‘What news?’ I ask Rach.
‘Like, datingactual women?’
Speaking of actual women, Rachael rolls onto her side in the white singlet top she’s slept in, head propped in her hand, bed hair tumbling across her face.Fuck, is she going for dating wing-woman or contestant?
‘Because, Dad, if you want to meet someone,’ Parker shouts back, dragging my attention away from the phone, an increasingly difficult challenge, ‘it’s okay with us!’
Us?
I look back at Rachael as she swings her legs over the side of the bed and sits up. ‘She and I had a long chat, the executive summary of which is that we agreed it’s time for you to move forward. I told her I want you to be happy.’
40
AUDREY
It’s like being in the school corridor with the popular boy. I’m pretty certain the cafe’s teenage employee is just as clueless as I am about who Beau is exactly, but he’s got the presence of beingsomeone, and she is blushing furiously just taking his coffee order.
‘Ssorry, was that one or two shots?’ she asks him, flustered. ‘I know you already said—’
‘No trouble at all,’ he reassures her, with patience that seems off-script for the model-dating, Oscar-nominated, social-pages-inhabiting big deal of a person I’ve built up in my mind. ‘Two shots, thanks. Didn’t sleep well.’
She notes this down and underlines it as he returns his attention to me.Am I the cause of his lack of sleep?
‘Writer’s block,’ he reminds me. Of course! What am I doing, castingmyselfas the cause of his insomnia?
‘What are you stuck on, exactly?’ I’ve stepped into my professional self, as if I’m his script adviser and this is an emergency meeting to help shape his narrative arc.
‘This is going to sound worse than it is,’ he begins, and I find myself leaning forward, glued to his incoming confession. He pauses and smiles, skin crinkling around his eyes behind his sunglasses, as he says, ‘Should I wait while you get out a tape recorder?’
I sit back, bolt upright. ‘Sorry!’ I blurt. ‘I’m just … also in a creative industry.’ It’s a gross exaggeration, but ‘professional empathy’ is a better excuse than unbridled nosiness.
‘A creative industry that relies heavily on spreadsheets?’
Oh, lord, I need to steer this back to him and why he’s stuck, in case he asks me for evidence of career success I can’t produce.
‘Tell you my story later,’ I promise, wondering exactly what I’m intending to share, and buying the time to invent it.
He exhales like an athlete calming his nerves at the start of a sprint. ‘So there was a woman …’
Of course there was.I all but bang my fist on the table like a gavel, case closed.
‘Let’s just say I allowedwrite what you knowto get out of hand. It was fine while things were going well, but then we fell apart, she got lawyers involved, the project crashed, and to cut a very long, very fraught, very expensive story short, I need to come up with an entirely new character for the female lead in my movie in the next seven days or my reputation in the industry will be shot.’
He breathes again, trapped words exorcised.
‘I see,’ I say. I very much don’t see, and need much more information, but at this point I am most definitely riveted.
‘I told you mine. Now you tell me yours,’ he challenges me, his penetrating dark blue eyes fixed on mine, as if we’re at a press conference and there will be no further comment about his situation.
‘Do you have any ideas?’ I barge on with the tenacity of a good journalist, ignoring his demand. ‘Anything at all? Seven days seems impossible!’
The coffee appears, and he stares at it the way a fortune teller might focus on a cup, as if he’s trying to divine a fresh plotline from the swirls of froth. Steam curls gently into the strong linesof his face, and the whole visage justsmoulders. If I’m not careful, I will slip into some sort of hypnosis …
‘Nothing that’s working,’ he admits. He looks up from his coffee with a disarming level of vulnerability for someone with his track record of success. It sends me into a momentary panic.If it’s this hard for him at this advanced point in his career, then when, if ever, does it get easier?
‘In my case, it feels even worse than writer’s block,’ I begin, his candour breaking me open. ‘Not that I’m trivialising what you’re going through—gosh, it sounds likehell. I just mean, oh, God. This is such a complicated story …’
Now it’s him leaning forward, arms crossed on the table, intense gaze inviting me to gift him the part of my history that I rarely disclose.Could he really be this interested?I sense the story bubbling to the surface and rushing towards him in a burst of uncharacteristic frankness.
