Everything You Need: Short Stories (21 page)

I relaxed. Okay, so polish was dull. But this stuff worked, by Jesus. Selling something that works is never too hard. I hung out for a while longer, took a couple of minutes in the john to tip my chemical balance in the direction of enthusiasm, then got the five minute call.

I murmured encouraging things to Rusty — who’d begun to shake slightly — and strode out under the lights. I don’t know why I did that, because we weren’t on air. They always cut in with you already in position. But I always stride on anyway. Call it professional pride.

Then the floor manager counts you down, the light on Camera One goes red, and you’re on. It’s showtime. Suddenly it’s not just you and some perspiring Southerner — it’s you and the rest of the world. Well, the world that’s up and watching a shopping channel at 12:02 a.m., anyway.

I started the hour with a searching but light-hearted meditation on the amount of old metalware in people’s houses, and went on to muse about how folks would get a lot more fun out of antique stores and yard sales if it weren’t for the prospect of having to
clean
their prizes when they got them home. I didn’t mention the other metal in people’s houses — the silverware, furniture, even the fascias of DVD players. Not yet. Throw out all your ideas in the first minute on a Special and by twenty after the hour you’re going to be treading water until you drown.

I segued direct from this into Rusty doing his thing. He was okay, even pretty good. There was something so down-home about him that you couldn’t help watching. ‘Christ,’ you were soon thinking, ‘This guy’s fucking
obsessed
. If he gets off this much on polishing, there’s
got
to be something in it. Let me have a try.’

He took a pair of old candlesticks, equally tarnished. Talking slowly, he described the process of using his wonder-polish, demonstrating as he went. I didn’t do much more than provide an echo every now and then — ‘Okay, so you put it on a
cloth
, right?’ — because I knew as the hour progressed he’d run out of steam. A minute later one of the candlesticks was looking brighter than the day it was made. I’d kind of preferred it with the tarnish, to be honest: for me taking an antique and making it look new was like sprucing up Stonehenge with fiberglass. But I knew that the audience would feel differently, and Rod the director was already chattering happily in my earpiece. The calls had started right away, and Supa Shine was out of the starting blocks.

For the next fifteen minutes Rusty tirelessly polished and buffed. I tried it myself, of course, affably pouring the full weight of my personality into restoring the shine to a variety of pieces of old trash — while being careful to make it clear that James Richard, like the viewer at home, had no previous expertise in the field. We did gold, we did silver, we did copper, we did chrome. They all worked spectacularly. We actually had to start being careful about the way we held the pieces, because the glitter was throwing the cameras off.

Twenty five minutes in I took over from Rusty, helping him out of a circuitous ramble he’d trapped himself into. The calls were really flooding in by now; Supa Shine was shifting big time.

It was time to start talking to people.

Our first call was typical. Lori from Black Falls rang to say that she’d bought Supa Shine when it’d been on before and it had changed her life. She described in detail how she’s polished everything in her street and how happy that had made her. She’d called that evening to buy stocks for her sisters, daughters and friends. She was so patently sincere that I let her run on for quite some while, knowing she was doing our job for us. Rusty nodded benignly, dislodging a small droplet of sweat from his hairline, which rolled slowly onto his forehead. I covertly signaled the director to switch to a close-up product shot, and Mandy the makeup girl darted on to powder us both. No more than six seconds, then back to a medium shot of the two of us, and all the while I kept the banter going with the caller until she’d said all she had to say.

Lori finally stopped yakking and went off to polish her dog’s head and we took a call from Ann in Raenord. Ann had called because she was concerned that Supa Shine might harm her gold-plated jewelry. Rusty whipped a piece of plated stuff off the pile and polished it there and then. It came up beautifully, and Ann was mollified. She thanked us for talking to her and was transferred to the purchase operators.

It was a natural point to take five, and so I signaled to Rod and talked us into a short break... giving just a hint of some of the exciting polishing action still to come.

A
s soon as
the ident was on the screen I winked at Rusty, and disappeared behind the set and into the green room. None of the production staff batted an eyelid. I’d left a line chopped and ready on the one table which wasn’t covered with crap from previous shows, and so it was the matter of a moment to get the marching dust into my bloodstream.

I strode back into the studio – taking care to grab a glass of water for cover — and stood next to Rusty. ‘Going great,’ I enthused. ‘Just had a word with the guys — you’re selling by the
shit
load.’

Rusty smiled shyly, and I noticed that another droplet of sweat was already forming. Mandy swabbed, Rod counted us back in. and we were on air less than three minutes after I’d left the room.

The next five minutes were fine. Rusty told us how it would only take two cans of Supa Shine to clean an entire 747, and it didn’t seem hard to believe. I must admit that by this time I was kind of wondering what was actually
in
the stuff: the pile of metal in front of us was gleaming so much it was starting to hurt my eyes. I got Rusty to tell his story about working in his mother’s garage for ten years coming up with the formula, then decided it was time to take another call.

And that’s where the evening went a little weird.

‘Hi,’ I said, smiling direct to Camera One. ‘So, who do we have come to talk with us now?’

The normal response to this question is the caller’s name and location, utterly promptly and clearly. They’ve been briefed by an operator and most of them blurt the information out super-fast, as if eager to prove they can follow instructions properly and will make a great addition to the programme.

This time, however, there was a silence.

Which is fine — sometimes people get overawed once they realise they’re really on air. The tactic then is to ask them a
very simple question
to start them off.

‘Have you already experienced Supa Shine’s cleaning miracles, caller?’ I asked. ‘Or do you have a question for friend Rusty here before you try it?’

Usually that’ll do it. The silence continued, however, and I began to let my right hand wander up towards my neck — in preparation for the agreed code for cutting a caller off. But then the caller spoke.

‘He’s not Rusty.’

The voice was deep and ragged and wet and rough. My heart sank. Every now and then one of the directors, Rod in particular, would let a weird one slip through. The stated intention was ‘keeping it real’, but as Rod wouldn’t know real if it slapped him upside the head I believed it was more likely to be about fucking up the presenter for the delight of the assembled spear carriers. Kind of irresponsible when the product was shifting so well, but that’s assholes for you. They’re assholey.

‘Well, not literally, of course,’ I pouted (winsomely). ‘But you know what? It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to find that Supa Shine wasn’t only great with stains and tarnish — but could handle a little spot of rust as well. In fact, I was just going to ask...’

‘His name isn’t Rusty,’ the voice said. It sounded like the guy had the world’s worst ever cold. Or flu. Or maybe the plague.

‘Well, no, it’s kind of a nick-name, isn’t it?’ I chuckled. ‘No-one gets called Rusty right off the bat, do they. Just like some of my friends call me Jim. And so caller, while we’re talking, what’s
your
name?’

There was no reply.

Screw this, I thought. I very obviously scratched my Adam’s apple. In other words,
get this loser off the air
.

Meanwhile I turned to Rusty, who was starting to look nervous. It’s often the way with the guests. When things start well they can get lulled into forgetting they’re on live television — but it’s a perilous relaxation. The smallest upset can unsettle them for good.

‘So how
about
that, Rusty?’ I asked, holding his eyes to lock him back into where he was, and what he was going. ‘Obviously Supa Shine isn’t going to be able to cope if something’s totally
covered
in rust, kind of falling apart, but how about a little spot or two?’

Rusty opened his mouth to speak, but then a very bizarre noise came over the studio monitor. It sounded like a loud, liquid cough, mixed up with the sound of a handful of nails being dropped on a metal surface.

‘Woh! I apologise for that, viewers,’ I laughed. ‘Little technical glitch here in the studio, don’t know if you heard it at home — just goes to show that we really are
live
tonight in your living room, live and
a-
live, bringing you the very best in bargains 24/7. So...’

Then the noise happened again.

I laughed once more, throwing my hands up in the air for good measure — as if helpless with mirth at the hilarious events which tumbled through life: not just my life, you understand, but also the lives of the viewers at home.

Then something else came over the speakers. The deep, broken voice said: ‘That’s my name.’

‘What?’ I said, momentarily thrown.

‘That’s my name,’ the voice repeated. Then the strange liquid noise rumbled through the speakers again. ‘That’s it.’

‘That... noise is your name?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well make sure you spell it out when you talk to our purchase operators...’ I said, with a wink directly into camera — to the normal man and woman on the couch, ‘...because I’m not sure they’ll have come across that one before. Eastern European, is it?’

‘No.’

‘Well okay then. I know that we have many, many other viewers out there who really want to share their experiences with Rusty’s Supa Shine polish with us, so maybe if...’

‘It’s not his.’

By now I was finally beginning to get pissed off. The entire exchange had probably only taken forty seconds, but that’s a
long
time on live television. Rusty was looking extremely wary again, and a whole army of perspiration drops were massed at the hair line, ready to roll down his face. That could not happen, not on my watch. Nobody wants to buy something from a guy who’s sweating like a pig.

I made the cut sign again, even more clearly.

‘Jim, there’s something odd going on.’

This voice didn’t come out over the speakers, but only into my earpiece. It was Rod.

I turned to Rusty and cheerfully suggested he show us his polish working magic on the second candlestick, which was weak, but I needed a few seconds’ cover.

As I watched him get to this, I raised my eyebrows quickly, just about the only way I could communicate to the box that I needed to hear more.

Rod spoke again, and what he said was strange. ‘We can’t get this joker off the air.’

I risked a glance off. Normally you never do this. You look direct to the camera, at the object you’re selling, or at your civilian co-host. Anywhere else looks weird to the viewer at home, reminding them that they’re watching a guy in a studio. But I swept my eyes quickly over the window to the director’s booth — their lair was sealed from the studio so chatter and techspeak didn’t leak onto the live microphones — and saw Rod standing looking directly at me, his hands held up in professional mime-quality ‘I have no fucking clue what is going on’ pose.

Behind him a couple of techs were moving quickly about the room, fiddling with wires. By this point in my life I had done many, many hours of live television. I’d never seen something like that before. I realised there and then that I was entering new and uncharted territory.

‘He has stolen it,’ said the speaker voice, loudly.

‘Stolen what?’ I said.

‘His so-called polish. It is not his. It belongs to us.’

I was still trying conjure a response to this when I heard Rod’s voice in my ear once more. He wasn’t speaking directly to me this time, but what he said was so weird I decided from then on I was just going to ignore everything except what was happening in front of me.

Rod’s voice was on the edge of cracking. ‘What the fuck do you mean?’ he was shouting, to someone, ‘Time is slowing
down
?’

I assumed he was ragging out some technician and it was a geek wires-and-sockets thing. Whatever. Their problem, not mine. If they couldn’t get this idiot off the air I’d have to plough on regardless. The show must go on, always. This was precisely what I got paid the big bucks for, Well, the bucks, anyway.

I smiled at Camera Two, the one currently showing a red light. ‘Well,
thank
you caller, it’s been great to hear your own special perspective on this. But just right now I want to ask Rusty here something.’

I turned to my co-host, the first time I’d looked directly at him for maybe a minute or two. I should have checked back before. He’d got stressed, nervous, a big old dose of stage fright. The line of sweat droplets I’d seen forming earlier had decided to all go over the top at once, and fresh ranks were following in their wake — taking with them what appeared to be a thick layer of make-up. Every guest gets some pancake, to smooth out blotches and variations and make everyone look nice under the lights. This make-up was a lot thicker than that, though. And, I noticed, looked kind of like... latex.

I stared at Rusty. Rusty looked back at me.

I noticed then that his eyes were perhaps suspiciously blue, too, like they were contacts. And that where the make-up was running or melting or whatever it was doing, the skin underneath seemed to be both rough and warty and also a unusual colour.

‘Rusty,’ I said, suspiciously, ‘Are you... green?’