Tell Me a Secret

by Jane Fallon

  I feel disproportionally annoyed. I know I’m being ridiculous. I have plenty of other work I could be getting on with. Instead I sit at my desk fuming, drinking my bitter black coffee, unable to concentrate on anything until Emma rolls in, bundled up like a snowman and clutching a two-litre bottle of milk in a gloved hand, at twenty past nine.

  She appears at the door to my office. Nose red from the cold. ‘Did you find that stuff?’ she says, unravelling a scarf from round her neck for what seems like way too long a time.

  ‘No. I don’t fucking understand it. It was printing when I left on Friday. Do you have the key to the cupboard where the ink cartridges are?’

  ‘It’s in the drawer of the filing cabinet in there, where it always is. We’re not really supposed to print everything out anyway. Waste of paper.’

  I ignore her.

  Five minutes later she pops her head round my door. ‘Done,’ she says. ‘Someone had taken out the old cartridge and not bothered putting a new one in. Unbelievable.’

  ‘Probably because they’re locked away in a cupboard as if we’re a bunch of kleptomaniacs who can’t be trusted,’ I snap.

  ‘And the key wasn’t where it’s supposed to be … I found it on my desk.’

  I send everything to print again. Ask Emma to grab whatever she can as soon as it appears. And then I wrap myself back up in my coat and head downstairs for a walk round the block to calm myself down.

  Roz and I are having a drink in our go-to pub round the corner. A guidebook might describe it as ‘a slightly rancid-smelling haunt for local ne’er-do-wells’ but it’s the closest one to the studio and we’re both inclined to be lazy. Or rather we’re having a drink outside our go-to pub, because Roz wants to vape. Despite it being two degrees above freezing. I don’t want to vape. I want to sit in a warm room, steamy with after-work crowds.

  I’m having a coffee. Not because I felt like coffee but because I thought it might be the one thing that would stop me from turning into an icicle. I circle both (gloved) hands round the cup and hold it up near my face for maximum heat-to-bare-skin transference.

  ‘ “Quiet, non-annoying, clean, mostly absent tenant wanted …” ’ Roz says, taking a theatrical drag. She’s helping me decide what to put in my ad. When I get round to it.

  ‘I like the “mostly absent” bit. “Would suit someone who works in London during the week but fucks off somewhere else every weekend.” ’

  Roz laughs. ‘ “Hopefuls will be required to take a vow of silence and promise to clean the bathroom after every visit.” ’

  I put my coffee cup down on the table. ‘Oh God, don’t …’

  She’s still on a roll. ‘ “Ideal for the person who really lives with their partner but just needs somewhere to dump their stuff in case it all goes wrong.” ’

  ‘I’ve got it!’ I say triumphantly. ‘ “Just give me your money and live somewhere else.” ’

  ‘Well, that’s that sorted.’

  We sit there in silence for a moment. Roz pulls her fingers through her hair to make it stand higher on top.

  ‘God, Emma’s annoying,’ she says. I wait, knowing she’ll enlighten me. ‘She’s got a rat up her arse about whose responsibility it is to wash the coffee mugs.’

  I shrug. ‘I suppose it’s not in her job description to do everyone’s.’

  ‘Who cares. Leave them then. The cleaners come in every night.’

  ‘I think her point was that we run out if no one ever washes them.’

  She rolls her eyes. ‘Oh my God, really though. She’s put it on the agenda for the next department meeting.’

  I can’t help it, I shriek with laughter. ‘No!’

  ‘Yes! I saw her typing it up.’

  I sip my coffee. ‘Well, that’s going to be fun.’

  ‘You might have to deal with it,’ she says, smirking. ‘Now you’re head of the department and all.’

  I pull a face that I hope says ‘fuck you’. Change the subject. ‘How’s Hugh?’

  ‘Lovely,’ she sighs. Roz is not someone you would describe as a romantic. She once told me she’d dumped a bloke because he bought her flowers on Valentine’s Day.

  ‘It was the lack of imagination,’ she said when I protested. ‘That was the best thing he could come up with when he thought about how he could show me how much he loved me. The same thing twenty million other women were being given.’

  ‘Chocolates are worse,’ I said, and she’d scoffed.

  ‘At least you can eat chocolates.’

  But where Hugh is concerned it’s as if she forgets she’s Ms Cynical 2018. They’ve been together for years – married for nearly three. It’s sweet how much she adores him. I, on the other hand, have been single for almost as long. In fact I can count the serious relationships I’ve had in the past twenty years on one hand. Actually, that’s an exaggeration, I could count them on three fingers. The Holy Trinity: Boring, Cheater and Wet.

  She tells me about a party they went to on Saturday in an old church in Mayfair, thrown by a record company Hugh looks after. The guest list sounds like the line-up for Glastonbury. She was chatted up by the lead singer from a band I’ve never heard of but who, apparently, are the new big thing. He’d been so persistent asking for her number, despite her protestations that she was married, that in the end she’d made one up and written it on his arm. Roz is a great anecdote teller, and I can see the whole scene unfolding.

  ‘I put a love heart next to it, and wrote “I’m all yours” with a kiss. He was practically salivating.’

  I laugh. ‘I wonder how many times he’s tried calling it.’

  ‘I’m hoping it’s some other girl’s number,’ she says. ‘It could be the start of something beautiful, like a bad romcom.’

  ‘It’s so weird about your scripts,’ I say when we reach a lull in the conversation. I’ve spent the day working my way through them – Emma adding a new one to the pile as soon as she had rescued it from the printer and bound it together. ‘I mean, I left them printing out. I checked before I went home, and the printer was working. There was a pile of pages already. I saw them.’

  She looks at me. Draws on her e-cigarette. ‘Juliet was still there when I left … You don’t think …?’

  I pick up my drink, put it down again. ‘Shit. No … she wouldn’t …’

  Roz shrugs. ‘Why would the cleaners throw away papers that had clearly just been printed out? Why would someone take the printer cartridge out and not replace it?’

  ‘Fuck.’

  She throws her e-cigarette back in her bag. ‘I mean, who knows? But it feels a bit odd to me.’

  I think about it. Can I really imagine Juliet bothering to sabotage me? Doing something as petty as this? To what end? So that I don’t perform as well as I could? It’s a stretch.

  ‘I don’t know. It seems unlikely.’

  She stands up. ‘Well, those scripts didn’t lose themselves. Let’s go inside. I’m freezing.’

  Inside I head for the bar because it’s my round while Roz hunts down a table. I get myself a gin and tonic and another Chardonnay for her. It takes me a while to find her but, when I do, she’s sitting with a couple of women from accounts who I barely know. They look like twins with their pumped-up cleavages and matching lips. They’ve clearly had a couple already because they’re both talking way too loudly and at the same time. I sit down on the spare chair, hoping that they might be heading home soon. I want to pick over the Juliet question some more, but I can’t in front of these two.

  ‘Holly, you know Lucinda and Janet, don’t you?’

  I smile at the two women, making non-committal noises. They barely pause for breath long enough to say hello.

  ‘He didn’t even bat an eyelid,’ the one called Lucinda says. ‘Not even when I told him I’d bought them as an early anniversary present for him. Like I’m going to waste good money at Agent Provocateur for his benefit.’

  Janet cackles. ‘So Ray is still none the wiser?’

  ‘No, thank
God,’ Lucinda says, swigging from a long and probably very alcoholic drink.

  I loathe the pair of them instantly.

  ‘Luce has a gentleman friend,’ Roz says to me in a stage whisper. ‘Ray is her husband.’

  ‘Nice,’ I say in a way that I hope comes out sounding as sarcastic as I mean it to.

  They all prattle on. A couple of times the people at the next table look round as if to say ‘Can you keep the noise down?’ and I look away because I don’t know what else to do.

  I sip my drink, letting their inane chatter waft over me. When Janet offers to get another round in I turn to Roz and say, ‘Or, do you want to move on somewhere quieter?’ hoping she’ll get the hint, but she just turns to the other two and says, ‘What do you reckon, ladies? Shall we stay here or go somewhere else?’

  ‘We’ll never get a table anywhere else,’ Lucinda says. I wait to see if Roz will suggest we go our separate ways and, when she doesn’t, I decide to cut my losses. I might as well at least get an early night.

  ‘I won’t have a drink, actually, thanks,’ I say to Janet. ‘I think I’ll make a move. I’m knackered.’

  ‘Lightweight,’ Lucinda says, guffawing. I pretend I haven’t heard.

  Roz pulls a disappointed face. ‘You’re abandoning me.’

  I smile at her, even though I’m a bit pissed off. ‘I think you’ll survive.’

  Back home I feed Smokey, then heat up the remains of last night’s pizza. I think about making a salad to go with it but I can’t be bothered. I flop on the sofa, fork in one hand, plate in the other. Try to imagine what it’ll be like coming home and finding a stranger making a mess in my kitchen. How I’ll be able to curb the urge to shout ‘Clean that up’ every time they spill a drop. Will I have to designate them space in my fridge? Or provide them with their own? Are we going to have to negotiate about buying milk and loo rolls? It’s making my head hurt thinking about it.

  I should put a lock on my bedroom door, I think. In case they’re a kleptomaniac. Or even just nosy. It always seems so clear-cut in films. Someone advertises a room and one of two things happens: the new person fits in seamlessly and within days they and the home owner are best friends (or lovers) and spend all day drinking coffee together at the kitchen table, or they’re a psychopath and within weeks have driven the landlord insane or skinned them alive and started wearing them as a coat.

  I get a pad and pen out of the little drawer in the coffee table and make notes. ‘Lock on bedroom door!!’ ‘References.’ Then I add ‘Fridge?’ And ‘Cat lover only.’

  I decide to have an early night but my brain is buzzing. I potter around, loading the dishwasher, sorting through laundry, trying to calm myself down. I think about what Roz said. That Juliet was still there when she left the office. That maybe she was the one who took the scripts, removed the ink cartridge from the printer. I know that she must be disappointed she didn’t get the job. To be honest, I expected her to get it, so I’m sure she did too. I hate to think that someone’s got it in for me, but maybe she has. Maybe I need to watch my back.

  5

  Let me explain why we dislike Juliet so much.

  I can’t even remember when it began. When I joined the company she and Roz were already here, having started on the same day, and already at loggerheads. Juliet was pleasant enough to begin with but she made no real effort to get to know me. Roz, on the other hand, invited me out to lunch on day one and we clicked immediately. Same sense of humour, similar likes and dislikes. On a dating website we would have matched. From the get-go Roz made no secret of the fact she and Juliet didn’t get on. She would tell me stories about how uptight she was, how humourless. I had gone there intending to make my own judgements about everyone as I always try to do but I suppose it did make me look at her in a slightly different way. A bit wary, if you like.

  Maybe Juliet wrote me off the minute she saw me and Roz getting on, but I always felt as if she wasn’t giving me a chance. Whenever I expressed an opinion in meetings she would pick it apart. She has a default sneering tone, not helped by her accent, which is all privilege and entitlement, gymkhanas and skiing holidays. She went to private school, then Cambridge where she got a first in English. None of this equips her to do the job we’re doing any better than me or Roz in my opinion – just the opposite in fact, because how can she possibly understand the world of the show when it’s so alien to anything she’s ever known? – but it does make her intimidating as hell in arguments. I’ve always had a kind of cap-doffing obsequiousness in the face of confident posh people (and don’t get me started on doctors) that generally speaks far more about my insecurities than their assumption of superiority. I hate myself for it but I seem powerless to stop it. They make me feel inadequate.

  As for Roz, who grew up on a council estate in what sounds like one of the roughest parts of Brighton (when I mentioned the name of it to Dee who hails from nearby Burgess Hill she shuddered), well, let’s just say ‘unashamedly posh’ is in the front of the window of her own personal Shop of Horrors.

  There was no defining moment when I decided I didn’t like her. No big showdown. It was just a fact of life. She takes everything so seriously; there’s no joy in her. Disapproval oozes out of her like sweat. We have nothing in common.

  Juliet has the kind of blonde ruddy looks that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Barbour and riding boots, with a cocked rifle under her arm. Roz used to mutter ‘Tally ho!’ at me whenever she walked past. Which was childish and a bit mean, but also cracked me up every time. And so the lines were drawn pretty quickly. We tolerate each other, don’t get me wrong. She’s good at what she does, and our paths have never had to cross too much before. Only now I’m her boss and I’m expected to have an opinion on everything she does.

  The following morning there’s a pile of scripts on my desk. Juliet’s. I spend most of the day reading through them, keeping my head down. They’re in good shape and I’m relieved that I’m not going to have to discuss anything in them with her. She’s made her point, hopefully. A petty attempt at sabotage that was about as effective as a petulant child stomping their feet. The worst that could happen happened. Which was that I wasted an hour of my life. Big deal. Pathetic. With any luck she’s got it out of her system.

  It’s peaceful in the office. Joe is down in the studio, watching a batch of his episodes being filmed, and will be all week. Fighting off attempts by the cast to change the lines to things they think sound better but which make no sense or directly contradict something that’s been said before. Roz, Juliet, Lorraine and Emma are all engrossed in their work. It’s one of those periods where it’s almost as if everyone has agreed on the need for silence.

  My phone rings.

  I pick it up. It’s one of those big desk things, and the display shows an internal extension, but one I don’t immediately recognize.

  ‘Hello.’ It’s a familiar woman’s voice. She carries on before I can respond. ‘Holly? It’s Amanda. I just wanted to say thank you … Gosh, how lovely of you to send me those beautiful flowers. And such a huge bouquet! I’m having to go round borrowing vases left right and centre …’

  I have no idea what she’s talking about. Amanda is one of the stars of the show. Locked in a rivalry both on and off screen with Caz, the actress playing her sister, their characters, along with their parents and their teenage children, are the backbone of the series. The episode that transmitted last night was a two-hander, the pair of them trawling through the mess of their relationship. It’s no secret we were thinking of the BAFTAs when we planned it. I have never sent Amanda flowers. I’ve never sent any of the cast flowers. That would be weird.

  ‘Um …’ I say, when she leaves a long enough gap for me to butt in. ‘I wish I could say it was me, Amanda …’ Little self-conscious laugh. ‘… but I think it must be someone else …’

  ‘No.’ I hear a rustling. ‘It says on the card: “Bravo! What a tour de force! Congratulations, you did us proud. Holly.” And then, in brackets, “sc
ript department”. That’s you, right?’

  I gloss over the fact that I have never in my life used the terms ‘bravo’ or ‘tour de force’. Someone has sent flowers and put my name on the card. For a moment I struggle to think in what way this might be an attempt to stitch me up, and then it hits me. Last night’s episode was a two-hander. Two actresses acting their socks off, giving it their all. I, the new head of the script department, appear to have sent one of them flowers. Unless Caz is trying to get through as we speak to thank me for hers I assume she hasn’t received a bouquet of her own. But she’ll soon hear about Amanda’s and all hell will break loose.

  ‘What’s the name of the florist?’ I say, trying to sound casual. She tells me and I write it down. ‘I think Emma must have sent them on my behalf because I was saying this morning how brilliant you both were, and that we should do something …’

  ‘Well, it’s very kind, however it happened.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I say. I just want to get off the phone now. ‘And congratulations again – both of you were amazing.’

  She goes off happy and I get straight back on the phone to the florist’s, after googling the number. I almost get bogged down in trying to establish who sent the first bunch, but the woman on the other end tells me she has no record, they must have paid cash. I ask for an identical bunch to be sent to Caz, but she can’t remember what they looked like. So I ask for something that costs the same, gasp at the price, then have to pay five pounds extra for an emergency delivery. Hopefully I’ve averted an incident but I’m furious. Not just about the money I can’t afford to spend – I consider for a second if I could get away with trying to claim it back on expenses but we’re really not that kind of show – but that this is someone’s – Juliet’s – idea of a joke. No, scratch that. Juliet doesn’t do jokes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her laugh. She lives a joyless existence. If she’s done this then she’s done it to make me look bad, pure and simple.