I asked Stella for any photographs she had of the cottage, and to leave me to re-create the place as best I could.
‘You don’t have to go to all that bother.’
‘I want to,’ I said. ‘It’s become a kind of project.’
It was obvious I was trying to avoid coming back home. Stella didn’t say anything, and neither did Fel. Somehow the pair of them had intuited that I needed my space.
‘Don’t forget to watch tonight,’ Stella reminded me.
The first season of DARE had begun airing on a pay-per-view channel. When I told Stella her television was broken (it wasn’t), she arranged the delivery of a set twice as large and a box to suck the relevant channel off a distant satellite. I was out of excuses, so I sat down to watch.
Stella’s style was all gloss and chrome and nylon and the shock of the new – or as close as her minuscule budget could get her. Every shot went on far too long as she squeezed every drop she could from my oh-so-brilliantly detailed mise en scène.
Episode three was called ‘Time and Tide’. It involved a plan to drain and transport the Earth’s oceans to the aliens’ homeworld using a temporal pump. Time, moving faster inside the pump, meant that water was leaving the Earth at a fantastic rate through a pipe of economical dimensions. This neat conceit not only made the device hard to find, giving the episode its narrative thread, it also kept the climactic shoot-out and destruction of the device within Stella’s modest budget.
Or that, anyway, had been the logic behind the script I had proofread for her. In execution, though, things slip about in odd directions. Stella must have been offered a deal on cheap location shooting, because the episode, which was supposed to have been a claustrophobic affair set almost entirely within the chipboard confines of DARE’s stealth submarine, had been opened out to include a romantic interlude in somebody’s back garden and moody establishing shots of the beach at Dungeness (standing in here for an exposed seabed). Towards the end of the episode, even the submarine came apart into a series of surprising real-world cutaways, including one extended sequence in which Fel, playing the submarine commander, crawls inside the ship’s weapons system to effect a vital repair. In the script, Fel’s risky adventure was conducted off-camera, via regular, increasingly desperate reports over the ship’s Tannoy system. Stella had somehow found the resources to visualise the whole thing. No wonder she had wanted me to watch the episode.
It surprised me that she had chosen to shoot in such cramped locations: there seemed very little here that Stella could not have got me to re-create in plasterboard and hot-knifed packing foam. Concrete walls and pipework; a floor with a drain. Signage whose significance escaped me but which, being in an easily legible and serifed font, no doubt belonged to the location itself rather than to Stella’s set-dressing.
At one point, Fel entered a cell-like, windowless space and took her mark behind a drain set in the floor. Her costume was a silver one-piece, sturdier than the foil-thin suits that were the usual daywear of her crew. She wore no wig: her head was close-cropped, shaved over the ears. (I remember that cut; the feel of it under my hand.) From the drain in the floor, water welled. It rose in a column, fluted and swirled by the pattern of the grating, and spread over the floor. It hit the back wall of the cell and broke, foaming: salt water. The flow strengthened and the cell began to fill. Soon the flow welling from the grate was no more than a dome of disturbance on the surface of the rising water. Inch by inch, the water rose around Fel’s body.
It was over her chest now, and in a weird breaking of the fourth wall, Fel looked directly into the camera lens. Not into the distance, as the shot seemed to demand. Right at me. The water got to her neck. The camera was mounted to match her eyeline. The water was nearly at the level of the lens. Wavelets plashed against a glass screen protecting the lens. Was the camera in a glass box, or were they shooting through a window?
The water rose over Fel’s face and the camera at the same moment, losing what was surely the most dramatic moment of the shot, the moment Fel’s face, her nose and mouth, became submerged. The image was a mess of distortions, foam, shadows, gloom. Not until the water level had risen above the lens did the scene stabilise.
Fel remained in shot, holding on to the pipework. The film lamps, adequate enough to illumine the dry cell, struggled to penetrate the seawater, so that Fel’s impassive expression, her apparent relaxation, her utter indifference to the water, may have simply been an artefact of poor lighting. Was she even in the water? Perhaps there was a glass wall between her and the water, just as there was a glass wall between the water and the camera. But how could that be? Surely the water had pooled around her feet? Surely I had just seen that – seen the water rise, not just in front of her, but around her? Yes. I had seen that. The impossibility of it – that she should be submerged and show nothing, and minutes later still show nothing (why on earth were they holding the shot?), impressed me. I wondered how it was done.
I was still wondering at Stella’s special effect, still impressed by its realism, as I pawed the bathroom door open and retched all my pent-up horror violently into the toilet bowl.
I wiped my mouth with toilet paper. I swilled and spat. I went back into the living room and phoned Stella. I wanted to know how she had pulled the trick off. I wanted some reassurance. I didn’t get any reply. I phoned Fel. She picked up straight away.
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Hi. What’s wrong?’
I laughed weakly. ‘It’s that obvious?’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’ve just been watching DARE.’
‘It’s not that bad.’
‘I’ve just been watching you—’
‘What?’
‘Drown. I’ve just been watching you drown.’
When I finally got her to understand what I was talking about, she laughed at me. ‘I held my breath, Stu. What the hell did you think?’
I couldn’t tell her. With the vividness of nightmare, the airlock sequence had realised my suspicion that Fel was advancing beyond the human. That she was changing from the woman I knew into something else. That she was leaving me.
‘I was just going to phone you,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘There’s some bad news.’
My heart skipped a beat. ‘Mum.’
‘What? No, Betty’s fine, don’t worry. Only Daddy and Stella. Well, they’ve decided to split up.’
‘Good God. Why?’
There was a pause.
‘Things aren’t getting any easier here,’ Fel said.
There were Christmas lights strung across the main streets of Islington. For some, the party had already got itself started:a balloon was stuck in a tree near Stella’s house, and spent firework casings lay trodden underfoot by the park gate.
With Georgy gone I had assumed Stella might dress her house for Christmas this time. There was no garland on Stella’s door and no tree in her window, though it was hard to be sure because her windows were barred on the inside by white steel concertina railings. The bell was gone from beside the garden door so I went around to the front. Stella let me in. Though it was after noon, she was still in her dressing gown. ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night,’ she explained. ‘Some boys were throwing firecrackers at my window.’
Betty was in the dining room in the basement, playing Operation. Her dexterity was almost adult. She nodded me hello but otherwise ignored me. The Process had put us at a remove hardly greater than that established already by her long absence. Would we have grown any closer had it not been for her cancers? I doubted it.