18:52
written by: Mark Patterson
@markDBS
The digital clock went soundless from 18:51 to a minute later. Eight minutes before the 7 pm news is broadcast.
Sharon Rubino glanced at the display with an uneasy terror strangling her stomach with a vice grip she had never felt before. She stared at the 18:52 on the display.
When she started as a television newsreader twenty years ago, it was a mechanical clock that clicked out each advancing minute. She had complained that the noise as the minutes advanced distracted her from her preparation concentration.
She wished it was here now. Its noisy progress to 7 pm would have helped her focus on the awful contents contained in tonight’s bulletin. It would have been like the family member with their arms around her, hugging her tight in a moment of grief.
She had described wars, deaths, all manners of violent crimes before, but never anything as tragic as tonight’s news. When Sharon had watched the supporting videos and still shots that would be broadcast with the news, tears had flowed non-stop. She was not the only one in the production team that had cried. Battle-hardened producers had left the prep room shattered in hysterical tears. It had taken a supreme effort in make-up after the meeting to hide the puffy red and lachrymal swollen eyes.
In eight minutes Sharon will be the face in every household watching the news. A face that must reflect the seriousness of the events but must not break down. It must appear her normal confident self. Yes, the normal smile would not be present, but her demeanor has to be professional, her diction perfect, she has to gush with waterfalls of empathetic tone.
She read through some of the paragraphs further down the bulletin and said the words out loud to try and put the right tone into the news.
‘The full extent of the damage to the Cape Town stadium is not known at this point and engineers will need to make a detailed assessment over the coming days.’ She picked up her red pen and put a comma after “point and” to remind her to pause a little, to take a breath, and prepare for the next paragraph. It wouldn’t be on the teleprompter, but she knew that visuals of the once magnificent stadium would be on the screen, and she could read from her paper version, which was her preference anyway.
The next paragraph now had her full attention, certainly one of the most difficult for her to broadcast. With nobody near her—and nobody wanted to—she talked to herself out loud.
‘Come on Sharon. Pull yourself together, girl. You’ve got this!’
She twirled the pen between her fingers and went back to read the paragraph to herself in her mind and not out loud.
“Until the engineers have given the go-ahead that the stadium can be entered from a structural point of view, none of the trapped persons and bodies will be able to be removed. This is going to be an emotionally difficult period for the families of those trapped or deceased. The engineers will be working throughout the night to complete their assessment, and they hope to allow rescuers into the stadium by tomorrow afternoon.”
If she had a loved one who had gone to the game at the stadium, she doubted that she would be able to sleep tonight. “No news is good news” would not have given her any comfort. But she could draw comfort that John, her seventeen-year-old only child, had not been able to get a ticket for the match.
She returned to the opening paragraph. This was always the most crucial of a bulletin and even more so tonight. She had rewritten the original one a few times until she felt comfortable with it. This time she read it aloud to make sure it felt good on her ears.
‘Good evening. I am Sharon Rubino with your bulletin. The 7 o’clock news tonight will be focused on one item. I must warn all of you watching that it features very graphic video footage. The entire bulletin is not suitable for sensitive viewers and listeners. If you are of a delicate disposition, I would ask you to move to another channel or turn off your television now.’
She knew when it went out live that she would pause at that point to allow the sensitive ones to reach the remote and move to another program. She was content with the tone and wording of the opening. Her thoughts turned to the root cause of the disaster that would be discussed much later in the bulletin.
The melting ice caps had seen a significant increase in the height of the sea in the past decade. The sea defences along Beach Road at what used to be called Mouille Point were a new addition to the Cape Town defences against the encroaching sea.
Beach road had been closed forever with the construction of a gabion on the sea side of the road. Immediately behind the gabion, a moat had been dug to drain away what little water was expected to filter through the stones. This would be enough to protect the low grounds around that part of the coast. At least that had been the plan ten years ago in 2030, but all the signs had been there for the past two years that it might not be enough.
In the past five years, the weather around the world has changed dramatically. Winters have become colder, and they also seemed to have moved from June to August in the Cape to be from August to October. The seas with the added depth had changed, the seabed now deeper close to the Cape shore, and this meant larger waves pounding the coast in a relentless thrust of dominance over the land.
Sharon marched towards the studio, her papers clasped to her chest and the phone in her hand. The sound engineer, Brian, fell in step next to her, a well-worn team these two.
‘Break a leg, Sharon.’
Sharon faced the camera.
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