The Continuity Girl

by Leah McLaren

  Richard raked his hands through his hair in raffish mock-consideration. “Another chance? Do you think soldiers get second chances on the battlefield? Moviemaking is war, Meredith, and I am the general. If you can’t toe the line, I’m afraid you’ll have to be court-martialled. This behaviour is entirely unacceptable. What if Kathleen had walked in on this? It’s inexcusable. And after the way your mother...Well, let’s just say I can’t take any more risks on this set. I’m sorry.”

  Joe had been standing beside Meredith with one hand half raised in a helpless gesture of emotional support, but he broke in. “Now look here,” he began.

  Now look here? Meredith thought. Who actually says that?

  “I don’t know who you are or what you do here, but you should know a few things before you make any rash decisions. Meredith is a respectable and hardworking young woman and I am entirely to blame for what went on here today, which I am prepared to admit was entirely inappropriate, and for that I apologize.”

  Richard cocked his head at Joe and then turned to Meredith. “Your Dudley Do-Right here is very gallant, but would you please ask him to leave?”

  “He’s not my Dudley Do-Right—he’s my gynecologist.”

  “My deepest apologies. Allow me to rephrase.” Richard swiveled around to face Joe. “Who the fuck are you and what are you doing on my set?”

  Joe took a step toward Richard just as Kathleen entered the trailer. She was dressed in a Chinese robe and trailed by Andrea and a thin man holding a flattening iron. When she saw Joe, her hand flew immediately to her hair.

  “Doctor—you’re here!” She looked at Richard and the toppled minibar and paused. “What’s going on?” Her pupils seemed to shrink when she laid eyes on Meredith. “What is she doing here?” She turned to Richard and spoke through clenched teeth. “I thought this was a closed set.”

  Richard picked up the continuity log and handed it to Meredith. “Naturally we’ll need you for the rest of the day,” he said.

  She looked at him, eyes dry. After a moment she tucked the binder under one arm and the hem of her petticoat under the other and left.

  14

  Meredith was halfway out of a nap when the buzzer rang at the flat on Coleville Terrace. The low-pitched static made her teeth tingle. It was five in the afternoon on a Saturday, but she barely stirred. One eyelid opened and she took in the room. A stream of dust-seasoned light poured in through the window. Her face was smushed into the pillow. She could feel the seam pressing into her cheek, making a shallow indent there. Again with the bell. Her mother must be out. Probably attending some committee meeting or other. Meredith was pleasantly surprised to notice she did not feel remotely guilty for being in bed. This must be what depression was like, and upon reflection she decided it did not seem so bad.

  After being fired from the Crouch picture, she had retreated into the guest room of her mother’s flat, first in an effort to avoid her mother and then in an effort to avoid everything else. She watched her cell phone squawk and beep until eventually the battery ran dry. Her laptop, similarly, languished unopened in the corner. She hadn’t bothered to check her e-mail in over a week.

  For the first couple of days she was restless, occasionally getting up and eating some toast from the kitchen or wandering over to the small, high-set window and looking down at the street below, wondering about the people walking by on their way to work or to see friends. People carrying umbrellas and pushing strollers and looking so purposefully blasé that it made her long for bed and sleep. Now all curiosity about the outside world had drained away. She felt safe in her little room with its stained yellow wall.

  Again the buzzer. Meredith imagined someone putting a finger to the button and leaning in hard. This was followed by a staccato series of buzzes, an atonal rendition of “Jingle Bells.” Meredith kicked off her quilt and stumbled down the stairs toward the door. She did not think of brushing her hair or putting anything on over the washed-out flannel nightgown she had been wearing for the past week and a half. She did not want to see the person on the other side of the door. The sound was irritating her and she simply wanted to make it stop.

  “Finally!” said Mish. Meredith struggled to haul open the door.

  Mish was wearing a clear plastic raincoat with yellow polka dots and holding a long, dangerous-looking umbrella.

  “It’s sunny,” said Meredith.

  “No shit, Sherlock. I’ve figured out that dressing for rain is the only way to ensure nice weather in this perverse fricking place.” She pushed past Meredith and into the dim, soup-scented hallway. “What floor are you on?”

  Meredith ignored the question and led the way upstairs with zombie steps. She didn’t bother to turn on the timer light. It always went off before she made it to the top anyway. Once inside the flat she returned to her room, lay down on the bed and pulled the covers up to her chin.

  “I was napping.”

  “I can see that.” Mish bounced on the corner of Meredith’s bed. She looked around the room and wrinkled her nose as though remembering something unpleasant. Pulling a Kleenex from her handbag, Mish spat on it, reached into her shirt and wiped under her armpits. “Raincoats make me sweat.”

  Meredith attempted a smile and found her mouth wouldn’t seem to go that way.

  “But I love them anyway. Hey, remember my Strawberry Shortcake poncho in school? The blue one with Strawberry Shortcake and her dog on it. What was her dog’s name again?”

  Meredith thought for a moment. “Huckleberry Pie?”

  “No, I think that was her boyfriend.”

  “She didn’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Sure she did.”

  Meredith sank deeper into the mattress and blinked once to refocus her eyes. The small talk was a kind of test. Bait dangled to see if she was up for the bite. She and Mish had been over the topic of her childhood rain poncho before, of course. That was the nice thing about girlfriends—you could have the same conversations over and over again without anyone ever getting bored. A good girlfriend was like a TV channel featuring all your favorite reruns. But not today.

  Mish left the room and returned a few moments later with two glasses of tap water. “Your ma’s not exactly Martha Stewart, eh?”

  Meredith hadn’t bothered to apologize about the mess because she had stopped noticing it herself. She felt a distant twinge of shame and closed her eyes.

  “The show’s really boring without you,” Mish said. “I have no one to talk to on set except that makeup girl from Essex or Sussex or wherever. Remember her? Anyway, I went out on a hen night with a bunch of her friends last weekend in Covent Garden. That’s what they call bridal showers here. Hen nights. Except instead of having sandwiches and spritzers at somebody’s aunt’s house they all go out to a nightclub wearing schoolgirl outfits and get completely tanked and flash their boobs and make out with strangers. Craziest girls I’ve ever hung out with in my life. I mean I felt demure around them. Me. Which is obviously saying a lot. They were like...like...” Mish searched for words, then banged her fist down on Meredith’s arm, which caused Meredith’s funny bone to vibrate. “They were like Roman soldiers in Topshop halter dresses. I’ve never seen so much exposed back fat in my life.”

  Mish tossed her head back and honked. Meredith made a neutral humming noise.

  “Okay, I’m sorry but that was really funny,” Mish said. “I’ve been saving that up for you all week. You okay? I left like three hundred messages.”

  “Sorry.” Meredith had let the covers slip down a bit and now propped herself up on a stuffed corduroy reading rest she had found in the closet the day before. She motioned to her prone body and shrugged.

  “So you’ve just been lying around all day? Are you sick? Have you just given up?”

  “More the latter, I think. Though I may have a sore throat. I’m not sure.”

  “You look super skinny. Have you been eating?”

  “Sometimes. Look, Mish, please don’t get on my back. I’m just totally exh
austed. I can’t even tell you.” Meredith felt something inside her chest split open like a walnut in a nutcracker.

  “Exhausted from what?”

  “By my own brain. From being alone.”

  “I thought you weren’t interested in relationships.”

  “I’m not. Not romantic ones anyway. I just want a baby—a little friend. I don’t care about meeting someone,” Meredith said. “I’m done with searching.”

  “What about Barnaby? He was good. I liked him. And his family’s loaded.”

  “Barnaby is a very nice guy who also happens to be an alcoholic falconer. I’m not sure I want to tell my child his father was an alcoholic falconer,” Meredith said. “And money is beside the point. I’m not looking for a husband. I don’t even want a boyfriend.”

  “I don’t know, Mere. He was pretty cute. Anyway, it’s not like you have to live with him or anything. You just have to get him to knock you up.” She thought for a moment and added, “He’s tall too.”

  Meredith put a corner of the duvet in her mouth and gently began to suck. “That’s true,” she admitted.

  “And he’s got it bad for you.”

  Meredith shook her head to one side. She hated it when Mish exaggerated.

  “I’m serious. He does. Have you talked to him?”

  “No. Why?” Meredith lowered the duvet corner from her mouth. It was warm and damp, and the material was much darker where she had sucked it.

  “I ran into him at some pub in Fulham the other night and he said he was trying to reach you. He wanted to invite us to a dinner at the club tonight.”

  Meredith shrank under the comforter and groaned. “I don’t know. I’m not really feeling...” The rest of her excuse was lost in the moist polycotton stuffing.

  “Oh, come on, it’ll be fun. It’s time you got out. We could get our hair done first. Toni & Guy takes walk-ins.”

  “I’m unemployed and broke.”

  “I’ll pay.”

  “I’m in a bad mood.”

  “I’ll cheer you up.”

  “I don’t feel like talking to people.”

  “I’ll do the talking.”

  “I want to be alone, okay?”

  “Actually, no, it’s not. Because if you don’t come out to dinner with me tonight I’m going to sit here at the end of your bed and irritate you all night. So you won’t get a chance to be alone one way or the other.”

  Meredith looked at the ceiling and pressed her lips together. They were dry and flaking off in little papery scales. She picked off a bit and was about to put it in her mouth and nibble on it to see if she was salty from dehydration when she remembered Mish was there and flicked it somewhere down the bed.

  “Fine, then.”

  Two hours later Meredith stood in the club draining a glass of champagne behind a velvet window drape. The people here, she knew, would call it a curtain, not a drape. She would call it a curtain too, but in her head she would think of it as a drape. There were other rules like that: couches were sofas, bathrooms were loos. The reuse of jam jars was frowned upon as was taking off your shoes in public or any overt obsession with household cleanliness. All of these things, Meredith had learned since arriving in London, were telltale signs of being middle-class and provincial. Meredith had never thought of herself as either, but now that she considered it, she supposed she was probably both. She had never really thought about class or religion or race at all, in fact, because no one in Toronto ever seemed to bring it up. She had been raised in an institution that protected her from this strange minefield of rights and wrongs that went far beyond social etiquette and became an encoded language based on tiny signals that indicated your entire background and even, in certain eyes, your life’s worth. In London, it was as if the sum of everything you had ever done or experienced could be tallied and measured by the way you pronounced the word “vase.”

  She rubbed her throat, hoping to dissolve the mysterious lump that was threatening to cut off her air. The club bar was far more crowded than it had been the last time she’d come with her mother and Mish for dinner. There was some sort of book launch being held. A biography of an eighteenth-century duchess. Barnaby had left their names at the door but was nowhere to be seen. Within seconds of arriving Mish had disappeared into the back garden to smoke a joint with a group of journalists whom she seemed to know from somewhere.

  The room was packed with people Meredith neither knew nor trusted. They all seemed to adore one another. The air was full of the premature applause of greetings: lips smacking cheeks and palms patting backs, squeals of exaggerated delight. A haze of Turkish tobacco hung above the crowd. Free champagne circulated on filigreed silver trays but did not make it anywhere near Meredith’s hiding spot at the far side of the room near the garden window. Her glass was empty. Meredith peeked through the curtains and looked across the bar to where rows of flute glasses brimmed with fizz, lined up for the taking. It was a terrible whatchamacallit. A catch-22. She wanted one of those glasses badly, but she was not brave enough to walk through the chattering throng to get it. The only thing that would give her the courage to get another glass of champagne was another glass of champagne.

  The party guests were either very young or very old, with no one in between. Closest to her was a long thin woman in her late teens or twenties with bulbous eyes set so far apart she looked like an exotic insect. Meredith recognized her as a model. She was listening to a grizzled count who had, many years ago, been narrowly acquitted of murdering his wife. “It’s just for show really,” he said, holding up an ivory walking stick. “I use it for beating women. They love it, of course.” The model laughed and wriggled as if she were being pinched all over.

  Meredith recalled there had once been a movie about the count. About the story of his trial. It had been released years ago, and in it he’d come off looking very guilty, but sexy and clever. Meredith wondered how the count felt about the movie. She wasn’t the sort of person to ask him, but wished she were. The count leaned over and whispered something in the girl’s ear. The model pushed two fingers inside the old man’s vest, pulled out a heavy gold pocket watch on a chain and looked at it. They kissed on both cheeks three times, and separated.

  With no one to spy on, Meredith found herself suddenly exposed to the room. It made her feel naked and jumpy, like being on the subway without a book to read. She inched her body out from behind the drapes. She had lost weight. The lightness made her feel like a paper-doll version of herself.

  Why was she being such an invalid? Why shouldn’t she just stride across the room and take a glass and drink it? But each time Meredith lifted her shoe to move it forward, her lungs threatened to collapse. Her mouth was dry and her windpipe stuck to the inside of itself every time she inhaled. There were two strange horizontal black bars at the top and bottom of her vision and they began to slide toward each other like a letterboxed film on a plasma-TV screen. She watched them dispassionately, wondering when they would meet and leave her in darkness. Perhaps she was going blind. She had forgotten about champagne by this point and now thought only of water. Water and a gulp of outside air. Something to lift the sandbag from her chest. If only someone would open a window. Or bring her a chair to sit on. But before she could ask for any of these things, the room faded.

  After that, blurred light and distant noises. A woman’s panicky hoot. A hand behind her head and another beneath her knees. The herbacious smell of Marlboro Lights.

  “I’m fine,” she tried to say, but it did not seem to come out that way. She tried to sit up but the hands that were holding her gently pushed her back down. She had been placed, horizontal, on some sort of daybed. The kind of sofa that existed only in New Yorker cartoon shrinks’ offices. Meredith thought this was funny and wanted to say so, but when she tried to make words they turned to porridge in her mouth.

  “Look at her face,” someone said. “She’s white as a sheet.”

  “More of a puce,” said another voice. “Poor thing.”
r />   Soon a cool bottle was being pressed against her cheek.

  “Here,” said a voice.

  She lifted her head and began to retch. Several convulsing contractions, like a humiliating reverse labor, except she had eaten nothing, so nothing came out but an acid drizzle that burned her throat and made her tongue feel numb. She sensed people watching her and felt terribly ashamed. Why wouldn’t they go away? Everyone but the hands that carried her here and the voice. The voice saying, “Darling. My poor darling.” Somewhere far away but coming closer. She took a sip of water and a slow breath and opened her eyes.

  “Meredith, my poor sweet,” Barnaby said. One of his hands cupped her head and the other dabbed her chin with a handkerchief. “Shall I take you up to my room so you can lie down in private?”

  “Yeth,” she said.

  And he scooped her up in his arms and carried her upstairs to bed. She was safe.

  The next morning she woke to the sound of a vacuum cleaner. Why? she wondered. It was as if the EU had passed a law stating that all hotel hallways must be vacuumed by nine a.m. or proprietors would be fined. She saw that she had been sleeping in a narrow single bed with a metal tube frame that reminded her of ones in an orphanage.

  A rickety wooden dresser stood cowering in the corner. The top of it was covered with small change. Thick shiny pounds and burnished pence pulled from someone’s pockets. A frayed shirt cuff struggled to flee the top drawer.

  Meredith was still fully dressed. She searched the room with her eyes and found the shoes on the floor, arranged neatly together under the windowsill. At some point between her passing out and the open bar closing at the book launch, she recalled, it had been decided she should stay the night at the club. She remembered Mish coming into the room, wobbling with a drink and gushing apologetically for abandoning her, and then her mother, who turned up at the party as well, asking her if she wanted to go, as the last tube was leaving shortly.

  Meredith didn’t recall speaking to her. These recollections were followed by a sleep so deep she felt as if she had emerged from it into another dimension of reality.