Position Fourteen

By twenty past nine on the Wednesday there was a forty-second clip.

I know it was forty seconds because Nadia told me, in the production office above the arches, standing up, with her coat still on and her laptop open on somebody else’s desk and two people pretending very hard to be reading emails four feet away.

“Forty seconds,” she said. “It’s gone to Guy Fenner and about nine people at the network with W2 TEASE — FRIDGE in the subject line, and the audio is clean, and the last thing on it is you asking him why he wrote it.”

“Who cut it?”

“An assistant editor in Soho who was sent a card of rushes at eight o’clock this morning and did his job.” She rubbed her face with both hands. “That’s the honest answer and it’s the worst one, because there’s nobody in that sentence to be angry…