Lunch in the background

An original first-person fictional account of an invented film shoot.

My first screen appearance began with an empty plate. The assistant placed it in front of me, adjusted the knife by a centimetre and asked whether I could keep my elbow away from the edge of the table. Behind the camera, someone was discussing a cloud. I had expected the room to go quiet because I was ready. The room had not noticed.

I was one of six people pretending to have lunch behind the main actors. We had been told not to speak, even when our mouths moved. I smiled at the woman opposite and discovered that a convincing conversation was difficult without a sound to lean on. She raised an eyebrow as if I had said something foolish. I laughed silently. For a moment, I forgot the empty plate.

Then we were stopped. A glass had caught the light. We returned our hands to their starting places, and the woman opposite became politely expectant again. I tried to remember which way I had turned my head. The assistant showed me a photograph on a tablet. In it, I was looking beyond the woman at a person I could not remember seeing.

On the next attempt, I concentrated so hard on repeating the movement that I lost the conversation altogether. My face felt assembled rather than alive. Nobody complained. The camera was interested in a different table.

By the afternoon, the woman and I had invented a disagreement about an imaginary holiday. She wanted mountains; I wanted somewhere with no uphill streets. We never spoke the argument, but it gave our glances somewhere to go. When the assistant finally said we were finished, I was surprised to feel interrupted.

I do not know whether my face remained in the final shot. I remember the exact position of the knife and the woman refusing, with a small movement of her chin, to spend her holiday beside my entirely imaginary sea.

How does the writer show the narrator's thoughts and feelings about working as a background performer? Support your answer with references to the passage.