Page 40 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"It's rated three hundred," the producer says.

"It is rated three hundred at the center of the seat with the load applied vertically."

"Sir, we are on a schedule."

I sit on the ground, cross legged, which puts my head at roughly the height of a human being in a chair, and the camera operator adjusts down and says nothing, and the producer starts the stopwatch.

The monitor comes on.

My grandmother is sitting at her own kitchen table in the good cardigan, the green one, which she does not wear in her own house, and somebody has put a lamp on a stand behind the camera because the light on her face is coming from the wrong side.

Behind her, in the hall, out of focus, there is the leg of the second bucket.

"Well," Vessik says. "There you are."

Sixty seconds.

"There I am."

"You've gone thin. Your face has gone thin." She leans forward and the good cardigan does something at the shoulder. "Are they feeding you? A man your size needs four thousand calories and they have got you on what."

"Four hundred."

"Four hundred." She sits back. "Well, that is criminal, and I hope they put that on the television."

"The roof."

"The roof is fine."

"Grandmother."

"The roof," she says, "is fine, and I have a young man from the church coming at the weekend with a tarpaulin, and I do not want you up on a mountain doing sums about my house."

She is lying. She lies about three things and the roof is all of them.

The producer holds up four fingers. Forty seconds.

"They telephoned me," Vessik says. "The television people. They wanted me to say I was proud of you and worried about you, and they gave me a piece of paper with it written on it, and I have not read it, and I am not going to."

"What are you going to say."

"I am going to say what I have got." She puts both hands on her own kitchen table. "You were always going to be big, Ghorlan. That was settled before either of us had a say in it. Being quiet is the part you picked."

The rain works on the canvas over the tent.

"I never minded it," she says. "But I have been sat here for nine days looking at what they have made of you on that program, and they have made the quiet into something. And I want it said out loud that I have looked at it, and that it is not you, and that I have shouted at my own television twice."

Two fingers. Twenty seconds.

"So talk," Vessik says. "Whatever it is. Talk in front of them. Let them have it. You are not going to get anything by being easy to sit next to."

"Ten," says the producer.

"Come home," my grandmother says. "And do not come home with a bad back."

"Five."

"I have not," I say, "got a bad back."