It felt good.
So good, I cried more, just at the relief of it.
He’d been on his way to the library when he’d spotted me approaching, and came down to see me instead. Blake and Nick were in the library waiting for him. It turns out another ofThe Screen’s journalists had followed him and Nick to Tim’s home yesterday, and contacted Blake for comment.
That’swhat Blake’s meeting request had been about.
‘We’d better go up,’ I said.
Which we did.
‘What’s happened?’ said Nick, catching sight of my face, getting to his feet.
‘Has anyone seen you?’ asked Blake, worriedly.
‘Only Felix,’ I said. ‘Now, listen … ’
And I brought him and Nick up to speed too.
I left nothing out.
Not even about my father.
I trusted them not to take it any further than that room.
Iwantedto trust them.
Pain, I’m finally learning, loses some of its power once shared.
‘You’ve had a big morning,’ said Blake, with a long exhale.
‘What do you need?’ asked Nick.
‘A lot,’ I said.
Then it all moved really quickly. The meeting grew; Ana, Naomi, Jeff and several others arriving, Ana dialling in Imogen, and waking a whole heap of people in LA, who forged a plan for the rewrites. Blake, meanwhile, calledThe Screen, offering them Felix’s exclusive on the news of our revised ending, in return for them not digging any further into Nick and Felix’s visit to Tim.
‘They just wanted to say hi,’ he told the journalist. ‘So leave the guy be, hey? Hasn’t he given enough?’
‘You’re not going to make it Tim’s fault, are you?’ Nick said to Imogen, when she arrived last night. ‘Surely we can save him from that, second time around?’
‘Absolutely we can,’ she agreed. ‘We will.’
The other writers arrived from LA first thing, and have been hard at it all day while the rest of us have been tying up our last scene in The Heaton Arms, on the eve ofMabel’s Fury’s final flight. I’ve been reshooting some other takes too, laying the ground for Iris’s tear-filled admission to Robbie that she’s pregnant: a hand to my stomach; a moment of nausea.
‘How you doing, Claude?’ Ana’s kept asking me.
‘Fine,’ I’ve told her.
‘You’re not fine,’ Nick said, our mics off between takes. ‘And you don’t need to be. No one expects that.’
‘What about you?’ I asked him, looking into his dark, bloodshot eyes. ‘Are you ok?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘This whole thing’s killing me.’
He’s still staying in Mum’s old room.
Give him a break,Felix told me.
