Dark Video

by Peter Church

  Alistair looked around the room. The curtains were drawn, all eyes focused on him.

  “It’s going to be a long process.”

  “It’s a waste of fucking time,” said Johnny, bouncing a tennis ball repetitively against the wall.

  “Johnny’s right, it’s a long shot,” agreed Richard.

  “I have faith in you, Alesandro. Everything you touch…”

  Richard stood up and walked through to the kitchen.

  “There is this one guy. Derrick Young. Terminal. He can swim. And his wife will be left destitute when he’s gone.”

  “How long’s he got?”

  “Six months.”

  “Sounds perfect. You working on him?”

  “Sure.”

  Johnny blew air loudly through his teeth. “Bullshit! I know Morgan. He’s got fuck all. He’s stalling us.”

  “If Alistair doesn’t want to do the deal, he’d tell us,” said Devon. “Wouldn’t you, Alistair?”

  “Sure,” said Alistair again. He rattled the brown plastic phial in his pocket.

  “It takes patience, Johnny. Try to learn some,” said Devon.

  Richard returned with a tray of tea. “I baked banana bread.”

  Johnny shook a limp wrist effeminately; Richard pulled a finger.

  “Why don’t we go my route?” Johnny repeated. “It’s a dare. If the shark eats me, I get nothing.” He grinned at Richard’s contorted expression. “Obviously. And if it checks me out, bumps me, I get a million. You film me, direct me, get the expression on my face—very professionally.”

  Devon feigned disinterest. “Johnny, we’re trying to have a meaningful conversation here. Alistair’s making progress. Stop speaking shit all your life and listen. You might learn something.”

  He turned to Alistair. “So he’s fifty. He’s a swimmer, no problem. Six months left. You think you can persuade him?”

  Johnny guffawed. “When you tell him about the shark, please let me be there to film it. Please. It’ll be the best piece this summer. We won’t even need to get him in the water.”

  Devon silenced Johnny with a wave of his hand. “Alistair’s winning his trust. How much time do you need?”

  Alistair shrugged. “I’ll go back tomorrow.” He hadn’t planned to go back. Ever.

  “I’ll speak to Carlos,” said Devon. “Other agents are working on this project so we need to push to close it first. But don’t rush. We have the location. I’ll buy time.”

  Johnny shook his head belligerently and hurled the tennis ball at the wall.

  “Don’t forget the dry run on Saturday,” reminded Devon. “I’ve organized the boat.”

  First light. They floated the boat off the trailer into the calm water of Kalk Bay harbor. His uncle hardly ever went out any more, Devon had explained, was happy to let them use it for a while. A twelve-foot ski boat kitted with rented wet suits, rods and reels, bait. Its load delivered, Richard drove the Mercedes off the slipway, over-revving, and parked it, under Devon’s wary orders, in a lot several hundred meters away.

  Johnny, waist deep in the harbor water, anchored the boat as Alistair and Devon loaded duffel bags with the camera equipment.

  “Beautiful fucking day,” Johnny muttered, looking out to sea. A low mist swathed False Bay, reducing visibility and lending an eerie atmosphere to proceedings.

  “Perfect conditions,” replied Devon. “Calm seas and no wind means we don’t get seasick. And this mist will burn off in an hour or so, I reckon.”

  This was practice session number one—a test flip, part of Devon’s grand plan to rehearse every aspect of the script. Today they were getting used to handling the boat; hopefully they could rig up some of the equipment, get some test shots out at sea. The sharks would come later. The early start was designed to avoid attracting too much attention from locals who might take notice of a group of suburban landlubbers struggling to put a boat to sea.

  It was a tedious day’s work. Up before dawn, out for the whole day in the baking sun, the sound of the engine, the smell of diesel, the salty spray of the ocean, the rocking of the boat as the breeze picked up.

  “What are we? Fishermen or divers?”

  “Both,” laughed Devon.

  The extensive video equipment was disguised as extra dive gear. Devon had even purchased a frozen yellowtail the previous evening to demonstrate success on the jetty if their token fishing session didn’t deliver any luck.

  They didn’t get a bite.

  But they managed to navigate their way east to Seal Island where they observed the two cage diving operators chumming for sharks a couple of hundred meters off the island’s south shore. They didn’t hang around, though, giving them a friendly wave before altering course, veering south, in the direction of Cape Point.

  A kilometer or so off Smitswinkel Bay, Devon cut the engines for their first equipment check. The underwater camera was attached to the telescoping pole and linked to a small onboard monitor, the feed coming through clearly after a painstaking rigging process. Johnny was ordered to dive in to serve as a test subject, to ascertain what distances they could clearly film to underwater.

  But the monitor image only lasted a few seconds before the picture was lost. Johnny spent several minutes treading water as Devon and Richard performed some emergency troubleshooting to no avail.

  “Must be water getting in somewhere,” muttered Devon, as he checked the connections. Eventually he gave up trying to fix the problem, concerned that there might be a casing leak, which would put the actual camera in jeopardy.

  “That’s why we do the test runs,” he remarked, as Johnny pulled himself into the boat, cursing the entire expedition. “Better not risk the other camera today if we’ve got a possible leak.”

  “Fucking waste of time,” Johnny muttered, stripping off his wet suit.

  Alistair laughed quietly to himself in the front of the boat. At the console, Devon practiced keeping a steady hand on a rocking boat.

  When they returned to the slipway in the late afternoon, they made a point of chatting to a couple of harbor locals. Not too conspicuous; not too aloof. Project Grey Suit was under way.

  “Derrick, look at this article,” Alistair said, holding up a recent issue of the Sunday Times magazine. He’d waited until after the reading session, his third, when the other patients had been wheeled off to their rooms.

  “Read it for me, won’t you?”

  Alistair narrated the stories of several prominent Hollywood stunt men, focusing particularly on the large sums of money they earned, proportionate to the risk taken. The article ended with an exposé on stunt men within the South African film and advertising industry.

  “Stunt men? As in Evel Knievel?” said Derrick.

  “Exactly. And in South Africa too. They can die. They risk their lives for a payout.”

  “Didn’t Evel Knievel die?”

  “Uh, yeah. But of natural causes, I think. He was pretty old in the end.”

  “What are you telling me, lad?”

  “Well…” Alistair paused for a moment. Where was he going with this? What exactly was he trying to achieve? “Well, your life is not at risk. Because you know you are going to die either way.”

  “That I do.”

  “So perhaps you could do a stunt. Because there’s no need to worry about the danger aspect of it.”

  Derrick Young’s body convulsed into a coughing fit. Alistair reached for his glass of water and offered it to him.

  “Thanks, lad. You’re cheering up my days, at least. What sort of a stunt could an old man in my state do?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Alistair replied, taking a large gulp of water for himself. “But just imagine: you could gamble on anything. The most dangerous of stunts.”

  “Getting down the stairs would be a stunt for me, lad. I don’t think anyone’s going to pay me for that.”

  “But maybe there’s something else…”

  Boat trip number two. This time they launched from the Buffel
sbaai slipway in the Cape Of Good Hope Nature Reserve, thirty kilometers south of Kalk Bay—Devon had wanted to avoid getting into a routine. He had fixed the faulty connection, ensured there wouldn’t be any problems this time round.

  Once at sea, Devon and Richard rigged the onboard Canon on a tripod at the back of the boat, with automated pivot and zoom functions. The pole camera, fixed and operating properly, was returning good shots of Johnny treading water next to the boat; Alistair operated the pole, while Devon tested the controls, rotating the camera and zooming in on the bottom of the boat, then panning back to Johnny. Both cameras were wired into the central controls, where the monitor allowed them to watch two outputs on a split screen, or flick from one cam to the other in full screen.

  “Aren’t we going to try lure a beast or two?” asked Johnny, as he hauled himself back into the boat, unzipping his wet suit to the waist.

  “In good time, Johnny,” replied Devon. He watched the monitor closely as he tested the onboard camera’s automatic controls, flicking over the surface of False Bay, zooming in to the dramatic cliffs of Cape Point, then out, panning slowly north along the peninsula.

  “Check it out,” he said. “They think no one can see them.”

  The monitor showed two topless sunbathers dropping in and out of view as the boat rose and fell on the swell. They were tucked in between the rocks at Venus Pool, over a kilometer away.

  “Jesus, the zoom on these things is crazy,” said Alistair, clearly impressed.

  Devon smiled and flicked to the underwater view: a sinister blue-green haze, visibility about eight to ten meters.

  “The trick is to synchronize. Both cameras must train on the same spot—which gets a bit tricky in the heat of the action. Ritchie, make sure you get the hang of operating this one manually.” Devon indicated the onboard camera. “You have to be aware of the swell. And Alistair, if you can control the pole with your left arm, you can film with the handheld in your other hand. Never know, it might be useful.”

  “Surely we need to get a shark in now,” insisted Johnny. “What if we can’t attract them?”

  “Not yet,” repeated Devon. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Two weeks from now, we’ll head out to the island when the cage divers have gone. If we just start chumming for sharks now, someone will report us.”

  Two weeks, thought Alistair—where did that come from?

  The rigging and derigging of the cameras was painstaking; the equipment disguised in plastic containers and duffel bags to avoid detection, the presence of video equipment on the boat entirely secret.

  That evening after docking, Devon told another skipper about a huge great white that had circled the boat while they were snorkeling.

  “You getting into that water?” the skipper asked incredulously.

  “Sure. Lots of people dive in False Bay.”

  “Ja,” he agreed. “But I’ll just stay in my boat, thank you very much.” He walked away shaking his head.

  “What’s it like to know you are dying?”

  Derrick rocked back and forth.

  “I have long since accepted it. I’m only fifty, but I feel old. Tired. No energy. I am not afraid. Except for Dorothy. It eats me deeper than the cancer. We have spent our lives together. Now I leave her with nothing.”

  “But do you think about the…actual death?”

  “I suppose so. You just shut down, fade out.”

  “Do you not think of ending it early?”

  Derrick chuckled, a rasping sound coming from deep down. Alistair felt a deep, abiding pity for the man, frail and vulnerable. He wanted to tell him that he was being stitched up, conned. That he should just tell Alistair to leave and get out of his life. Instead, he continued probing, detached, as if his voice were independent of his thoughts.

  “I know someone who works for a foreign company that performs mad, crazy stunts. But the risk is great. He asked me if I would do one.”

  “And what stunt is that?”

  “Swim with a great white.”

  “You look haggard,” Silverman said. “You missed class.”

  “Are you my mother?” Alistair lay on his bed in Green 212.

  “No. But I can be. Mamma wants a hug.”

  “Buzz off, Silverman. I need to sleep.”

  Devon had phoned in the morning, urgent for a progress report on Derrick Young at the Hospice. Alistair couldn’t understand it; one minute it was a six-month timeline, then suddenly two weeks.

  “I came to borrow your opener,” said Silverman, holding up Alistair’s corkscrew. “But these caught my eye. What, pray, are they?” He pointed to the brown phial of tablets.

  “Anxiety pills.”

  Silverman picked up the phial and twirled it in his hand. “No label?”

  “A friend makes them up. They’re natural or something.”

  “Hmm. What’s in them?” Silverman popped the lid and sniffed.

  “Put them down,” said Alistair, sitting up.

  Silverman lifted the phial to his mouth and poured in the contents, about a dozen pills.

  “No!” Alistair jumped up and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Spit them out, you idiot!”

  Silverman opened his mouth, showed him the contents, then crunched his teeth together and swallowed.

  “You’re insane, Silverman.”

  “In sin! What’s in them?” Silverman turned and headed for the door, corkscrew in hand. “I think I better go lie down.”

  “Damn it, Silverman!” shouted Alistair, hurling the phial after him.

  How am I going to relax now? he thought.

  “You look tired,” said Terri. Alistair had slept the whole day.

  “I’m under work pressure.” Khaki shorts hung loosely on his hips.

  They lay on their backs on the grass in the Rose Garden, close enough, but not touching. A breeze blew a wisp of her hair across his face and Alistair leant over to tuck it behind her ear. He felt lethargic, as whacked as the students dawdling down the hill.

  “You know,” she said, “what happened to me changed my life. As terrible as it was, it has defined me. I am a different person.”

  A shaft of sun filtered through the trees.

  “Better or worse?”

  “Different.”

  He waited for her to explain.

  “I don’t know what it is, but I can talk to you, Alistair.” She pushed herself into a sitting position, ran her hand along the sleeve of her T-shirt. He wiggled his toes against hers.

  “Do I make you happy?” he fished.

  She considered the question for a moment. “You’ve become a good friend.”

  He stopped wiggling, not sure if he was satisfied with the answer.

  “I met Henri in my very first week at varsity. He was my first boyfriend.”

  “First?” He sat up too.

  She looked away and blushed. “Can you believe that?”

  “I think you should be proud of that. I wish I could say the same.”

  She laughed and kicked him. “I won’t tell you what Katie said about you.”

  “I know! More charming than a bridegroom, sweeter than a boy scout. Does Katie know?”

  Terri frowned. “She knows about you helping me.”

  “No, I mean, about us seeing each other.”

  “Are we seeing each other?” She giggled.

  “Well, you said…you said we were good friends.”

  Above their heads, the clouds motored across the sky, high winds beating a slave-like tempo to an indefinite location. Inside the Rose Garden, the air seemed to hang breathlessly.

  “Do you still have the dread?” he asked.

  “It’s fading.”

  “I think I’ve got it now.”

  “Do you ever wonder what happened to me?”

  “I know what happened,” he replied quickly, then paused. “An act of revenge. Henri’s ex. It must have been.”

  “I sometimes wonder.”

  Alistair fell back and closed his eyes.


  “You look so tired,” she repeated.

  “I think it’s these pills I’ve been taking.”

  “Pills. For what?”

  “Anxiety attacks.”

  “I can’t believe that.” She laughed. “You. Anxious. More confident than a…”

  He looked away.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make fun of you.”

  She shuffled over, leaned in. Her hair fell down around his face creating a cocoon. He breathed deeply, her nearness, her scent, the subtle heat in her cheeks, the movement on her lips; he could even sense the warmth of her skin as she lowered her lips above his. She kissed him lightly.

  “What was that?”

  She threw her head back, blushed. “I always wanted to kiss Jude Law. It’s the new me.”

  “I like the new you.” Alistair sat up and pulled her back toward him. “Want to try again?”

  She backpedaled, resisted his pull. “No. Once is enough. Been there, done that.” Her eyes sparkled.

  “Where’ve you been all my life?” he asked.

  “You don’t believe for a moment that kind of talk will work with me, surely?”

  “I can only try.”

  “You’re not my type,” she said, patting his hand.

  “I thought your type was someone who made you happy.”

  “That’s the old Terri.”

  Alistair stared at the sky, the marching procession of white clouds. “What’s your type now, Terri?”

  “Someone I trust myself with.”

  Alistair rolled his eyes.

  “Counts you out,” she laughed.

  “You’re going to swim with a great white?” asked Derrick Young, eyes wide. “Must be crazy.” The room smelled of disinfectant.

  “I am…thinking about it.” Alistair placed a marker in the Withnail screenplay. Most of the other patients were asleep. “The money is just so tempting.”

  “Madness, I’m telling you.”

  “Do you know how much they’ll offer?” said Alistair.

  “You’d be mad to, boy.”

  “But if the money was right, it’s got be worth it….Have you ever heard of snuff movies, Derrick?”