by Nev Fountain
Mervyn went on to the location bus with a coffee and a bacon butty.
‘Hi Mervyn,’ said everyone.
‘Hi everyone,’ said Mervyn.
The guys who shifted stuff and plugged stuff in were always friendly to the writers; they shared a camaraderie with the underdog. He would have talked to them in a suitably matey fashion, but that would have involved knowing their names. He sat down near the male runner and the female runner. He didn’t know their names either, but at least they were young and unimportant.
In among the shaggy beasts of the location crew there were even hairier creatures—a few Gorgs at the back sipping coffee and doing sudokus trying to amuse themselves as best they could, which was difficult as they’d been in make-up for about four hours so far.
Gorgs were the subservient creatures that did the Styrax’s menial tasks for them, which conveniently included picking things off the floor, operating controls, opening doors and walking across terrain that wasn’t perfectly flat. Anything that a large lump of fibreglass on wheels couldn’t do. Which was everything.
Mervyn hurriedly created the Gorgs after watching the Styrax flounder around on their first day on location. The Gorg’s back-story was simple and neat. They were the race that built the Styrax, their original drivers. But after centuries of being dominated by their own machines they’d regressed into primitive grunting creatures. He’d got the idea after he’d needed the guttering fixed on his house and two lumbering apes in overalls turned up driving a rusty old van with the Daily Star on the dashboard.
In the original series, the Gorgs were little more than guys in ape costumes. The current production team had decided to update them so they looked like proper aliens—let the fans sort out why they appeared so different. Mervyn approved of the redesign. The new Gorg looked rather impressive. It was now a huge beast with a tiny trunk-like nose, like a tapir. The trunk nose had horns sprouting from it, leading all the way up its head and stretching down to its armoured neck. It looked like the product of an orgy between an elephant, a bear and a rhinoceros.
He couldn’t see any senior members of the production team about outside. Wait—there was Glyn, walking across the car park with a satchel. He bounded up the steps of the bus and shouted down the aisle. ‘Hello, hello, hello! Isn’t this brilliant with an extra dose of terrifying, my lovelies? It’s my first day, so I’ve got my new school bag and scrumptious apples for all the teachers.’ He went up and down the bus, handing out bright red apples and goodie bags. Some smiled at the gesture, others tried to ignore him. ‘Bye bye all! See you at assembly my lovelies!’ Glyn gave a cheery wave, left, walked past the window and into a large green trailer.
‘Who’s in there?’ Mervyn asked the runners.
‘Glyn,’ said the male runner. ‘That’s his trailer.’
He had a trailer! The writer had a trailer! Mervyn had definitely been born 20 years too soon.
Just as Glyn shut the door of the trailer, Nick appeared from nowhere as if he was lurking in the vicinity. He followed Glyn inside. No more than 15 seconds later, Glyn left again. His demeanour had completely changed. He looked tired and exasperated.
Nick appeared at the door and followed him out. Then Glyn appeared again. He’d just walked around the trailer and returned to the door. He went inside. Nick went up to the door, hovered there, but this time decided not to go in. He mooched away, dispirited and lost. It was like watching the performance of a bedroom farce from backstage.
‘Do they share the trailer?’ Mervyn asked.
‘They did on Dog the Wagz,’ said the boom operator. ‘Unofficially.’
‘Yeah,’ said the unit driver. ‘Now they unofficially don’t.’
Randall climbed aboard the bus. His affable ‘Aw, shucks’ manner was not in evidence. He looked tense and angry.
‘Where’s Ken?’
‘I haven’t seen him,’ said the female runner.
‘Well he should be the first one here. The shoot can’t function without him.’ Mervyn was watching Patch, the Location Manager and the Production Designer busily chugging past the bus in puffer jackets. The shoot was indeed functioning without Ken. Ken would have probably slowed things down with his obstructive and muddle-headed instructions.
‘Have you tried the boot of his car?’ Mervyn muttered. Randall sat down opposite him, slumping head-first on the table. Mervyn felt guilty; Randall was obviously distressed. ‘Don’t worry,’ he added. ‘I’m sure nothing’s happened to him.’
Randall looked up, and stared at Mervyn like he was just saying random words. ‘Who?’
‘Ken. I’m sure he’ll be fine. I don’t think there’s been an accident.’
Randall looked darkly at Mervyn.
‘There’s already been an accident, Merv.’
He threw his newspaper down on the table. The headline was ‘HIT AND RUN DRIVER KILLS MOTHER OF TWO’.
Mervyn picked it up and studied it. He failed to see the point.
‘Who is she?’
Randall laughed bitterly. ‘Don’t worry. It’s no one attached to the shoot. No one I know. Just some lady from Gwelk or Gwark or Gweedo or whatever they call their villages down here. Just some woman who just got unlucky.’
‘Fair enough. But I don’t—’
‘The roads round here are really treacherous, tiny windy little tracks with blind corners, no room to pass or overtake. You really need to concentrate. But visiting drivers just don’t treat them with respect. They just don’t give a shit. That’s why the roads are so dangerous.’
He tapped the paper. ‘There. That’s the reason why I wanted your Styrax on the pilot, Merv. I’ll wager this asshole was just some guy down from the city, escaping to his second home, hoping to wax his surfboard and do some fishing. I bet he thought he could treat the roads round here like a freeway, take the bends at 70 miles per hour. He was wrong, and now she’s dead.’
He sat, crossed his arms and stuck one foot on the edge of the table, like a watchful sheriff in an old western. ‘I once lived in a little place near Mulholland Drive in the hills. It’s got some nasty roads too, and some kids drive too fast round there, but not as fast as the boys on their way in and out of the big city…’ He blinked furiously. ‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, my friend’s car got totalled by another stupid driver who didn’t like waiting for stop signals and she ended up with her ass in a wheelchair and peeing through a tube.’
‘Oh. I see. I’m sorry about that.’
‘So am I. So, you see Merv, there’s your answer. That’s why I wanted the Styrax in the pilot. When I watched the reruns on PBS they made quite an impression on me. “Whoah,” I thought. “Evil super-intelligent automobiles bent on killing and ruining people’s lives? I can relate to that.” That really spoke to me.’ He stopped and frowned. ‘What?’
Mervyn turned to follow Randall’s line of vision. Bryony was there in the door of the bus. Her expression was sickly, like a surgeon preparing to tell an anxious father-to-be that they’d lost the baby.
‘Ken’s here.’
*
‘He looks terrible.’
They watched him from the bus. Ken had arrived and had poured out of his car. His face was chalk-white and he staggered with agonising slowness to the location bus. Mervyn was reminded of a mime artist walking against a non-existent wind.
He didn’t say ‘sorry’ for being late; in fact he didn’t say anything to anyone. He grabbed a polystyrene cup, poured himself a generous black coffee, lumbered to the table vacated by Mervyn and practically fell on to it, scattering the runners like skittles.
The newspaper was still there, where Randall had slapped it down.
Ken glanced at the paper. At the headline ‘HIT AND RUN DRIVER KILLS MOTHER OF TWO’.
Was it Mervyn’s imagination—or did Ken flinch?
*
No one seemed interested in tackling Ken about his lateness; not even Randall. Perhaps they all realised that the number one priority lay in getting some fi
lming done, not having a screaming match in a supermarket car park.
Mervyn decided to hang around the set so he went into the supermarket, doors gliding open and shut in front of him and behind him.
Louise walked up to him, swathed in a huge coat that looked like it had a tog value of 93. ‘Impressive, isn’t it?’
‘It looks very snug.’
‘Not the coat. Look what our team have done. Impressive, isn’t it?’ she said, gesturing at what they’d done.
‘It’s very surprising, what they’ve done.’ Mervyn neatly sidestepped an outright lie.
The production team had dressed the inside of the supermarket to look like an alien battleship. They’d put fake banks of controls over the frozen chickens, taken down the ‘special offer’ signs and put flashing lights over the tills. Now it looked exactly like a supermarket clumsily dressed to look like an alien battleship.
‘Anything the BBC can do, we can do better. We’ll show them. Not that we’re competing. But we’ll show them.’
There was a crackle, and the supermarket tannoy system scraped their ears.
‘WILL LOUISE FELCHAM COME TO THE TILLS. WILL LOUISE FELCHAM COME TO THE TILLS, PLEASE.’
‘That’s Nick’s voice. What the hell’s he playing at?’
They went to the tills where Nick was waiting for them. His face was like a naughty schoolboy’s.
‘What do you think you’re playing at?’
‘So cool. I’ve so always wanted to do this.’
‘What the hell do you want, Nick? Or are you just playing the arsehole?’
He pressed the button again. ‘CLEAN-UP IN AISLE 13.’
‘Stop that!’ snapped Louise. Nick pointed to aisle 13, where raised voices were heard. ‘Stop messing around, Nick. Spit it out.’
‘It’s one of the Wagz—the dark-haired one. There’s a problem.’
‘Oh God. Has she collapsed in the toilets with her head in a bucket of coke?’
‘Worse.’
‘Oh God. She’s decided she wants to stop collapsing in toilets with a bucket of coke? That’s it isn’t it? Don’t tell me—she wants a week to dry out.’
‘Even worse. She’s asking questions about her character’s motivation. And she’s asking Ken.’
‘Get Glyn.’
Nick paled. ‘I’d rather not.’
‘Fine. I’ll get Glyn. You wet piece of haddock.’ She waddled off, like an angry Womble.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The dark-haired one was standing, appropriately enough, by the frozen chickens.
She was the one with ambition. If she didn’t have ambition, she wouldn’t have auditioned for Star-Spangled Ballads. She was working in a sports shop in Birmingham when she saw the advert in the paper and didn’t waste any time. She kicked off the expensive trainers she was demonstrating, handed in her notice and travelled to London with a tent and a Thermos. Four days later, after the rest of the Stepford Wagz joined her and the O2 arena opened its doors, they were the first in the queue.
Once in the audition rooms, she squealed and flattered the female judge, flirted with the nasty judge and bitched about the other judges with the gay one. When it came to the semi-finals, she suddenly remembered her dad was in prison and cried about him on live television. She invented hard luck stories for the blonde one’s mum and hinted that the ugly one was being bullied by some of the other contestants. Unlike the other girls in the group, she didn’t believe it was destiny that she would be a world megastar, she knew she had to make it happen. And she wasn’t about to stop working for it any time soon.
The film was fun, yeah; a film about the members of a girl band who also happened to be hardened criminals. It traded off the Stepford Wagz’s popularity among pre-teen girls and sexually awakening boys, and they all essentially played themselves. But that was just a British movie. To the dark-haired one, it was like appearing in British porn; sure the punters watched it, but it was all a bit shabby, low-rent stuff. But this pilot, this was another opportunity; this was the first step to proper acting. To Hollywood.
The dark-haired one was smiling, but it was a smile on a smooth, pointed, dangerous face. The smile was comically out of place, like the cheeky grins squaddies draw on missiles before they get launched. Tight black jeans and a T shirt with ‘Get the Fun out of Here’ written on it (the name of their first album) were like a second skin on her hard, boyish body. The kind of body about which men usually say ‘but she’s just skin and bone’ when they’re reassuring their girlfriends with the lie that their saggy white breasts are infinitely preferable to the leather-clad ladies gyrating on the telly.
She was talking to Ken—the worst person she could have found. Ken had somehow found his way on set, the coffee still in his hand. He looked more baffled than her, his hand cradling his forehead. She was showing him her script, which was heavily tattooed with notes and squiggles around her lines. Mervyn moved closer, and could hear their voices from the other side of the aisle.
‘This is just nonsense.’ Her voice sounded like it came from a woman many decades older, a low growling noise she’d cultivated by standing outside nightclubs in winter wearing tiny skirts with a cigarette in her mouth. She sounded suspicious and aggressive. ‘This just doesn’t make sense. I’ll say it again. In scene 83 I tell Elysia I know she’s an android spy, and that I always knew it, and I’ve known it ever since she came back from the Voidlands.’
‘Okaay,’ said Ken wearily. Mervyn remembered Ken’s catchphrase. Every problem was met with his trademark, weary ‘Okaay’. The director looked around for help, but there was none.
‘But in scene 19, me and Elysia, we’re both trapped in the ship by the Styrax and we surrender because the air is leaving the ship faster than rescue can get to us…’
‘Okaay…’
‘But I’ve got a space helmet. So I’m not in danger of being suffocated, and she’s a robot, so neither is she. So why do I surrender? And if I know she’s a robot, doesn’t that make me really stupid? Isn’t Medula supposed to be the clever one?’
‘Well, obviously, you want to keep the fact you know she’s a robot secret, so you can study her, you know, find out more about her.’
‘But we’re being captured by the enemy! Studying the enemy by pretending to be chummy with a bloody robot is just crap. It’s mad. And it doesn’t say that in the script.’
‘Well okaay… If you didn’t surrender, right, and you reveal you know she’s a robot…then she’d obviously try to kill you.’
‘Um. Hello? Got a blaster in my hand! Why don’t I roast her metal arse with my laser gun, put my helmet on and sit tight until the rescue ship arrives?’
Ken looked like he would love to be blasted with a laser gun at that precise moment; anything to stop him listening to the shouty girl talking about plot holes in Vixens from the Void.
She continued, flapping the script back to another bookmarked page. ‘Also right at the start, in scene nine there’s this really stupid bit when we’re alone on the bridge of the spaceship. I talk about my difficult childhood to her, I get all weepy and stuff and I let her comfort me. She cradles my head on her lap and it’s kind of implied we have sex and stuff.’
‘Right… Okaay…’
The dark-haired one looked aghast at Ken not getting it. ‘Well where do I start? If I know she’s a robot… I’ve, well, I’ve just had sex with a robot! And I knew she was a robot! And I just talked about my difficult childhood…to a robot!’ She waved the script in his face. ‘I mean, what am I? The kind of girl who gets her rocks off sitting on washing machines?’ Ken pushed his face up through his fingers, noticed Mervyn, and threw a finger in his direction.
‘Look, there’s a writer. Go and discuss it with him. I’ve got better things to do.’ Ken blundered off. The dark-haired one turned her gaze to Mervyn.
‘You wrote this? Seriously? I thought Glyn wrote it.’
‘Well I wrote the original version. The one that was on the telly in the 80s.’
‘Where’s Glyn? I want to talk about scene 83.’
‘I…don’t think he’s about.’
‘Well he fucking should be. God, fuck this shit. I want my agent,’ she shouted at some random person. ‘Get me my agent! No one’s taking this shit seriously but me. I only did this because Glyn was the writer. Dog the Wagz was good, but this is bollocks!’ She got out her iPhone and tapped the screen, shouting into it. ‘Denise! I’m coming back to London. I want a plane here in 15 minutes.’
Mervyn was faced with a potential crisis. He saw the production crumbling before his eyes. He could finally see a way he could help, and pay Randall back for that money he’d shovelled his way. He scuttled after the dark-haired one and intercepted her.
‘I think we can fix this.’
‘It’s way too late. You heard what I said to Denise.’
‘Unless she’s hiding behind that piece of scenery, I don’t think she heard you.’
‘What?’ she snapped.
‘You might be able to conjure up a private plane in 15 minutes, but I don’t think even you can conjure a mobile phone signal in Cornwall.’
She looked at the useless iPhone in her hand and put it away. She actually smiled. A cute little smile. ‘Okay. You got me.’ She slammed the script in his hands. ‘You see my problem? It’s just bollocks.’
‘Let me look at that. Oh, this is easily fixable. You can do it with a few extra lines.’
‘You’re fucking kidding me.’
‘You’ve got three problems, here. The line in scene 83 about knowing all along that she’s a robot; the scene in the stranded airless spaceship where you surrender; and the scene near the start when you get all emotional and everything gets a bit, well…’
‘Sexy.’
‘Right. We can change the line in scene 83 to solve the other two problems. Bear with me.’ Mervyn rested her script on his knee and wrote very carefully in the margins of her script. It took a while, but the dark-haired one waited meekly, all traces of furious impatience gone. At heart, she was an insecure young girl barely out of her teens, and the strain of decision-making had taken its toll. She was tired of being in control and all she really wanted was someone to tell her what to do and reassure her.