Nicola Griffith - Always

“No need to creep,” Dornan said from a few feet away. “At least not until the klaxon.” His eyes were alight with the kind of intensity I hadn’t seen since before Tammy had left him. For some reason it made my stomach clench.

“Why is everyone so tense?”

“Three cameras,” he said.

“So Peg said.” And it hadn’t meant much the first time.

“The director walked out, as I said, and the main stunt actor, and now Rusen is risking everything on one throw. This is the last day Sîan will be here, and instead of breaking the scenes down to separate angles, he’s going to shoot from three at once for the close-action sequences and dialogue. If we don’t get it in the first or second take, everyone, we’re screwed. The film cost alone is huge.”

We, I thought. We both looked from Branwell, still chanting to herself, seemingly oblivious to the tweakers and powderers, to Rusen.

“Rusen’s directing?”

“Yep.”

“He’s done it before?”

“In film school. The real director walked out. Said he couldn’t work under this kind of pressure.”

We looked beyond Rusen, who no longer looked like a chess prodigy but like a teacher on a field trip with twenty psychopathic schoolchildren, to Kick.

“Who’s that standing with her?”

“Bernard. The stunt guy.”

“He’s not the same one who was here the other day.”

“No. He left with the director. Bernard’s a beginner. Kick says that if she doesn’t babysit him, he’ll bolt. It’s a something-and-nothing scene: jump over a table, roll, pretend to hit someone. But he’s pretty inexperienced.”

Kick was talking intently to Bernard, who was nodding. He was only an inch or two bigger than Kick. I wondered why she didn’t do it. Dornan probably knew; he always seemed to know these things. Without her white coat, the deep V-shape of her torso and the wide shoulders and narrow waist were clear: a high-diver’s body, or a trapeze artist’s. Her hair was clipped up, and tiny muscles in her neck moved under the skin.

She looked different. Better. “She seems… less tired.”

“Yes,” Dornan said.

He sounded almost smug, and I started to feel prickly and restless. “It’s hot in here.”

“The air-conditioning is so noisy we have to keep shutting it down. People keep forgetting to turn it back on again between takes.”

As I watched, Kick mimed a ducking turn for the stuntman, who was looking dubious. She moved easily, a quarter horse to the racehorses: powerful, nimble, responsive, intelligent, present. The thing around her neck swung out and banged back against her breastbone.

“So what’s with the rent-a-cop?” Dornan said.

“Um? No idea. But he won’t be around long. What’s that thing around her neck?”

“A fan. She doesn’t do well with heat. I wish she’d use it.”

I hadn’t known her long but I couldn’t imagine Kick buying something like that for herself. “So is it going well, the filming?”

“Well, yes. I think. People are focused, and Rusen seems to know what he wants. Though they haven’t actually done any filming yet today.”

“No?”

“No. Rusen’s been running everyone through the rehearsals. It’s complicated. The second-biggest sequence of the whole pilot.”

I nodded, not really listening. Kick was now turning her chin into her chest, gesturing to the stuntman, watching him do the same.

“You still don’t know the plot, do you?” Dornan said.

“No.”

“Have you even read the treatment?”

“Whose treatment?”

“The treatment. The story outline.”

“Why don’t you tell me it?”

“And you’ll listen?”

I turned to face him. “You have my undivided attention.”

“Okay.” He seemed mollified. “There’s this woman, Vivienne—that’s Sîan, of course—who wakes up one night and she’s naked, and alone in the middle of a big city.”

I nodded. Wisps of strategic steam.

“She has no idea who she is or how she got there. And she’s just recovering from the shock when she sees the dawn, and as the sun rises, phhttt, she turns into a fox.”

“A fox.”

“It’s pretty cool—metaphor made concrete: foxy woman and all that. Anyhow, the fox, naturally, has no clue about anything. I mean, it’s a fox. So then night comes again, and, phhtt, the fox turns into the naked woman, Vivienne, who once again has no clue, et cetera. Only this time, she remembers, after about an hour of shivering naked behind a Dumpster, that she woke up the day before in the same position and then somehow lost time.”

It was interesting how he assumed a vaguely American accent to tell me all this.

“So she spends the rest of the night thinking and planning, stealing some clothes, scrabbling for food in the Dumpster, et cetera. Day comes, phhtt, she turns into a fox—”

“You don’t have to keep saying phhtt. ”

He blinked. “Oh. Well, so she turns into a fox. Fox runs around, eats a bird, all that fox-type stuff. We can use stock nature footage for that. Did you know that foxes live all over the city?”

“Yes. Go on with the story.”

“So night comes”—he made a flicking phhtt gesture with his right hand—“she turns back into Vivienne—that’s easy, apparently; you just do a shimmering dissolve—”

“Dornan.”

“Right. So, anyway, she’s Vivienne again, she doesn’t know anything, but this time she remembers in about ten minutes that she’s done this a couple of times before and trots off immediately to her Dumpster, where she finds the clothes. Which she puts on. And this goes on for a while, with the cycle getting shorter. Eventually she makes friends with other people— street people, to begin with, of course, all of whom, for budget reasons no doubt, seem to live in the warehouse district—which is complicated by the night-as-woman, day-as-fox shapeshifting.”

“The Ladyhawke part.”

“Right. Eventually, through a series of events that, frankly, seem a bit muddled to me, but Kick says will get cleared up in the editing, she gains allies, learns about the fox transformation, makes sure she’s protected while she’s an animal, and starts trying to work out who she is, where she came from, and what happened. With me so far?”

I nodded.

“And it turns out, there’s this bad guy—I don’t know if he’s an evil corporate research scientist or an evil government agent, but he’s evil—”

“And lives in a florist’s shop.”

“What? No. That’s one of the friends. Lots of friends. It’s an ensemble show—that’s the Dark Angel part, that and the government thing, and that it’s in Seattle. Where was I?”

“Lots of friends.”

“Well, there will be, if we ever get to do a series and not just this backdoor pilot. Anyhow, this guy does something to Vivienne, only that, it turns out, is not her real name…”

Kick was… not frowning, exactly, but getting tight around her cheeks and eyes. The stuntman was looking young and frightened.

“…this afternoon’s sequence comes just before the end, where the bad guy has followed her to her friend’s place, the florist, and is sending in the hard lads.” Now the American accent was slipping and he sounded very working-class Dublin, the way he did when he was ebullient. “Lots of action. Viv and her friends fighting for their lives. But all surrounded by greenery, d’you see, instead of the usual shite blowing up. It’s cheaper. And what that means is it’s all internal work for the actor.”

“In addition to the stunts,” I said.

“Well, yeah. The stunts. No one’s exactly sanguine about that. Rusen asked Kick to give Bernard some unofficial coaching.”