The car is thudding in and out of holes in the road. I can’t tell where anything is until I’m driving over it. But I’m used to that. We haven’t had streetlights since I was a kid, and they stopped making headlamps a decade ago. No-one goes out in the dark apart from me. I’m the only Prop Master. My pass, an etched disc with The Simple Things logo on it, gets me anywhere, anytime.
Filming goes on till late, and if they have an idea for the shoot the next day, I’m the person who is sent to find whatever’s needed. Most people don’t mind me bothering them in the small hours. When I say I’m from The Simple Things, they get that glow that just hearing the name has given viewers since we launched. People will do anything to hang onto that feeling.
There aren’t any editorial guidelines for the show. Everyone just knows what feels right and what doesn’t. Making custard, that’s fine. But gravy doesn’t work. Knitting, or sewing on a button is standard and features in most episodes, as does washing and folding sheets. But ironing is a no-no. Weeding can take up half an episode when everyone is too exhausted to think of anything else, but cutting back bushes is too close to the tree felling that happened when the fuel ran out for the first time, vast fires set outside, so many people gathering.
The last Prop Master went missing when she went out to get something for an episode that was never filmed. There are still rumours about what they’d been sent to find: a ball of wool; a pint glass with a handle; a rolling pin. I know it was the wool because we could have made the glass and the rolling pin in the workshop.
Tonight’s search takes me on a long, distant road. Usually I like the missions. A starlit trip to bash on grocer’s doors, hunting for brussels sprouts or a tin of baked beans. But tonight could be a long one. And for the first couple of hours, the darkness is very deep. After that, the flame fields provide light and I make smoother progress. These are slow burning fires, mostly rancid animals burned to stem the spread of infection; sometimes relatives that no-one has the energy to bury.
It was half way through the final segment today when the Food Director skipped around the set clasping his temples, saying that he couldn’t believe no-one had thought of it before. An apple pie. With custard. How could it not already have been done? I could have told him it was because the last orchard failed before I was born. It was hard to think of anything harder to find than an apple.
The hosts, Alison and Ish, were instantly on board. Alison has long, glossy black hair that looks like something from a wartime photograph. Her round cheeks squeeze up into the creases around her eyes when she smiles to make a topography of joy. Ish has smooth skin and glittering eyes. He says everything with wonder, as though it is the first time he has thought or known it, and now that he knows it, he knows it to be wonderful.
If there aren’t any new ideas for the show, we spend a night on Mescaline with old Ladybird books. Sometimes something small will pop out, like the pink satin of Cinderella’s dress making a good hairband for Alison. Or there will be a specific thing that we’ve all forgotten, like gingerbread men. They gave us enough material for three episodes. The melting of the butter and sugar, the kneading of the dough, (anything involving Ish’s hands is always a big hit), the cutting out, the gently bent metal easing into that tender mixture, pushing little sweeties in only so far. But we didn’t show the gingerbread men being eaten. Like I say, some things just don’t feel right.
Until the Food Editor said the words ‘apple pie,’ I hadn’t thought of an apple for several years. The more deeply we have forgotten a thing, the harder it usually is to procure. The drugs are easiest to get hold of. Alison likes uppers. I bring them to her in little squares of old newspaper which she chews up and swallows when she’s finished snorting. Ish likes something to even him out. His stuff is prettier than Alison’s: purple rocks that come in a blue-tinged glass tubes. They have to be stored like that or the crystals react and become inactive. Ish puts them in his tea. Once, a speck got stuck between his front teeth and could be seen during a segment on daffodils. The production room was going nuts but nobody noticed. After that they made him throw away all the empty tubes he’d stored in his dressing room.
Fear is relative, we all discovered. But if there’s one thing that everyone is afraid of now, then it’s the shells of nursing homes that judge us from the ends of long driveways in the longest-dead parts of cities; rotting along winding country roads, set back into woodland. I’m going to need to drive past one to get to the far fields.
The street at the end of the town I’ve just come through, is unusual. A few people haven’t closed their curtains. I drive slowly so I can see into their windows. They’re all watching. A re-run from two years ago: season eighteen. The one where they sewed a button onto a shirt very slowly, and then made a cheese and potato pie. The potato had been pulled up in a gardening episode a few weeks before. When it reappeared, cut into cubes, no-one could tell it was the same little guy they had seen covered in soil. I can’t make out the people’s faces as they watch, but I can catch the spirit of them: calm, comforted. That’s the ticket, just what we’re after.
The nursing home isn’t far from this little clear-windowed street. Likely none of the people in the houses will have gone further than the water tank for a generation and won’t even know the home is there. I can tell I’m close because the speed numbers on the old road signs get lower, telling people from the old world to slow down. There’s a red triangle attached to a defunct lamppost showing a blasted silhouette of stooped old people.
There must have been trees in front of the home before, guarding it from the traffic. It’s a tall place so I can see some of the upper floors without needing to change position. I tell myself the lights in the windows are security lights, the type that used to turn themselves on if there was a fire. But they are very bright. I realise I’ve shut off the engine but I can’t remember turning the key. The glass panels of the entry door aren’t broken but they are smattered with a grimy sort of algae. Piles of litter are heaped up on the small lawn in front. I wonder why it hasn’t been burned. I put my hand on the key and will myself to drive away. But I can’t help looking up again to the upstairs windows. I shake my head. What am I doing? I laugh, but the sound is unfamiliar and I make myself jump. I simultaneously sense sound and movement. I turn the key quickly and my foot hits the floor. I don’t think too much about the thump of the bonnet meeting with something nondescript as I drive out, fast.
Three hours on the dark road. I won’t be back in time for filming. Somewhere around dawn I page the studio and let them know. Out here there aren’t any field fires. No-one comes this far.
That this tree has never been seen by anyone before is hard to understand. Its low branches and short-legged trunk seem toddlerish; but it’s also an old man with its crispy bark and gnarled stance. The tender white blossom has never been witnessed. Should its fruit be eaten now? I touch the cold sphere, sensing the sweet interior, and work my fingers up to the stalk, a ropey twist palpable beneath its casing.
Light is here now. It sweeps down the swathe of meadow and picks out the tangled grasses, the thick-stemmed cowslips that churn through. My car is at a strange angle to the fields, its bonnet jutting further over the gravel path than I thought when I left it in the morning twilight. On the bumper is a smear of blood. Whatever I hit outside the old people’s home. I go back to the tree, to the apple. I see Ish, holding the knife, cutting into it the russet skin, Alison’s eyes closing later in ecstasy as she spoons pastry and custard into her mouth.
I have reached the end of the road. The stalk remains unsnapped.
Georgia lives in the Cotswolds. Her work has featured in Shooter and Popshot, on BBC Radio, and at Cheltenham Literature Festival. She has won commendations from the Wells and Sean O’Faolain Prizes, and been shortlisted for the Alpine Prize, The London Independent Story Prize and the Laurie Lee Prize. You can read more of her work here: https://onlyticksinthemargin.wordpress.com/
