Chapter 40
The cameraman switches on the light on top of his camera and another on a thin stand next to me. The sudden influx of illumination in this dark hallway makes me thrust my head back; I cover my eyes like I’m shielding them from the sun.
‘Sorry, is that bright?’
‘Aye, just a bit.’
He adjusts the settings, reducing it to something manageable. I dab away where my eyes have watered, trying not to smudge my makeup. Behind the camera, next to the cameraman’s shoulder, is Pippa, reading her phone.
‘The buyers are still an hour away.’
The cameraman stops fiddling with the light. ‘So, what, late finish, then?’
‘Yeah. Maybe. Let’s get this in the can and then we have the second agent to do and we can see how we go.’
The sound recordist has already had me feed a microphone wire up the inside of my dress, sticking it to the fabric against my chest, the battery pack for it attached to my knickers.
The weight of it tugs at the top of the elastic waistband like a slow-moving, persistent lover.
I put my arms at my side to keep it in position.
‘Can you move your arms back to where they were before?’ the sound guy says.
It takes me a second to realise he’s talking directly to me.
Up until now I’ve been treated like a prop, put on a cross of fluorescent orange tape on the floor and left to stand there while the crew decide what to do with me.
My arm in its approved placement, the cameraman checks.
‘Pip, you happy with the shot?’ He’s from somewhere not a million miles from Hamilton.
His accent is the same as many men I know, which makes Pip’s cut-glass English ‘Fabulous’ sound all the more foreign and wrong in this rank wee house we all find ourselves in.
The sound recordist asks me to tell him what I had for breakfast. ‘Just a coffee.’ Proof I have not eaten well is given when my belly chooses now to growl its emptiness.
Whether it’s that or something else, he doesn’t like what he hears.
He comes over and adjusts the microphone hidden under my dress.
‘And what are your plans for this evening?’
Like the breakfast question, I don’t expect he actually cares about my answer so I tell him the truth. ‘The usual. Have some dinner. Watch a few episodes of Fixer Uppers Go Under the Hammer. Wait for the police to take me away.’
He gives me awkward laughter, not understanding the joke but assuming there is one. Everyone else is engrossed in their phones. After a minute or two, Pippa puts hers in the back pocket of her jeans. ‘Ready?’
‘As I’ll ever be.’ I smile, run my tongue over my teeth in panic in case some of my lipstick has transferred onto them and push my hair behind my right ear, which I believe is more fetching than my left.
‘I know you know what we’re looking for.
’ This is sort of true. Her email gave me a few prompts to think about how to describe the property.
I didn’t need them; I’m an expert on what makes it to the broadcast episode.
‘Just try to be as concise as possible. So, can you sum up the current state of the property?’
‘Sure.’ I pause, knowing this first word will not be used.
With a grin plastered on, I give my response in my slowest, clearest voice.
‘I think it’s safe to say the condition of the property is fairly poor.
It’s going to need a full renovation, top to bottom.
A lot of similar properties in the area have benefited from losing the dividing wall between the small living room and the kitchen to create a roomier, open-plan space, and I think that would definitely benefit this home, too.
’ I keep smiling, maintain my gaze on Pippa.
‘Wow.’ Pippa’s enthusiastic word is not delivered with the matching intonation. ‘You ticked off the next question about proposed work in the one answer. Have you ever been filmed before? You’re a natural.’ Again, she doesn’t sound genuine. Maybe it’s the accent.
‘Right, next question. There’s obviously a very large building site close to the property–’
A pneumatic drill kicks in here to make the point.
‘Are you getting that?’ Pippa asks the sound recordist.
He pushes his headphone closer to his ear, as if the sound is possibly not intrusive when it is all that fills the room. ‘Yeah, we’re picking it up.’
Pippa sighs. ‘When it stops, as soon as it’s quiet, can you tell us your thoughts on whether the building site will cause any issues, please?’
‘Sure, of course.’
The drill makes the floor quiver, the shoddiness of the house further emphasised when a hunk of plaster falls from the ceiling and lands in the space between me and the crew.
It seems unlikely they do much in the way of structural checks on these buildings; maybe the ceiling will collapse and this whole endeavour will kill me.
Silence falls, and I say, ‘There’s a large building site on the plot across the road from the property.
There’s no avoiding that it will cause a lot of inconvenience in the short to mid term, but the mini supermarket and other stores planned for the location will be a real boon once they’re complete, and whoever stays here in the–’
My perfect answer is cut short by the doorbell to the house being rung in three short bursts, which still hang in the air when the visitor knocks with a rat-a-tat-tat.
‘Who the hell is that?’ Pippa leaves the room.
‘Cutting.’ The cameraman presses a button on his camera; the sound recordist presses one on the black box he wears around his waist.
‘Did you hear what oor Mal was up to this morning?’ The sound recordist takes the headphones off his head and hangs them around his neck. Where they’ve been against his ears is red; he rubs at them.
‘He wasn’t kissing the house again, wis he?’
They are not talking to me. Without the camera being turned on it’s as if I too have been switched off. Maybe that’s why when I butt in with, ‘Sorry, kissing the house?’ they both turn to me like they’d forgotten I was there. Their brief surprise at my existence passes and they bring me in.
‘Malcolm, the presenter–’
‘Yeah, I’m familiar.’
‘Well – and this sounds like a lie but I promise you it’s not – he’s been spotted before kissing the houses we film in.’
I know Malcolm; there is no way this can be true. Diplomatically, I raise an eyebrow. Surely not, it says for me.
‘We’re not winding you up, he genuinely does.’ Any follow-up I have is intercepted by Pippa’s return.
‘Bloody next agent is here already. He’s waiting on the doorstep. The builders are on a tea break, so if I can get you to repeat what you were saying about the supermarket while it’s quiet we can get moving on to the valuation and b-roll.’
‘Action!’ Pippa calls, and I give a flawless delivery of my line with no interruptions.
‘Amazing, truly amazing. Now could you give me your valuation for the house in its current state?’
I nod. This is the biggest moment of all – what all of this has led up to.
This is the crescendo of my appearance, of the episode.
Then it comes to me: what more fitting a way to end this than with the truth?
Fixer Uppers has created a nation of monsters and I have been slaying them one by one for the sake of us all.
Looking down the barrel of the camera, I should confess.
For a second I’m going to do it, but faced with the bored crew who just want me to say my response so they can get on with their day, my statement of intent disappears from my mouth.
‘In its current state, I would value this property between ￡60,000 and ￡64,000.’ I am a coward.
‘Again, please,’ the sound recordist says. Pippa swivels her head, gives him a hard stare. ‘There was a siren,’ he explains.
Pippa swallows, pushing down the question ‘What siren?’ Instead she says, ‘That was perfect. If you could do that one more time.’ This is my chance for redemption, and again I don’t grasp it. I say what’s expected of me.
The sound recordist nods to Pippa; everything was good on that take. ‘That’s a wrap on your interview. Thank you for making that so painless. All we have to do now is get some shots of you walking around the house.’
Her phone starts ringing; she checks the flashing screen. ‘It’s Mal. Boys, I’m OK to leave you to sort the shots, yeah?’
She walks off across the uneven floorboards towards the kitchen. She puts on a girlier, flirtatious voice for Malcolm. ‘Hello, darling. Where are you?’
Hearing any more of the conversation is impossible as I’m being manhandled by the sound recordist. He unclips my microphone while the cameraman tells me, ‘There’s no denying that doing this bit you’re going to feel like an idiot.
It’s a very unnatural thing to do, to look at an empty room and pretend to be interested in it.
I promise, if you go into the room believing it’s not a strange thing to do, you’ll come across much more naturally than if you worry you look like an idiot. ’
‘I will try to believe,’ is all I can muster to this pep talk.
There’s a break in filming so they can take the camera off the tripod, position the light elsewhere. The two men must work together often. There’s an ease to their movements; they don’t need to chat about what they’re doing, they just do it. I use this lull to my advantage.
‘So, Malcolm kisses the houses?’
‘Yeah. He likes to have a private moment outside when he gets to the properties to tell them he’s going to make sure they’re well represented on the show.’
‘Does he have any control over that?’
‘He thinks he does.’ The cameraman puts the camera on his shoulder, checks what he’s capturing by squinting through his viewfinder.
The sound recordist is putting his stuff in a pile in a corner.
‘So what was it he was doing today that was weird?’
‘When I got here, he was at the neighbour’s door, asking the old guy who lives there if he wanted a selfie. The guy said naw, because you would, wouldn’t you?’
‘Why’s he doing that?’