La Grua

Fionn Duffy

“CINCO. CUATRO. TRES. DOS. UNO. RUAIRI.”

Pablo’s voice blares in my headphones as I watch the camera at the end of my two-metre-long crane begin seesawing downwards.

“CAMARA CINCO.”

A dusty box tv sitting on a stool to my left shows me I started a little too low. I fick my stare up to the fat screen monitor above. It displays, from a slight leftward angle, a blue trapezoidal table occupied by four shadowy guests split by a spotlit host, Mónica, at the short end of this unfnished pyramid.

“CAMARA DOS.” The monitor cuts to Camera Two with Mónica at centre of the frame now welcoming our audience: “Hola, hola, hola. Buenas tardes!”

Is she wearing a hoodie?

“¿RUAIRI?” Pablo barks. I look back to the box tv and jerk the frame right as I twist the dial beside the joystick on my little console to zoom in. I eventually fnd Manolo.

“¡ENFOQUE RUAIRI!”

I twist a smaller dial for the focus, squinting at the old convex screen. It’s impossible to know what’s in focus.

“CAMARA CINCO.”

I look back up at the monitor. Manolo’s shaved head is looking crisp as ever. It helps that all the lights are on now. I think he has a moustache, but it’s hard to tell with the mask.

#RIZANDOELRIZO suddenly appears on the top left corner of the screen. Better late than never lads. ‘Rizando el Rizo’: ‘Curling the curl’ directly translated; ‘Uncurling the curls’ more properly translated, but neither really roll off the tongue. I peek around the crane to look at the set itself. Mónica is wearing a hoodie. Interesting. I mean it’s a perfectly fne hoodie (I like volt green!) but for a debate? (Is it a debate? I didn’t read the brief, I just saw the word ‘debate’, and ‘debate’ in Spanish (deh-bah-tay) could mean news for all I know.)

“PUBLICIDAD RUAIRI.” Zoom out. Recentre. Get the camera low.

“RUAIRI.”

Above my head my left hand trembles on the joystick while the other attempts to cup the base of the crane. I pull down.

“CAMARA CINCO.”

The crane smoothly rises but the camera tilts down rapidly leaving the subjects awkwardly hanging at the very top of the frame by the time the frst commercial break begins.

“¡MIERDA RUAIRI! ¡PUTO DISASTRE!”

I stare at the wrist of my impatient left hand. Along a pulsing vein I watch a single bead of sweat pop out.

Along my beating wrist, I watched a single bead of sweat pop out, like a timelapse of the growth of a plant. I felt my temples steam as I counted the tiny little bumps on my grey technical graphics desk, slightly upward inclined for convenience. Through the open door I saw her skip into the woodworking room across the hallway. We had no classes together, so I always looked forward to waiting for TG after breaktime on Thursdays because she’d be there surrounded by us boys, laughing away. Sometimes she’d ask me to pull down her hockey stick off the top of the lockers and we’d talk. I once told her she was pretty and she smiled at me, her green eyes shining as if a bucket of soapy water had been thrown on a dusty old Mercedes for the frst time in years. I soon knew where all her classes after breaktime were. I’d make sure to glide past the doorway every time just in case she’d see me.

“You’re nice,” she told me, “But I’d rather be friends.”

These words clattered around my head until Mr O'Donnell strolled in and shut the door.

Seven years later we’re all sitting on benches around our professor Fernando, a short balding man wearing the only navy feece I’ve ever seen him in. As he reads from our evaluation sheet in his barely comprehensible accent, I imagine the bathroom cubicle I’ll be heading to immediately after he fnishes so I can cry and wonder why I ever came to this country, how I ever had the hubris. I think of how I brought the camera way too high before the second commercial break or how I accidentally knocked into the crane during the credits. I stare at the ground as he mentions my name for, I think, the frst time ever. I feel the eyes of my classmates, all sympathetic apart from Pablo. I imagine him coming over to me to tell me how we practiced for two weeks, and I still couldn’t get it right. I struggle to fnd the words in Spanish so that I can tell him, “I tried my best! Chastising me does not help! I wasn’t born fucking yesterday!”

“Ruairi,” my professor says in Spanish, “Out of all four groups in the year, that was the best cranework by far!" cranework by far!”