The Continuity Girl

by Leah McLaren

  Tite to Continuity Girl scribbling notes in a binder. RL angle toward door of room. The Movie Star enters. Pan her walk across the room toward the Director’s chair. Hold Full 4/shot over Movie Star’s R-should to Director seated on chair.

  DIRECTOR

  Kathleen, how sweet of you to show up for work. And looking ravishing as usual.

  MOVIE STAR (HUSHED)

  Thank you for being patient, darling. So sorry about the delay. I’m afraid I was having a bit of a woman’s problem.

  DIRECTOR

  A nasty affliction, that. Now, where were we? Oh, yes, we were in the middle of making a movie.

  Wide shot of the room. The crew and extras wait for the Director’s command.

  DIRECTOR

  Places!

  FIRST A.D.

  Let’s have a bell!

  Angle on the Sound Mixer pressing a button on his panel. A buzz is heard. New angle on the red light outside the stage door.

  FIRST A.D.

  Quiet!

  Silence engulfs the room.

  CONTINUITY GIRL

  Scene 26, Take 1.

  FIRST A.D.

  Roll sound.

  A beat as the Sound Mixer waits for the recorder to stabilize at the correct speed. Tite of the Sound Mixer whispering the slate number into the recorder.

  SOUND MIXER

  Scene 26, Take 1. (Beat of silence.) Speed.

  Tite on the Camera Operator peering through the lens to make sure the picture is in perfect frame and focus. Angle over R-should of Operator as he snaps the camera switch on. P.O.V. camera. A slate appears in front of the lens.

  CAMERA OPERATOR

  Mark it.

  Tite on the clapsticks snapping shut. Timecode on slate freezes, indicating the picture and sound are now in sync. Angle on the Slate Operator dashing out of set.

  CAMERA OPERATOR

  Rolling.

  Pan across the room, the dancers stand in pairs, poised to begin.

  Tite on Director.

  DIRECTOR

  Action!

  When Meredith got home that night, her mother was reclined on the living room sofa smoking a pipe and listening to a vinyl recording of Leonard Cohen reciting a poem about a girl on a beach. Meredith came up the stairs, dropped her knapsack and exhaled. Her mother, who was wrapped in a black satin dressing gown, acknowledged her with a nod.

  Meredith looked around for somewhere to sit, but as usual every surface was piled high with rubbish. Not the same rubbish, however, as everything seemed to have been shifted around as the result of some invisible tidal pull since she’d last surveyed the room. She lifted a long-dead potted fern and discovered a perfectly serviceable footstool beneath it. Pulling her cardigan sleeve over her hand, she dusted it off and sat down.

  “Brilliant!” Irma said, opening her eyes. “I’ve been looking for that footstool since the eighties. I remember the night it went missing. I had a very large dinner party. Full of journalists. Everyone got frightfully pissed and a few of them stayed over. In the morning the footstool had vanished. Naturally I always assumed one of them had filched it. Don’t ever date a journalist, darling. They’re dreadful people. Cheap. Unhygienic.”

  Meredith said nothing. She placed her chin in her upturned palms and rested one elbow on each knee. Leonard Cohen continued his droning description of a nude girl’s bottom. If you tuned out the words, he sounded like a man delivering a eulogy for a person he didn’t particularly like.

  “Care for a nip?” Irma indicated the bottle of Limoncello balanced on the sofa near her gnarled and naked feet.

  “I’ll have water.” Meredith rose and wove her way around the stacks of magazines and books toward the kitchenette sink. “Want some?”

  Irma’s eyes fluttered open again. “Ucch. Silly Moo, you know I loathe water.”

  Irma was always reminding Meredith of things she supposedly knew, but didn’t actually know at all. Had no way of knowing.

  Meredith searched for a glass (there were mugs, but she had an aversion to drinking anything cold out of an opaque vessel) and eventually found one at the back of the oven. She rinsed it out with the last bit of dish soap and dried it with a tea towel. Filling it took ages. When the water from the faucet finally did pour steadily, it came out warm and full of suspicious-looking white clouds, which her mother assured her was only gas. Unconvinced, Meredith poured the water down the sink. The drain belched in protest. Tomorrow she would have to go buy some Evian.

  “You know, he was the reason why I sent you to boarding school in Canada,” Irma said.

  “Who?”

  “Leonard, of course.” Irma seemed suddenly exasperated. “I met him in Montreal at a reading in the early seventies. You were just a wee thing. He was so charming, just like the young Dustin Hoffman, only with more sexual confidence. He had a son about your age and the two of you played together. Don’t you remember?”

  “No.”

  “Anyway, we had such a nice time, I thought it would be lovely for you to grow up Canadian. Icicles, snowball fights, that sort of thing.”

  “You sent me to school in Canada because you flirted with Leonard Cohen?”

  “I did a great deal more than flirt with him, my duck.”

  Meredith pushed her hands through her hair and tugged on the ends. “Please—don’t. I really don’t want to hear about it. Just, why Toronto?”

  “Fewer French people. You know I detest the French. Completely humourless.”

  Meredith picked up the bottle of Limoncello and poured some into her empty water glass.

  “That’s an awful lot, darling. Are you sure you need that much?”

  Meredith brought the drink to her lips. It was almost unbearably sweet but somehow tart at the same time, like those sour gobstoppers you bought as a kid that were meant to give you a funny face from sucking them.

  Meredith sat down on the footstool again and balanced her drink on her knee.

  “Listen, I have something to ask you. Remember when we used to go and feed the rabbits in Holland Park?”

  “Of course! You named the black one Peter, and you thought there was only one—of course there were probably thousands, but I didn’t have the heart to tell you. It was terribly cute.”

  “What I was wondering was, did you ever let anyone else take me? To feed the rabbits, I mean? Like maybe a boyfriend of yours, or another man?”

  Irma raised herself up on a throw cushion and turned her head toward Meredith. “Why would you ask such a thing?”

  “It’s just that I have this memory of a man. He’s holding my hand, in the park. It’s not a bad memory or anything. That’s the thing. It’s actually quite a nice memory. The only problem is, I can’t remember who the man is, and I was wondering...”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “I mean, I told you—your father is dead. If you choose not to believe me, that’s your problem. But don’t expect me to reinforce your delusions.”

  “Who was he, then?”

  “I told you. He was a dashing American film director. We had a drunken shag in his pool house during a party. I left around three a.m. and the next thing I heard he was found floating facedown in his pool. Bloody idiot.”

  “No, Mother, I mean the man I remember from the park.”

  Irma shrugged, settled back into the sofa and closed her eyes. “It was such a long time ago, darling, I’ve no idea. There were so many men around then. To tell you the truth, it could have been anyone.”

  Meredith drained her glass and stared at her mother. Bones poked out of her dressing gown like concealed weapons. Meredith ran her tongue over her teeth and found they were sticky. She vowed to brush them for a full five minutes before bed, instead of the usual two.

  12

  Meredith spent most of the train trip to Gloucester looking out the window at the mist-blurred fields while Mish snored in the seat beside her, slumping onto her shoulder with each sideways lurch of the car. The train was a
lready forty minutes behind schedule. It kept stopping, inexplicably, for rests between stations. Meredith tried to imagine the possible reasons for a train to stop in the middle of the countryside and couldn’t come up with any good ones apart from life-threatening technical problems. She worried about Barnaby, who was meeting them at the station.

  Squirming in her seat, Meredith smoothed her new chocolate corduroys (bought at Selfridges the weekend before, specifically in anticipation of the weekend) and adjusted the laces on her hiking boots to make sure the bows were evenly tied.

  Ever since pulling out of Waterloo she had been considering, for the first time, the real ramifications of bringing up a child on her own, without a man. It was not the image of destitute single motherhood that troubled Meredith (she earned a decent wage and had saved up enough over the years to tide her over for a year, if not longer), but the issue of denying her child a father. It was the same thing her mother had done, after all. And while she had always convinced herself she didn’t particularly care about not having a father (one crazy, ill-equipped parent was enough, thank you very much), the question of paternity had lately started to bother her. Not having had a male parent on-site introduced certain problems into the issue of rearing a child. She had been thinking more and more about genes. For instance, what if her father had a genetic deformity that had skipped her generation (or was only carried through the male line) and that would now affect her baby? How could she be sure that the father of her child didn’t come from a family with a history of madness, premature baldness or some other inherited defect? Above all, though, Meredith had begun to consider the moral ramifications. It had all started this morning when Mish met her at the train station waving a copy of the Times. On the front page was a story about how there was a movement afoot to make British sperm donors untraceable, so that future sperm-bank recipients could have complete parental rights over their anonymously fathered children.

  “Forget the sex part,” Mish had said, rolling up the paper and thwacking it against her hip. “You could just go for a blind donation. I hear they’re mostly from hot med students.”

  Meredith had read the full article on the train and had been moved by a comment piece written by a fertility specialist. He argued the case that the fetus has a “right to know.” As a grown-up fetus herself, one who had been denied the facts about her father (even as a child, she had never believed her mother’s pool-party story), Meredith could understand where the specialist was coming from. At the same time, she remained unwavering in her determination to have a baby on her own. The trick was to find out as much as she could about her biological partner before conceiving. Then she would have something to tell her baby when it grew up. Who knows, maybe she and the father could even keep in touch. At least she could get a photograph of the donor, which was more than she herself had ever had.

  Meredith considered Barnaby. He was tall (check), with a full head of hair (check) and no evidence of skin problems or acne scarring (that she could see, anyway). He seemed bright enough (though maybe it was just the accent), and, perhaps most important, he had the right smell. Clean but not too clean. There was something about the way he’d put his jacket over her shoulders and guided her back to her seat that night. For all his initial fumbling, he knew what to do when doing something mattered. Meredith liked a man who knew how to move. True, his teeth were a bit snaggled, but nothing a bit of North American orthodontics couldn’t have fixed. Perhaps he drank a little too much, but that could be said about most people here. In short, he was promising. And Meredith was keen to kiss him again. That was a good sign.

  The real question, of course (and the one Meredith had been studiously ignoring ever since she stepped on a transatlantic flight to seek her biological fortune), was whether Barnaby (or any other man, for that matter) would mind fathering a baby that was to be, in no uncertain terms, her baby. Above all, she wanted no interference—financial, emotional or otherwise—in her parenting project. She imagined an annual round of Christmas and birthday cards, perhaps with a bookstore gift certificate stuck inside, and maybe the odd visit (lunch on the day he happened to be passing through town on business), but that was absolutely it. Anything else verged dangerously on a relationship.

  Barnaby met them at the train wearing a yellow mackintosh and matching boots, and looking, Meredith thought, exactly like an overgrown Christopher Robin. He kissed both Meredith and Mish lightly on their right cheeks and insisted on carrying their bags to his car, an ancient Austin Mini so encrusted with rust it was hard to tell the decay from the original ruddy paint job.

  “Your train was only forty-five minutes late,” he said, cramming their things into the nonexistent trunk. “That’s early for British rail.”

  Meredith smiled. Mish rubbed her face, still grumpy from sleep.

  “So sorry, but I’m afraid you’ll have to sit on top of each other in the front, as the backseat is full of dead things.”

  Meredith laughed and then saw, through the grimy back window, that it was true. On the backseat lay a tarpaulin with a pile of limp furry bodies, mostly rabbits, squirrels and a couple of small birds.

  “Ghastly of me. So sorry. I’m afraid I didn’t even notice they were there until after I’d arrived here at the station. I was planning to take them over to the publican the day before yesterday—he makes the most fantastic game pie—but I completely forgot, and now I suppose I’ll have to bury them. But then the dogs will only dig them up, so that won’t work either. Perhaps when we get back to the house you could help me put them down the garburator.”

  Mish made a gagging sound.

  “I’m only kidding, of course. I don’t have a garburator.” Barnaby smiled. “I hope you won’t hold it against me.”

  “We couldn’t care less,” Meredith lied. “We’re from Canada. We grew up trapping our own food and living in ice huts.”

  “How fascinating,” said Barnaby, getting into the driver’s side.

  Meredith couldn’t tell if he thought she had been joking or not. His mind seemed to be somewhere else. Without discussion, Mish took the seat and Meredith perched as gracefully as she could on her friend’s bony lap. Mish poked her angrily the entire way, and Meredith was feeling irritable and sore by the time they pulled into the gates at Hawkpen Manor.

  The village of Stow-on-the-Wold was located in the damp heart of the Cotswolds, just down the road from Shipston-on-Stour and halfway between Morton-in-Marsh and Bourton-on-the-Water. Hawkpen Manor was a fifteen-minute drive west of Stow, along a winding series of country roads with towering cedar hedges that rose up impenetrably on either side of the road. The estate itself was composed of several hundred acres of uncultivated moorland. On the eastern border, about half a mile in from the road, sprawled the main house.

  As they rounded the bend and it came into view, Meredith felt as though the air had been squashed out of her. A stadium heap of golden Cotswold brick, the house reclined across the lawn like a sleeping lion. A shameless grin beamed out from its bow-windowed front facade.

  “You actually live there?”

  “Oh, no,” said Barnaby, keeping his eyes on the road in front of him. “My brother and his wife do. I’m down the road in one of the cottages in behind.”

  There was a confused silence.

  “Second-son syndrome, you see.”

  “So your older brother got the house,” said Meredith.

  “And the title, and the land. And I got the aviary—otherwise known as the unpolished jewel in the Shakespeare crown.” Barnaby winked. “He lets me live in the cottage, but technically speaking, Nigel is my landlord. Law of the land. We’ve been invited there for dinner tonight, by the way.”

  Barnaby Shakespeare lived in Pear Cottage, a shabby outbuilding to the south. He pulled the car onto a grassy knoll beside a little yellow-brick cottage with a moss-shingled roof. They climbed out of the car, and Mish and Meredith wandered inside while Barnaby unloaded the trunk.

  For a minute or two they were alone in t
he cottage. Mish looked around the main room, making goofy faces over the dilapidated furnishings and dirty dishes, while Meredith sniffed the air.

  “I think we should go,” Mish said in a flat, robotic tone.

  Meredith started. “Why?”

  Without taking her eyes off her friend, Mish pointed at the butcher’s block. On the block was a blood-splattered meat cleaver and four black-and-yellow king cans of Double Diamond—one standing, three squashed.

  “So what?” Meredith shrugged.

  “So what if he’s a serial killer is what,” Mish hissed. “Think about it. All the signs are here. Lives alone. Socially isolated. Has a predilection for murdering small animals—”

  “He just happens to have outside interests, okay? It’s called a hobby. Which is more than I can say for you.”

  “I have outside interests.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as...” Mish searched, twirling a piece of hair between her thumb and forefinger. “Shopping.”

  “That so doesn’t count.”

  “Skiing.”

  “One trip to Whistler with an ex-boyfriend six winters ago? Come on.”

  Mish looked at the ceiling and bit her lip. “I read.”

  “Being able to read is different from actually reading.”

  Mish opened her mouth.

  “And magazines don’t count.”

  She closed it.

  “Well, I give him points for the family spread,” said Mish. “I just wish you were dating his brother instead.”

  “Mish, could you please not—”

  Barnaby walked in carrying their bags and a few paper grocery bags and caught Meredith mid-hiss.