by Leah McLaren
The flat on Coleville Terrace was located on the third and fourth floors of an ivy-strangled town house. The building had originally been intended as an upscale single-family dwelling, but had been chopped up into several apartments sometime during the postwar boom.
Dragging her luggage uphill from the tube, Meredith listened to her mother’s rant about the neighborhood. Over the past couple of centuries the area had risen and fallen in its fortunes, and risen and fallen again. In the four decades since Irma moved in, the area had changed dramatically, and in her view, for the worse. The West Indian flophouses had been bought at a pittance and renovated into gleaming mausoleums by the offspring of ailing rock legends. She could barely leave the house to buy a can of sardines without running into one of these trustafarian twits, on the way to the salon to have their hair matted or tuning up their vintage kit cars. They put her in a bad mood, the bohemians of today. Such pretenders. So rich. The village was nothing like in the old days when drugged gypsies flopped for the night in doorways playing bongo drums and everyone pretended not to mind. Back then, Coleville Terrace was dirty and uncomfortable and real. Now it was a movie set inhabited by upscale squatters.
Of course Meredith didn’t remember it this way. Her early recollections of life here were hazy. Literally. A film of smoke permeated the inner atmosphere of the flat from morning to night—cherry tobacco fumes emanating from a hookah pipe Irma kept smoldering in the corner of the living room. There were visitors—hundreds of them, coming and going, sleeping and dancing, eating and throwing up in the loo. These happy wanderers lit fires in the sink and sang campfire songs, pinched Meredith’s ears and knees, and roared through the night at jokes she didn’t understand.
Early childhood—pre–boarding school, pre-Canada—was murky territory for Meredith. She had been back to Coleville Terrace only once (on a layover flight to Croatia, where she was working on a sci-fi vampire Canadian-European coproduction) in the twelve years since graduating.
Now, standing outside the chipped front door, Meredith was suddenly starving. This was unusual. Like her mother, she ate little and was particular about what she did eat. Unlike Irma, she abstained for reasons of health and vanity rather than defiance of social conventions.
She watched Irma fumble, muttering, in her handbag and, after a minute or so, withdraw a Hello Kitty key ring from which hung two brass keys. One of them she detached and handed to Meredith with a ceremonial air. The other she slipped into the lock.
“Mom?”
“Yes, dear? Oh, and before I forget, if you must call me that, could you at least pronounce it in a way that doesn’t make you sound like a cashier at Wal-Mart?”
Irma rammed the key into the keyhole, withdrew it and rammed it in again.
“All right, then. Irma.”
“Yes?”
“Do you have anything in the fridge?”
The door swung open with a thud.
“To eat?” said Irma, as if her daughter had just suggested they spend the afternoon inline skating to Brighton. “I’ll pour you a nice glass of London tap and that should curb it. They say eighty percent of hunger spells are actually caused by dehydration. Particularly after a long flight. Murder on the skin. You look parched.”
Meredith began to drag her roller suitcase up to the flat. She remembered her prenatal yoga instructor’s words: “Be mindful of your body, and the bodies of others.” She translated the words into a mantra of her own: “Try not to smack your mother, no matter how much she tempts you.”
The flat was not so much dirty as decimated. Whole pieces of furniture were simply lost—buried beneath the heap of abandoned human implements: paper, cloth, metal, plastic. The odor of wet wood shavings was overlaid with the suggestion of long-forgotten fruit. For a moment Meredith considered the hopeful possibility she might be hallucinating from exhaustion. She gave her head a shake. No luck.
The front hall opened onto the third floor of Irma’s building and served, illogically, as the upper floor of the flat: it housed the two bedrooms and the bathroom. Immediately to the right of the front door was a largish bathroom, the walls covered with crumbly tiles. To the right was the master bedroom, discernible by the piles of books, board games and discarded bottles of Limoncello. Under a huge heap of velvet and a Cossack coat hulked Irma’s single bed. Beside it was a tea tray bearing half a honeyed crumpet. Somewhere, from under something, a transistor radio brayed yesterday’s football scores.
Irma opened a door that led to her daughter’s childhood room. Meredith was relieved, and even touched, to see that it was tidy compared to the rest of the place, even if it was barely the size of a pantry. The only furniture was a narrow military-issue sleeping cot pushed against the far wall and made up neatly with a yellowed, but quite possibly clean, eyelet bedspread. The walls were bare except for a framed and yellowed fingerpainting of a flesh-toned blob on a grassy expanse under a teal sky. Meredith had no memory of executing this work, but figured she must have done it during one of her summer holidays spent with her mother’s artist colony in the south of Spain.
“So what do you think?” Irma said.
“It’s very nice. But is there somewhere for me to work? I need to prep for tomorrow.”
“Hold your horses.”
Meredith dumped her suitcase and followed her mother up the stairs. At the top, she surveyed the main room.
“Hasn’t changed a bit, has it,” said Irma.
She walked into the kitchen (really just the southeast corner of the room), refilled the prehistoric electric kettle and set it to boil with a flick of the switch. Meredith’s heart did not sink, it plummeted.
The room—a postage stamp of living area tacked onto a narrow galley kitchen—had the look of a well-loved bomb shelter. There were books and papers and china teacups and strange swaths of gauze and feathers and tree bark and fur and antique hospital equipment. Scraps of fabric that had once been ladies’ undergarments had been left to disintegrate on every open space. Piles of human consumer waste—records, shoes, cutlery, ornamental gourds, dried-up potted plants, decorative papier-mâché party place-setting cards left over from a long-forgotten dinner party, discarded auto parts, socks—were scattered about the place.
Meredith longed for a cheap hotel room but had to concede the truth. She was broke.
“Where, then?”
“Over there.” Irma pointed to a heap of books on top of an old steamer trunk.
“A trunk? You want me to work on a trunk?”
“No, dingbat, beyond it. In Jose’s old spot.”
Irma crossed the room, turned on a standing lamp and pulled away a saddle blanket to reveal a child’s school desk, the kind with a plastic chair attached by a curved metal bar.
“You aren’t serious.” Meredith rubbed her face and reopened her eyes.
“Ucchh, of course I am.” Irma took her daughter’s hand and held it to her chest. “This is where Jose wrote his best poem.” Her eyes shone with emotion. “It was only six lines long and it was about my hands. He called it ‘The Digits of Experience.’”
She fanned her fingers out for Meredith to see. The knuckles on her third and fourth fingers were thick with arthritis. A liver spot on the back of her left palm looked like a tiny map of Africa cut adrift.
“What did it say?”
“I’m not sure. It was in Spanish. But it was beautiful. Poets communicate in a universal language.” Irma retreated across the room toward the whining kettle.
As her mother puttered over the tea, Meredith fell asleep on the leaky beanbag chair in the corner of the flat. She awoke several minutes later and wandered into the kitchenette.
“What is it, dear?” Irma had been reading a story in a tabloid newspaper about an eleven-year-old single mother of twins living in Yorkshire.
“Nothing.”
Meredith was overcome by a sudden need to tidy. To organize and itemize. She felt weightless, as though she were floating just outside her own body. Forget food—instead she
would clean. If she could do something to introduce order, that would make her feel better. She would start with something small, a surmountable task at the core of the chaos.
Irma vanished down the stairs to her bath (she had one every Sunday). Meredith observed her going as if from a great distance. She searched the room for where to start. Of course! She would defrost the freezer.
Her mother’s icebox was a stout Frigidaire from the nineteen-sixties, a barrel-chested soldier of an appliance. Meredith held her breath, gripped the stainless steel handle, pulled down hard and felt the latch give and the door swing out toward her. Inside, the fridge was startlingly bare and bright. She sniffed. Nothing but the faint chemical smell of working electrical machinery. The appliance hummed a meditative om and Meredith exhaled in unison. She reached up and flicked open the smaller blue plastic freezer door—and was blinded by a glittering flash. There was a loud crack, a stab of pain and then, nothing.
When she came to, she was staring into a house of glinting mirrors.
“Silly goose!” her mother called from somewhere above her head. “Wake up and stop this nonsense, would you? There’ll be no dying on my kitchen floor.”
She felt a hand on her forehead, but still the prisms glittered. In desperation she dragged herself a few inches along the floor, until her mother pulled her up by the shoulders and propped her against the cupboard like a doll. Oh, poor, poor head.
“What were you doing in the freezer? You know I only use it to store the chandelier.”
“The what?”
“It must have fallen out and hit you on the head. It’s very valuable, you know. Edwardian.”
Meredith noticed the dangling topaz crystals, now scattered over the floor. She opened her mouth to say something, but before she could do so, a longing moved through her. All the familiar sensations were there: the gaping belly yawn, the arterial fizz, the hardening of her nipples...
“Mummy.”
“Yes.”
“Can you help me with something?”
“What’s that?”
“I want to have a baby of my own.”
Irma pressed a damp, dirty washcloth over the bump on Meredith’s forehead. “Is that all?” She laughed and patted her daughter on the cheek. “Easy-peasy.”
That night Meredith’s eyes snapped open in the dark. She raised herself from the bed and removed the plastic bite-plate she wore to bed each night in an effort to “deprogram” her from grinding her teeth. There would be no more sleep for now.
Fumbling around in the dim chaos of her mother’s flat, she managed to open her binder-size laptop and dial up a modem connection. Cross-legged on the floor, Meredith logged on to the server and opened her account. There were eighty-six new messages, the bulk of them regarding penis enlargement, mail-order college degrees, discount Viagra and urgent salutations from African despots in need of a temporary overseas loan. Meredith scrolled through her in-box, deleting whole screens at a time, until suddenly she came upon a message that froze her thumb in mid-click.
To: Meredith Moore
From: Dr. Joe Veil
Subject: Your disappearance
Dear Meredith,
I hope you don’t mind that I have taken the liberty to contact you via the e-mail address provided in your file, but after your exit yesterday I found myself at a loss for what to think. I hope my advice was not overly blunt. If that was what made you leave my office so abruptly, I apologize. As your doctor I felt it important to take the time to check in and make sure you are not in any kind of distress.
I hope you are well and taking good care.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Joe Veil
Meredith read the note twice before even attempting to compose a reply. What to make of it? Professional obligation? Fatherly concern? Flirtation? No, Meredith did not detect a hint of that in his tone. Though, how strange that a busy gynecologist should go so far out of his way to contact a skittish patient. For all he knew she was simply a nut. What to make of this sudden interest in her behavior? She clicked on REPLY and began to type.
To: Dr. Joe Veil
From: Meredith Moore
Subject: Re: Your disappearance
Dear Doctor,
Thank you for the kind note, but I can’t accept your apology. I did not leave your examination room because of any offensiveness on your part—quite the opposite. You were professional and direct, and I thank you for your concern. I am currently away on business but will make an appointment with one of your colleagues upon my return.
Sorry if I alarmed you by leaving so abruptly. It wasn’t like me to run away. I guess I haven’t been myself lately. Perhaps it’s the biological twitch twitching. You’d probably know better than me. You’re the doctor.
Sorry again,
Meredith
6
Meredith didn’t mind being called the continuity girl. Over the past year or so, however, she had begun to wonder whether she ought to be slightly embarrassed by the title. Like so many otherwise driven women, her greatest fear was not having a lack of authority but having a surplus of it. Too much power (she had to admit it) made her feel less...feminine. She waited anxiously for the terrible day some third-assistant-director film school grad would turn around and unthinkingly call her “the script lady.” That would be the day she’d quit.
In recent years, the industry had been called to task for its use of outdated terminology, particularly when describing jobs traditionally occupied by women or gay men (this being show business, there were lots of both). Since Meredith had started working on set, producers had been forced, in official contexts at least, to hire makeup artists instead of “pretties,” actors instead of “talent,” and background artists instead of “extras.” It wasn’t that anyone on set actually talked any differently than they used to, just that everybody now had two job titles instead of one. Meredith’s twin title was script supervisor, but thankfully no one called her that. She was still performing what the trade considered a young woman’s job, and she wanted to keep it that way.
Of course, in a way, she had quit. Walked off Felsted’s set with the bleary intention of getting out of show business altogether. (There had been the occasional intention of enrolling in cooking school, until she remembered nearly fainting the time she had to “dress” the turkey giblets at Elle’s house one Christmas, and the thought passed.)
But here she was in London, back on set and in the thick of it all. Toughing it out with a bunch of men who in all likelihood resented her presence more than they appreciated it.
But that was where the similarities to any previous job ended. Richard Glass was an altogether different sort of director from those she had worked with in Toronto. For one thing, he was slender and almost girlish looking. And he wore suits—unhemmed pants and monogrammed shirts so worn you could see his flat penny-size nipples through the fabric.
While most directors tended to be brusque and proud of their macho to-the-pointness, Richard seemed to have all the time in the world for silly small talk and pranks. Like others in his position, he spent a lot of time flirting with the actresses (whispering in their ears, placing a supportive hand on the small of their backs), but unlike most, he flirted with everyone else on set as well. He slipped and slithered about the set all day, offering every individual the unexpected treat of his undivided, if momentary, attention. In this way he managed to charm every member of the crew into carrying out his orders without ever raising his voice.
Meredith had been on the set for eight days of the forty-day shoot and was coping well enough so far. The film was a Victorian period murder mystery/romantic comedy starring Kathleen Swain, an American starlet coming to the end of her bankable period. In it, she played a spinster pathologist who falls in love with a brooding detective while performing autopsies on the bodies of the prostitute victims of a Jack-the-Ripper-like murderer. The film was financed on the slope of Swain’s cheekbones.
The project’s backer was the mysterious and
never-present Osmond Crouch, who, it was widely rumoured, was a former lover of Swain’s. In his place, Mr. Crouch (as everyone called him on set) had sent a line producer to oversee the shoot. Dan Button, an overgrown Scottish goth boy, minced about in a black trench coat and skull boots, looking terrified to talk to anyone. He couldn’t be more than thirty, Meredith thought, and yet Crouch had for some reason sent him here to oversee the production of a twenty-million-dollar movie. Twenty million! That’s what this pimply monkey of a boy, this wannabe vampire, was in charge of. It boggled the mind. While most of the hands-on crew generally ignored Button, the director would occasionally slip off with him for a little chat. Button would invariably emerge from Richard’s trailer flushed with pleasure, and for the rest of the day would skulk more happily around the set, occasionally tap-tap-tapping his walking staff to the tune of some dark, internal symphony.
The crew was setting up in a large empty warehouse space on the third floor of a nearly condemned East End building when Meredith arrived for her call time of seven thirty a.m. She grabbed a juice from the “tea cart” (funny Brits) and unfolded her tiny portable camp stool in a quiet corner, then began her day’s logging. Hauling a binder out of her bag and wiping the crumbs from its surface (a packet of airplane pretzels had somehow escaped its packaging), she examined the day’s pages for the third time that morning. The script had been changed so many times by Glass and the writer that it was now an unruly rainbow of candy-colored revision pages. Every revised page in the script was dated and printed on a different-colored page from the one before. The rotation, according to protocol, began with white and was followed by blue, pink, yellow, green and goldenrod (Meredith had never understood why they didn’t just call it orange). The scene they were shooting today (which involved a fight, a kiss and a bad guy being set on fire and thrown out of a fifth-story window) was printed out on white paper—double white—which meant it had been rewritten exactly six times so far. Meredith would not be the least bit surprised if handwritten blue revisions—double blues—appeared and had to be stapled into her binder. Usually, by the time shooting began, Meredith knew the script so well, had read it and made so many detailed notes on it, divided it into eighths (for scheduling purposes, all scripts were organized this way—Meredith’s job was to keep track of the shooting times of each eighth of a page) and numbered all the scenes and shots, that she felt she could recite the thing by heart. Nevertheless, she now studied the scene once more.
