Free The Continuity Girl by Leah McLaren

be there.
    Meredith pushed these thoughts from her mind and forced herself to concentrate on the job at hand. Richard was striding across
     the set, right hand pitchforked deep into his bale of brown hair. He obviously needed something big from her, and Meredith
     resolved to make herself useful.
    “Meredith. Heavenly to see you. Turns out you’re
just
the person I was looking for.” Richard covered his heart with ten long
     white fingers and bowed like a courtier. There was a slightly sarcastic inflection to everything he said or did, as if his
     entire life were one elaborate adolescent boarding-school prank. Meredith felt very slow and cement-witted whenever he was
     around. She stood up.
    “Sir?”
    “Listen.” He lowered his voice to a clamp-toothed whisper. “We have a rather serious crisis on our hands—one that I think
     you could help to diffuse by employing your...” He searched.
“Womanly charms.”
    “I’m sorry?”
    “I’m afraid it’s Miss Swain.” He winced and looked around to make sure none of the crew members were in earshot. “She’s—how
     to put this delicately?—having a bit of a hissy fit at the moment. A sort of a does-my-ass-look-fat-in-this-dress tantrum.
     In her trailer. Won’t come out. It’s all quite ridiculous, but she’s utterly inconsolable—by
me
at any rate. She’s already
     scared the wardrobe stylist off set, and if she doesn’t calm down shortly I’m afraid Dan could be next in line.” He glanced
     across the warehouse to where Dan Button sat dejectedly polishing the carved ivory knob on his walking stick with a shammy.
    “That’s awful,” said Meredith, feeling confused. Swain’s diva antics were hardly surprising, but Richard’s confidence in her
     was. Continuity supervisors had little contact with the actors, apart from annoying them by taking Polaroids of their costumes
     or reminding them to back-match their lines to their actions. Meredith preferred it this way. Actors were unpredictable, self-obsessed
     and invariably unstable. No good could come of befriending them. She worked around them like a stable hand sweeping out a
     thoroughbred’s stall.
    “You see, Meredith, what I was wondering was—and no pressure, by the way, although to be perfectly honest, at this point the
     entire balance of the show does depend upon it—if you wouldn’t mind
talking
to her, American woman to American woman.”
    “But I’m Canadian.”
    Richard corrected his stoop and looked over Meredith’s shoulder toward a team of grips assembling weights on the back of a
     crane. “Ms. Swain’s trailer is the third on the left. The first setup should be complete in half an hour.” The conversation
     was over.
    As she made her way to the line of trailers (affectionately referred to as “the circus”) Meredith marveled at how archaic
     the average film set was. In an era when computers could be chess champions and compose original symphonies, cinema was clunky
     up close. The makeup artist applied blue lipstick to the mouth of the girl playing the corpse; and fake blood—a mixture of
     gelatin, water and purple food coloring—was splattered at the scene by a propsmaster wielding a child’s plastic squirt gun.
     Cameras were still laboriously rigged on the outside of cars, fastened to the top of cranes or mounted Snugli-style on the
     chest of the Steadicam operator.
    Meredith felt more of an affinity with the camera than with any of her breathing colleagues on set. She and the lens had certain
     things in common. They were both dispassionate observers valued for their ability to meticulously record details without judgment
     or embellishment. Immovable in their pedantry, both were utterly indispensable to the process.
    The door of Kathleen Swain’s trailer was slightly ajar. Meredith tapped twice and stood frozen on the floating stainless steel
     stoop, listening for signs of life. After a half minute or so, she knocked again.
    “Oh,
what
now?” That