Cables

He has a cameraman’s posture: back – wide and straight, arms – lose and strong, bottom – pert and angled upwards, ready to support the load of a tripod or a lights’ kit. He is a straw blonde, messy hair sticking up and sideways. His eyes are dark-blue, eyebrows – dark straw, eyelids – puffy, cheekbones – broad and vaguely Mongol. He has cameraman’s hands: rough-skinned yet nimble fingers, palms already muddy, he is untangling a stubborn cable.

The cable is a thin, wiry job – he is struggling with it but not showing any signs of annoyance. He has a cameraman’s patience. I take all of this in as I walk up to the marquee and ask him where to find Joule (I have the name in a message from production director and not sure what gender that person might be). “You are in the right place, – he beams, eyes decidedly Mongol, teeth sweet corn-like, – I am he.”

It is early winter, we are outside, we are filming. It is cold and we rush intermittently to heaters spaced around the set, stretching our rigid hands towards them. It is muddy after days of rain, we stamp the grass into a mush, and our feet are soon caked in mud and we make jokes about working out on the job just through lifting extra load attached to our shoes.

He works calmly, he is focused yet relaxed. The shoot is not easy, problems keep popping up. He is switched on and cooperative, he never loses temper, solving issues not directly his: he happens to have the correct jack to fix something to do with audio, yet he makes nothing of it and doesn’t bother to tease the sound guys.

We watch what he’s filmed on playback and I’m aware that I’m more excited by his physical proximity than by his shots’ quality. They are excellent shots, anyway. He is creative and daring, yet he keeps asking me what I want, what I like and what I’m looking for.

By the time we break up for late lunch, I have a crush. I have to stop myself from watching him walk off or even more – bend over to pick something up or squat to fix something. I feel that special haze coming on, as I look at him wrapping a thin cable round his three fingers, listen him talk about the quality of winter afternoon light.

We eat inside a larger marquee with more powerful heaters, it’s warmer but we still stay in our bulky coats to conserve the heat. We pick up ready made pots with fusion noodles, he makes a joke about the production company pulling out all the stop. We slurp the warming noodles and laugh. I ask him about his name, he asks me about mine. Turns out his parents were physicists and called him after the guy who invented energy, or rather worked out how to harness it. Or measure it, or something like that. Joule is his middle name but he dislikes his first – James.

I give him the account of exoticism behind my own name. He rests his chin on his fists, listens to me with utmost attention, his eyes widening and turning a slightly lighter shade of blue. I’m in heaven.

We end the day late. It is dark outside of the brightly lit perimeter, and so cold that my teeth chatter. We scramble into a minibus to go to the hotel where we will be staying tonight and tomorrow night and the night after that.

In the minibus he is squeezed next me, there aren’t enough seat belts to go round, he wrestles out of his parka and, as he leans forward, in the light of a single street lamp I catch a glimpse of his neck, with a pulsating vein and fine blonde hairs. I tense up and stop breathing momentarily. He turns to look at me and for the first time in the past ten hours I don’t look away or giggle in an embarrassed way. I look straight back at him, into his dark-blue eyes and into his cheek-bones and the peaks of his hair.

And I already know that in a matter of hours or maybe even minutes his face will be above me or underneath me and the lips will part and the expression will have changed from that of friendly professionalism to cheeky invitation to desire, to an almost pained grimace of pleasure, to otherworldness, to distance, to dream.

When we are arrive in the hotel and check in and are given keys to our rooms, we don’t say anything to each other. Others in our party chatter and make plans to go for a drink to the hotel bar. Our party is sufficiently large for us to get unaccounted for. We call the lift and as we wait for it, he reaches for my hand and checks the number on the cardboard cover of my room key-card.

We ride in the lift silently for about seven seconds. When we get to his floor, he steps through the sliding door, turns back to me, saying “I’ll see you in a minute…” and it is barely a whisper. The door slides back and I see my face, reflected in the stainless steel. It is thin, wiry, distorted into a grimace, of pleasure, of desire, of expectation.

Khinkulova (c) 2019