Read Last Days for Free Online Page B

something clever with the lighting. There was a front room with the glamorous street in view; a rear ground-floor room overlooking a painfully green garden; a second smaller bedroom; and the sombre stone steps before the front door. Two higher storeys had the same floor plan as the ground level, and there was a basement too according to Max’s notes. The entire second floor had been the penthouse for Sister Katherine, which he’d shoot last.
    In the rear room the sun wasn’t so bright. Kyle asked Dan about the lights. ‘I’ll throw something soft against a wall. Use white paper. Bounce the light off. Maybe use a background light too. A rim. Get some ambience.’
    They’d learned through experience to adapt the lights to each unique environment on location, at whatever time of day or night they shot. He knew what most of his peers would do here: they’d use a fill light and blanche Susan’s face because of all the white walls.
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    ‘Key light can go on her face from the side. Get some depth, get all that character she has.’ Dan grinned.
    ‘Good man. Could even use the soft tubes,’ he dropped his voice to a whisper, ‘get some Lon Chaney action going on.’
    Dan wandered off and left Kyle looking through the viewfinder of the second camera, the Panasonic HVX200, until Dan called for him from somewhere in the rear of the building.
    In the room across the hall from the kitchen, Susan stood in silence in the middle of the bare floor. Painted claws clasped to her cheeks, her intense eyes gazed at the ceiling.
    Here we go . Though her stance and expression eroded his immediate suspicion of more hamming.
    ‘In here. The renunciation began.’
    Dan took up a position to the side of Susan, to check the light.
    ‘Maybe we should start here then, Susan?’ Kyle offered.
    ‘With the renunciation .’ He kneeled down and untangled the cables and unpacked the sound equipment.
    Susan removed a tissue from her clutch bag, sniffed, dabbed under her nose on both sides. ‘I gave away so much in here. So much of myself. And have never stopped wondering whether it was the right thing to do.’
    ‘What was it, the renunciation?’
    Susan held two hands in the air as if she hadn’t heard Kyle.
    He still wasn’t sure if she would play up like this for the camera, or whether she was so eccentric she was already oblivious to what a freak show she would be on screen. ‘ She 42
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    presided over everything. Every session. Listening. Always listening. Assessing us. Gathering intelligence. Things she could use. Later. Use against us. I have never forgiven her. I knew it would end badly for her.’
    Kyle looked up. ‘Why do you say that?’
    Susan laughed to herself, as if he and Dan weren’t present.
    Sniffed, dabbed at the corner of her lurid eyes with the tissue.
    ‘We gave her everything. Everything to be a part of this. Our families, our jobs. You have to understand, some people left marriages. And their children. Their poor little children.’
    ‘So what went on in this room?’
    ‘Sessions. Sometimes they went on all night. Started in the evening and finished in the morning when you were empty.
    Endless, it was endless. She was a seer of our shames. We were here to be cleansed of our pasts, our woes . . . responsibilities, disappointments . . . our attachments to anything but her. Everything. Memories even. She wanted everything.
    All of it. Out of us. Everything that makes us people. Makes us unique. Anything that was a barrier between us and her.
    ‘You have to understand, back then, we were different.
    Buttoned up. Terrified of boredom. Of being trapped. Afraid of the world ending. We were young. We wanted adventure.
    Life! We had so much to say. To prove.’ Breathless with excitement and shaking with emotion, Susan turned to Kyle.
    He paused in his hurried attaching of the XLR cables to the second camera and DAT sound recorder. Her eyes flashed wide and bright. A pinkish hue grew beneath the