Tell Me a Secret

by Jane Fallon

  ‘Did you see Patricia when she came up?’ I said to Emma, hoping she’d be able to give me a heads up about what her latest issue was.

  Emma looked up from her computer. Pulled a sympathetic face. ‘No. I’ve been out.’

  I flicked my eyes at the silent TV screen on the wall, where the feed from the studio plays all day, to see if Patricia was involved in the scene currently being shot. Grabbed the remote and turned the sound up. There was no sign of her.

  ‘I’ll go and hunt her down, get it over with.’

  ‘Good luck,’ Emma said. ‘I’ll make up an excuse to come and find you if you’re not back in half an hour.’

  ‘Twenty minutes,’ I said, grimacing. I made my way down the stairs and across the car park to the building that housed both the studio and the cast dressing rooms. Patricia has the biggest, a nod to her seniority. She hates being disturbed unless it’s because she has to go to set that second, but I figured she had asked to see me so she must be expecting me to show up.

  I checked the name on the door. Twice. And then I knocked. There was silence, so I knocked again more loudly.

  There was a shout. ‘Who is that?’

  ‘It’s … um … it’s Holly. You wanted to see me …’

  I waited. I could hear movement in the room and then the door was flung open, Patricia standing there in a dressing gown with an eye mask parked on top of her head. Her make-up was slightly askew. Most of the cast try and sleep on their backs if they nap, to minimize the time taken to reapply later, but clearly not Patricia. She filled the doorway. She’s a big woman. Even though she must be nearly sixty she could definitely take me in a fight.

  ‘I told Chris no disturbances,’ she said, naming the runner who escorts the cast back and forth to the studio and generally scrabbles around getting them whatever they want, whenever they want it.

  ‘Oh God. Sorry. Were you asleep? It’s just you said you wanted to see me and I thought it might be urgent …’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she boomed. She has a voice to match her stature. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Chris the runner hovering at the end of the corridor like a frightened rabbit.

  ‘You left me a note …’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ she said and I had the feeling she wanted to add ‘you stupid girl’. ‘What note?’

  And then it hit me. A sickening, sinking feeling in my stomach. Juliet. I breathed in slowly.

  ‘There was a note on my desk … it said you wanted to talk to me. I take it it didn’t come from you?’

  ‘Clearly not.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I think someone must have got their wires crossed. Really sorry to have disturbed you.’

  ‘What would I want to speak to you about?’ she said accusingly, as if she wasn’t the one who always initiated the conversations about the ways in which the storylines were lacking. Still, I was duty bound to be polite. Mustn’t upset the talent.

  ‘Well, I don’t know … something in one of the scripts, I suppose …’

  She rolled her eyes as though that was the most ridiculous idea she’d ever heard. ‘And you’re the new script executive, are you?’

  I stammered out a yes.

  ‘God help us,’ she said, and she shut the door in my face.

  I stormed past Chris without saying anything. I knew she’d probably give him a bollocking later but my mind was on other things. Back up in the department I went straight into my office and slammed the door, then got up again and stomped back into the main office.

  ‘Did someone put a note from Patricia on my desk?’ I said, glaring at Juliet.

  She looked right back at me with that level gaze she has that I always find disconcerting, as if she was challenging me to accuse her. I looked away.

  Roz, Lorraine and Emma all looked at me blankly. Joe was in the studio but I couldn’t imagine it being his idea of a joke. Roz was the first to speak.

  ‘What note?’

  I turned back to my desk. The Post-it wasn’t where I’d left it, on top of my notebook. I hunted around a little. Realized that whoever had done it had now destroyed the evidence.

  ‘It’s not there now,’ I said, coming back out. ‘But there was a note saying Patricia wanted to speak to me.’

  ‘Didn’t she?’ Emma said, confused.

  ‘No. She didn’t know what I was on about. I looked like an absolute idiot. Not funny.’

  ‘We were all out at lunchtime, anyone could have put it there,’ Lorraine said haughtily.

  ‘Did she lecture you about the nature of drama?’ Roz said, trying to make light of it. One of Patricia’s favourite sentences starts with ‘When you’ve been in this business as long as I have you’ll start to understand the nature of drama …’ I was having none of it though.

  ‘I’ve just made a total tit of myself.’ I turned and walked back into my office, slamming the door behind me. I slouched down behind my desk, fuming. When I looked up everyone had their heads down working. Or at least, pretending to.

  Even though I’m starting to get a bit worried about my own journey home, I’m determined to try and get a look at Roz’s application. I need to see it for myself. If she wanted the job so much that she was willing to nick my ideas to try and get it. I don’t want to believe it’s true but it’s starting to look that way. Still, I’m not sure it’s worth being snowed into the office overnight for.

  My commute is on the Overground direct from Acton to West Hampstead, which is usually amazingly convenient, but the whole capital comes to a standstill if there’s so much as a leaf on the line. I’m just wondering if I should call off my mission when Emma and Juliet start packing up at the same time. I nod at Emma’s suggestion that I shouldn’t stay too late, offer up a curt ‘’Night’ to Juliet, who blanks me, and they’re gone. I wander out into the main office and watch as they amble along the corridor to the stairs. We’re only on the first floor so there’s no lift. Downstairs is the art department, the prop store and a scenery storage area. I watch Emma and Juliet emerge side by side and pick their way gingerly along the icy path.

  I have a quick check that no one else on my floor is around. There’s no sign of life in either Fay’s or Glen’s offices. Jeremy’s coat is still there but he’ll be in the studio till seven, as will Joe. The other offices are deserted. I run back to the script department, click on Roz’s computer and enter her password. I have no idea what she will have called her application or where she will have saved it. I scan through her downloads, keeping my eye on the door. Almost immediately I find a document labelled ‘Script Exec Application’, and a load of numbers. I open it, my hands shaking, but the responses to the questions are blank.

  I hear a shout from downstairs: someone calling goodnight. I flick the home screen back up and jump away from the computer, trying to look casual. Through the window I can see someone – I can’t tell who, they are so swaddled – walking towards the gate and home. I take a deep breath, tiptoe back to Roz’s desk. I need to think of another way to find it. And then it occurs to me: she will have emailed it in. We were asked to submit to the HR department in an effort to make it look as if it was a fair fight between us and any outsiders. I bring up email, try to remember some part of the address and then, bingo, there it is. Without stopping to read any part of it I print both the accompanying letter and the form. I panic about whether I should run and grab the documents as they come off the printer, or take the time to remove the traces of my search from the desktop first. In the end I do that, taking the risk that if anyone does suddenly show up, the chances of them needing something from the print room are small. Once I’ve double-checked that I’ve closed both the email and the attachment I run and grab the printout and then I return to the computer and click on a series of Roz’s favourite websites – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Digital Spy, a couple of holiday sites I’d seen her looking at earlier, just to bury what I’ve done deeper in her search history. Roz has a tendency to flick constantly between
social media sites, barely pausing on one before she’s on to the next, so she would never question that they would show up in her most recents.

  And then I stuff the evidence deep in my bag and get out of there.

  The station is almost deserted. It feels more like three in the morning than quarter to seven in the evening. As (bad) luck would have it one of the only other people there is Janet, one of the ghastly accounts duo. I keep my head down and hope she doesn’t spot me, but, of course, she does. She waves an arm and then slip-slides her way over to where I’m sitting on a bench.

  ‘It is you! I thought it was,’ she booms.

  She crashes down beside me. ‘This is bloody unbelievable, isn’t it? I had no idea it would get this bad this quickly.’

  Roz’s email is burning a hole in my bag. I’m thankful I haven’t yet taken it out but all I want to do is get somewhere I can be on my own and study it.

  ‘Where do you have to get to?’ I ask, hoping she won’t hear how loaded my question is.

  ‘Kentish Town. How about you? I didn’t know you came this way.’

  Great, so now I have her for the whole journey. And I don’t even want to think about the fact that I’m going to have to start trying to time my commute to avoid hers from here on in. ‘West Hampstead.’

  ‘Ooh, nice,’ she says, in a way that makes me feel defensive.

  ‘It’s nearly Kilburn, really. And it’s a tiny basement so …’ I look along the track, willing the train to come, even though I know it’s hopeless because the board says seven minutes. Remember that teenage game, seven minutes in heaven? Imagine the opposite of that.

  I struggle to think what polite conversation we can make but all I can come up with is ‘How’s Lucinda’s bit on the side?’ and then I hate myself for asking, because I really don’t want to know. Janet’s round face lights up; she’s delighted to fill me in.

  ‘Hot as hell,’ she says excitedly. I smile weakly. She prattles on, and I only half listen but at least it beats having to think of something to say myself. From what I can gather, Hot Scott is ‘ripped’, ‘buff’ and fifteen years younger than Lucinda, a fact that seems to make Janet salivate. I’m tempted to ask her how she would feel if it was the other way round, if Lucinda was the man, drooling over a much younger woman, but I can’t really be bothered to engage. Every now and then I steal a glance at the board, willing the minutes to count down until I notice that the train we are waiting for seems to have disappeared from the screen altogether, and now the next one says twenty-three minutes.

  ‘I might try the Tube,’ I say, standing up. I’m hoping she won’t say she’ll come with me, and thankfully she doesn’t.

  ‘I think I’ll wait,’ she says. ‘By the time you’ve walked to the Tube station this one’ll practically be here. And who’s to say the Underground’s even running?’

  ‘I’ll chance it,’ I say, knowing she’s right. I won’t get home any quicker this way, but I might get home without strangling someone. And, besides, once I’m on my own I can kill any waiting time by reading Roz’s application.

  I trudge through the snow, barely able to see two feet in front of my face. When I get to the Underground station there’s a man outside writing on a whiteboard, announcing that they’ll be closing at half past seven – in fifteen minutes – due to the weather. I’m lucky though. There’s a train about to close its doors, so I throw myself inside without even checking how far it’s going. Anywhere in the right direction will do at this point.

  There are only two other people in the carriage, and I can just about tell, even though they’re both wrapped in scarves and hats, that I don’t know either of them. I pull my gloves off and reach into my bag for the printout.

  I remember that the section asking for a storyline idea was towards the back, along with the request that applicants continue on a separate sheet if they didn’t have enough space. I find it easily. And there it is … my story about good girl Morgan going off the rails because of exam pressure. It’s beat by beat how I explained it to Roz, even with some things in there that she advised me to take out if I were going to submit it myself.

  To be honest, the main emotion I feel is confusion. Is that an emotion? I’m not sure, but anyway. Why would she need to do this? In so far as I have always been able to tell, Roz is good at her job. She’s a natural at storytelling, and even though she can sometimes err on the side of being lazy I’ve always thought that was because she knows she’ll always pull something out of the bag when it counts, rather than because she doesn’t care. For all her cynicism I think she loves what she does.

  I flick idly through the rest of the form. A couple of the answers bear a strong resemblance to the responses I mulled over with her. But then those questions are so generic that’s almost bound to be the case whoever is responding. I lean back in my seat. Tell myself she didn’t get the job anyway, so what does it matter? But the idea that she would blatantly fish for information about what I was putting on the form – even persuade me to change what I was intending to write – so she could use my ideas on hers make me furious. It’s just so … sneaky. Why didn’t she tell me she was going for the job too and then we could have helped each other? Or decided not to? Either way would have been fine.

  I call Dee on my walk from the station. Tell her what I’ve discovered.

  ‘Shit,’ she says. ‘You don’t think …?’

  I will her not to say it. I don’t want to even acknowledge that it could be true. That the person who is really smarting that they didn’t get my job isn’t Juliet. It’s Roz.

  9

  ‘So,’ I say. ‘This is weird …’

  Roz fills the kettle, turns to me. ‘What is?’

  It’s the next morning and I have basically followed her to the office kitchen because this is the grown-up way in which I have decided to handle the Great Storyline Robbery. Avoid full-on confrontation at all costs. I know Roz well enough by now to guess that my telling her what I’ve seen on her application form would lead to a screaming match, followed by a campaign of all-out hostility and a phone call to HR accusing me of accessing her private documents. I’ve seen her go on the defensive before. She’s like a wounded animal, lashing out in every direction. I remember she used to be quite friendly with one of the make-up artists until they asked her not to keep helping herself to bits of their kit when she was down visiting. Roz went crazy, accused her of being jealous, bad-mouthed her to anyone who would listen. People who have been her friend become public enemy number one overnight. I don’t have it in me to deal with it.

  ‘I mentioned that Morgan story to Glen and it was like he already knew it. He thought it was yours.’

  I’m not imagining it: there’s a split second where she looks caught out. But she covers it up pretty quickly as she rifles through the teabags and selects a peppermint.

  ‘Why is that weird? He barely knows what day it is half the time.’ Roz is not one of Glen’s biggest fans. She thinks the fault for the declining ratings lies squarely with him and his decision making. There’s no way I can push the issue without giving myself away, but her expression is enough to let me know that she hasn’t had some kind of memory-erasing mind meltdown that left her believing that my storyline was actually hers. Not that I ever thought she had, obviously. But it’s good to have it confirmed.

  I force a laugh and try to cover my tracks. ‘True. I must’ve mentioned it to him at some point. I just can’t remember. I’m getting old.’

  I wait while she dunks the teabag and takes it out.

  ‘How’s life?’ I ask in an effort to change the subject.

  ‘Hugh’s taken on a big high-profile client and he’s fighting a huge shitstorm in the press about something … He’s been working twenty-four hours a day.’

  ‘Not David Summers?’ David Summers is a much loved actor, famed for his family values and clean-cut living. Rumours abound that he’s also the issuer of a super-injunction after news reports of a lurid cocktail of illicit sex, drugs
and all-round bad behaviour by an anonymous star hit the papers last week.

  Roz raises her eyebrows. ‘It’s meant to be top secret.’

  ‘I knew it was him!’ I can’t help it, I’m impressed. Not just by her proximity to superstardom, but because Hugh really must be at the top of the PR game to have attracted a client like him. ‘Have you met him?’

  ‘I haven’t said that’s who it is,’ she says, but she’s beaming a conspiratorial smile at me. ‘And no, I haven’t. Not yet.’

  ‘Blimey, though.’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone.’

  ‘I won’t. Of course not.’

  We walk back towards the department. I bite my tongue to stop me from asking all the questions her revelation has made me want to ask. Like ‘Did he really do all those things he’s supposed to have done?’ Obviously we rub shoulders with minor celebrities all the time but where David Summers is a regular at the Oscars, our cast are more likely to show up at the opening of a nail salon.

  ‘We are OK, aren’t we?’ I say eventually. I want her to reassure me. To tell me something that makes me think my suspicions were wrong. ‘I mean, you’re really all right with me getting the job?’

  She looks at me and if I didn’t know better I’d say she was genuinely confused about why I would ask that. ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘OK, good. If you had a problem you’d tell me …?’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’ she says.

  ‘Nothing. I just … So long as we’re all right.’

  ‘Stop being so cryptic, Holly,’ she says with a smile, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

  Roz and I usually have lunch together any day we’re both free. So, when it gets to ten to one and we’re both still working at our desks, despite my burgeoning misgivings about her, I send her an email: ‘Food?’

  From where I now sit I can see her at her desk opposite my former, now empty, one, her back to me. She’s looking at her screen but at what I can’t tell. Then I watch as she stands up and reaches for her coat. Smiling, I do the same. I’m shoving an arm into a sleeve, tugging my hand past the ripped bit of lining that snares me every time, when I see her walk over to Lorraine who is also in the process of swathing up for the cold.