Chapter 22 ~ Family Rules – Part VI
May 18, 2010
In between scenes, I got to watch the filming on the monitors.
On the screen I watched the only people I knew as more than meaningless shapes; who didn’t just come and go through my life taking something, asking for something or giving me something to keep me quiet.
These people on the monitors, I recognised their smiles, the way they held their heads when they were listening to each other, the way they all seemed to avoid honesty.
They laughed too loud.
They smiled too hard.
They glared behind each other’s backs.
They whispered behind closed lips.
I saw all of this and it was my family. Every day on the monitors, I watched my mother and my father arguing with my grandpa and his paramour. Most days, I didn’t know when I’d last seen my real mother and father.
I didn’t even remember to let that hurt me.
* * *
“Are you crying?” Jamie asked, bending over the pushchair.
There was the noise of a baby crying. It wasn’t me. I was watching the monitors. The baby in the pushchair was a dummy.
“Oh my lord,” Martin said, winking at his onscreen son, “not only is she blind, she’s deaf now too!”
Pause. Canned laughter.
“Obviously can’t hear a thing!” Another wink.
Jamie bent over the pushchair, engrossed with a dummy that the camera couldn’t see.
“I could just about say anything…” This time, Sanderson aimed the wink at the camera. It could not have been more telegraphed.
She was lifting the dummy, wrapped in woollen knitting.
“Go on love, do an old man a favour, eh? Get ‘em out!”
Jamie dropped the dummy back into the pushchair. Stood upright. Hands on hips.
“You dirty old bugger,” she said, “who d’ya think you’re talking to, eh?”
“Oh I’m sorry,” he said, all innocence and shrugs, “I didn’t think you could hear me, so I just thought I’d..”
“Just thought you’d say what was on your mind, eh Dad?” His son chimed in.
Sanderson turned, paused, let the canned laughter respond to the look on his face.
“Whose side are you on?”
“Yeah,” chimed Jamie, “whose side are you on?”
Cut to a wide shot, Jamie to the left, Sanderson to the right and the poor unfortunate boyfriend-son caught right in the middle.
It was a tug of war waiting to happen, the canned audience eager to see the denouement.
“CUT!” Joel’s voice yelled from my left.
They turned as one to look at the director.
“Can’t we do something about this fucking baby?”
And for a moment, I didn’t know whether he was talking about me or the dummy or even whether I actually was the dummy.
“Huh?” Jamie’s voice was loud in the silence.
Joel was up and pacing, heading towards the set.
“Well look at it!”
They did. It was lolling out of one side of the pushchair, arm bent at an alarming angle, eyes staring lifelessly at the ceiling ; or where the ceiling would have been if this were a real house rather than a television studio with about a million lights above the set, swinging from scaffold poles bolted to the roof.
“Oh.”
“Yes, fucking well Oh!” Joel was furious. “Now we’ve got to redo the whole thing. Can’t you be more careful how you drop it, Jamie?”
“I didn’t mean to…”
“No, I bet you didn’t,” the director seething, his ire palpable even on the monitors, “can’t we use the real one?”
“You’re joking, right?”
“No.”
“We can’t drop a live baby…”
“Why not?”
“Because… Well… He’s alive…”
“And that’s why he won’t end up looking like this pathetic little piece of worthless plastic…”
And with that, Joel kicked the dummy out of the pushchair. It flew end over end and smashed through a window on the other side of the couch.
“Oh fuck,” Jamie hissed between her teeth.
“You said it,” Sanderson concurred.
Joel went supernova.
Later that day, I was dropped into the pushchair when Martin suggested that Jamie go topless in order to test her hearing. I banged my head on the frame of the pushchair. It hurt a little. But I didn’t care.
I’m a dummy. Nothing happens to me for real.
Nothing.
It’s all just television.
Chapter 23 ~ Imagine All The People
