How Not to Fall in Love, Actually

by Catherine Bennetto

  ‘CUT!’ the director yelled. ‘Where’s the frigging blood?’

  Blood was supposed to be spurting from a bunch of slippery, rubbery prosthetic veins coming out of the zombie with the severed arm. A tube in the prosthetic was attached to what was essentially a keg of blood and a standby art girl was to pump it through manually – she was pumping but we saw no spurting.

  ‘I think it’s blocked,’ she said, pumping faster and faster. She had fake blood all over herself and had begun to sweat.

  The man playing the zombie dropped his frightening charade and watched his shoulder of veins with a look of curiosity completely at odds with the decomposing nature of his make-up.

  ‘Five minutes’ break, people, while we sort this out!’ the First AD called.

  Crew and cast dispersed, placing scripts on chairs, booms on tables, cameras in lock-off mode.

  ‘When’s the baby due?’ Caroline asked, while instinctively tidying and fussing with Archie’s hair.

  ‘The sixteenth of July.’ I peeled the wrapper from a cupcake.

  The crew were taking the opportunity to snack and smoke outside the studio while the art department rushed around with bits of tubing, worried faces and fake blood on their hands/trousers/sides of their faces. It got everywhere. I’d trod in it at some point, and the bottoms of my Converse looked like I’d walked through a crime scene.

  Caroline and Claire had joined Archie and me at a picnic table. Claire was sitting opposite, her back to us, blowing smoke upward and chatting on her phone.

  ‘Wow. Exciting! Do you know what it is yet?’ She released Archie and looked at me the way make-up artists do: eyes moving over your face, assessing your collagen levels, the size of your pores and whether you need some eyebrow reshaping or upper-lip waxing.

  ‘No, the scan is on Friday.’ I crammed the cupcake into my mouth.

  Caroline uh-huhed and got out a sleek case of neutral-coloured powders. She dabbed a brush over a colour.

  ‘Are you going to find out what you’re having?’ Her powder-loaded brush headed towards my face. ‘Or do you and your partner want to keep it a surprise?’

  Without any question as to whether the pallid skin, deep purple under-eye bags, wet hair pulled into a bun and wayward eyebrows was actually a carefully considered look I was going for, Caroline commenced powdering.

  ‘I don’t have a partner,’ I said, flinching and blinking. ‘I’m just . . . having a baby.’

  ‘Oh.’ Caroline nodded. She flicked open another black case and waved a large bristle brush over the glistening skin-coloured powder. ‘Insemination,’ she said, dusting my nose and cheekbones.

  ‘No.’ I coughed, inhaling the powder. ‘My boyfriend and I broke up. But he’s still, well . . . he’s coming to the scan.’

  I went back to thinking about Ned and his date and wondered if the girl was now his girlfriend. I hoped not. I would rather he date a variety of vacuous girls than embark on a new and meaningful relationship with some cool, tolerant girl who wanted lots of freckly kids.

  ‘Wow. That’s tough. Are you OK doing it on your own? Shut your eyes.’

  Being a make-up artist required you to spend your working day inches from someone else’s face. This created some sort of false intimacy that saw make-up artists asking probing questions and actors unloading their souls. Actors treated make-up artists like therapists. Therapists with glitter. I shut my eyes to receive the unasked-for makeover and proceeded to do what many before me had done. Unleash my inner emotions to a near stranger because they had the ability to make me look pretty.

  ‘Wow,’ Caroline said again, after I’d told her the whole Ned story even down to the sexual position I thought I’d been in when I’d got pregnant and the size, the exact size, of Ned’s penis. ‘You’re so brave. Good for you,’ she said, brandishing a mirror.

  Now it was my turn. ‘Wow!’

  Without so much as a slick of pink lipstick or a slash of green eyeshadow, Caroline had made me look quite lovely. Clever covering-up and colouring-in (not professional terms, of course) had transformed me from ‘Pasty Pregnant Whore on Crack’ to ‘Glowing Woman in Charge of Own Destiny, Fit to be in a Plug-in Air Freshener Commercial’. I was impressed.

  ‘I look like me. But pretty!’ I said, turning this way and that, trying to find where the real me ended and Air Freshener Girl began.

  ‘You are pretty. You just need to bring out your best features.’ Caroline flicked open a powder case. ‘All I did was use this one here, that down there, highlighted this with a bit of that one, mixed these two to match this area here and made small strokes with this one under here. Simple.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I said, unsure. It seemed as simple as painting a Monet with an eyelash. ‘Maybe I will just use the stuff for under my eyes.’

  Caroline shrugged.

  A few minutes later the crew were called back to set.

  I quickly checked that Archie remembered his lines. ‘And you know that zombie on the floor isn’t real, don’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. It’s wubber.’

  ‘Rubber. And the person chasing you is just Peter with fake eyeballs and teeth. You remember Peter? We met him in the—’

  ‘Yes,’ Archie said, getting impatient.

  ‘OK, OK,’ I said, glancing round the set and realising how bloody (literally) hellish it looked. ‘And the blood is fake too, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. It tastes like chocolate.’

  ‘Right. Maybe don’t eat the fake blood, though.’

  Archie nodded and trotted to his ‘first positions’ mark and I headed back to my hard plastic seat behind the monitors, passing Andrew on the way.

  ‘You look very pretty today,’ he said, looking down at me from his great height of godlike good looks. ‘Have you done something different?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been renovated by Caroline.’ I grinned beneath the nude contouring.

  Andrew chuckled.

  ‘OK, GOING FOR A TAKE!’ screeched the First AD. ‘EVERYBODY OFF SET!’ She gave me a curt glare.

  I felt Andrew watching me as I continued past him. When I turned and sat down he was still looking. He winked and turned back to his camera.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The morning of the scan I’d woken at 4.31 a.m. with a fear the baby would be born with no brain or cartilage. Just an empty head attached to rubbery arms and legs. I’d got out of bed, turned the lights on and sat watching the last of the dawn infomercials. I’d become very enamoured with a hair curler that was also a hairbrush and a hairdryer and something else I’d missed when I went to the bathroom – maybe a can opener. I’d then called Alex in Bangladesh and she’d told me, with the screech of rickshaw horns drowning out every second word, not to worry, my baby was going to be peachy of cheek and wispy of hair with all essential brains, cartilage, toenails and so on, and I’d ceased my shallow breathing. Alex was good like that. Pragmatic to my preposterous. Rational to my ridiculous. Working in squalor for the good of poorer people while I ate Green & Black’s for breakfast and hoped my ex-boyfriend would get the clap from his date.

  Later that day I walked out of the cottage and down to the corner of the street, where Ned had agreed to pick me up in his mother’s Volvo. Then stood around in the dimming light while my toes turned to toesicles for the next seventeen minutes. A car tooted at the end of the road. Not Ned. I pulled my feather-filled parka tighter round me. Very soon I wouldn’t be able to fit my pregnant belly into the coat, but for now the zip could be coaxed over the bump with obvious strain. My phone rang and I immediately predicted the conversation.

  ‘Em, it’s me,’ Ned would say breathlessly.

  ‘Yes,’ I would say tightly.

  ‘I’m running late, can I meet you there?’

  I’d hear Gerry in the background moaning about how my pregnant neediness was getting in the way of their alcohol flavour testing. Hic.

  ‘I guess,’ I would say even more tightly.

  ‘Great. You’re the best. Chelsea Hosp
ital, right?’

  ‘St George’s,’ I would spit.

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I meant. See you there,’ he’d say.

  And acid would rise in my throat and I would mentally castrate him. And Gerry. But when I pulled my phone from my coat pocket, it wasn’t him.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hello, darling!’ Mum said with her customary enthusiasm.

  It was never there when she was married to Dad. She’d worn navy blouses, sensible shoes, made our school lunches (Marmite sandwiches every day) and driven us to school in silence. She’d emerged from the divorce an exuberant butterfly complete with Prada wings, a Lanvin purse and more energy than a Pussycat Doll on speed.

  ‘Are you at the hospital yet?’

  ‘No. Just waiting for . . .’ I decided against mentioning Ned. ‘A cab.’

  ‘I want you to ring me the minute you’re out. I need to make sure it has my nose and not your father’s. You girls are very lucky you didn’t get his nose, my goodness; it’s like an aircraft hangar. I’ve put some money aside for surgery just in case.’ I could hear a noise in the background like coat hangers sliding along rails and imagined my mother stalking round a boutique on the phone, bowling sales assistants and shoppers left and right. ‘Do you have matching underwear on?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re lying, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. And the elastic’s gone in my knickers.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Mum grumbled. ‘Now listen, I read an article about single motherhood in teens—’

  ‘I’m twenty-seven!’

  ‘Yes but darling, you’re very immature.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Anyway, the article was talking about getting into the dating pool when you’re young and have a baby and it said “If at first you don’t succeed—” ’

  ‘Mum, I don’t want to date.’

  ‘Just listen.’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘It said, “If at first you don’t succeed, ask yourself—” ’

  ‘Do you be-LIEVE in life after LOVE,’ I sang in a below-average Cher voice.

  Mum was quiet for a second.

  ‘Do you want my advice or not?’

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘It’s no wonder you get yourself into these messes.’

  ‘Well, everything happens for a reason, I guess.’

  ‘Yes, but sometimes that reason is because you’re an idiot.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘I meant about forgetting to take the pill.’ She made a half-sighing, half-laughing noise. ‘I just worry, my darling.’

  ‘I know.’

  Mum was tactless and bossy, but her heart was in the right place. Perfectly positioned behind a tanned bosom and covered in an Yves Saint Laurent shirt with a generous spray of bespoke perfume.

  ‘Now, one more thing.’ Mum was back to being officious. ‘Have you got your money back yet?’

  ‘No, but I will. I just have to—’

  ‘You just have to strap on a pair, Emma! I won’t have you in the same situation I was in at your age. I refuse to fund his ridiculous ideas and your lack of balls.’

  ‘I’ve got . . . balls, I’m just—’ I paced the footpath. Why hadn’t I been more forceful with Ned? I’d asked; he’d said he needed another couple of weeks and, well, that’s where I’d left it. ‘His phone . . . it’s . . . he’s off-grid. He’s gone underground. He’s—’

  ‘Don’t give me gone underground. He’s not Jason Bourne, and you’re not in an episode of CSI: New York with that sexy man from Forrest Gump.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Get the money. You have two weeks. Or I’ll call the police on him myself.’

  ‘He’s the father of my unborn child! You can’t call the police.’

  ‘Darling, I love you, but I have to be cruel to be . . . What’s the saying?’

  ‘Kind. You have to be cruel to be kind.’

  ‘No, that’s not it. It’s something to do with revenge . . .’ She sounded preoccupied. ‘Well, anyway, I just want you to stand on your own two feet. Even if they are in those tatty sneakers you insist on wearing. I was a single mother – now that’s lovely . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you have this in a grey? A Spanish dove grey, not that horrible Argos polyester tracksuit grey you have your skirts over there in.’

  I’d lost her. Lost her to a Bond Street boutique and a quivering sales assistant.

  ‘Bye, Mum.’

  ‘Bye, dear,’ she said. ‘No, that won’t do. Get me—’

  And she was gone.

  I checked the time. I waited a few more minutes with a familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach. Ned had forgotten. I wasn’t the last thing on his mind – I wasn’t there at all. I dialled his number, said ‘I hate you’ childishly to his answer phone, then called a cab. While the taxi made the short journey through the backstreets of Wimbledon, Ned returned my call.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, feeling like I’d dropped my self-respect out of the cab window for it to be run over by a passing bus.

  ‘I totally forgot!’

  ‘I figured.’

  ‘I’m coming to get you. I just have to wait for Mum to get back from the chiropractor.’

  ‘Forget it. I’m in a cab,’ I huffed. ‘Look, if you don’t want to come, then don’t. I only asked you—’

  ‘I want to come!’ he whined.

  God, how I hated him at that moment. My feelings towards Ned changed so often I was getting motion sickness. On Christmas Day, when he’d given me the little beer tankard (before he killed Grandma’s cat), I’d wondered if it had been a mistake to break up with him. And only a few days previously I’d been jealous of the date he was on. Remembering how in the early days we used to go out for beer and cheap pizza, then go home and watch QI, Ned recreating the experiments with an impeccable Stephen Fry impression. We’d usually end up running from poorly measured, rapidly frothing concoctions, breathless with drunken hysterics. And yet a few weeks before, when I’d looked at my bank account and realised I couldn’t afford the ergonomic baby carrier endorsed by all sorts of celebrity mums, that I’d have to tie the baby to my back with a piece of batik fabric like a rice paddy worker, and swing the naked babe round to my knee-length bosom for its feed while I continued to hoe the earth with my gnarled fingers, I’d wanted to turn him over to the wrath of Helen and my mother and cheer as he emerged a eunuch with bald patches and a dislocated nostril.

  ‘Emma? Please?’

  ‘I’m here now,’ I said as the cab pulled up at the hospital. ‘I don’t care if you come or not.’

  ‘I’ll be there! I promise.’

  I hung up and headed inside.

  ‘Miss George?’ A jolly-looking Caribbean lady peered round the door of one of the patient rooms holding a chart.

  A few minutes later my maternity jeans were down low, my top was up high and Janice, the Caribbean midwife, was swinging the barcode thingy across my stomach, the cold blue gel slowly warming up.

  ‘Hello, little one,’ Janice said as a picture of the baby appeared on the screen. I looked up and saw what was now, so clearly, a tiny person.

  ‘It’s having a rest!’ she chuckled. ‘Look at its little hands!’

  The baby was lying in the foetal position. Face down, bum up in the air with tiny legs tucked underneath. A foetus. Lying in the foetal position. I was undoubtedly constructing a genius child. There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Come in,’ Janice said, turning in her seat.

  A young nurse popped her head round the door. ‘Sorry to disturb you. The father’s here. Can I show him in?’ She looked from me to Janice.

  I nodded, a small black cloud gathering above my head. The lady disappeared and a second later Ned’s flushed face appeared at the door.

  ‘Hi,’ he said sheepishly. ‘Sorry I’m late. I just . . . Can I?’

  ‘Grab that chair, young man,’ Janice said, then turned back to the screen.

  Ned dragged a chai
r over and stared at the screen, not noticing his chair leg was caught on my handbag and the contents were spilling.

  ‘Is that . . . our baby?’ he said, captivated.

  ‘No, that’s a live feed to a woman’s uterus in Brazil.’

  Ned narrowed his eyes at me.

  ‘Yes, that is your baby. From in there.’ Janice pointed to my stomach and looked at me like I was unstable. She turned back to Ned. ‘See how it lying? So sweet.’

  Ned studied the screen. Janice continued with her duties, clicking and scanning, making notes and providing facts. The placenta was lying low, which was not a problem at this stage, apparently (although I’d already commenced fretting) but meant I’d need another scan in a few weeks’ time to make sure it had moved. Ned asked Janice many, many questions and she answered them all patiently like she didn’t have another fifty-five wombs to scan right after mine. She chuckled away while making notes, pausing now and then to clutch a hand to her bosom and emit a wheezy laugh at one of Ned’s anecdotes. The two of them acted like I wasn’t even in the room.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ Ned said, staring at the screen where our baby had turned its head to face us and from what I could see, did not have the large beaky nose of my father. ‘Isn’t it?’ He looked from me to Janice. ‘We made a baby. It’s just so amazing . . .’

  Janice nodded and patted Ned’s hand. I grimaced at the touchy-feely crap.

  ‘Christ, it’s just reproduction. Bacteria reproduce at a rate of, like, one billion per second.’

  Janice and Ned chose to ignore me.