Popshot Magazine – August 2019

“Well, so I have. So I have.” He lets out the words like he’s still waiting for their
meaning to hit home. I’ve wedged on my good, thick boots by now, and I’m chuckling
softly to myself as I pull out my own hair-cap. He looks at me.
“Chris, I look like an egg don’t I?” He pauses, begins to laugh. It’s a good, loud
laugh, and I join in. He carries right on laughing with one hand on the mirror and the
other stroking the space where his eyebrows used to be, but then the laughter seems
to change a little – dies down, takes on an uncomfortable edge — and I know we’re
both thinking about Phil and what happened to him last week, and how he’d have
been lucky to have only lost his eyebrows.
We stop laughing. I pull on my under-gloves in silence and do up my hood. It’s
getting warm now in this suit, like a sauna on a summer’s day. It's only going to get
hotter. A familiar fluttering-thumping starts up in my chest as I pull on my goggles,
and I’m just hoping I get a good run today, that nothing goes wrong.
“Could you pass me the gloves?” I ask Dale, and he hands them over. They’re big
old things, like giant oven-mitts, and it takes a lot of skill to get any precision with
them whilst we work, but somehow we manage.
“What are you on today then?” Dale asks.
I frown, wiping some of the mist from my already steamed-up goggles.
“What day is it?”
“Thursday,” says Dale.
“Ah, Venetian Barbtongue,” I say, remembering. He’s a nice old beast that one, too
lazy to spark up much of a flame, but his tongue’s the bit to watch for on a bad day.
“Shouldn’t take too long.”
“If you’re lucky,” Dale says, smiling. “You might manage to get the afternoon off. I
hear it’s going to be a sunny day. Nice and warm.”
We both chuckle at this, and I give Dale a good nod as I turn to face the doors,
heart-in-throat as always. I take a deep breath, and go in.