Real or For the Cameras

The note came down at twenty past four, which is when notes come down, because it is late enough that a decision has been made upstairs and early enough that somebody in the building still has to act on it before they go home.

Nadia read it off her phone standing in the arch with her back to the camera positions, which I had learned by then was deliberate.

“‘Great press today. Let’s not be shy about the obvious. Suggest a market-day two-hander for ep five — Borough, early, the two of them buying for the finale, keep it loose, keep it long. Plus a sit-down: what’s changed since week one. Guy.’”

“No,” I said.

“I thought so.” She put the phone in her pocket. “I’m going to do the thing where I argue his side properly, because you deserve the real version rather than me pretending I’m on your team for free. Here it is. The show is at one point nine million and rising. Episode one did the fridge, episode two did the fire alarm, and there are two episodes left, and if we put you in a market at seven in the morning with one camera and no questions, the audience will see two people buying fish and they will do all the rest of the work themselves, and it will be the most-watched thing this production makes, and the Larder Trust will finish the run somewhere north of a hundred and twenty thousand pounds.”

“Say the other half.”

“The other half is that it’s a market-day two-hander. You know what that is. Everybody watching knows what that is. It’s the segment they do on the dating programmes.” Nadia rubbed her eye with the back of her wrist. “And I’d be filming a true thing in a format that makes true things look arranged, and in about four months neither of you would be able to tell the difference any more. That’s my honest objection and it isn’t good enough to stop a note from Guy Fenner.”

Simon had not said anything at all.

“You’ve gone quiet,” I said.

“I’m being disciplined.” He was sitting on an upturned crate with his elbows on his knees. “If I say what I think, it’s a man with an interest in the answer telling a woman what she should do about a camera. So I’m going to say one sentence and then it’s yours. Whatever you decide, I’ll do, and I’ll do it without sulking, and I won’t make it mean anything afterwards.”

“That’s three sentences.”

“It’s been a long day.”

I thought about it for maybe a minute, and everybody let me, which is the single greatest luxury a television production has ever extended to me.

“Counter-offer,” I said. “You don’t get us in a market. You get an hour in the Lewisham hall, on the Thursday, with the eleven o’clock volunteer shift. Not a masterclass. Bernice runs it and we do what we’re told. We show four hundred thousand people how to break down a chicken into eight portions and get three meals out of it, and how to build a stock that doesn’t taste of nothing, and how to cook rice for twenty when you have one pot and one ring. You run it long. You don’t cut to us looking at each other.”

Nadia’s face did something complicated.

“He won’t take it,” she said.

“He’ll take it if you tell him it’s that or nothing, and then he’ll be extremely gracious about it, and then in about a fortnight something will land on us from a direction we’re not watching.” I picked up my knife roll. “That’s already priced in. We bought that in week two with a runner’s contract.”

—

At twenty-five past twelve that night I stood outside 22 Cloudesley Row in the rain and looked at a black awning where an oak one used to be.

Bilal let me in. I had met him twice; he is thirty-five, he was at the pass with a cloth in his hand and the section already broken down, and he said, “Chef,” and then, “There’s a coffee coming, and then I’m going, and he didn’t ask me to say any of that, he asked me to stay, and I’m going.”

“Thank you.”

“The tiles behind you are the good ones,” said Bilal. “The ones down the left are mine. Four of the originals broke in the works and he made the fitter find the nearest match and then he apologised to me about it for a week.” He picked up his jacket. “He’s a good boss and a mediocre cook and he knows which of those two sentences he’d rather I said. Goodnight, Chef.”

And then it was the room.

—

Here is what I expected: that it would be unbearable.

What it actually was, for the first four minutes, was disorientating in a purely physical way, like putting your foot on a stair that is not there. The room is the wrong way round now. He has the pass where my office used to be, which means the kitchen door opens the other way, which means the whole flow of the space runs anticlockwise instead of clockwise, and I stood in the middle of it and could not make my body agree with my eyes.

Then I found the floor.

There is a patch by the third window where the boards are a different colour, about the size of a tea tray, and it is where a radiator leaked for a winter in the year I turned twenty-four, and I had a man in to fix it who charged me four hundred pounds and did not fix it, and I used to stand on that patch at the end of service because it was the only place in the room where you could see both the door and the pass.

I stood on it.

“You didn’t lift the boards,” I said.

“The quote was nine thousand and I didn’t have nine thousand.”

“Good.”

He stayed by the pass. He did not follow me round the room, and he did not narrate it, and when I asked him where the wine fridge had gone he said “skip” and nothing else, and when I stood looking at the green tiles for a long time he let me do it.

In the cellar, on the inside of the door of the electrical cupboard, in chinagraph pencil, in my own handwriting, there is a delivery schedule.

MON fish 0630. TUE veg 0700 ASK FOR NOT DARIUS. WED nothing. THU fish 0630 + dry. FRI everything, God help us.

I wrote that in November 2019 with a pencil I had borrowed off an electrician, and I had forgotten it completely, in the way you forget the shape of a handle you used four times a day.

“I’ve never taken that off,” said Simon, from the top of the cellar stairs, not coming down. “Bilal wanted to. He said it was unhygienic. I told him it was inside a cupboard with a fuse board in it and that nobody has ever caught anything off a fuse board.”

“Who’s Darius?”

“I have no idea. I have wondered about Darius for three years.”

“He worked for the veg supplier and he used to leave the crates in the rain.” I closed the cupboard door. “He was nineteen and his heart wasn’t in it.”

Back upstairs I said, “Say something.”

“I’ve got about forty things and they’re all mine rather than yours, which is the problem I have had for six years.”

“Say the least selfish one.”

He thought about it.

“On the second night I opened,” he said, “a woman came in on her own and sat at the corner two-top and said, I used to come to the place that was here, and I said yes, so did I, and she said, it was the best room in London and they ruined her, and then she had the pork and she left, and I went into the walk-in and stood in it for a while.” He put the cloth down. “That’s the least selfish one. It’s still about me. There isn’t a version of this that isn’t.”

I came back across the room and stopped about a metre away from him, which was a distance I had been maintaining in one form or another since the first Thursday.

“I’m going to ask you something,” I said, “and I want you to understand before I do that I have thought about it for four days, and that it isn’t because of the tiles or the floorboards or anything you’ve said in the last twenty minutes, because if it were any of those things it would be a reaction and I’d take it back on Thursday.”

“All right.”

“Can I kiss you.”

He went completely still. Then he said, “Yes,” and then, immediately, “Ines, you don’t have to ask me for—“ and I said, “I do, though, because if I don’t ask, then in a month I get to tell myself it happened to me,” and he said, “Yes. Yes. Ask me any time.”

So I did.

His hand came up to the side of my face and stopped short and I put it there myself, and he made a small sound against my mouth that I am going to keep. He tasted of coffee and the room smelled of the last of the service and somewhere behind me rain was coming down the front of a window I had chosen in 2019, and for a while there was nothing in my head at all, which has happened to me perhaps four times in my adult life and never once standing up.

Then I put my forehead against his collarbone and we stood there and breathed for a bit.

“Right,” he said, unevenly.

“Don’t say right.”

“It’s what I say.”

—

We stopped there, and it was mine to stop, and he did not make one single second of it difficult, which I noticed at the time and have thought about a great deal since.

“There’s fifteen days of filming left,” I said, into his shirt.

“I know.”

“And a clause on page nine about conduct that brings the production into disrepute, which my lawyer flagged in September and which I laughed at.”

“I read mine in the car park in week two. Twice.”

I stood back so I could see him.

“Here’s what I’m not doing,” I said. “I’m not hiding it. Not because I’m brave — because hiding it hands it to somebody. The second this is a secret it becomes worth something, and there is a man sitting in the back of the junket room with reading glasses who has spent forty years working out what things are worth.”

Simon let out a breath.

“I was going to have to say that to you,” he said, “and I’d been dreading it since about half past midnight, because I thought you’d hear it as me wanting to be looked at.”

“Nadia. Tomorrow, before the call sheet goes out. Just her, in a room, and she can do whatever she needs to do with it, including telling Fenner, and it will cost us something and I don’t yet know what.”

“Agreed.”

“And then we work the last fifteen days and we do not touch each other in that building.”

“Agreed,” said Simon. “Chef, can I say one thing that costs me twenty pounds?”

“No.”

“Fine,” he said, and he was laughing, and he got my coat off the back of the chair and held it up for me, and I put it on, and he saw me out into the rain on Cloudesley Row at twenty past two in the morning and did not ask to come with me and did not stand watching me down the street.