Free From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle by Kate de Goldi Page B

The fire risk had been minimal because the roof was concrete, but Dick liked to talk up the danger.
    ‘I’ll have to get this into a better light,’ said Barney, lifting the camera from the tripod. You guys just relax for a bit. You probably need it. C’mon, Ren.’
    Ren followed Barney out into the corridor and down to the foyer of the hotel’s side entrance.
    ‘Over heating ?’ whispered Ren. ‘A tape?’
    But Barney was having an extravagant – though mostly silent – meltdown. He clutched and pulled at his great thatch of hair, raked his cheeks, put both hands around his throat and pretended tothrottle himself, then slumped to the floor and groaned piteously.
    Ren got the giggles. Silent laughing was somehow always twice as funny as laughing aloud. And, twice as difficult to stop.
    ‘ Stop it, Barney ,’ she hissed. She felt helpless and a little crazed, the way such laughing made you. Barney was doing silly spasms on the ground. ‘ Stop it! They might come out .’ Ren prodded his gyrating body with her foot and tried to take sobering breaths. She busied herself with the camera.
    ‘Oh I see ,’ she said, loudly, in a voice that sounded horribly false. She opened the tape holder. ‘Oh, that’s the problem … stop it, Barney .’
    Oh, oh, oh, it had been terrible and wonderful, smothering hysterics in the side entrance of His Lordship’s, peering anxiously around for signs of Dick or Marie, trying not to look at Barney playing the lunatic.
    Eventually they managed a hushed and hurried conversation about Dick’s never-ending answer and went back to try a new question. But Dick was not to be swayed from his determined path. He had planned a blow-by-blow account of every event, little and large, that had occurred around His Lordship’s during the Scullys’ residence on the Street.
    By 11 a.m. they had only reached 1986, which was years before Barney and Ren had been born. Prehistory.
    ‘This is going to be the most boring documentary ever,’ said Barney bitterly, as they trudged home. ‘It’s going to be a total and epic bomb.’
     
    But now, just a day later, prone in Ren’s beanbag, Barney seemed to be cheering up. He was starting to see the funny side.
    ‘It’s like Marie was a mute. Or a blow-up doll. She was so stiff .’
    Ren giggled. ‘She was a silent movie.’
    ‘We can probably use a couple of Dick’s stories,’ said Barney. He sat up. He looked decisive. ‘I’ll just do a massive edit.’
    ‘What if everyone goes strange in front of a camera?’
    ‘We have to explain better,’ said Barney. ‘Tell them not to think about it too much. Tell them not to prepare anything.’
    ‘Tell them to talk in a normal voice,’ said Ren.
    Barney climbed to his feet. He pulled back his shoulders and stuck out his jaw. ‘My. Name. Is. Ri. Chard. John. Scul. Ly,’ he chanted.
    ‘Adults are so strange,’ sighed Ren.
     
    The next morning the sky was blue and the air fresh and Ren and Barney sprang out of bed with renewed vigour and optimism. They had decided to postpone the rest of Dick’s interview. They could get his stories from 1986-until-eternity later. Or not at all. There were eight days until school started back. They would make some amendments to the timetable, and film in a different order – people who wouldn’t become living statues in front of a camera. That way they wouldn’t get disheartened.
    ‘Filming is all about staying optimistic,’ said Barney.
    ‘Did your ex-friends Hal and Felix say that?’ said Ren.
    ‘No! I’m saying that. I speak from experience. I’ve had two years of hard grind in the film industry,’ said Barney with wounded dignity.
    The best person to start over with, they both agreed, was Lovie and Bingo’s mother, Sally. She was curator of the Living History Museum and had talked on television often about the Museum.
    ‘In a way,’ said Barney, as they walked round to the Square, ‘the Museum is the same thing as The Untold Story . It’s