‘Matthew, you don’t owe me, you know, I hope you don’t …’
‘We’ve always kept it between us. But now … I mean, what do I say? Do I tell the press: No, not true, never been alone with Amber? That fiction would crumble quickly and then I’d look like a liar. I would be proven a liar. But if the alternative is telling them, Yes, we’ve fucked but it was consensual? Then I ruin my family. I have to ask myself, who do I owe the truth to? To my wife I owe the ability to hold her head up in front of our friends. I owe my children their family. I owe Amber … less than any one of those people. I didn’t owe her that part either. And I owe the press nothing at all, though they don’t like settling for that. And then I suppose I have to ask myself, what do I owe you, Becky?’
This time she assumes that the question is rhetorical and that she can afford to sit in silence and wait to be given his answer. But instead he sits back, and she realizes that he may, after all, be waiting for her.
‘You’ve supported my whole career,’ she tells him. ‘You don’t owe me anything. It’s me who owes you.’
Matthew’s eyes fill with tears. He takes Becky’s hand. ‘Thank you. I know how it costs friends to weather this kind of thing together. But you don’t forget the ones who stick by you. I promise you that. You walk over glass for those friends, for the rest of your life. Believe me.’
It is the first time he has ever referred to her as his friend.
After a moment he releases her and, as if a little ashamed of his show of feeling, rises and walks to his desk to check a notebook. Becky guesses that he’s not really looking at anything, but that he simply doesn’t know how to end their meeting. As an employee he told her when the meeting is over; as her friend, how is it done?
‘If you don’t mind, I’m going to call Sharon now,’ Becky volunteers.
‘Good. Let me know when you’ve done it and I’ll set up a nice dinner for us all – just you and me, Emilia and Sharon – so we can celebrate properly. I’ll take you all to a place that’s just opened in Fitzrovia. Private room. Have Siobhan look for a date we can all do.’
He is back to business. He reaches for the phone on his desk and, without looking up at her again, expertly taps in a long number. An American number, she guesses.
She slips out of his office and goes to her own desk as Matthew’s friend and fellow producer. In the trenches together, doing what they do – putting out fires and making room for magic. It is her and Matthew together now; they are the people with projects on the line. In the middle of all this ugliness, has she somehow been promoted? Is that actually what is happening now? she wonders, feeling the granules of the favour she is doing him dissolve into water. Transaction complete.
She feels such relief there is an explanation for it all, and just the slightest knot in her stomach at his genius, his sleight of hand: how he has turned the shape in her head, the possibility of a woman who was receiving something she did not want, into the woman who was not getting enough of what she wanted.
She looks out of the window and sees the clouds form animal shapes, or just clouds. The man is a magician, an alchemist, a god.
Chapter 15
A few days later, Becky is gingerly lifting hot mugs and plates from the dishwasher back into their homes. She is tired after last night when she, Matthew, Sharon and Emilia met to share toasts and successes, stories and champagne at a new gloss-black-tabled Japanese restaurant in town. The mood had been upbeat, those unpleasant allegations dispatched with, far in advance.
They had eaten diver scallops, Wagyu beef and mountains of sashimi. Sharon told them about getting stuck halfway up Mount Kenya with the giardia bacteria multiplying in her gut. The night ended with too many tequila slammers, which Becky managed to avoid by pretending she had a call to make. Out on the pavement after midnight, they had all turned to their Uber apps, high and happy and bonded.
‘The potatoes! We’ve got to get the potatoes on!’ Maisie’s voice rises in amusement and frustration. ‘Come on Mum, that’s your job.’ She is grasping a vegetable peeler in wet hands and looking annoyed enough to use it on her mother.
Becky looks up, disorientated. ‘Sorry, yes.’
‘I worry about you sometimes.’
Becky smiles. ‘What’s to worry about? Other than this mountain of food to chop and slice and fry and boil in time for your dad’s friends.’ The kitchen table is a mountain range of stuffed shopping bags. Becky rams a few items into cupboards, bending cardboard corners to fit, and switches on the kettle. ‘I forgot the streamers, and the balloons, and I meant to do a banner. I was going to write Happy Birthday You Old Bastard, in glitter – but he’ll have to make do with a 15 Today badge.’
‘Did Matthew talk about Amber last night?’
Becky keeps moving, and has to work to pull all the surprise out of her voice.
‘Amber Heath? No, he didn’t.’ She keeps her voice breezy, turns away to the cupboards and pulls out salts and spicing and rubs. ‘Can you pass me that … that thing?’ She motions to a spatula. ‘She’s just an actress trying to drum up some attention while she works out her disappointment at losing a role. Storm in a teacup. We had better things to talk about.’
But try as she might, in the last few days Becky has struggled to find any kind of peace, finding herself battling between an image of Amber between castings and gym visits and lunches and beauty appointments, strategizing and wringing the situation for all the publicity she can get – and another image of Amber broken and barely able to get out of bed. An online gossip outlet has recently published a picture of her in tracksuit bottoms and oversized sunglasses, hair scruffed up in a bun, which could cover both the realities Becky is imagining.
Things come back to gnaw at her. DB’s anger with Matthew. Antonia storming in to see him long before any story broke online. And her own skittish memories of seeing Amber there, her mouth opening as if to say something to the woman she must have seen in the kitchen. What had she intended to say?
Becky clasps a palm to her stomach where it twists and complains, and reaches for a clean chopping board from the dishwasher. A carving knife, positioned blade up, catches the end of her finger and a bead of blood forms at the tip. ‘Shit,’ she says.
‘Language!’
Maisie speedily hands her a folded clump of kitchen towel which Becky squeezes around her finger. Fleetingly her focus shifts and Becky finds herself understanding the calm relief that people report after cutting themselves.
Then she files that feeling away.
‘Jules the Viking is going to be at Lily’s and I said I’d pop by after dinner,’ says Maisie. ‘I hope that’s OK? Your lot’ll be on to the crap jokes and beer pong by then.’
‘Be back before eleven.’ Becky begins peeling, awkwardly navigating the potato skins with her kitchen-towel-bandaged finger. ‘What is he, exactly?’
‘What do you mean? Like, is he a werewolf? What are you asking?’ She is smiling, messing with her mum. ‘Relax. He’s my friend.’ Maisie is in a bouncy mood, full of questions tonight, and just when Becky is hoping for some quiet. ‘When you and Dad dated …’ Maisie begins again.
‘We never dated. We just liked each other for a bit.’
‘Enough to have me. So obviously it was meant to be on some level, you lucky people.’
‘What did you want to ask me?’
‘So Jules called me his Viking Queen yesterday. What do you think that means?’
‘It means he believes you are royalty and also that you are a member of a sea-faring race of warriors from—’
‘Don’t even try to be more annoying than me. Be serious.’
Becky can hear the girlish insecurity in Maisie’s voice, the need to know what this boy is thinking about her. She almost regrets teasing her: what if Maisie stops talking to her? Then how will she keep her safe? But Becky also thinks that Jules sounds bombastic and full of machismo, the kind of boy who is looking to get his rocks off at Glastonbury in an expensive tent bought for the occas
ion by his parents, who have positively encouraged he go, seeing it as a passport to adventure. All the while, Jules is probably planning how to get the pills and dreaming of deflowering someone like Maisie, perhaps Maisie herself, on the built-in groundsheet floor of his expensive tent.
She wants to tell her daughter that, whatever it is Jules means by his comment, she is without doubt so much better than this probably disappointing teen lothario, who is busy hiding a galaxy of insecurities behind his new leather jacket and his long hair and his loud voice.
‘If he’s teasing you? If he’s giving you nicknames? It means he’s thinking about you.’
‘Did you and Dad have nicknames for each other?’
‘I called him my Viking King, as it so happens.’
‘Mum!’
‘Sorry. Um, I don’t know, really. I’ve forgotten so much from back then already. I think I always called him Adam. He didn’t, I don’t know, he didn’t project a need for nicknaming. Does that make sense? Like, some people end up with ten nicknames given to them by ten different people. But others just get their birth name.’
Maisie has lost interest. There is something else she needs to press on her mother.
‘There’s this spare ticket for Glastonbury going round,’ she says. ‘He hasn’t offered it to me yet but Lily thinks he will.’
‘No. You’re not going.’
‘Give me three reasons.’
‘Pills and amphetamines and vodka.’
‘Mum, nobody does speed any more. It’s not 1975.’
‘Toilets, then.’
‘I think I’d survive them. Two hundred thousand people seem to manage it each year. I’ll get one of those portable travel things that women can wee into standing up, if you’re really stressing about it.’
‘You’re not old enough for a festival.’
‘How come the other parents think their kids are old enough then?’
Becky’s phone rings, flashing Sharon’s name up on the screen.
‘Hold on, I have to take this,’ she says to her daughter, clamping the phone between face and neck, wiping grimy and wet hands on a tea cloth, heart thumping with anxiety. ‘Sharon! How are you? How’s the head? Wasn’t last night fun? No, I understand … Yes, I think that’s normal but you don’t need to worry. He simply wouldn’t mention it. He finds it very difficult. It’s hard to have someone say those things … Yes, he’s got a lot of dignity.’
Becky turns away from her daughter, who is scraping the white seeds from the core of a pepper and straining to listen.
‘Amber has a bit of a track record of making false allegations,’ Becky says. ‘It’s really unfair that some people would condemn him without any proof. It’s like they used to drown witches – no evidence, just one person’s word and your life’s taken from you.’
How very unlike herself she sounds, Becky thinks, turning around as if she can feel the beam of Maisie’s gaze burn into her. She sounds too loud, too vehement. Becky wipes grime from her eyes. She is tired, stressed, she thinks. She is not herself. She must get more sleep.
Becky turns back, steps further away and comes to a standstill at the kitchen doorway, looking out into the hallway.
‘Of course I understand. I can tell you that he absolutely … no … no, he is appalled by the accusations. Absolutely appalled, of course he is. But the thing is, Amber hasn’t said anything. It’s actually some drunk, show-off friend of hers who was probably recycling a second-hand rumour about the wrong person. The bottom line for me is that I couldn’t work for a man who I believe might do anything like that.’
Becky leans against the doorframe and struggles to find something to hold onto, something more than the painted wood beneath her fingers that would not yield or break were she to thump and slam at it.
‘I’ll see you at the FilmFour meeting next week,’ she says. ‘Yes, it’s very exciting. If we can get them on side we could be shooting this side of Christmas.’ Her fists clench and her thoughts turn to Medea. The call ends.
She can feel Maisie’s eyes on the back of her head.
‘You sounded pretty worked up,’ her daughter says.
‘I am. It’s cruel, lobbing accusations at someone without proof.’
‘Yeah …’
‘What?’
‘Like … isn’t there no smoke without a fire?’
‘Such overused words. Why bother with the justice system then? What, we can just throw people into jail on the say-so of their pissed-off neighbours or vengeful exes? I know, what about if someone said, I saw Maisie kill someone. Or maybe someone who looked a bit like Maisie. She was tall anyway. Off you go then, Maisie. See you in twenty years. Is that enough smoke?’
Maisie looks a little shocked. Says quietly, ‘So why would the actress make something like that up?’
‘We have no idea what she thinks! She hasn’t said a word to anyone. It’s her moon-faced stupid twat friend who’s been ruining lives so he can get his fifteen seconds of fame.’
‘It’s fifteen minutes of fame.’
‘Whatever.’
‘Who were you talking to just now?’
‘Oh. The, um. The director.’ A flash of something catches her eye. ‘What are those on your feet?’
‘Nike Volt Utility Trainers?’ Maisie replies sheepishly.
‘I know that,’ she snaps. ‘Where did you get them from?’
‘Uh … Dad bought them for me?’
‘They were supposed to be a reward for working hard.’
‘He gave them to me as an early birthday present this morning because he said I was working hard already.’
‘He shouldn’t have done that.’ Becky shouts. She wanted to buy her daughter those trainers. She wanted her daughter to learn the value of hard work. She didn’t want to feel so undermined. And now all these questions Maisie has for her.
Becky looks up and sees the surprise, more a low level of fear, in her daughter’s eyes and pulls herself up. She shouldn’t be punishing Maisie for Adam’s actions, or for asking questions. None of it is her fault.
She promises herself she’ll bring up the trainers with Adam. At the right time, she will.
After a pause Maisie says, ‘Is she worried about it?’
‘Is who worried about what?’ Becky snaps again, unable to help herself.
‘The director,’ Maisie says quietly.
‘Everyone’s worried about it. If Sharon or Emilia walk off, we don’t have a film. And after that it’s a film that anyone with decency wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. And then you don’t ever have a film again. And it’s years of my life down the plughole. And I’ll probably get fired as well. So, yes, I’m a bit worried.’
Maisie nods slowly. ‘Amber is obviously a nutter.’
‘Who knows what she’s like? She should pick her friends a bit more carefully. I’ll say that about her.’
An hour later Becky’s phone pings.
Matthew has given an interview at the request of a journalist looking at the story for a major entertainment news outlet.
Becky sits and reads it carefully.
Matthew tells the journalist that nobody has formally approached him about these allegations. The police certainly haven’t been in touch. He knows as much as everyone else, which is to say very little indeed. But he’s heard from enough concerned friends now to decide that he has to speak out: before baseless rumours become baseless facts and real damage is done.
He mentions how he is hesitant about talking freely when several sensitive subjects are raised by the allegations and moreover when Amber herself hasn’t said anything about them.
The journalist asks him if he’d like to comment on Amber’s reputation for being difficult on the set of her last film, possibly due to mental health issues?
Matthew chides his interviewer. It’s not really fair to discuss someone’s private life, and besides, mental illness is heavily stigmatized already. It shouldn’t be raised to tar someone as a liar.
Anyway … When Matt
hew last saw Amber it was for a work thing. He felt she seemed a little altered and rather aggressive with him. He now wishes he’d done more to reach out and help but; as ever, work swamped me.
Becky pictures sedation needles and strait-jackets and a mask over Amber’s face with metal rods that look like teeth.
I could have done more to help. I regret that I didn’t act to help her.
He concludes by saying that he has tried to reach out to Amber to talk to her, but hasn’t succeeded. He wants to wish her well, and to urge people involved in spreading malicious rumours, both at his expense and at Amber’s, to reflect before they join the feeding frenzy. We all gossip. That’s human nature, says Matthew. He’s been telling stories for decades now. He knows how quickly a good one travels. But there’s a crucial difference between fact and fiction. Or at least, there ought to be.
There is a picture, lifted from a professional photographers’ online portfolio, of Matthew looking tanned and at ease with his family in the living room of their house. Piano in the corner. Black and white.
The journalist quotes some anonymous sources:
One says she’s vengeful.
The other, a film producer, name withheld, mentions that Amber made a pass at him for a part.
The journalist finishes with ruminative remarks about stories and storytellers that echo Matthew’s points.
The article is written by Alex Simms.
Becky Googles his picture and, as she suspected, this is the same Alex she met in Cannes. Matthew’s old mucker. His passport to the best parties.
Becky’s hands are cold and they quiver at the edge of the phone.
She wonders whether she wouldn’t just do the same if she was in trouble: call a friend and get them to help out, corroborate her point of view. Give the world her truth, as she saw it.
You walk over glass for friends like that.
Becky runs a quick search on Amber Heath and finds that off the back of Matthew’s statement ‘mentioning’ her mental wellbeing, other stories have been mushrooming all over the internet in the last few hours.
Blurred Lines: The most timely and gripping psychological thriller of 2020 Page 14
