“What do you say?”
“Thank you?”
“Thank you, what?”
“Thank you, Maggie?”
“No, not Maggie. From now on, you call me Mum.”
Seventeen
London, 2017
Today feels like a day of lasts.
My last day driving through the Pinewood Studios gates.
My last time playing this particular character.
My last chance.
I sit in front of the dressing room mirror while other people tame my hair and disguise the imperfections on my face. I’m not feeling myself today, I’m not sure I can even remember who that is. I always experience a period of grief when I stop filming; all those months of hard work and then it’s over, but the finality of this day feels far more ominous than it should. Keeping everything that is happening to myself is taking its toll, but there’s only one more day to get through, and I know I’m not alone. We all make daily decisions about which secrets to decant, and which to keep for a later date, when they might taste better on our tongues.
When I am all alone again, staring into the mirror, not sure who I see, I notice something that isn’t mine. Nina, the wonderful woman who magically transforms my hair, has left her magazine behind. I flick through the pages, more out of boredom than curiosity, and stop when I see a double-page profile piece about Alicia White.
The woman grinning in the enormous, Photoshopped picture went to the same senior school and drama school as me. She was in the year above, but somehow looks a decade younger. Alicia White is an actress too. A bad one. We share an agent now and she always likes to remind me that he signed her first. He’s all she ever talks about, as though we are participants in some kind of unspoken competition. She feels the need to put me down every time we meet, as though she wants to make sure I know my place. There’s really no need; I’ve never had a high opinion of myself.
The sight of her face reminds me of Tony. He asked me to call, but I still haven’t managed to get hold of him. My fingers search for my mobile inside my bag, and I try again. Straight to voice mail. I call the office, which I hate doing, and his assistant picks up on the second ring.
“Sure thing, he’s free now,” she says in a chirpy voice, and pops me on hold.
I listen to tinny classical music, which makes me feel even more stressed than before, and I feel a wave of relief when it stops and he answers. Except it isn’t him.
“I’m sorry, my mistake,” his assistant whispers. “He’s in a meeting, but he’ll call you back.”
She hangs up before I get a chance to ask when.
I return my attention to the magazine, desperate for any form of distraction from the ever-growing list of anxieties lining up inside my mind. Things must be pretty bad if I’m resorting to reading about Alicia White.
I haven’t always had an agent. Until eighteen months ago, nobody wanted to represent me. I belonged to an agency instead, which did little more than send my headshot off for various jobs and take 15 percent when I got one. I always had work, just not always the kind I really wanted. When Ben and I got married, I was the understudy in a play on Shaftesbury Avenue. The lead was sick one night, and I got to perform in her place. My agent’s wife was sitting in the audience, and she told him about me. I owe her a debt that I can never repay, and within weeks of having an agent I landed my first film role.
Sometimes it only takes one person to believe in you to change your life forever. Sometimes it only takes one person not believing in you to destroy it. Humans are a highly sensitive species.
I rest my tired eyes for just a moment, then stare down at the photo of Alicia again. I drop the magazine onto my lap when her face becomes three-dimensional and starts talking at me. A catalog of catty comments she’s said in the past spill from her red paper mouth in the present.
“Tony took me for a fancy lunch when he signed me, but then I was so in demand, everyone wanted to represent me, not like you,” says magazine Alicia, before flicking her long blond hair. The highlighted strands unravel like paper streamers, out of the page and onto my lap.
“I was so surprised when he took you on, everybody was!” she continues, then wrinkles her perfect paper nose in my direction. “It was good of him to give you a chance, but then he’s always been a charitable man.” She takes a fifty-pound note from her purse, rolls it up, and lights the end. Then she starts to inhale it like a cigarette, before blowing a cloud of smoke in my face. It stings my eyes and I tell myself that’s the reason they are filling with tears.
“It isn’t as though your face fits with his other clients; it isn’t as though your face fits at all.” She’s right about that part; I don’t fit anywhere, I never have.
“You know he’s going to dump you one day, don’t you? Quite soon I’d imagine. And then you’ll never find work again!” She tilts her head back and laughs like a comedy villain, tiny black-and-white paper words spewing from her mouth, while the page folds into creases around her eyes.
The sound of someone laughing outside my dressing room wakes me, and I realize I’ve dozed off in my chair, I’ve been dreaming. I’ve barely slept for three nights in a row; I’m so exhausted that I fear I might be losing my mind. I tear Alicia out of the magazine, screw up her face, and throw her in the bin, instantly feeling a little calmer now that she’s gone.
Alicia White hates me, but can’t seem to leave me alone. Over the last few months, she has copied my haircut (although I admit it does look better on her, everything does). She’s copied my clothes, she’s even used some of the same answers I give in interviews, literally copied them word for word. Apart from her peroxide-induced hair color, it’s as though she wants to be me. People say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I don’t feel flattered, I just feel freaked out.
Other than the agent, and the job, we have absolutely nothing in common. For starters, she is beautiful, at least on the outside. The inside is a different story, and one she should learn to hide better. Being a bitch might work out well in some industries, but not this one. Everyone talks, and the talk about Alicia White is rarely good. It makes me realize that I could never be an agent: I’d only want to represent nice people.
Something niggles me, and I feel the need to rewind, not just reset myself. I reach down into the bin and retrieve the ball of crumpled print, flattening the image of Alicia with my palm. I stare at her face, her eyes, her bright red lips. Then I read the final question and answer in the piece and feel physically sick.
What three items of makeup can you not leave the house without?
That’s easy! Mascara, eyeliner, and my Chanel Rouge Allure lipstick.
The name of the lipstick is not new to me. It’s branded in my brain, written in indelible ink inside my mind; it’s the lipstick I found under my marital bed when I got back from filming last year.
Did Alicia White sleep with my husband?
The first assistant director summons me with a knock on the door, I screw Alicia’s face into an even tighter ball and throw her back in the bin before following him outside. We make polite small talk as the golf buggy trundles around the lot. He’s still young and worries about things he won’t when he is older, the way we all did before we knew what life really had in store. I listen to his tales of woe, interjecting the occasional sympathetic word, as we drive along at less than twenty miles an hour. I enjoy the light breeze in my face, and the smell of paint and sawdust that lingers in the air around every film set. It makes me feel at home.