Chapter 11
There be dragons
I climb the few steps and knock tentatively on the door labelled Star Room 1A, Cilla Swytch — Director. The next door along is labelled Star Room 1B, Britney Vaux. Both rooms, along with a few offices, are located on the outside of one of three massive warehouses which dominate the film studio lot. The lot itself is an enormous operation located out on the flatlands near Cape Town International Airport.
No answer. I knock again, harder.
“Yeah?” barks a voice from inside.
“It’s Romy Morgan, Miss —” Miss, Mrs, Ms? “Ms Swytch. You said I should come speak to you today?”
“Who?”
The door is flung open. I take in many things at once — the white stripe in Cilla Swytch’s black hair, how much taller than me she is, the vivid red of her lipstick, and the large lizards perched on her shoulders. The one on her left shoulder fixes its beady eyes on me, opens its mouth wide, puffs up a spiky collar of spines, and hisses.
“Crap!” I take an automatic step backwards and tumble down to the ground. Embarrassed, I scramble to my feet, dusting the seat of my jeans.
“And who are you, now?”
“I’m Romy Morgan — here about the job?”
“Oh,” she says, looking me up one side and down the other, “it’s you. I hardly recognised you. Hang on, I’ll just put my baby away. She bites.”
She disappears back into the room, and peeking into it after her, I see her carefully lower the prehistoric-looking creature into a giant glass tank with a floor of coloured sand, and a bright light stuck on the side.
“There, my little chickabiddy,” Cilla croons, replacing the screen lid on the tank and returning to me.
Warily, I eye the other creature still attached to her right shoulder.
“Relax, the male of the species is always less deadly. And he’s a sweetie, aren’t you?” She tickles the beard-like spines under his chin. “Here, give him a stroke.”
I don’t much feel like touching the thing — I’m quite attached to my fingers — but perhaps this is a test. I’d better not act like a wimp if I want her to give me a job.
“Nice lizard. Er, good boy,” I say, stroking one finger down his rough back, towards his tail and away from his mouth.
“He’s a bearded dragon, not a lizard. Oh look, he likes you.”
The reptile raises a front hand — paw? — into the air and waves it in circles at me.
“Right, let’s get to it, uh, what’s your name again?” she asks.
“Romy Mor —”
“Right, Romy. We’re due to start filming when the breakfast break ends — in precisely fourteen minutes. We can talk on our way to the soundstage.”
“Yes, Ms —”
“Call me Cilla. I’m the director, not a school teacher.”
She locks the door of the room behind her and marches off across the gravel at a rapid pace. I run to catch up, looking all around, hoping to catch a glimpse of Logan.
“What you see all around you is our lot. The fence keeps out press and other strays.”
She points in the direction of the high perimeter fence topped with electrified wires. It’s still early, not yet seven o’clock, but people swarm in all directions, carrying clipboards, megaphones, lights, cameras, and what look like sections of narrow railway tracks.
“Those are for the dolly, but you don’t need to worry about the gadgets and gizmos, you’re not going to be doing anything technical. You’ll be a personal assistant.”
We stride across the lot towards the other two warehouses which are labelled with giant signs — Stage 2, Stage 3 — and have small golf carts and big trucks parked outside. People disappear into and emerge out of the warehouses’ enormous sliding doors like bees at the opening of a hive.
I’m just about to ask who I’ll be assisting, and how, when we come around the corner of the first warehouse, and I walk straight into a gigantic shark’s head. The enormous jaws, at least a metre in diameter, are wide open, and the serried rows of sharp and bloody teeth are right in my face. I just manage to stifle my instinctual shriek. The muted whimper which escapes is drowned by Cilla’s loud laugh.
“Fabulous, it’s fabulous! Has it got horizontal motion?”
Now I see that the shark’s head is on a high trolley, and that the back end of it is a mass of wires, switches and levers. A young man with a shaved head and tattooed arms stands beside it, holding a set of controls that resemble a video-game console. He wiggles a lever on the console and the shark thrashes its head from side to side.
“Fabulous!” Cilla repeats, stroking the head of the bearded dragon on her shoulder. Its eyes close in apparent bliss. “But you know what I’m going to say?”
“More blood?”
“More blood!”
She yanks me away from my fascinated inspection of the model.
“Amazing, isn’t it? Kyle’s a genius. Sad that animatronics is a dying field — so last century. We do almost everything with computer-generated graphics these days, but the actors find it useful to have something to act against.”
“It’s fantastic, and so lifelike!”
“We make magic here, Romy. Watch it, don’t trip on those,” she warns as we step over a tangle of electricity cables. I’m touched by her concern, but then she adds, “They’re connected to my lights, and lights are expensive.”
“Assistants come cheaper, I guess.”
She frowns at me. “And they’re easier to replace, so don’t you forget it.”
We step from the early morning sunshine into the cool gloom of one of the soundstages, and I stop in shock. The warehouse is gigantic — bigger than several aircraft hangars combined. A catwalk of complicated metal platforms and gangways runs overhead, mounted between massed banks of powerful lights and fat aluminium air-conditioning tubes. An orange crane, with arm extended to the domed ceiling, lifts a man on a platform up to the lights. Trolleys, tripods, rigging and cabling litter the floor, but what snags my gaze is an enormous, full-sized fishing trawler “parked” on the concrete floor of the warehouse in front of a vast lime-green wall. The sides of the trawler are encrusted with rust and printed with faded lettering. It looks amazingly realistic.
“Wow,” I say, taking in the scene.
We walk up to the enormous boat, and Cilla leans forwards to inspect the decorative workmanship. A woman in paint-spattered overalls, who’s sticking fake barnacles onto the trawler’s sides, gives me a friendly, “Hiya.”
“This is Romy, she’s the new gofer,” Cilla says.
“Hi,” I say.
I make to shake hands, but the artist shows me that hers are covered in glue and paint. Then she reaches out and sticks a fake barnacle onto the back of my right hand before turning back to her work with a friendly, “Good luck!”
“Add a few mussels, and that rust needs more brown and less orange,” Cilla says, and then she’s on the move again. I sneak out a hand and tap the prow of the boat. It sounds oddly light and hollow.
“Moulded fiberglass,” Cilla explains, indicating that I should follow her to a refreshment station at the far end of the warehouse.
On top of a trestle table is a hot-water urn, two coffee machines, rows of cardboard cups, a wide basket of muffins and donuts, a fruit and nut platter, packets of chips and sweets, and a few dozen bottles of mineral water. Plucking a small grape from a bunch in the fruit bowl, Cilla peels it and holds it up to the dragon’s mouth between two of her blood-red nails.
“Here my little chickabiddy,” she says in a sing-song voice.
The reptile snatches it up between his jaws and swallows it in a series of gulps which make his throat bulge unpleasantly.
I peel the barnacle off my hand and surreptitiously stick it on the underside of the table.
Cilla picks up the only porcelain coffee mug on the table — a green one as big as a cauldron and emblazoned with the words She Who Must Be Obeyed — fills it with coffee, and takes a large swallow of the steaming brew.
“What’s a gofer?” I ask, rubbing at the residue of glue on my hand.
“You go for this and you go for that. Gofer.” Cilla’s sharp gaze scans the warehouse and fastens on a small mound of rocks covered in brilliantly coloured sea urchins and starfish. “Jake!” she barks. “I see you hiding there. Where are my storyboards?”
A man rises sheepishly from behind the rocky outcrop and calls back, “Coming right up, Cilla.”
“I’m going to do some raking over the coals today — I can see it coming,” Cilla says darkly. “If I don’t check up on everything, things get out of control.” To the man, she yells, “Well? What are you waiting for?”
The man runs off, stumbling against a large boulder and sending it rolling right at me. I leap aside before it can wedge me against the table, but Cilla stops it with the toe of her high-heeled shoe.
“Put it back where it belongs,” she tells me. “And don’t put out your back. Bend from the knees.”
I grab hold of the huge rock and heave — but it’s as light as a beach ball. I give a surprised laugh and turn to look at Cilla in wonder.
“It’s all an illusion, Romy. But what an illusion it is!” She laughs loudly, a startlingly deep, throaty kind of cackle. “You realise that working here, seeing the magic, is going to spoil you for the real world? There’s no going back once you’ve caught the fever of movies.”