I Know Who You Are

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‘Come on in, no need to be shy, this is your home now.’

I push the door a little harder, and see Maggie sitting in bed next to the man with the gold tooth. His smile has holes in, as though he has worn it too often, and he has little bits of white toast stuck in the black hair on his face. I see the television reflected in his glasses, and when I turn to look at the screen it says TV-am, before changing to a picture of a man and woman sitting on a sofa. The walls in this room are like the walls in the hall, all patchy and bare, and there is no carpet in here either, just more of the springy green stuff.

‘Come and get in with us, it’s cold. Move over, John,’ says Maggie, and he smiles, patting a space on the bed between them. I’m shivering, but I don’t want to get into their bed.

‘Come on,’ she says when I don’t move.

‘Hop in,’ he says, pulling back the covers.

Bunny rabbits hop. I am not a bunny rabbit.

I can see that Maggie is wearing a nightie, her skinny legs sticking out from beneath the sheets. Her long, black, curly hair is hanging down over her shoulders, and I wish mine was still as long as that. I climb in next to Maggie, but only because her happy face looks as if it might change into her cross one if I don’t.

Maggie’s bedroom is a mess, which seems strange to me, because she looks like such a neat and tidy person. Dirty cups and plates are everywhere, piles of newspapers and magazines lean up against the walls, and clothes are thrown all over the floor. The duvet smells, I’m not sure what of, but it isn’t nice. We all sit and stare at the TV, then my tummy rumbles so loud I’m sure everyone hears it.

‘Do you want some breakfast?’ Maggie asks when the adverts come on.

‘Yes.’ Her face changes and I add, ‘Please,’ before it is too late.

‘What do you fancy? You can have anything you want.’

I look over at one of the dirty plates with crusts on. ‘Toast?’

She pulls a pretend sad face, like a clown. ‘I’m afraid your dad ate the last of the bread.’

I’m confused at first, then remember that she means the man with the gold tooth.

‘Don’t worry that pretty little head of yours, I’m going to make your favourite, back in a jiffy.’

I don’t know what a jiffy is.

Maggie leaves the room and I’m glad she doesn’t close the door. I don’t want to be on my own with John. He looks like he is wearing a rug on his chest, but up close I can see it’s just more hair. He seems to have an awful lot of it. He reaches past me, and I lean out of his way. Then I watch while he picks up a packet of cigarettes and lights one, tapping the ash into an empty cup while he laughs at something on TV.

Maggie comes back with a plate, which is strange, because she said she was going to make my favourite breakfast, which is porridge and honey. My brother used to make it for me at home and I always ate it in my favourite blue bowl, even though it was chipped. My brother said it could still be my favourite bowl, even when it wasn’t perfect any more. He said things that are a little bit broken can still be beautiful.

‘There now, get that down you,’ says Maggie. Her cold bare legs touch my feet as she climbs back under the covers.

‘What is it?’ I ask, looking down at the plate.

‘It’s your favourite, silly! Biscuits with butter. Make sure you eat them all, we need to fatten you up a bit – you’ve gotten far too skinny.’

I think I look the same as yesterday and the day before that.

I look from Maggie to the plate and back again, unsure what to do. Then I pick up one of the round shapes, and can see that it has its own name written underneath it, just like my new name is written on my pyjama top. I whisper the letters inside my head: D I G E S T I V E.

‘Go on, take a bite,’ Maggie says.

I don’t want to.

‘Eat. It.’

I take a small bite, chewing slowly. All I can taste is the butter and it makes me feel a bit sick.

‘What do you say?’

‘Thank you?’

‘Thank you, what?’

‘Thank you, Maggie?’

‘No, not Maggie. From now on, you call me Mum.’

Seventeen (#ulink_2940c437-4b52-54f1-a69c-5852aa3262a4)

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 voicemail. 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, who did little more than send my headshot off for various jobs, and take fifteen per cent 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 for ever. 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 catalogue 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 blonde 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 pages fold into creases around her eyes.

The sound of someone laughing outside my dressing room wakes me, and I realise 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 colour, 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 realise 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 make-up 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 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 worry about 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.

The designers spend months building whole new worlds, then tear them down as though they never were when filming is over. Just like a break-up, only more physical and less damaging. Sometimes it’s hard saying goodbye to the characters I become. I spend so long with them that they start to feel like family, perhaps because I don’t have a real one.

My anxiety levels are at an all-time high by the time the buggy turns the final corner. I haven’t rehearsed for today the way I normally would; there just wasn’t time. The traffic of worrying thoughts has come to a standstill in my mind, as though it were rush hour up there, and I’m stuck somewhere I don’t want to be.

We stop outside our final destination: an enormous warehouse that contains most of the interior film sets for Sometimes I Kill. I hesitate before going inside. My mind is so full of everything that is happening in my private life, that for a moment, I can’t even remember what scene we are shooting.

‘Good, you’re here. I need you to deliver something special today, Aimee,’ barks the director as soon as he sees me. ‘We need to believe that the character is capable of killing her husband.’

I feel a little bit sick. It’s as though I’m trapped inside a life-sized joke.

I stand on the set of my fictional kitchen, waiting for my fictional husband to come home, and I see Jack smile at me before our first take.

Nobody is smiling by the twentieth.

I keep forgetting my lines, which never happens to me. I’m sure the rest of the cast and crew must hate me for it. I get to go home after this scene, but they don’t. The clapboard sounds, the director says, ‘Action,’ again, and I do my best to get it right this time.

I pour myself a drink I’ll never swallow, then pretend to be surprised when Jack comes up behind me, slipping his arms around my waist.

‘It’s done,’ I say, turning to look up at him.

His face changes, in exactly the same way it did nineteen times before. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean. It’s done. It’s taken care of.’ I raise the glass to my lips.

He takes a step back. ‘I didn’t think you were actually going to do it.’

‘He wouldn’t give me what I wanted, but I know that you will. I love you. I want to be with you; nobody else is going to get in the way of that.’

The word ‘Cut’ echoes in my ears, and I can tell from the look on the director’s face that I’ve nailed it this time. As soon as he’s watched the scene back, I’ll be free to go.