‘I’m actually a Second AD.’
‘No way!’ Amy said, perking up. ‘Why are you doing this?’
‘I’m doing my aunt a favour. Archie’s my cousin.’ I decided against telling her about the quitting/near firing of my last job.
‘Cool!’ she said with new interest.
Martha waved at me from across the room. ‘Emma! Emma, over here!’ She patted a seat next to her.
After I’d eaten and listened to Martha list the stars she’d worked with, all told with a gleam in her eye and a bit of broccoli in her teeth, I took Archie for a walk outside. I wanted to get him away from Martha, who was busy grilling Tilly about learning her lines. She was only five, for god’s sake.
‘Do you like acting?’ I asked Archie as we strolled hand in hand.
He seemed so unfazed about being on set; he delivered his lines, remembered his moves and chatted with the director like he’d been doing it for years.
‘Yip,’ he said.
‘And you’re sure you understand that poker didn’t really go into Peter’s chest? It was just a trick poker, wasn’t it?’
‘Yip.’ Archie said. ‘It’s wetwactable.’
‘Retractable. Exactly.’
We walked around the car park looking into the backs of the film vehicles. The wardrobe trailer held a harried lady on a sewing machine. Two assistants prepared an afternoon tea platter in the catering bus. Claire, the Sex Pistols-esque make-up artist, leant against the make-up trailer swathed in a fur-trimmed parka, talking on her mobile and puffing on a Marlboro. Sitting on the back of one of the lighting trucks were two guys from the sound department. A distinct marijuana-y smell wafted from their direction. They waved at Archie.
‘Emma?’ Archie stopped and looked up at me. ‘What’s a ore chasm?’
‘Um . . .’
‘Now there’s a question,’ a voice said behind me.
I spun round and saw Andrew jabbing at his phone. He pressed a final button and slid the phone into his jacket pocket.
‘Hi, I’m Andrew,’ he said, extending his hand.
‘Emma.’ I felt my cheeks burn through the cold. Andrew was the opposite of Ned. Burly, manly, deep-voiced and probably in possession of a strapping penis. ‘I’m Archie’s chaperone.’
‘Do you know what a ore chasm is?’ Archie said. ‘Emma doesn’t.’
I tried to laugh a response, which came out as a strangled snort, and then coughed as I choked on my own saliva.
Andrew chuckled. ‘I think Steve and Damo might know.’ He pointed over to the sound guys. ‘Why don’t you go and ask them?’
‘OK.’ Archie took confident steps across the car park towards the back of the lighting truck.
‘Let’s see what they come up with,’ Andrew said with a mischievous grin.
I smiled while trying to undertake what everyone else seems able to do: talk and breathe and control their own saliva without asphyxiating themselves.
‘I haven’t seen you before,’ he said. ‘What happened to
Fran?’
‘Quit, I think,’ I said. ‘Archie’s my cousin. I’m not really a proper chaperone, I’m just helping out.’
‘Cool.’ He bobbed his head. ‘Archie’s a great kid, real little professional.’
We watched Archie ask the sound guys his question. They looked at each other, slapped their knees and threw their heads back, laughing. Archie waited patiently at the foot of the truck for an answer. The lanky, dreadlocked sound guy, Steve, raised his gangly arms above his head and flailed them around while the other one, stocky and short with a shaved head, sat grinning and nodding. I could feel the warmth from Andrew’s body even through my coat. I stole a glance at him. His profile was Bond-like. Strong nose, pinkish lips that had the faintest pout about them and an angular jaw. A faint ski mask shape was apparent in his tan and a taut tendon in his neck let me know there was a strong body under his parka.
‘Andrew!’ Amy appeared round the side of a trailer, clutching her arms round her thin waist against the cold. ‘They want you inside to talk about the next scene.’
‘OK.’ Andrew turned to me. ‘Nice to meet you.’
‘You too,’ I said, smiling, wishing I’d bothered to wear some concealer. Well, wishing I bothered to own some, at least.
Andrew joined Amy and rested an arm casually across her shoulders.
‘Emma,’ Archie said, tugging at my coat. ‘It’s a bomb.’
‘What is?’ I watched Andrew hold the door to the apartment block open for Amy.
‘A ore chasm. It’s a bomb.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said, refocusing my attention on him. ‘Is it?’
‘Yes. And girls and boys fight over who gets to let off the bomb first. Because when it explodes there’s a party.’
‘Hmmm,’ I said, looking over at the two sound guys.
They gave the thumbs up.
‘I want a ore chasm at my five-year-old birthday.’
‘Do you?’ I said, ushering him back inside for the next instalment of ‘guts and bras’ for preschoolers.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I tucked the last of my clean washing in my suitcase as the doorbell ding-donged through the house.
‘I’ll get it!’ I hollered, clomping down the stairs.
It was Sophie, Helen and Douglas arriving to help me move into the cottage. Charlie was in Manchester giving a lecture about sustainable insulation, and I hadn’t asked for Mum’s help in case she was tempted to redecorate the cottage with, say, the vintage model skeleton she’d had flocked in neon fuchsia last week. Archie and I had survived our first day together on the film set and he wasn’t called again until the next Monday. There hadn’t been that many guts, and he’d not really noticed Melody’s half-exposed bosom, so I didn’t yet feel guilty about ‘not-saying-a-word-to-your-uncle-or-I’ll-tell-your-mother-you-got-up-the-duff-on-purpose’ as Sinead had so sweetly instructed.
Mum and I had cleared Grandma’s cottage with the help of Sinead and the kids. We’d had five broken ornaments, honey spilt in the knitting box, a tumble down the stairs (Alice), a sprained wrist from jumping on the beds (Jess) and Archie had somehow managed to get BBC News stuck on Mandarin voice-overs. Despite Mum’s protestations I’d decided to keep most of the furnishings. Like the old beige sofa she detested. I remembered cuddling next to Grandma on the sofa while she peeled and sliced an apple for Alex and I with a paring knife. One slice for me, one for Alex, one for herself. Then she’d start again. Those apples doled out by the fire were the best I’d ever tasted.
I opened the front door to a freezing blast of air and three beaming faces.
‘Hi!’ Sophie said, throwing her arms round my neck a little too enthusiastically. ‘I’m so excited!’
I prised her stripy-gloved hands from around my neck. ‘That’s . . . great, Soph,’ I said, looking at her tiny frame. It seemed all the cells in her body were jostling with joyfulness.
‘Pixie Twit is a little high on life at the moment,’ Helen said. ‘Now move it, Tinkerbell, it’s freezing out here.’ She gave Sophie a friendly shove over the threshold, planted a perfumed kiss on my cheek and walked through the door, peeling off her coat.
Douglas, a grey woollen coat buttoned to his chin, came in rubbing his leather-gloved hands together.
‘Good morning, Emma. Chilly day for a move.’ He gave me a cold-lipped peck on the cheek and joined Helen and Sophie in the unloading of coats, scarves, gloves and hats.
‘So, this hot guy at your new job.’ Helen unwound a ruby knitted scarf from her neck. ‘Should I be meeting him? And by meeting, I mean—’
‘I know what you mean,’ I laughed, happy to have my friends around me again. I’d been missing my daily office banter with Sophie and Douglas and the fifty or so emails Helen and I would exchange in the average workday. ‘But you can forget it. I don’t want to look at him and know you’ve had your lips wrapped round his whatever a few hours before.’ I smiled but pointed my index finger to show I meant business.
‘OK, OK, bossy.’ She flicked my outstretched finger and walked past me to the living room. ‘But if he wants it, who am I to deny him?’
‘Who indeed!’ Douglas shook his head and gave me a smile. ‘You know, it really does surprise me that you are the one with the accidental pregnancy.’
‘I heard that, my bespectacled friend. You’re on my list, you know!’ Helen called from the living room.
‘What list?’ Douglas looked worried.
‘It’s either her Shit List or her Sex List,’ Sophie offered as she took off the last of her many coloured layers. ‘I’m on the Shit List.’ She grinned, showing her lack of concern.
I linked arms with Sophie and Douglas and led them to the living room, where Helen was on the sofa flicking through a copy of Vogue.
‘Tea?’ I said, feeling content.
After delaying the inevitable over numerous cups of tea, some recent baking, a tête-à-tête with a highly vexed Douglas about the flaws within the zombie storyline and many discussions on the appropriateness of sex with co-workers, we headed upstairs to grab my stuff. I didn’t have much. Ned and I hadn’t owned any furniture, unless you count a drinks trolley with a missing wheel Ned found on the street one night. Douglas loaded Helen’s car with my bags while Sophie, Helen and I went up to Mum’s office to say goodbye. We climbed the last of the narrow stairs and knocked on the door.
‘Come in!’
I opened the door and was greeted by the Lycra-clad back end of my mother, mid-downward dog.
‘Hello, darling!’ she said from between her legs. Her iPad lay on her yoga mat, a runway report playing.
‘Hi Diana,’ Helen said.
‘Oh, hello girls.’ She pressed pause on the iPad.
‘Mu-um,’ I whined. ‘Get up. It’s embarrassing.’
‘I think it’s great! I hope I can do that when I’m old,’ Sophie said cheerily.
Mum dropped out of her pose. ‘Old?’ She narrowed her eyes.
‘Diana, do you mind if we look at your scarf collection?’ Helen deftly changed the subject. ‘Did you get the latest Katrantzou one?’
Mum, eyes on Sophie, waved her approval.
Helen grabbed Sophie by the elbow. ‘God, you really are a total and utter imbecile. I bet you were dropped as a baby.’
The door closed behind them and Mum’s frown evaporated. She stood and put her hands on my shoulders.
‘You’re leaving?’
‘Yep.’ I returned Mum’s sad smile.
‘I have something for you.’ She leant behind her glass-topped desk and pulled out a selection of glossy shopping bags, tissue paper frothing from the tops like cream on a pavlova. ‘Just a few things for your new place,’ she said as I bent down to rummage through the bags.
‘What kind of things?’ I said, fighting with the tissue paper and giving up.
‘A few items to make you feel at home. Not your kind of home, of course, my kind of home.’
‘I don’t want that bloody skeleton!’
‘Oh I wouldn’t dream of giving you that! That is Advanced Decorating. You’re not ready for that. It’s just some Ungaro towels, a Missoni throw for the back of the sofa – soft furnishings, darling. I’ll get you on to the hard stuff later.’
‘Oh, OK. Thanks, then.’ I smiled. ‘Well, I’d better get going.’
Mum clasped me to her bosom. ‘I’m flying to Rome on Tuesday. Just for a day or two. But I’ll come and see you as soon as I get back. You’ll be all right?’
I told Mum I was going to be OK, hugged her, said yes, I would avoid carbs and wash the Ungaro towels separately on a gentle wash, hugged her again, told her to stop her snivelling – I was literally only a forty-five-minute tube ride away – grabbed the shopping bags, dodged another hug and took off down the stairs yelling out goodbye and yes, I would call if I needed an up-and-coming photographer’s first edition print of ‘Hands Under Public Toilet Hand-Drier’ for my living room, and if the current throw pillows were not to standard.
By 3 p.m. I was sitting on Grandma’s old sofa, sipping peppermint tea and absorbing the feel of my new home. The walls in the living room were bare. With my mother’s intervention they wouldn’t be that way for long. I put my tea on the coffee table, adjusted a crocheted cushion and lay back, resting the palms of my hands round my baby bump. The night before I’d felt the baby move for the first time. And it was not, as all the books had said, like a butterfly in your abdomen. That seemed a ridiculously flowery description now I’d experienced it. It was more of a dense, watery sensation. Like the fluid vibrations a swimming goldfish makes through the plastic bag you take it home in. It was a private little feeling. So deeply interior. I felt as if I had a wonderful secret that couldn’t ever be shared. Those watery movements were mine alone to know and relish.
‘Looks like it’s just you and me, my parasitic little friend,’ I said, patting my stomach.
Helen, Sophie and Douglas had unloaded my stuff and made swift exits to prepare for their individual Saturday nights. Helen was going to a club you had to access through a phone box at the back of a diner, a speakeasy for those bored with the common freedom of legalised drinking. Sophie was ‘doing something’, apparently, ‘with someone’. It was all we could get out of her. But whatever it was, it had her bustling with anticipation. I wondered if the male voice I’d heard over the phone at her place weeks ago was the elusive ‘someone’. And Douglas was taking a new lady friend to the theatre. I’d been quite relieved when they’d left. I missed the bubbling expectancy getting ready for a night out held. Often I’d found it had been my favourite part of the evening. My friends were radiating that Saturday-night expectancy and I wanted rid of them and their mid-twenties freedom so I could eat my way through an M&S box of eclairs and browse Netflix.
My MC Hammer ‘You Can’t Touch This’ ringtone blasted the quiet. I answered it without checking the caller ID.
‘Hello?’
‘Emma?’ the voice replied. ‘It’s me.’
Ned.
‘Oh. What do you want? Going to pay back my money?’
‘Ah, no,’ Ned said. ‘I’m ringing to see how you are. How . . . ah . . . how’s the baby thing going?’
‘The baby thing?’
‘Ah, yeah. Is it . . . going OK? Are you, you know, taking your vitamins?’
‘Taking my vitamins? What the fuck, Ned?’
Ned sighed. ‘I’m trying, Emma.’
‘Yes, I agree. You are very trying.’
‘You broke up with me. You decided to keep the baby.’
He was right. I’d done all of the above. But then he’d emptied my bank account, leaving me with nothing.
‘What’s your point?’
‘I don’t have a point, just . . .’ he said, his tone defeated. ‘I wanted to check up on you and, I dunno . . .’
I felt a minor pinch of guilt. He was the father; he had a right to ask about the baby. I’d be devastated if he didn’t care at all.
He cleared his throat. ‘Well, I do need to talk to you about—’
‘I have a scan on Friday,’ I said. ‘I suppose, well, you don’t have to – I don’t need you there or anything, but you could come if you want.’ If Ned was trying, then so could I.
I waited to hear his answer, expecting him to make excuses about Gerry needing help with his Where’s Wally jigsaw or his Mum saying he wasn’t allowed out until he’d matched up all his socks.
‘Really?’ he said, a note of disbelief in his voice. ‘I could come?’
‘You’re the father, aren’t you? I can’t stop you,’ I said, but there was warmth to my voice. Ned actually sounded interested. Keen, even.
‘I won’t have to, you know . . . see your . . . I mean, they won’t make me look into your—’
‘My what, Ned? Spit it out.’
‘Your . . . fagina?’
Not for our entire relationship could Ned bring himself to say that word. But when he did it was with an F instead of a V. I started to laugh
.
‘Yes, Ned,’ I said. ‘If you want to see the baby you will, in fact, have to peer into my vagina.’
‘Shuddup!’ he said with a smile in his voice.
He waited for me to stop tittering.
‘I’m gonna wear a snorkel,’ he added, which set me off again.
Ned made more inappropriate vagina-rummaging jokes and did an impression of a man lost in a uterus asking directions to the blastocyst and I laughed till I cried and the motion caused potential bladder issues. It felt good (the laughing – not the bladder concerns).
‘It’s Saturday night,’ I said, wiping at my eyes. ‘Are you going out?’
‘Yeah, I have a date,’ Ned said, still laughing, and then stopped, realising what he had said. ‘Oh, um . . . yeah, I am going out, later on . . .’
There was no more laughter.
‘Who’s your date?’ I said, trying to sound normal.
‘Um, just a girl I met.’
We were back to being uncomfortable again.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Well, have fun then.’
‘Yeah.’
We sat in silence.
‘Emma?’
‘Yep?’
‘I’ll see you at the scan?’
‘Yeah, yeah, of course.’
We said an awkward goodbye. I hung up, tossed the phone on the sofa and stared into the fire.
Ned was dating?
‘ARCHIE AND TILLY ON SET PLEASE,’ the First AD shrieked down the radio. Amy, having found out I was a Second AD, was taking full advantage and had given me my own radio. Martha was more than miffed at the perceived privilege.
I pressed the transmit button. ‘Archie and Tilly travelling.’ I opened the door and motioned to Martha and the kids that it was time to go.
Martha put down her supersized bag of Twiglets and pushed past me.
‘Scene Forty-seven, guys,’ I said. ‘The one with—’
‘We know which one it is.’ Martha shuffled on her heavy legs, gripping Tilly’s delicate hand. ‘I have been doing this for years, you know.’
‘OK,’ I said, making a face at Archie.
Archie and Tilly delivered their lines again and again while hiding from two zombies, one with blood spurting from where his left arm ought to have been and the other with an exposed ribcage. I should have been concerned that Archie was seeing too much gore for a 4-year-old, but he seemed fine – he’d been playing happily with a severed head during a lighting set-up – and anyway, I just couldn’t get Ned and his date out of my mind. Did he take her to our favourite cheap pizza place in Balham? Did they kiss? Did they shag? Was she skinnier, prettier, cleverer or nicer than me? Would it become serious, or was he just playing the field? My heart sank. Ned was afraid of the field. Any date he was on would be with a girl he genuinely liked.
How Not to Fall in Love, Actually Page 11
