Engleby by Sebastian Faulks Read Free Book Online

for a smoke, you can do the job for him. You put on the headphones and say, ‘Just hold it there, everyone, there’s a plane going over.’ It’s not that difficult.
    I can also use a saw and a chisel and make things and paint them if I have to – not that Stewart required much extra scenery, what with it being a pastoral thing set mostly in the woods, except for the bits inside the ‘castle’, which was the house itself. If nothing else, there was always someone who’d like a cup of tea.
    A few nights after the chicken evening, there was a shortage of dope and I had to go back to the Clohessys’ and dip into the stash I had in my sponge bag. I had a brought a hell of a lot over on the ferry from Fishguard. Glynn Powers had told me, just before the end of term, ‘Mike, you’ve been my best customer. I wonder if you’d like to do a bit of work for me. It’s like I can’t really handle it all.’ He opened his locker and showed me these spherical lumps of hash the size of tennis balls. He had half a dozen and I took a couple off him to dispose of and split the profit.
    When I got back to the garden, I chopped some up into five-pound deals but sold it for a pound a go, credit accepted.
    ‘Hey, man,’ said Andy, ‘Mike the cook’s turned into Mike the pusher.’
    The next morning, Stewart was serious when he called everyone together. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we’re having a closed set this morning. Just Geoff on lights, Tom on sound, DoP of course, me, and the actors – Alex, Jennifer and Hannah. No one else at all. Is that understood?’
    ‘What’s a closed set?’ I heard Steve ask Hannah.
    ‘It means Jenny has to take her clothes off.’
    ‘Tom’s not back from Tip,’ said Dave. ‘You know he and Bob went last night? He rang in to say he’s got a migraine. He gets them.’
    They needed someone to do the sound because they couldn’t delay the scene. It was on the schedule for today and, who knows, it might rain tomorrow. I told Stewart I could do it.
    ‘You happy with the machine – the cans and everything?’
    I told him I’d done it before, which I had, when Tom was off one morning. Tom’s heart wasn’t really in sound; he wanted to act.
    Stewart nodded. ‘Everyone cool?’ He looked at Jennifer and Alex and Hannah. Alex looked terrified. Jennifer seemed close to tears.
    It was a rape scene of course, but it was feminist in the way Stewart filmed it so you were meant to share the rage of the woman character, played by Jennifer.
    There were a lot of planes going over towards Dublin, so we had to keep redoing the bit where Alex’s character pulled Jennifer to the ground and lifted up her dress. There was a problem with her underwear. It was difficult for Alex to rip it off without tearing it, and they didn’t have enough spare pairs. Also, it took too long to get it off and it looked as though the camera was sort of dwelling on it.
    Jennifer didn’t seem to be enjoying any of this, but when Stewart asked if she wanted a break she made as if it was a test of her integrity not to complain.
    Hannah suggested Jennifer should be naked under her dress because the pulling off the underwear was too much like a ‘male fantasy’, so it was agreed she shouldn’t wear anything.
    Then the lights weren’t working so Stewart decided to start again using available light only and Hannah told him that’s what he should have been doing all along anyway, and that made an even tenser feeling on the set.
    Everything seemed to go wrong that morning. Hannah said she didn’t think Jennifer should be naked if Alex wasn’t because that would exploit the woman, but the trouble with having Alex naked was that he was always excited and that was exploitative, according to Hannah, because no one was meant to be enjoying this. Alex said that if he wasn’t excited then there could be no rape and no point made, and presumably a rapist did enjoy it anyway, that was the point: he was sick.
    Hannah told him not to give