Day for Night by Jean McNeil

Author:Jean McNeil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2021-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

Part II: Day

I

“Cut. That’s the scene. Thank you, everyone.”

The actors fall out of pose and scatter into shade, gulping water. It is as if a tableau has been shattered; its pieces knock against her ankles.

She draws her sunglasses over her eyes. The grip has erected an umbrella the size of a small marquee for them. She joins Molly, the third AD, and Wedge and Anton underneath its shade, but still the sun bores through it. This year summer has come early to southern Italy: it is only late May and thirty degrees in the shade.

The fixer, Giulio, was right: Capri is overrun, even this early in the season. The tourists — mostly cruise ship groups and coach tours as far as she can tell — clump by the gelatería, requiring Molly to shoo them out of shot, but they keep coming back and congealing in the strict brew of heat, like flour added to soup.

“Joanna, how long do you want this track here?”; “Joanna, that line came out too downbeat, can we possibly go back in?”; “Joanna, it’s Tony on the phone from LA, I think. Or maybe New Zealand. Wherever he is, it’s 3 a.m.”

She has never heard her own name spoken so often in her life. She has become a military strategist, ruthlessly making lists in her head before she has even formulated a thought. Yes, no, yes. She knew it would be like this. She’d been on set enough and seen directors doing more or less what she is doing now, but they’d made it look easy, especially Richard. Or easier.

Her head swims with heat, with hesitancies. They feel the same. She retreats to the shaded side of the street and lays her head against a peach-coloured wall. Its coolness sinks into her scalp.

Her gaze alights on Elliott in shirt and tie. Even in the phenomenal temperatures he never complains or flags. He seems to run not on ordinary kinesis but some kind of inner halogen. On the live monitor he literally glows. She wonders if this is what is called star quality, or if it is something more metaphysical.

Her crew flash up and down the narrow streets, doing her bidding. For a moment they have forgotten her. She looks up at the vertical cliffs that separate Capri from Anacapri, which sits a hundred and fifty metres higher up the island. Not even a goat could scale them. She absorbs the island’s Bond villain appeal: the stark arroyos, the shattered, terraced land, a layer cake poised to crumble into the sea. The lair of Dr. No indeed. She’d read somewhere that the Emperor Tiberius brought his enemies here and hurled them into the sea off its six-hundred-metre-high cliffs.

The crew bus shuttles them between the two towns, twinned by their names, like the Arctic and Antarctica. It journeys along a hairpin road that genius or insane engineers built bolted on the side of the cliff face with concrete stanchions. After the first run she learns not to sit on the sea-view side of the bus.

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