Break-Up Club

by Lorelei Mathias

  ‘Yeah well, when you know, you know,’ Olivia said.

  ‘Any more, Liv?’ Holly said, holding out more food towards her.

  ‘Oh no, I’m stuffed,’ Olivia said, slotting her knife next to her fork and laying it to rest. Her plate looked as full now as it had at the start of the meal, only everything on it appeared to be in a slightly different position. ‘That was great though, thank you!’

  Some hours later, they had retreated to the lounge. Lawrence was snoozing on the faded blue sofa in a post-gluttonous coma. Olivia sat perfectly upright next to him, staring at her phone, and Bella was picking at the yellow strips of foam that were leaking out of the sides of the sofa like oven chips. Over time, the hole had grown so large that these chips were now a regular feature of the lounge décor. Lawrence was forever coming into the kitchen after a big night out, picking them off the floor and going to eat them in his drunken stupor. Then, once Holly reminded him they had slightly less nutritional value than their real-life counterparts, he would drop them back onto the floor. But not before placing one of them on her shoulder and saying, ‘Look, you’ve got a chip on your shoulder.’ Every time.

  ‘We really should stitch up that hole. Can anyone sew?’ Holly said.

  Naturally, Bella did not respond. Her filter for all things domestic was now so advanced, the vibrations of Holly’s speech were physically shielded from penetrating her eardrum and making the journey to the middle ear. Instead, she stood up, a puddle of chips at her feet, and began the preparations for a round of Analogue Netflix. This was a game Bella had devised some time ago, borne out of her reluctance to pay for what she called ‘special television’, and her belief that they should all learn to appreciate the one thousand films they already owned between them. In reality they spent far more time deciding what to watch than they did watching anything, so in many ways it was exactly like the real Netflix.

  Bella stretched up towards the Jenga-like tower of DVDs and plucked some out at random, as Holly began laying them out on the coffee table. Bella started calling out titles.

  ‘OK, so what have we here… The Notebook.’

  ‘Nope. Boring, saccharine, predictable…’

  ‘It’s beautiful!’ Bella said, staring daggers at Olivia.

  ‘Pride and Prejudice?’

  ‘Too long. And too… period,’ Lawrence said, rubbing sleep dust from his eyes.

  ‘How about… The Curious Case of—’ Olivia began.

  ‘Benjamin Boring? The film that editing forgot?’ Holly said.

  ‘Love Actually.’

  ‘Um, get a life, actually,’ Holly said, and Lawrence nodded in agreement.

  ‘But it’s a wonderful film,’ Bella insisted. ‘So affirmative of the power of love as life’s great leveller—’

  ‘If I can just stop you there, Miss Bella. I’ve nothing against Richard Curtis per se,’ Lawrence began to pontificate, ‘I mean, let’s be honest, Blackadder was pure televisual perfection. But the trouble with Love Actually – nay, the whole Curtis canon – is that he’s clearly being paid by the people at Visit Britain to promote a wildly inaccurate view of London to the rest of the world. Take Notting Hill. There is no way the character William Thacker would be able to afford to live in such an attractive period property – with a gargantuan roof terrace – in the real Notting Hill. I mean, let’s be real here: HE WORKS IN AN INDEPENDENT BOOKSHOP!’

  Lawrence was getting more irate than was probably necessary. Holly felt her stomach constrict, and looked round the room to see if anyone else had noticed him being a little too shouty.

  ‘But maybe house prices shot up after the film? Maybe Notting Hill used to be like Hackney?’ Bella posed, desperately still wanting to believe.

  ‘Hey, you know what would be fun?’ Holly began, her eyes on Lawrence. ‘We should make a tongue-in-cheek mash-up of all the Curtis films, where the characters live in properties which actually correspond to their income. So, let’s see… Will Thacker would live in an ex local authority one-bed in Kensal Rise, with a Juliet balcony at best.’

  Lawrence laughed. ‘Yes! And we’d replace all the friendly cabbies and romantic Routemasters with those charmless new buses with grumpy drivers that refuse to stop for you.’

  ‘We’ll have it raining the whole time! And we’ll call it Stamford Hill!’

  ‘Perfect! And Love Actually could be – Dumped Actually,’ Lawrence said, smirking.

  ‘Or, Shat on from a Great Height, Actually!’ Holly added, and they both fell about laughing.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Whatevs,’ Bella said. ‘So. Anyone for Four Weddings? Oldie but a goodie?’

  Holly began to realise she and Lawrence were outnumbered. An hour and twenty minutes later, she was feeling her usual bout of nausea at the scene where Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell kiss in the rain, when she noticed Lawrence’s eyelids closing out of the corner of her eye, his wine glass hanging off his fingers at a precarious angle. In slow motion, she saw his fingers relax and the glass slip, sending Shiraz cascading to the floor. As everyone leapt up to try and stem the tide with a whole roll of extra-quilted kitchen roll, Holly reached a conclusion. It was time to take Lawrence to a place where other people were not.

  Twenty minutes later, she emerged from the bathroom and smiled. Once again Lawrence lay on top of her bed, eyes closed, with all his clothes on. His muddy Adidas trainers hung off the edge of the bed. A trickle of drool was slowly wandering from his lips and onto her freshly laundered pillowcase.

  ‘Lawry…’ she said, peeling off her clothes and hopping into bed beside him. She kissed him on the back of his neck, noticing that, as ever, he smelled very strongly of unwashed hair. She told herself this was sexy and manly, and not that Lawrence was a disciple of the ‘your hair starts to clean itself after a while’ gospel of hair care.

  She began unlacing his shoes, rolling down his jeans and unbuttoning his shirt.

  ‘Hey, I’m fine,’ he said, as though bidding his manservant off duty.

  ‘Oi,’ she said, resorting to prodding.

  After a few more inaudible grunts that sounded like ‘No… sleeping…’, he turned his back to face the wall and resumed snoring. Following a couple more failed attempts at erotic coercion via the means of spooning and shiatsu, Holly gave up and turned around so they could do that less talked about but equally popular sexual position – the back-to-back ‘we’re in a strop’ position, where they remained for some time. Occasionally, their bare bottoms made contact, but they quickly moved apart on impact as though electrically repelled.

  An hour later, she felt someone kissing the back of her neck.

  ‘Hey. I miss you.’

  ‘I’m right next to you,’ she said, but she knew what he meant.

  She felt his arms tighten around her. She turned to face him and they shared a slow, sleepy kiss.

  ‘Meet me somewhere?’ he said when they stopped. ‘Old Havana?’ His eyes closed again, his last words dispatched.

  Holding his head to her chest, she closed her eyes and thought of vintage motor cars, cigars and salsa dancers and everything else they knew about the city they planned to visit together. She attempted to teleport herself there, to join him in his sleep-world. This wasn’t a low-budget version of Inception; it was a game they’d invented when they first got together. It had been one of those nights where they’d laid together talking and cuddling all night, amazed at having found each other and wondering how other couples ever got any sleep. This had been their way to make parting for sleep just that bit easier: to pretend they would meet in their dreams.

  Sometimes it didn’t work so well. Tonight in particular, there was heavy congestion on the teleporting highway. Five hours later, Holly was staring vacantly at the ceiling, listening to the busy traffic noises of Holloway, not Havana. She closed her eyes as she heard the recycling van belting out its one-hit wonder, ‘Stand Clear. Vehicle reversing’. Sometimes the traffic was so unfeasibly loud that she had to check her mattress wasn’t actually in the middle of
the road.

  After a while, she became aware of how spectacularly un-tired she was, and lay watching Lawrence snoring blissfully away. Attempting to locate some inner yogic calm, she tuned in to the rise and fall of her boyfriend’s snores. Loud to soft. Heavy breathing to quiet breathing, then back to blissful silence. Another chorus of heavy breathing, a guttural snort, then back to more quiet breathing. Holly listened to this on a loop for hours, wondering when she’d first become an insomniac. Gradually, the room stopped being so dark, and Lawrence’s snoring solo found some backing singers in the baby blackbirds outside her window.

  Two hours later, she switched off her alarm and wanted to weep at the time. She stared down at Lawrence sleeping and whispered, ‘Lawry, I’ve got to go. See you later.’

  A freckly and toned forearm emerged from under the covers, attempting to pull her back into the warm, feathery world under the duvet. Half asleep, he planted kisses on her cheeks, moving down to her neck.

  ‘Hey, I’ve got to go to work,’ she said as he drew her further inside and pulled the duvet high above their heads. He tucked it round them, so they were hidden from the world, in their own dimly lit universe. And then she remembered. When things were good with Lawrence, there was nowhere she’d rather be than under the duvet with him. Hiding from responsibility, from pretending to be a grown-up.

  ‘Stay.’

  ‘I can’t. It’s only my second week!’ she said as he planted kisses on her stomach. She pulled in her non-existent abdominal muscles. ‘I’ve got to try and be in early as I don’t think my new boss is terribly impressed with me. My first episode ended up over length, when I forgot to allow for the extra ad-breaks they have on Sky!’

  Lawrence looked at Holly, his eyes hazy with sleep. ‘But you can’t go – I’ll miss you too much.’

  ‘But I need to try and make a better impression.’ Mustering all her willpower, she lifted the lid on their private universe, letting the cold air to their faces. It was a wrench, but slowly she untangled herself from the covers and peeled herself out of bed. She kissed him goodbye, feeling a tinge of pain.

  ‘I love you,’ mumbled Lawrence through slumber, his eyes closed.

  ‘Love you too.’

  ‘Love you three,’ he said as he sank into sleep.

  Holly smiled and tucked in the covers around him so he was all sealed up and no cold air could sneak in. She stood watching him sleep; his brown curls splayed out over the pillow, his long eyelashes twitching as he dreamed. She thought how adorable he looked, all wrapped up like a lanky, stubbly bundle of cute. He was exasperating at times, yes, but Lawrence-on-form was so full of life that she struggled to imagine a world without him.

  In a way, knowing it was hard to leave him gave her a kind of comfort. Maybe Shakespeare was onto something with that whole ‘parting is such sweet sorrow’ thing. Sweet because somehow it made it OK that they were still together – that even five years in, it still hurt a little bit to say goodbye. Yeah, we’re all right, Holly told herself as she tiptoed out the room and down the hallway. Then quietly, she snuck through the front door and went to work.

  2. Airbrushing

  ‘OK, that’s it, a bit closer, Chardonnay, we can’t quite see your pores,’ Holly said in her broom cupboard of an office. ‘There we go.’

  Holly picked up the clip of Chardonnay and dragged her into the timeline of her Final Cut editing programme. Then she began to mix, chop and change the scene around, in the hope of making something good out of the weekend’s footage.

  It was hard not to talk to yourself in the broom cupboard. Having no one to share her new ‘office’ with, Holly’s self-discipline had to work extra hard just to stop herself from taking naps or ringing her friends. Still, she was only two weeks into the job – she’d get used to not being open plan anymore. It was all part of being a more responsible adult, this promotion to actual Editor. Even if her old job assisting the Drama Editor at a small, artistic production company now seemed infinitely more creative. Mark, her lovely old boss, had always referred to the edit suite as the ‘shit to ice-cream department’. But as Holly played with the colour levels, adjusting Chardonnay’s tangerine skin tone to something more natural, she wondered whether she would ever manage to submit an episode of Prowl that had anything like the appeal of ice cream.

  The latest in a craze of brain-dead reality TV shows, Prowl was a docu-soap set in a suburban nightclub which screened on Sky’s Channel 653 (she couldn’t say for sure, never having watched it). Much of the content came from the ‘fly on the bog wall’ footage from within the ladies’ lav. Not actually inside the cubicles (they weren’t that desperate for content… yet), but in the communal wash-basin area, where the perfumes, lollipops and Brandii, the guilt-mongering towel lady, were gathered. The ‘unsung hero of the UK club scene’ (so sang the press release), Brandii was effectively the eyes and ears of ‘Prowl’ in East Sheen. So, quite literally, the show Holly edited was unadulterated crap.

  No, she decided, cutting this negative thought and pasting it at the back of her mind. Taking this job in Daytime TV had been a triumphant career move of epic proportions! It paid twice as much as her last job. Not only that, she was going to use her evenings and weekends to pursue Proactive Creative Projects. Like making short films. Yes, with Lawrence’s help she would edit a fabulous film to enter into festivals. Together they would use their spare time to win industry awards, like the creative powerhouse dream-team they were truly meant to be. Hurrah, she thought, stemming the tide of career anxiety and picturing her lovely, talented boyfriend back home, tucked under her covers – his long-toed man-feet poking out of the bed.

  If Holly had mastered one skill so far in her small time on Earth, she reckoned it was the ability to cut and paste the things of life into little compartments in her brain. She was as good an editor of her thoughts as she was of daytime television. As she returned to editing the scene in front of her, a new face filled the monitor; that of Luke Langdon, the show’s main male ‘character’, Phil the Barman.

  Luke was a trained actor, reduced to the status of a barman on a reality TV show. But because the premise of the show was that everything must appear real, to all Luke’s luvvie peers, it looked as though he was actually a barman. As he bent over to lift the beer barrel in the fictional-but-real-world bar that he ran, Holly couldn’t help staring at the muscles on his upper arms as they flexed in and out. Playing around with the slow motion effect (in a purely artistic way, of course), she realised the job had some perks. Although, it was unlikely to propel her to Baftaville any time soon. Nor was it getting her any closer to her dream job of editing a feature. But she might as well enjoy the scenery along the way, she mused as she heard a beep from her emails.

  Jeremy.Philpott@Totesamaze‌Productions.com to

  Holly.Braithwaite@Totesamaze‌Productions.com

  Morning Holly,

  Could you bring me a coffee when you have a minute? Just my usual! Also, just a heads-up that we had to do some major re-cutting on some of the scenes at the end of the second episode. Bit woolly in places. Too many indulgent shots over the graffiti on the toilet walls, for one. The ending has much more punch now we’ve taken those bits out. Less is more.

  Also, small point: What was with the Wagner soundtrack??! Maybe artistic if this was a film festival, but let’s try and remember that this is DAYTIME TV. Your audience are ASDA MUMS with 2 GCSEs or less, who eat KFC for breakfast and smoke while breastfeeding. They don’t need to see pretentious shots set to opera. The only music they know comes out of the X Factor.

  Did you get a chance to type up those minutes? Would like to get them circulated before lunch.

  Many thankings,

  Jezza.

  P.S. Oh – almost forgot! A little niggle’s come up regarding your contract. I’ll tell you when you come in.

  Getting to the coffee machine involved traversing a mixed terrain of sets, wardrobes and dubious props. Being a very small production company, TotesAmaze often had to
shoot some of their scenes in-house when they couldn’t get into the actual locations. So there were a number of makeshift replica locations to wander through – down the pretend hallway, past the pretend cloakroom, and through the pretend chill-out room. As Holly arrived, she found herself staring at the same muscular arms she’d been admiring from before, only this time less pixelated. TV’s ‘Phil the Barman’ was fixing a drink in the real world. He was resting one arm on the coffee machine, staring vacantly into his plastic cup as it filled up with tan coloured foam. Holly couldn’t help wondering whether he had one too many buttons of his checked shirt undone than was really comfortable for a work environment. She wondered if the open-chested look was a decision from the Wardrobe department, or if it was Luke’s own style. But after a few moments of staring at the chest hairs that were peeping out, she decided it definitely wasn’t a problem.

  ‘Hi. Sorry. All yours in a minute,’ he said, and she stopped gawking and looked up at his face.

  ‘Oh, don’t hurry. I’m in no rush to get back to the broom cupboard.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘My windowless edit suite.’

  A penny dropped behind Luke’s retina. ‘Oh, I thought you were a runner, I don’t know why. Sorry, I don’t think we’ve met.’

  ‘That’s OK. Flattered you think I look young enough to be a runner! The anti-wrinkle cream must be working!’ she said, wishing she could cut that last sentence as soon as she’d delivered it.

  ‘Oh, definitely,’ Luke said, his smile that bit more genuine in the flesh.

  ‘And you are?’ she said, immediately wishing this shabby attempt at humour could also be relegated to the cutting-room floor.

  ‘I’m Luke. I’m – “the star of the show”,’ he said with a reasonable dose of irony.

  ‘I know. I was joking. Sorry. My bad joke filter isn’t working today.’

  ‘And you call yourself an editor,’ he said, and Holly smiled nervously.

  ‘Is this fake?’ Luke said, staring at her.

  Holly was flummoxed. Was her conversation that dull?