style="font-size:15px;"> ‘Nah, it’s fine.’
He walks off as I shut the door, saunters back to his van. He looks like he gets a lot of sex. He looks like he has them queuing up. You can tell he is good in bed, in a young excitable way.
I thought my parcel would be from the book club, but it’s not. It’s the organic meat my father keeps ordering for me and having sent directly to my house. He is worried about contaminants, about what they put into beef these days. If I refuse to become a vegan, like my dad, he is going to keep ordering me ‘clean cow’ as Charlie calls it, which just makes me want to chuck it straight in the bin. Somewhere deep inside of me I know I don’t want to eat meat any more. If Charlie calls our bacon sandwich ‘pig’ I retch. I can’t eat the animal, and hear or say the animal’s name at the same time. Unfortunately I just really like the taste. It’s yet another issue I’m avoiding, I know, but today isn’t a day for confrontations, especially with myself. I just put the meat in the fridge, in the knowledge that it will probably have gone bad, organic or not, by the time I get around to cooking for myself in my own flat. Cooking for one demands minimal effort, and therefore the use of either the toaster or the microwave, and I don’t think I can put steak in either of them. Of course I don’t know for sure.
My neighbours are out now, going to work, going to the shops. I say good morning to a couple of them, the older ones. I smile at the young guy who has moved into the flat on the first floor. He is tall and broad and looks like he does a lot of sport. He is wearing a suit, which puts me off slightly, and swings a gym bag by his side. He will work out today, at the gym at work, with the other City boys, but in his own little world, picturing his muscles expanding with every bench press. I can picture his lungs, clean and clear, the little hairs swaying, not tarred and blackened like the anti-smoking programmes show me mine will be by now. He’ll sweat a lot, maybe get a little red in the face, exactly the look he’d have after sex; not that I know.
Walking is only ever a pleasure for me on a day like today, with the sun out and sensible trainers on my feet. Today is a day to smile. The man on the fruit and veg stall by the station makes a remark about melons, which I choose to ignore, my bubble will not be burst this early at least, if at all on a day like today. If I could just wander around all day, in my comfortable footwear, getting a tan, smiling to myself and not having to talk to anybody I know, it would be heaven. But I have to go to work. And even if I manage to make it through the political minefield that has become making TV programmes for a living, it won’t last. Tonight I am going over to Charlie’s, and I will cook for us both, and sit out on his much bigger balcony – with a glass of wine afterwards. It’s amazing how easy it is to ignore a problem. You just don’t say it, and it doesn’t matter. I’ve done it for years.
I was going to do something. I decided, somewhere in my sleep, to talk to Charlie about us, but on waking, today doesn’t seem to be the right day. I just want to enjoy it. I want the entire day to go without a hitch, without a raised voice or argument. Maybe I’ll leave it and talk to him next week. I’ve been seeing Charlie for nearly six years. I met him in America, but we are both British. It’s not working out. It’s more than a bad patch …
I work in Covent Garden – it’s a lovely place to be based, apart from all the fucking tourists. I know that might seem a bit strong, but I am smacked by an oversized rucksack at least three times a day, just walking from the tube to work, and back again.
By the time Tony arrives to drive us to the shoot in a studio in Islington, José has still not turned up at work. He’ll think I was running late and went straight to the shoot, which pisses me off, so I send him a quick innocuous e-mail, asking him when the video for Evil Ghost, the original film, is due for release, so that we can tie up our TV sales. We haven’t even made the film yet. This is the way that it works. By the time we get around to actually making this damn sequel we are going to have about six weeks to finish the thing. We have been teaser trailering for months on the front of all our other videos. And the thing isn’t even made. The marketing comes first, then we film. I don’t know my job title exactly. There are only thirty of us in total. We do a lot of everything, masters of all trades.
I am left to direct the shooting of the foggy woman myself. She is very sweet, actually – Tony hung up the phone after he spoke to me last night, and caught the first bus he saw. He spoke to three OAPs before he found us this one. She is grateful for the money – she lives on her pension, and after Tony proved he was legitimate, and I don’t ask him how he did this, but it had something to do with carrying shopping and playing gin rummy at her ‘Home’, she agreed to come along. She asks if she can sit behind the fog machine, because her legs aren’t as strong as they used to be, and I almost feel bad saying no, she has to stand. An old woman sitting in a cloud of smoke just doesn’t scream ‘horror’ to me.
To be honest, there are only so many ways you can shoot it. But the day itself will still cost about five grand. Tony and I spend most of the time sitting outside on the steps of the studio, smoking cigarettes and eating the muffins that were supplied by some eager beaver production assistant keen to impress the television lady. It embarrasses me slightly – I am not quite so impressed with myself. Not fresh muffin impressed. My phone rings, and I check the number before answering – it’s Phil.
‘Yep?’
‘Nicola, it’s me,’ he says.
‘I know, what’s wrong?’
‘There’s a problem with the teaser trailer.’ He sounds panicked. It’s rare to hear him this worried, which panics me.
‘Oh what now?’ I ask, and close my eyes, ready to concentrate on today’s catastrophe.
‘Somebody has called it porn.’
‘What?’
‘It’s been put on the front end of the new Bristo the Badger videos, and some mum has written in and called it porn.’
‘It’s what?’ I say again; I don’t know why, I heard him the first time.
‘Somebody’s put it on the new Bristo the Badger video and José’s going mad. He says it’s your fault. And then he asked if you had got me to send him an email from your computer this morning. I said no.’ Phil goes quiet at the other end of the phone.
Evil Ghost: The Return is going to be the equivalent of an eighteen certificate for television – it will be strictly post-watershed. Needless to say, the trailer that I cut was very much an eighteen certificate. Some young model, who I now have to write into the film, practically naked but for a wet bra, but it’s fine because we would have had one in there somewhere. I spliced in shots from the first film, the one with a decent budget and a film release, the one we didn’t get to make. This is what I do; you’ve got to hook your audience. And we stick it all over our adult comedy videos, our soft porn videos. It raises awareness, so when we finally come to sell the thing, we can say we already have a market. But my audience is not three- to five-year-old kids, or their mums, who stick their pride and joy in front of our bestselling kids’ video franchise, Bristo the Badger, for an hour’s peace in the mornings. As usual it has nothing to do with me. Some bright spark in the mastering department, some doped up operations type, has got confused. It’s a publicity nightmare. Not that anybody is going to care so much about that. What José is obviously doing his nut about right now is the fact that it’s going to cost us tens of thousands of pounds to recall all the tapes, and replace the trailer with something a little more three-to-five-year-old friendly. Saying that, I doubt it’s the kids themselves that have complained. More likely some young mum with
