I was horrified that the question had slipped out of my mouth, but all Murray did was smile. ‘For as long as I can remember.’
I made a decision.
Inside my mind, there was a vault. It was the place I put things when they got too big, too overwhelming, too much; a place where I could keep them until I was calm and steady enough to unpack them properly, to draw lines around them and file them – or bury them completely.
I loved him so much.
But I couldn’t have him.
So I opened the vault.
I took it all: all the feelings, all the emotions, all that volcanic attraction, all that bone-deep certainty that he was mine, mine,mine.
And I locked it away.
‘I’m really happy for you, Murray,’ I said, patting him platonically on the shoulder. ‘Let’s get another drink.’
10Murray
It was still dark when my alarm went off. My head felt heavy, like it was stuffed full of wool.
I drank my coffee strong at the best of times, but the one I made myself in the tiny kitchenette in my trailer was practically tar. I made it with lukewarm water, so I could slam it down. I boiled the kettle while I splashed water on my face, pulled on a clean black polo shirt and jeans, put my earpiece in, laced up my boots, and buckled on my utility belt. My second coffee – just as strong, but actually hot this time – came with me, in the world’s largest travel mug.
‘Morning, Murray,’ Frida said. ‘Petra and I are going to head down to the Convent now and get the cameras and mics set up. Do you want a ride?’ She gestured at the golf cart they’d loaded up with equipment.
‘Go on ahead. I’ll be right behind you. I’ve just got to grab a few things first.’
I’d come up with a plan, before I finally managed to doze off the night before. If Romeo-Dylan and Cece were determined to do these friend spots, then I needed to give them a different visual language to the rest of the show: something spartan and sexless, instead of spectacular and sexy. They could come across as comfortable, but the second that crossed over into intimate, it would step all over the romance plot.
Years of being a man with a female best friend had taught me how easy it was for people to assume that ‘friends’ was just a transitional space you were passing through on the way to ‘lovers’. I could make that work in my favour with the friendly dynamic between the Dylans, despite their lack of a romantic spark, but I was going to have to treadextremelycarefully if I was going to prevent audiences reading Epic Romance into Romeo-Dylan and Cece, especially after he hero-carried her down the hill.
I arrived at the Convent with a bag full of blankets and cushions in the least-romance-coded colours I could find, and a selection of very ugly and shapeless cardigans for Cece. She wrapped a particularly hideous beige one around herself as Frida and Petra mounted cameras and hung mics, and I probed for the pressure point that would let me manipulate her.
It didn’t take long to find. The pandemic had left her broke and unemployed, and so here Cece was, trying to become an influencer in order to make money, even though she froze up whenever people looked at her and, as anyone who’d taken even a brief glance at her Instagram could see, she didn’t know anything about social media strategy.
It was a terrible plan, but that didn’t matter. I could use it.
I spun a story for her. How if she played her cards right in these friend spots with Romeo-Dylan, there were more possibilities. A spot onJuliet on the Beach.Possibly even the lead onWherefore Art Thou Romeo?. Underpinning them all, money, money, money.
Then after the possibilities, the demands. She had to keep her shit together on camera. She had to keep the conversations focused on Romeo-Dylan, not her. And most importantly, at every opportunity she got, she needed to make it painstakingly clear that she and he were not a match.
Later that morning, I scrubbed through the footage from the first friend spot, sitting in the war room with another enormous cup of coffee. Given Cece’s disastrous performance on the first night, my expectations had not been high, but I found myself cautiously optimistic.
It wasn’t perfect. Cece was trying, but she definitely wasn’t comfortable with the cameras, and she was coming across stilted and awkward.
But that just allowed Romeo-Dylan to shine. Covering for her so she didn’t have to talk, he delivered a golden monologue about the twelve Juliets left in the game, audio we could splice in whenever we needed a quick character introduction.
And there were other lines, too, which were going to be perfect sound bites. ‘Just because there’s a spark with me and Dyl, and not with me and you, doesn’t make her “better” than you,’ he told Cece.
I could use that grab for so many things. I could emphasise that he and Cece were friends and that non-romanticfriendships were important – but I could also isolate the phrase ‘there’s a spark with me and Dyl’ and drop it in any Double Dylan scene I wanted. Showing was a better narrative technique than telling, but sometimes if you told people something often enough, they’d believe it.
I made notes as I scrubbed through more footage from the first few days of filming, jotting down timecodes of particularly good moments. We wouldn’t do the real work of editing until we had the whole season in the can, but I could assemble some rough cuts from what we had, good enough that even Fucking Greg would have to admit it.
‘Was Jess K a bitch to wardrobe Tess?’ Lily asked from the doorway. ‘That First Night Party dress was hideous.’
I paused playback. ‘That door was locked.’
She smiled and held up a bobby pin.
