Part 4 (1/2)
”What were you doing in the freezer? You know I only use it to store the chandelier.”
”The what?”
”It must have fallen out and hit you on the head. It's very valuable, you know. Edwardian.”
Meredith noticed the dangling topaz crystals, now scattered over the floor. She opened her mouth to say something, but before she could do so, a longing moved through her. All the familiar sensations were there: the gaping belly yawn, the arterial fizz, the hardening of her nipples...
”Mummy.”
”Yes.”
”Can you help me with something?”
”What's that?”
”I want to have a baby of my own.”
Irma pressed a damp, dirty washcloth over the b.u.mp on Meredith's forehead. ”Is that all?” She laughed and patted her daughter on the cheek. ”Easy-peasy.”
That night Meredith's eyes snapped open in the dark. She raised herself from the bed and removed the plastic bite-plate she wore to bed each night in an effort to ”deprogram” her from grinding her teeth. There would be no more sleep for now.
Fumbling around in the dim chaos of her mother's flat, she managed to open her binder-size laptop and dial up a modem connection. Cross-legged on the floor, Meredith logged on to the server and opened her account. There were eighty-six new messages, the bulk of them regarding p.e.n.i.s enlargement, mail-order college degrees, discount v.i.a.g.r.a and urgent salutations from African despots in need of a temporary overseas loan. Meredith scrolled through her in-box, deleting whole screens at a time, until suddenly she came upon a message that froze her thumb in mid-click.
To: Meredith Moore From: Dr. Joe Veil Subject: Your disappearance Dear Meredith, I hope you don't mind that I have taken the liberty to contact you via the e-mail address provided in your file, but after your exit yesterday I found myself at a loss for what to think. I hope my advice was not overly blunt. If that was what made you leave my office so abruptly, I apologize. As your doctor I felt it important to take the time to check in and make sure you are not in any kind of distress.
I hope you are well and taking good care.
Yours sincerely, Dr. Joe Veil Meredith read the note twice before even attempting to compose a reply. What to make of it? Professional obligation? Fatherly concern? Flirtation? No, Meredith did not detect a hint of that in his tone. Though, how strange that a busy gynecologist should go so far out of his way to contact a skittish patient. For all he knew she was simply a nut. What to make of this sudden interest in her behavior? She clicked on REPLY and began to type.
To: Dr. Joe Veil From: Meredith Moore Subject: Re: Your disappearance Dear Doctor, Thank you for the kind note, but I can't accept your apology. I did not leave your examination room because of any offensiveness on your part-quite the opposite. You were professional and direct, and I thank you for your concern. I am currently away on business but will make an appointment with one of your colleagues upon my return.
Sorry if I alarmed you by leaving so abruptly. It wasn't like me to run away. I guess I haven't been myself lately. Perhaps it's the biological twitch twitching. You'd probably know better than me. You're the doctor.
Sorry again, Meredith
6.
Meredith didn't mind being called the continuity girl. Over the past year or so, however, she had begun to wonder whether she ought to be slightly embarra.s.sed by the t.i.tle. Like so many otherwise driven women, her greatest fear was not having a lack of authority but having a surplus of it. Too much power (she had to admit it) made her feel less...feminine. She waited anxiously for the terrible day some third-a.s.sistant-director film school grad would turn around and unthinkingly call her ”the script lady.” That would be the day she'd quit.
In recent years, the industry had been called to task for its use of outdated terminology, particularly when describing jobs traditionally occupied by women or gay men (this being show business, there were lots of both). Since Meredith had started working on set, producers had been forced, in official contexts at least, to hire makeup artists instead of ”pretties,” actors instead of ”talent,” and background artists instead of ”extras.” It wasn't that anyone on set actually talked any differently than they used to, just that everybody now had two job t.i.tles instead of one. Meredith's twin t.i.tle was script supervisor, but thankfully no one called her that. She was still performing what the trade considered a young woman's job, and she wanted to keep it that way.
Of course, in a way, she had quit. Walked off Felsted's set with the bleary intention of getting out of show business altogether. (There had been the occasional intention of enrolling in cooking school, until she remembered nearly fainting the time she had to ”dress” the turkey giblets at Elle's house one Christmas, and the thought pa.s.sed.) But here she was in London, back on set and in the thick of it all. Toughing it out with a bunch of men who in all likelihood resented her presence more than they appreciated it.
But that was where the similarities to any previous job ended. Richard Gla.s.s was an altogether different sort of director from those she had worked with in Toronto. For one thing, he was slender and almost girlish looking. And he wore suits-unhemmed pants and monogrammed s.h.i.+rts so worn you could see his flat penny-size nipples through the fabric.
While most directors tended to be brusque and proud of their macho to-the-pointness, Richard seemed to have all the time in the world for silly small talk and pranks. Like others in his position, he spent a lot of time flirting with the actresses (whispering in their ears, placing a supportive hand on the small of their backs), but unlike most, he flirted with everyone else on set as well. He slipped and slithered about the set all day, offering every individual the unexpected treat of his undivided, if momentary, attention. In this way he managed to charm every member of the crew into carrying out his orders without ever raising his voice.
Meredith had been on the set for eight days of the forty-day shoot and was coping well enough so far. The film was a Victorian period murder mystery/romantic comedy starring Kathleen Swain, an American starlet coming to the end of her bankable period. In it, she played a spinster pathologist who falls in love with a brooding detective while performing autopsies on the bodies of the prost.i.tute victims of a Jack-the-Ripper-like murderer. The film was financed on the slope of Swain's cheekbones.
The project's backer was the mysterious and never-present Osmond Crouch, who, it was widely rumoured, was a former lover of Swain's. In his place, Mr. Crouch (as everyone called him on set) had sent a line producer to oversee the shoot. Dan b.u.t.ton, an overgrown Scottish goth boy, minced about in a black trench coat and skull boots, looking terrified to talk to anyone. He couldn't be more than thirty, Meredith thought, and yet Crouch had for some reason sent him here to oversee the production of a twenty-million-dollar movie. Twenty million! That's what this pimply monkey of a boy, this wannabe vampire, was in charge of. It boggled the mind. While most of the hands-on crew generally ignored b.u.t.ton, the director would occasionally slip off with him for a little chat. b.u.t.ton would invariably emerge from Richard's trailer flushed with pleasure, and for the rest of the day would skulk more happily around the set, occasionally tap-tap-tapping his walking staff to the tune of some dark, internal symphony.
The crew was setting up in a large empty warehouse s.p.a.ce on the third floor of a nearly condemned East End building when Meredith arrived for her call time of seven thirty a.m. She grabbed a juice from the ”tea cart” (funny Brits) and unfolded her tiny portable camp stool in a quiet corner, then began her day's logging. Hauling a binder out of her bag and wiping the crumbs from its surface (a packet of airplane pretzels had somehow escaped its packaging), she examined the day's pages for the third time that morning. The script had been changed so many times by Gla.s.s and the writer that it was now an unruly rainbow of candy-colored revision pages. Every revised page in the script was dated and printed on a different-colored page from the one before. The rotation, according to protocol, began with white and was followed by blue, pink, yellow, green and goldenrod (Meredith had never understood why they didn't just call it orange). The scene they were shooting today (which involved a fight, a kiss and a bad guy being set on fire and thrown out of a fifth-story window) was printed out on white paper-double white-which meant it had been rewritten exactly six times so far. Meredith would not be the least bit surprised if handwritten blue revisions-double blues-appeared and had to be stapled into her binder. Usually, by the time shooting began, Meredith knew the script so well, had read it and made so many detailed notes on it, divided it into eighths (for scheduling purposes, all scripts were organized this way-Meredith's job was to keep track of the shooting times of each eighth of a page) and numbered all the scenes and shots, that she felt she could recite the thing by heart. Nevertheless, she now studied the scene once more.
Act 1, Scene 6 Int. Empty Victorian garment factory-the scene of the crime.
The voices of Celia and David can be heard off camera as they make their way up the stairs.
CELIA (OFFSCREEN).
Once again, Inspector, I'm not sure what you think you're going to find here that the police already haven't.
Int. stairwell.
David is helping Celia up the rickety steps.
She struggles a bit and tears her petticoat on a nail.
CELIA.
Good heavens.
DAVID.
Are you all right, miss?
CELIA (IRRITATED).
Yes, yes, fine. To be perfectly honest, Inspector, I'd be a great deal better if I was back at the morgue doing some useful work.
DAVID.
My dear Miss Hornby, thank you again for your skepticism, but surely as a doctor you must agree that no hair can be left unturned, particularly when lives are at stake.
Just this snippet, Meredith knew, would take most of the morning to get on film. First a camera setup for the interior of the factory, then another for the stairwell. They would shoot the interior scenes of the factory first, and likely get to the stairwell segment later. Meredith made a mental note to ensure the wardrobe people had provided a visibly ripped petticoat for Celia in the interior garment factory scenes.
The truth was, for all her copious work and attention to detail, few directors or editors even looked at the continuity notes anymore. Schedules could be generated by computer. The log was kept more out of tradition and protocol than genuine need. The bulk of Meredith's job was to record the difference between what was on the page and what was shot. If dialogue was added or cut, Meredith made note. If an actor strayed into an unscripted moment of genius or folly, she noted that too. If anything changed from the original plan, she was on it. Her first loyalty, as continuity girl, was to the script.
She removed a ruler from her case and darkened the dividing lines of eighths using her sharpest pencil. Then she flipped forward in her binder to the Daily Continuity Log sheet, on which she would take careful note of the setup, scene and slate (the clappy board) number, as well as shot time, pages shot and, most important, which take of which shots the director wanted the lab to print and send out to the editor. With her Polaroid camera, digital stopwatch, binder and sharpened pencil, Meredith would record and keep track of even the most seemingly unimportant detail on the set, from the exact time (down to a quarter of a second) the crew broke for lunch, to the precise measurement of the rip on the hem of the actress's petticoat. She would keep notes for the a.s.sistant editor in a daily log, recording the scene, slate, time and print numbers for him to note when he looked over the rushes in the following days.