankly, rank; she really didn’t want to start to associate their stench with getting her hands on Dave.

  It was while she was walking back to the marquee that she saw Michelle leave the site office, buttoning up her blouse. Michelle must have thought everyone was at the meeting, as she didn’t seem bothered that she only had two buttons done up so far. And then walking out right behind her was Leary, who rested a hand casually on her hip. Well well well, Rose thought, what have we got here? And since when did I become a clichéd British bobby?

  Clearly Michelle wasn’t above sleeping with the boss. Well, he wasn’t exactly her boss. But Rose was pretty sure they were sleeping together, going by the way Michelle kissed Leary before scurrying off around the back of the food truck towards her house. Leary watched her leave, then turned and headed towards the marquee. Rose waited until he’d rounded the corner of the site office, then followed.