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

by Hannah Begbie

  ‘It didn’t happen to you.’

  He takes his hands from her face and rests them lightly on her hands.

  ‘I could track down the people who were playing Spin the Bottle in that room,’ she says.

  ‘How would you even do that? Did you know who they all were at the time? And if Maisie ever found out. If she ever heard even a vague rumour …’

  ‘I know, I know. I know I can’t.’

  Her breaths overlap and she is beginning the sky-high tumble into a terrible panic.

  ‘This is about Amber, isn’t it?’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it … what’s the word they use … “triggering”? Has it stirred stuff up? Because you were doing so well. You were off at Cannes, conquering the world.’

  ‘I had a panic attack on the beach, Adam.’

  ‘You were managing all right. Mostly. So what changed? And how do we get you some help so we can get you past it?’

  ‘I was the woman in the kitchen. At Matthew’s house. I went there to deliver a present. I was there. I saw them. I’m the person she asked to come forward, and I haven’t done that. And I think it’s a problem for me. I mean, I think I know it’s a problem for me.’

  Adam sits back, taking his hands away from hers. He’s a smart guy. Becky can almost see him crunching this new information, trying to make the best plan for them.

  ‘This will be OK,’ he says.

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘Can you be sure of what you saw?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you’re not much help to her as a witness. I don’t mean that nastily. I just mean in practical terms, in terms of a possible prosecution, you not coming forward wouldn’t change much. Given you’re not even sure what you saw.’

  ‘But she asked for that person to come forward.’

  ‘I know that. We’re just trying to weigh it all up, Becks. The other thing is, you’ve denied it was you, haven’t you?’

  ‘I didn’t really mean to do that.’

  ‘All the same, you’re in the papers as denying being “the woman in the kitchen” or whatever they tried calling it. And you’ve definitely given quotes to journalists since then about what a good guy Matthew is. How do you get around that? On top of which it’s been quite a while since she appealed for that witness to come forward. If you do that now, it’ll look really bad. The papers will tear you apart for not coming forward immediately.’

  Becky doesn’t respond. What is there to say?

  ‘And Medea?’

  ‘It’d be over.’

  ‘So on the one hand you’ve got stepping forward, which won’t make the blindest bit of difference as to whether Matthew gets convicted or not. Plus you don’t even know what you saw so what would you be trying to say? And then on the other hand you have getting to make your film, and not becoming a hate figure in the press for covering for your boss instead of coming forward immediately?’ He weighs up the choices with the palms of both hands.

  ‘I know, I know,’ she says, though she doesn’t quite feel it. ‘Do you think I’m a bad person?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Not at all. This is about Matthew and Amber. Nobody else.’

  ‘I can’t live with myself.’

  ‘Yes, you can. You’ve lived with worse. Becks, this is what I do every day with my businesses. I weigh up the opportunity, the cost, the risks, the benefits. You have to step back and try to see the big picture. It’s not about one decision, it’s about your life. Your future. Our daughter’s future. All those things matter as well.’

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘Be a good person? Try your best to be kind and generous? Give people a chance? That’s how you make the world a better place. Not by throwing yourself onto the fire because you feel like you owe something to a woman you’ve never even met. Who you’ve done nothing to.’

  ‘She tried to kill herself.’

  ‘You didn’t do that to her. You didn’t do anything. And, more to the point, even having seen it, you don’t know what you saw.’

  Becky nods. She wonders if she can do it. Just absorb it. File it away. Forget about it. Let the red carpet roll out. Smile, and thank Matthew from the podium if she wins.

  ‘You didn’t seem that surprised when I told you,’ says Becky.

  ‘What, about Matthew?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I suppose I’m not that surprised. I think shit like that happens every day.’

  ‘And I’m supposed to let Maisie loose into all that …?’

  ‘Yes. You have to. We have to. It’s what good parents do.’ He smiles at her. ‘Hey, I’ll be right there with you stalking her boyfriends and threatening them with a baseball bat if they don’t make her feel amazing every single day.’

  ‘I am so going to be that person,’ she smiles. He always makes her feel better with his reasonable thinking and jokes. If only she’d said something sooner.

  ‘I know you’re going to be that person. And so does Maisie. It’s fine. We’ll still love you when you are. I do think you should think about changing jobs though. Maybe once Medea is filming? You don’t want to be working next to someone you’re afraid of.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of Matthew. I think he made a terrible mistake. I’m not sure … I don’t know what it was, but I don’t think he’s a bad person.’

  ‘There you are then.’

  ‘There I am.’

  ‘Ready for some breakfast alcohol?’

  ‘Can I have a pancake instead?’

  ‘Always.’

  She kisses him. Somewhere in the city, Amber is lying hooked up to multiple machines, everyone trying to keep her alive against her wishes, and here is Becky, realizing that, if she is honest, she has fallen in love with Adam, or has finally admitted that she has always loved him. How can this be fair? But how can it be otherwise?

  They spend the rest of the morning under their own glass dome, breathing each other’s air, moving in the warmth of their own microclimate. They lie in bed, legs flung over each other, talking, laughing and remembering: I thought you were annoyed with me that time … But then I caught you looking at me … At first I thought it was just my new haircut … I saw it in your eyes … Felt it, yes … But couldn’t be sure …

  That afternoon, the rumbling crashes of a summer storm make Becky so nervous she can’t settle. You have a choice, she says to herself. So she chooses to ignore it. But the thunder rolls and it feels like her heart and stomach are being flattened by heavy stones. You can always do something. So she shuts the windows tight, turns the music up and her phone off. She throws her arms round Adam and they kiss each other.

  You have a choice, you can always do something.

  Chapter 26

  Becky sleeps fitfully, waking near dawn but then quickly falling back into a viscous dream where she is standing at the bottom of a bank of spiked hedgerows, on the hard shoulder of the motorway. An unending stream of lorries and cars pass her at terrifying speed. A man walks towards her holding a breeze-block in his arms. Becky knows that he is coming to smash her brains out, in front of everyone. She cannot move her feet. She screams but no sound comes out. Why does nobody stop? She tries to beg him to spare her. He comes closer, raising the block high above his head.

  Only the blow never comes – instead he tosses the block sideways into the nearest lane, where it caves in the windscreen of a family car. The car swerves, clips a van in the passing lane, and spins and flips. Cars, trucks and vans collide, piling up, flinging off their wing mirrors and tyres high up into the air, sending engines spinning across the tarmac like flaming tumbleweeds. Becky stands transfixed. She is alone, watching the vehicles smash and pile, making a pyramid of shattered panels, spilled oil, broken glass. It is like ballet. She finds herself crying because of how beautiful it is.

  She comes to, disorientated, in the grey yellow light of early morning.

  Maisie will still be asleep and Adam has gone home now, leaving a rumpled and cold space in the b
ed beside her. She feels afraid and alone and longs for Adam’s warmth and chatter as she senses the dark and silent approach of the many questions she has been trying to stifle.

  How should she now think of all that time spent obsessing over Scott’s potions and fashions and the holidays and words that inspired her thoughts, her plans and narrative? If he inspired her Medea film, does that make her passion for the subject somehow less truthful? And what of the last sixteen years?

  What of that time (Maisie must have been six or seven) when Becky had arranged to meet that man in the garden of a local pub? He’d drunk four pints of cider, she’d smoked a lot of cigarettes and they had talked about soap opera and Big Brother. She wasn’t attracted to his thoughts, his voice, his thin nose or rubbery lips but she still travelled with him in a bleach-smelling lift up to the eleventh floor of a council block overlooking Canary Wharf, and she still willingly took her jeans off while seated on his faux leather couch. She thought she was ready. She’d told herself in the run-up that sex post-rape could free her if only she was strong enough to achieve it.

  But she wasn’t ready and so, being thrown back into the very past she was trying to escape at the cider and boiled-sweet smell of that man’s skin, had felt like a failure. The fact of his body coming down hot and heavy on hers, ridiculous to think it now, but she had felt she was as close to death as if she were trapped inside a sandwich toaster. She had asked to leave before things went further, and he let her.

  At home she had destroyed ten years of her old school exercise books in a bonfire, incanting Scott’s name as she watched charred black feathers of paper rise to the sky, as if somehow these actions might cauterize the places he was still growing inside her and grant her peace.

  It was several years before she tried sex again, that time with a media studies student, still horrible but with greater success – but now, lying in her bed at home, Becky struggles to know whether the last sixteen years would have been any less traumatic had she imagined a faceless ghoul pumping away inside her instead of Scott.

  Scott had been like a co-ordinate on a map. He’d given her a diseased kind of security.

  Becky comes back to herself remembering Adam. How gently he holds and touches her during sex, how safe she feels safe with him. Perhaps there is no need to reframe her whole past? Perhaps all is well in the present. Perhaps her love of Adam is all she needs now to heal completely. She can choose to think this way and so she does.

  Becky arrives at the office and senses immediately that something is wrong. Siobhan glances up briefly and returns to her work, without a word – intent on clearing and sorting, making piles. The next time Siobhan glances up she looks so angry that Becky’s insides ripple, ghost over grave.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ says Becky, arranging her coat and bag in the crook of her arm.

  ‘He’s waiting for you in the boardroom. With champagne. Financing is agreed. Contracts ready to sign,’ Siobhan says, opening her desk drawer and yanking it off the runners with a crack.

  ‘Are you coming too?’ says Becky.

  ‘No,’ says Siobhan.

  ‘Please come and have a drink. Emilia was your idea.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Just …’ She purses her lips and holds her palm up, flat and final. ‘I can’t talk to you right now.’

  ‘Have I done something to you, Siobhan?’ Becky’s insides lurch and she begins to feel a queasy combination of exhaustion and nausea, like the draining aftermath of extreme motion sickness.

  ‘Of course not. You’d better go in. Your champagne might get warm.’

  Becky finds Matthew sitting at the head of the boardroom table. He looks up as she enters. He looks healthier than the last time she saw him. Taut and shining, like somehow he has shed wrinkles, shaved away years.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ he says, motioning her to a place at the table, laid with a freshly copied version of the Medea script and a pile of contracts marked with coloured Post-its. ‘You need to read the draft agreements. As producer you have some legal duties you’ll need to be aware of. It’s all boilerplate stuff. FilmFour sent some script notes through as well. But first …’ He reaches for a bottle of champagne and two glasses. He opens the bottle and the cork hits the ceiling with an air-pellet pop.

  Drink Me.

  She takes the proffered glass and holds it mid-air.

  ‘You look well, Rebecca,’ he says. ‘Success evidently suits you.’

  ‘Thanks. But can we get Siobhan in on this too?’ she says. ‘Make her a part of this?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘She resigned this morning. About five minutes before you came in.’

  Becky puts the glass down and sits back on her seat. ‘Why?’

  ‘She joined at the same time as you. You’re going places and she’s not. She’ll find a job elsewhere without much trouble. I’ve said I’ll help her out there, obviously. I’d do the same in her position. She’s read the writing on the wall and made a move. We’ll hire some more people. I’ll need a PA. You’ll need one as well. And we should get a development person who can report to you.’

  ‘It’s a shame. She’s been here ages.’

  ‘That’s why she needs to move on. Don’t feel sorry for her. She’s doing the right thing for her career. You’ll probably end up working with her on things. It’s a small industry. You might ask her if she’ll let us throw her a leaving drinks?’

  ‘I’ll definitely do that.’

  His phone rings and she waits for him as he talks, until he holds up a hand to her, indicating that this call might actually go on a bit. She excuses herself, leaving her champagne glass behind.

  Becky walks out into the office again where Siobhan is filling a cardboard grocery box full of her personal stuff.

  ‘Aren’t you working out a notice period?’

  ‘No. I said I didn’t want to. He said that was fine.’

  ‘Have you got another job?’

  ‘I don’t know what I want to do next.’

  ‘I just don’t understand why you’re leaving if you’re not going anywhere.’

  ‘Well, I am.’

  ‘Come on. We’ve known each other for years. Why have you resigned? Tell me. Is it just because you’re jealous?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. I just wish it was me toasting my nearly green-lit, massively hypocritical film.’

  ‘Wow,’ says Becky. ‘That’s kind of rude.’

  But Siobhan won’t meet her eye. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to make a fuss. I’d like to get a reference out of this and I know how things work.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  Siobhan plucks files out of her drawers and hurls them in fanned piles onto empty production desks. ‘I can’t work at this company any more.’

  ‘Is this about Matthew?’

  ‘No. It’s about you. I did your expenses. While you were off in Kent being “treated” by the boss.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Going through your Uber business account was interesting. You know there’s a map of every bloody journey you ever take? It shows the time and date and a line showing which route you took. You, Becky, got an Uber from your flat to a wine shop very near Matthew’s house on a Sunday afternoon recently. Ringing any bells yet?’

  Becky stands very still. Tries not to give Siobhan anything.

  ‘Which Sunday, you ask,’ Siobhan continues. ‘Yes, the same Sunday that Amber Heath says our beloved leader pinned her down on his kitchen floor and raped her. What’s next for Becky’s Uber account that evening? Less than ten minutes later you’re in a different one, taking off about a hundred yards from Matthew’s house, heading home. Almost like you’d popped in, and then made a very hasty exit. Almost like you walked in on something and ran away pretty sharpish.’

  Becky wills her muscles to be corpse-still, her eyes pond-still, but she feels the tremors – feels the concentric ripples on her surfaces.

&nb
sp; ‘I went over to deliver a bottle of wine, to thank him for his support,’ says Becky. ‘I went to the front door but the lights were all out. So I took it away with me. I took it back home. I didn’t go inside at all.’

  ‘Somebody did.’

  ‘Allegedly. Wasn’t me.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Leave me alone, Siobhan,’ says Becky slowly. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I am leaving you alone. Look at me. I’m filling my box. I am getting the fuck out of here.’

  ‘Matthew wants to know if you’d like a leaving drinks?’

  ‘Ha. Yeah, I don’t think so. I might have one too many and end up in a room with one of you poking me while the other swears blind that it isn’t happening.’

  Becky slaps her open palm hard across Siobhan’s face.

  Siobhan holds her own hand against her cheek like she is checking it is still there.

  ‘If you come after me, Siobhan, I will destroy you. Do you understand?’

  Siobhan looks nothing but sad. ‘Of course I understand that. I know exactly who you are, Becky. But in this moment, I can choose to leave and there is nothing you can do about it. I will not be an accomplice in your stinking, fake success. I will not stand by and watch a film about a strong woman being made by a woman as weak as you.’ She looks down at her cardboard box. ‘I don’t even want any of this shit. Just send me my money.’ Siobhan throws her key-fob into the box, turns and leaves.

  Chapter 27

  When Becky gets home she locks the front door and closes all the windows. She sits cross-legged on the bed with her laptop open. Later Adam’s parents, Maisie’s grandparents, will come over to celebrate Maisie’s big day. They’ve agreed to do all her presents then. Becky loves Grandpa and Grandma T. She loves how much they love her daughter and she admires their calmness and their deep devotion to each other. Those are the foundations for a man as thoughtful and kind, as loving and generous, as Adam.

  Becky turns over Adam’s arguments about Scott. The recklessness of confronting him. She knows he’s right, of course he’s right. She tries to picture the moment: Maisie discovering that Adam is not her father. The unknitting of an entire childhood. The destruction of half her story – who she got her sense of humour from, the shape of her nose, the bend of her calves, her intolerance for tree pollen, her capacity for hard work. This from Dad, that from Mum. The two halves that make her: all tainted, all broken.