Well Groomed

by Fiona Walker

  But before she could wriggle away from his grip and tell him off, the door burst open and Niall pulled abruptly away as Minty swept in, her beautiful face pink from the warmth of her own trailer.

  ‘The rain’s stopped, darling!’ she announced in a breathless voice. ‘Nigel says there’s enough light to go for a couple of takes, so get into make-up tout de suite for a touch up. See you!’ Without even a perfunctory glance at Tash, she whisked out again.

  Tash felt a light stain of colour leaping to her cheeks, aware that she and Niall had been caught necking like teenagers. She briefly let herself indulge in a fantasy that Minty had a honking crush on Niall and was devastated to catch him indulging in carnal pleasure with his intended, minutes before she herself was going to steal a much-coveted and totally celluloid kiss with him.

  ‘I’ll just clean my teeth.’ Niall headed into the bathroom, pulling off his jumper in his wake.

  Tash took a great slug of coffee that ran down her chin, her fantasy image disappearing as quickly as a popped balloon.

  ‘Niall around?’ A bedraggled blonde poked her head around the door, clutching a clip-board in a plastic bag.

  ‘He’s just coming.’ Tash nodded towards the bathroom.

  ‘Great.’ The girl grinned, her nose red from the cold. She was a young, soft-voiced American with incredibly white teeth that had probably cost thousands of dollars. ‘You must be Tash – I’m Mel. Come and watch, you can stand with me.’

  If Niall really wanted to impress Minty, Tash reflected sourly, he should invest in a set of teeth like Mel’s.

  The celluloid kiss was a long time coming. Tash had been on location with Niall before, and it never ceased to amaze her how much faffing, forethought and energy was expended for just a few seconds of film.

  The shot had been set up on the edge of a tightly clustered pine wood. Beside it ran the tracks for the craned trolley cam which would swoop to earth as it captured Niall galloping in from battle followed by his gang, and then swing around to track him as he slithered to a halt on a marked spot where he would leap from his steed and straight onto Minty.

  As ever, there seemed to be an enormous number of extraneous people hanging about swigging from beakers of tea, banging their hands together for warmth, or dragging on cigarettes. The techies were easily recognisable from their practical anoraks, baseball caps and occasional fleeting attentions to a wire or a piece of tracking. They huddled together talking through the technicalities of the scene, slightly apart from the artistes – themselves conspicuous by their costumes, inertia, and the preferential treatment they received from everyone else. Also hanging around the hub of the action were other more arty production types who were notable for their impractical outfits, loud voices and occasional temperamental fits.

  Of them all, Nigel the director was the loudest and most tempestuous. Wearing a tatty Goretex coat and a baseball cap promoting one of his previous films, he seemed to derive a sadistic satisfaction from making everyone do three times as much as they really needed in order to satisfy his near-obsessive perfectionism. Gnawing at his lower lip, eyes darting madly, he stalked around barking orders like a despotic military leader conducting the last stages of a bloody coup. Terrier-like, he snapped and snarled at everyone in sight – Tash included – as he demanded that everything was triple-checked and set to go before they started the final camera rehearsal. Even rehearsing the actors through the scene – which, according to Niall he had already done before the rain broke earlier – was something of a five-act play.

  ‘Don’t suck her face off, Niall!’ he screamed. ‘Open wider, Minty darling – no, no, not like that. That looks revolting. For God’s sake, use your tongues.’

  Tash cringed under her shared umbrella as she watched Niall kiss Minty over and over again, and seem to enjoy it far too much. It was a strange experience, and something of a first. She had seen him kissing a multitude of actresses before – but that had always been in two dimensions, after the scene was cut and edited and projected on to a white screen. Watching the live performance was agony.

  ‘Kinda odd for you, huh?’ Mel watched her cheerfully.

  Tash nodded. ‘I guess I’ll have to harden myself to it.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s a bit like being married to the mob, isn’t it?’

  Mel, who had been looking across at Nigel’s frantic hand signals to the horse trainer, turned back to her in amazement.

  ‘Did you just say married?’

  ‘Yes – well, not yet, I mean.’ She blushed, realising she was spilling more beans than an overturned Heinz lorry. ‘Later this year.’

  ‘Christ!’ Mel grinned, rubbing her red nose with a mittened hand. ‘That was quick work, wasn’t it? I thought you and Niall only met kinda recently?’

  Remembering that Minty had said the same thing, Tash started to detect a lie. She swallowed uncomfortably. ‘A couple of years ago, actually.’

  ‘Oh.’ Mel’s eyebrows shot up. ‘I see.’ She was plainly astonished.

  ‘But perhaps it would be better to keep quiet about it.’ Tash smiled apologetically. ‘I mean, if Niall’s not eager for people to know.’

  ‘Sure.’ Mel was looking across at Nigel again. ‘Here we go, they’re in first positions.’

  Tash looked up and saw that Minty was now in place under a pine tree, a costume assistant holding an umbrella over her until the last moment to stop drips from the trees landing on her nose. A make-up assistant was fiddling with the long black tresses, using a Polaroid picture as a guide.

  In the distance, Niall and three more of the kilts were waiting on horseback for the hand-signal from a nearby walkie-talkie-wielding techie which would cue them to gallop into shot. Steam was rising from the horses, who had already been pounded around a distant field for twenty minutes to give them the sweated-up, battle-weary look. Plumes of hot air puffed from their impatient nostrils as the assorted actors – some with clearly limited equestrian skills – fought to keep them in check.

  Tash felt a sudden, aching pang of homesickness for Snob and the Lime Tree Farm mob. She longed to be sitting in the warm, cluttered kitchen at the farm right now, tucking into one of Zoe’s off-the-wall meals and talking about the progress of the horses and the gossip on the circuit.

  Nigel was barking into a walkie-talkie as he crouched beside the swarthy director of photography, both looking into a monitor at the base of the camera crane which displayed what the camera operator had in frame. Up on the crane, the camera-man and his focus-puller were sitting in a tight space, shoulders high as their ears against the cold. Tash decided they looked like two grumpy sailors perching in the crows nest at the top of a ship’s mast.

  Someone was yelling for silence on set behind her head.

  ‘Okay – let’s go for it on the first take, shall we?’ Nigel yelled. ‘Where’s the fucking clapper?’

  Tash jumped, wondering whether she was supposed to applaud, but the next moment a nervous-looking youth had darted in front of the camera crane and was holding an electronic clapper-board over his head.

  ‘Not yet!’ Nigel snapped witheringly. ‘And get out of shot, Cynthia!’ The brolly-woman dashed away from Minty, who licked her lips in anticipation.

  ‘Turn over,’ Nigel barked. ‘Standby for take – everybody quiet, please.’ He pulled down the peak of his baseball cap so that it tipped towards his nose in very Third Reich fashion. ‘Okay. Camera?’

  Up on his crane the focus-puller nodded and yelled back, ‘To speed!’

  ‘Sound?’

  A sound engineer crouching beside a lap-top computer which was attached to various space-age master boards fiddled with his headphones and glanced across at a man holding a furry mike on a boom. ‘Rolling,’ he muttered.

  ‘Mark it!’

  With a breathless spiel of the slate and scene number from the nervous-looking youth, the clapper came down and he loped gratefully out of shot.

  ‘And – action! Go in three, Jim!’ Nigel squawked into his walkie-talkie, gazing fixed
ly at his monitor.

  Moments later, Niall and his posse were thundering down the hill, sending up great divots of earth in their wake. The camera swept around on its crane, following their progress in a smooth downward sweep.

  Tash stifled a laugh as she saw that one of the kilts, his face pinched with fear, looked dangerously close to falling off, or not stopping at all. Thankfully his mount was far more experienced than he was and, without any apparent guidance from its rider, slithered to an obedient halt behind Niall’s huge, sweating chestnut as the camera dropped to head-height and filmed Niall jumping off.

  Then it slid easily along its well-oiled tracks as it followed his short run to the delighted Minty who fell into his arms, her exquisite tulip-bud lips rising towards his.

  Tash winced as the kiss seemed to go on forever. Craning her head to try and see whether they were using tongues, she fought a desperate urge to shout ‘Cut!’

  When Nigel finally yelled the blissful word, Tash had come to the conclusion that not only were they using tongues, but they were indulging in mutual mouth-washing and teeth flossing with them.

  After a quick consultation with his camera-man and the sound engineer, Nigel squinted at the sky and shrugged. ‘Print it?’ He turned back to his DoP.

  ‘Print it.’ The swarthy DoP nodded and backed off to talk to the camera crew once more while Nigel addressed the group at large.

  ‘That was fucking fantastic, guys – more fantastic than the fucking, in fact,’ he yelled at the actors. ‘The light’s going. We’re out of here, folks. Thank you, everyone. Grab your call sheets from Angie if you haven’t already. See most of you tomorrow.’

  Tash heaved a sigh of relief and watched as Niall slowly disentangled himself from Minty and tried to make his way over to her, big grin still firmly in place. But he was waylaid en route by Nigel who had suddenly shed his dictator role for oily, conciliatory father-figure.

  ‘Terrific work, Niall – great passion. I think we should work on . . . ’

  Hoping he was going to say ‘the scene where Minty loses all her teeth’, Tash tried to listen in but Nigel turned his back to her so that his words were muffled.

  As Mel sloped off to help with the wrap, dropping piles of paper in her wake, Tash huddled in the worsening drizzle feeling left out. Minty had joined Nigel’s tight little congregation now and was preening delightedly under his increasingly unctuous praise. Tash loathed the way she touched Niall when she spoke, as familiar as a lover. She knew that this was typical of actresses, but it didn’t stop a squat little green harpy of jealousy from crouching on her shoulder and whispering ‘They’re bonking’ into her ear.

  ‘Tash!’ Niall waved her over. ‘Come and meet Nigel. Nigel, this is Tash.’

  Nigel, who close up was a weasely-nosed little man with darting eyes and an over-wet mouth, didn’t look at her at all.

  ‘Hi,’ he muttered, walking off to chat to his location manager.

  Niall laughed cheerfully. ‘Bastard. Let’s rip this plaid off, get my stuff together and go back to the hotel – you must be bored stiff. I said we’d give Minty a lift, okay? Her driver hasn’t turned up yet.’

  Tash gave Minty as big a smile as she could muster. ‘Fine.’

  At least the back seat of the design classic was tiny and covered with dog hair and sweet wrappers, she realised with some satisfaction.

  Tash had hoped for a quiet meal together that evening. She badly needed to talk to Niall, to try to draw him out about his erratic behaviour, his drunken, near-comatose unhappiness of the night before, his relationship with Minty. It occurred to her in a moment of panic on the way back to the hotel that he had only kissed her in his trailer because he had spotted Minty approaching through one of the steamy windows and wanted to make her react. Worst of all, Tash was beginning to worry that his odd behaviour stemmed from the most disturbing of all reasons – his feet were getting colder than a Himalayan hill-walker’s about the wedding.

  But she had no chance to talk to him. The moment they were in their room alone, he peeled off his clothes and headed into the shower. As soon as he was out, he was dressing, eager to get to the bar, MacGinnen’s smile still dancing on his lips.

  ‘Can we go for a walk or something first?’ Tash asked hopefully.

  ‘In this weather?’ Niall laughed, looking towards the vast window where the loch was almost in darkness and being lashed by another downpour. ‘Tash, you’re so gloriously hare-brained sometimes. Are you going to change, or shall we go now? I’m parched, so I am.’

  ‘Can’t we stay here and talk for a bit?’ She snuggled against him imploringly.

  He pulled a face, still boundlessly cheerful. ‘We can talk in bed later, so we can. I want you to get to know everyone better, angel. They’re a terrific bunch, you said so yourself.’ He pulled gently away from her and walked over to the desk to glance at his character notes.

  ‘Niall,’ she bit her lip, following him, ‘have you told them we’re getting married this summer?’

  ‘’Course I have,’ he gathered her into a hug and dropped his mouth to hers. The move seemed alarmingly perfunctory, as though it, too, was scripted.

  Tash badly wanted the reassurance of the kiss, but the image of him using precisely the same moves on Minty over and over again in front of a crowd earlier made her feel jumpy and distanced. And when his mouth did close over hers it was greedy and boisterous, not at all gentle. She kissed him back, but nothing kicked inside her except for a great churning swell of panic.

  ‘You,’ he announced as he pulled away and headed for the mirror to check his hair, ‘are going to cheer up tonight, if it kills me. You’re so morose, angel, it’s depressing me. I know you find film sets intimidating, but it’ll get easier, I promise. The guys think you’re a knock-out, and Minty adores you already.’

  ‘Minty?’ Tash croaked, gaping at him.

  ‘Sure.’ He grinned at her over the shoulder of his mirrored reflection. ‘She told me earlier that she thinks you’re priceless. I’ve invited her to the wedding.’

  When he urged her to hurry up, Tash trailed into the shower and indulged in a long, thoughtful, lonely blast of hot water, listening to Niall chattering away in the other room or singing Rolling Stones hits very loudly. She wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or on the phone, the shower made it impossible to hear a word. After five minutes he went quiet.

  Wondering if he was okay, Tash wandered back into the main room, a toothbrush poking from her mouth as she tried to neutralise her breath from so much coffee on set.

  He had gone already, leaving a selection of clothes on the bed which he was clearly eager for her to wear.

  Tash sighed unhappily. Dear Niall had such romantic ideas, but his taste in women’s clothing was appalling. He had laid out her nylon under-slip, thinking it some sexy little black number, plus her black riding jacket which she had been wearing at the trials the day before and had brought along by mistake. It reeked of horse and, on close inspection, had a line of scurf along the front from leaning into Snob’s neck as they jumped. Added to this, he had put out her hold-up stockings which always fell down in minutes and her long boots from the christening.

  She longed to pull on some jeans and one of his jumpers, but was too uncertain of him at the moment to risk it, guessing that it would be best to pander to him while she rode out his current mood.

  When she looked in the mirror, she perked up slightly. The outfit was ridiculously tarty, but she had to admit it was absurdly sexy as well. The stockings made her legs look gloriously long, and the strappy slip clung to exactly the right curves of her body. Matched with her bruised, tired eyes and damp, dishevelled air, she felt both sleazy and sophisticated – a been-there, bored-by-that rock chick in the Marianne Faithfull mould.

  Having made up her face and dusted off the worst of the jacket’s scurf, she headed to the bar with a rebellious swing of her hips, her nerves firmly held at bay.

  The first person she caught sight of was Minty, loun
ging on a tartan sofa wearing threadbare jeans and a shrunken Fair Isle sweater which clung to every curve of her capacious bosom and minute waist. Her beautiful face free of make-up and her hair as wild as it had been on set, she made Tash feel like an over-primped tart trawling the hotel lounge for trade. Her fragile confidence started to ebb away.

  ‘Tash darling!’ Minty gave her a friendly wave. ‘You look gorgeous. Doesn’t she look gorgeous, everyone?’

  She was draped partly over the sofa arm and partly over Niall who, scruffier than ever in his ancient jeans and Aran, was knocking back scotch and chatting to several other sprawling men. Tash assumed they were the kilts, now unrecognisable without their muddied faces and draped blankets. As Niall made no effort to move sideways and accommodate her, she dragged over a spare chair and plonked it beside one of the lounging men.

  ‘Were you in the battle scene earlier today?’ she asked, trying to imagine his face covered with mud.

  ‘Hardly.’ He looked put out. ‘I’m the lighting camera-man.’ Turning his back on her, he joined in an animated conversation about whether or not Nigel was shagging the young clapper loader.

  Niall was still completely ignoring her as he laughed uproariously with Minty, MacGinnen’s big grin tugging at his cheeks, gaze merrily soaking up that clean, scrubbed pink face with its ripe plum cheeks, kitten eyes and cocoa dusting of freckles.

  Tash felt a tide of bile and panic surge at her throat. More than anything, she felt jealousy eating at her stomach. Their confidence and companionship left her hopelessly alienated. The entire group was chattering about the film and future scenes, a topic of which she knew precious little. Most of them, it seemed, were heading on to Edinburgh the next week to continue shooting there.

  Gratefully recognising the man who had given her a cigarette in the tent earlier and told her that Minty was a bitch, she caught his eye and grinned.