Blurred Lines: The most timely and gripping psychological thriller of 2020

by Hannah Begbie

  Good news travels fast but rumours fly faster here, where knowing things is the one currency everyone understands and values.

  Sit somewhere visible, Matthew has told her, and watch them come to you. That’s when you know. Bringing her in on his secrets now.

  So she sits outside a café, sheltered from the sun by a canopy, blue and branded with the insignia of a well-known champagne – drinking black coffee and making notes on the script, anxiously checking her email for a confirmed time and place for Sharon and Emilia to get together. She waits for people to find her and, as Matthew predicted, they do. Two financiers and an actress stop to chat. Can I read a script? When does casting start? I hear good things. I hear you have the hot project.

  Emilia emails her in person. Their schedules don’t work in the next two days, though Sam and Mads – Sharon’s agent – have bent themselves in half trying to make it happen, so Emilia’s proposing flying to London before she goes home. Cake in Soho? The three of them?

  The three of them!

  Becky hides a smile at the fleeting image she has of herself as someone who is invited to summer cocktails on the rooftop of a London private members’ club and then, a few months later, to drink whisky sours and cinnamon-spiced mulled wines for the Christmas party season.

  Once Matthew rejoins her, even more people stop by – sometimes staying for coffee – greeting them with kisses and sitting close to Becky, as if they know her well. She is his golden girl, the clever one who is making that timely film about women and revenge. Becky sees herself reflected back in other people’s faces as they tell her Medea sounds fabulous. What an exciting package. What a wonderful team. Send me a script. I’ll read tonight. I’ll read it today.

  She begins to glow from the inside. Can they see her excitement? Is that off-putting? Or does it read as passion for the material, the actress, her director?

  Sharon is ‘her’ director now.

  Somebody notes that Becky is kind of what Sharon needs to move up the ladder: like she, Becky, has done Sharon an almighty favour anointing her as the one chosen for her Emilia pic!

  The snot-blowing, insecure half-girl in the toilet stall is fading fast:

  Becky was only ever there to adjust her eye make-up.

  Sharon approached her.

  They’d met before.

  It was a meeting of minds.

  Her eyes were clear and she hadn’t been crying.

  Let me tell you a story, she’d said, across the marble hand basin, and Sharon, rapt, had listened to her, Becky Shawcross, protégé and producer.

  A woman who gets things done.

  Champagne, orders Matthew, and Becky allows him to fill her glass so that the liquid tips giddily over the rim. She drinks the whole thing down in three or four gulps, with everyone around her doing the same, toasting their, her success. She allows herself to let go and feel it all; her insides warm with the alcohol, her skin warm with the sunshine, her whole self cocooned and belonging with these interesting people. She is enjoying herself. She is safe. Snooker ball carpets and steak knives have no place in this Cannes, her Cannes. More champagne, orders Matthew. And Becky knows that now it has begun, it will never stop.

  Chapter 10

  Later that night, Becky and Matthew continue their work at a party on the beach – confirming the rumours of Sharon’s attachment, speaking positively about Emilia, keeping the energy high with talk of casting and shooting dates – leaning against the bar under swags of rainbow fairy lights and a straw roof, set up like something out of Cocktail. Many of the people they have spoken to that afternoon are there, plucking from trays of cocktails and canapés, all courtesy of one of the UK’s major film financiers.

  The heat and adrenaline and half a bottle of champagne have taken Becky’s edges off and now she is taking the first sweet and sharp sip of a mojito, figuring it as the most sensible chaser. She’d forgotten how fabulous and invincible alcohol could make her feel.

  ‘Becky, right?’ The woman who has appeared at Becky’s side is a little shorter than her and has long dark hair scraped back tight. It is impossible to tell her age; her skin is stretched like cling-film, flat and shining as if it were fresh out of a packet, but then the stories about her go way back. She needs no introduction but gives herself one anyway. ‘I’m Madeleine, Sharon McManus’s agent. So pleased to meet you.’ She grasps Becky’s hand. ‘Sharon is so looking forward to getting her teeth into Medea.’

  ‘I’m thrilled she’s come on board.’

  ‘She tells me the updating really works? That it’s timely. I’m afraid I haven’t read the script yet.’

  ‘Yes, there’s the whole toxicity of men and how they don’t see women coming because of it.’ Becky realizes that she’s garbling her words, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Not here, with the sea and this cocktail and the heat behind her.

  ‘Is Matthew producing?’

  ‘I’m its producer but it’ll be through his company.’

  ‘I see.’

  Becky picks up on a fine skein of something she doesn’t want to see. Dissent? A problem? What hasn’t she thought of?

  ‘I spoke to DB earlier,’ says Madeleine cautiously.

  ‘Oh, I love DB,’ blurts Becky. Then, remembering his curt words on the phone to her and his anger with Matthew, she speaks in more sober tones. ‘He’s such a great agent. So tough.’

  ‘We go back a long way,’ says Madeleine. ‘It’s not like in Hollywood where they’re all slitting each other’s throats before breakfast.’ She pauses. ‘We talk.’

  Becky has no idea where the conversation is going now but she feels the low thrum of dread, something bad is coming. She hopes she’s wrong, hopes they’ll simply talk about favoured lunch spots. Does she have a DB story that she can table? She thinks hard.

  ‘I saw DB recently, he told me that an ex-client of his came over to his house one Christmas Eve. He was working as an actual Father Christmas in a shopping centre because that was the only work he could get, and he’d got drunk in his costume after work and had come over to shout at DB. Only DB’s kids opened the door and were all excited and then this man apparently felt so bad that he went through with it and did his whole routine for the kids in DB’s living room.’

  ‘I heard that one,’ Madeleine laughs. ‘And when one of the kids, Lottie I think it was, asked for a present, the client gave her his cigarettes and DB was like, let me get you some wrapping paper for those!’

  ‘I love DB,’ says Becky again, and she really feels it.

  ‘He’s rather cross with Matthew. You know that, don’t you?’

  Becky hesitates as if feeling her way round the edges of a concealed and sheer drop beneath her. ‘There were a few calls before we left.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘Do you?’ Becky asks.

  ‘The difference between us is that it doesn’t matter to me why he’s angry. I don’t have a film with him … But you do, and Matthew’s been a rather naughty boy.’

  Becky feels the heat of Madeleine’s expectant gaze on her as she struggles to link the facts in the right order: looping back to the woman on Matthew’s kitchen floor around to DB’s irritation, Antonia’s rage and where she finds herself now …

  ‘It’s clear you don’t know,’ says Madeleine flatly. ‘Well, it’s not fair to gossip, but I’d advise you to talk to him. If it really is your movie, you don’t want a stink around it. Not when nobody’s under contract yet. Sorry to patronize. I’m sure you don’t need advice.’

  Madeleine detaches herself with a soft squeeze to Becky’s forearm before she goes. A message has been delivered, but what is it? A grim grittiness now sits in Becky’s belly. Has she done something wrong? Becky feels around those dark discomforting areas, searching for something that could give her new information, feigning distraction at something going on across the bar, trying to push back the energy emerging from a buried and ignored place deep within her, feeling it swell and grow, powered on by alcohol as if it were petrol.
Soon she feels that same energy gather to a sharp, metal spade-tip point and begin its work excavating. She sips her drink and tries to think of all the reasons that DB might be angry with Matthew. Mentally she scrolls through DB’s client list. Has Matthew dumped one of his actors from a film? Riled him or her with a disrespectful deal?

  She tries to remember details about the woman on the floor: her long neck and spun-gold hair. She momentarily catches hold of an image – a chignon-twist – but she can’t place exactly where she saw it. Laid out on a table somewhere as a headshot or photograph elsewhere? In a magazine? One of the stills from this week’s Radio Times television preview about that new drama? But as quickly as the image arrives, it is washed away with the alcohol and the interruption:

  ‘Hey, good to see you. It’s all been kicking off for you in the last twenty-four hours, hasn’t it?’

  It’s the journalist from yesterday, Alex. His eyes are a little glazed, and he leans in, enough for her to smell spirits on his breath. ‘So this friend who recommended, whatever, the galleries here,’ he says. ‘What was he? Like a special friend?’

  It takes her a few moments to connect with what he’s asking and then she remembers: Scott and the Bonnard Museum. Scott had complained on his Instagram feed that there weren’t enough Bonnards in the Bonnard Museum. He’d wanted to see his favourite painting, Nude In The Bath, which wasn’t there, was never going to be there, actually; something he’d have known if, like Becky, he had bothered to look it up. Becky had stared at the digital image of Nude In The Bath for an age. A body in the bath, stretched out for all to see. A woman’s body, looking like a corpse. His comments had seemed so mocking and victorious; as if, despite everything, he could still take what he wanted from a woman, ogle and gaze and leer at her body like he fucking owned her, like she existed just to sate one of his many appetites. Becky had slammed her fist so hard on the sideboard that it bruised the soft fleshy bit of her hand, tenderized it like one of Scott’s stupid fucking steaks.

  Alex leans in again then, suddenly and close, in a way that she had not been expecting.

  And she flinches, like he has hit her.

  He collects his drink from the bar top behind her and then makes a show of creating a wide berth between them. She can see that he is hurt, because his eyes seem to turn to stone, a dark offence, like she has accused him of something terrible.

  ‘I …’ There aren’t words to explain her reaction so instead she turns and pushes her way toward the outside. Her foot catches on someone’s bag strap and she falls to the ground.

  The flesh on her upper arm is gathered and pinched and she panics at this sense of being held and caught like a fish on a line, and she tries to shake it off by punching her arm outward in a well-mastered jab. It looks like she is defending herself from something. She looks up at the person holding her and it is Alex, surrounded by a sea of shiny, painted, concerned faces.

  ‘It’s OK, God, I’m just trying to help you up,’ he says.

  She gets to her feet and, before she can stop herself, the panic overwhelms her completely, driving her out of the bar – without a thank you or goodbye or sorry or excuse me. Shame runs cold in her blood at the thought of what people will surely be saying about her now and in the morning: that fledgling producer who doesn’t know how to control her appetite for alcohol, so drunk, probably got carried with it all, quite embarrassing for the poor girl. Bless.

  She runs down to the seashore where lights are bouncing off the water now, where glasses are being clinked for dinner and charcoal burnt to fire orange for fish and meat. She finds a place far from the people and the laughing and the eating. Searches for her phone, knowing she must call him first. He will guide her along the maze as she walks through it, step by step, hoping not to lose her way forever. She dials his number.

  Adam answers her call sounding relaxed, but—

  ‘Adam? Adam? Is Maisie OK?’ she says.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Was she OK when she got back from school? After the sleepover. Did she seem herself?’ She is wiping the tears roughly from her cheeks with the pads of her fingers.

  ‘She was happy,’ he says, his words kind, soft. He knows where she is. ‘She had a great time. She’s in the living room now doing her coursework … You sound …’

  ‘I did it again,’ she says.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I let myself relax and … I drank. I drank alcohol.’

  ‘Hey, that’s OK. It’s OK to drink, you know it is.’ He pauses. ‘What actually happened? How drunk are you?’ His voice splits with a new, contained panic. ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘No, nothing bad’s happened. I just couldn’t cope. I had a few drinks, I shouldn’t have drunk, I can’t do it, I just thought … the most basic thing just set me off. Someone reaching for their drink across me. I looked crazy.’ She begins to cry.

  ‘It’s OK.’ His voice is calm, full of relief, full of questions he knows not to ask straight away.

  ‘My film is happening. It’s actually going to happen. And I still …’

  ‘It’s OK. Breathe deep. Come back to the future. Come back. I’m talking to you now. You’re safe.’

  ‘I’ll never be good enough.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘I’m not going to be fixed.’

  ‘This is a small part of you. It’s not who you are.’

  ‘I just wanted to enjoy the moment. I wanted to celebrate. I wanted to let go. I tried, I really did.’ She is crying so much she’s not sure he’ll be able to understand her.

  ‘It’s OK. It’s OK.’

  ‘Adam, I’m so angry.’

  ‘Long slow breaths.’

  ‘I fucking hate myself.’

  ‘In through the nose, out through the mouth.’

  ‘Yes, fine,’ she says, and when she’s calmer they end the call; he, reassured that she will go back to the hotel. But she is not reassured: his words are not enough, they never are, nothing is ever enough. She turns her back on it all, forming a fist, thumping her thighs in time with the crashing waves, harder and harder, the flesh humming with pain from the time before, and the time before that. There will be bruises tomorrow, and more, if she can help it, she thinks, crying, tears spooling down her cheeks, spooling back in time.

  Chapter 11

  Hampstead, London

  13 September 2003

  There is barely space to move in the house. People smashed and smoking and wandering and dancing and chatting, perched on sofa arms, five people crammed onto a two-seater. Scott is holding Becky’s hand, leading her through the halting, pushing, drink-spilling crowd, to the kitchen, and then to the stairs which they climb to join Mary, Brendan and the others. She has drunk more than she realized. Everything only makes sense in sections.

  At the door to the bedroom Becky says something like, ‘After you,’ and then Scott says, ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ and they laugh and drink some more beer. When he smiles at her, she is pathetically pleased to be proved so wrong about this tall, handsome but lunkish man who has only ever been on the fringes of her world.

  Scott takes the lead and pushes at the door into a vast bedroom – white-painted shutters closed tight to the outside world, carpets sprouting grey and soft underfoot, and a pale pink silk coverlet rumpled in a wave over the kingside bed so that it looks like the inside of a conch shell. A blanket chest, a side table, chairs, all pushed up against the walls to accommodate a big group of people – fifteen or twenty, perhaps – all sitting in a circle on the floor, all clogging up the otherwise sophisticated air of this room with their smoke-choked, pheromone-laden, alcohol-tanged teenage breaths.

  Alcohol is everywhere. Six-packs, twelve-packs, boxes of beer. Lines of disco-blue and medicine-orange alcopops. At least two people are swigging from champagne bottles, holding the necks lightly and effortlessly as if this is what they do all the time.

  This is how things are done here. Try to pay attention, Becky tells herself.

 
She goes from feeling shot through with delight and confidence – showing teeth and eyes, standing at her real height – to feeling smaller, shorter, duller, greyer, years younger as she looks at this circle of North London teenagers whose voices are perfectly pitched and cutting, whose laughs are elegant or flirtatious, or barks that fill a room. Becky feels the eyes of the room look her up and down, but she merits no more than a quick glance from anyone. Scott has left her side.

  Brendan and Mary sit in a small huddle with two others she does not recognize.

  Mary smiles.

  ‘Mate, over here,’ Brendan says to Scott, and motions to a space next to him.

  Scott waves Becky over and, grateful, she squeezes in between Scott and Brendan. She is too big for the too-small space – knees overlapping with a boy either side. She wonders if she should sit outside the circle.

  ‘Hey,’ whispers Scott, looking up at her. ‘You’re flying low.’

  Becky glances down and sees the lace of her pants showing in the gape of her jeans zip.

  Scott laughs. ‘Don’t worry about it, you wear it well.’

  He hands her a bottle of the disco-blue drink as she tugs at her top to try and cover her pants.

  ‘Let’s do this, bitches,’ shouts a girl with a nose ring, brandishing an empty champagne bottle.

  ‘Are we seriously still twelve?’ mutters a boy in a vintage Goonies T-shirt.

  ‘Ground rules?’ asks another girl.

  ‘Take turns clockwise. Snog wherever it lands.’

  ‘I’m not getting off with Nick,’ says Goonies boy.

  ‘You couldn’t handle me,’ replies a boy Becky assumes must be Nick. ‘I’d fucking destroy those thin lips.’

  ‘I’m only playing to watch Nick and Bento get it on,’ shouts one of their friends. ‘Who needs gay porn?’

  ‘I do,’ says a beefy guy, putting his hand up, to gales of laughter. Becky laughs too.