‘I don’t need help—’
‘I’m sure it’s fine!’ she says. ‘Honestly. I believe in you, Beau! Always have. Let’s workshop it?’
She pulls a marked-up copy of the script from a Louis Vuitton tote, and I’m crushed on his behalf. If she really believed he could handle this, and if the producers did, she wouldn’t be here. I find myself nodding at him encouragingly, hoping he’ll read my silent vote of confidence. Theknock everyone’s socks off. Theprove it!
‘Audrey! Nice to see you again!’ Harlow says, leading lady and best supporting writer. She guides me to sit opposite Beau and Lucinda before she throws her script down and takes a seat on his other side. So now I’m staring at him, flanked by glamorous exes, questioning why the hell I thought this was a good idea.
The table read begins. And the further into the first act they go, the more invested everyone becomes in the emotion of the characters, the storyline, the stakes. Harlow is good. Even just reading the part. It’s not only me becoming more enamoured with her the more nuance she brings to the new main character. It’s everyone.
That character is flawed in ways that I am not. She’s vulnerable about things I haven’t experienced. She’s suffering, not with what I’ve been through, but with equally difficult, devastating things. Every so often, Beau glances at me, keen for my nonverbal feedback. He watches for my reaction whenever she’s funny or hopeless or hopeful …
She is notme, and I am grateful for that, but I can see my influence all over her. Maybe I am his muse, after all. I try to conveywell doneas we exchange a discreet smile across the table, both of us delighted at how this seems to be going.
They reach the end of the first act, and the producer speaks up. ‘Take ten, but well done, everyone. Good work, Beau.’
Lucinda puts her hand on his arm, perhaps ready to congratulate him on his success, but he barely registers her beside him.
Because he has turned the page … and suddenly the room tilts.
Panic shoots through his face as he devours that page, and the next. Then he picks up Harlow’s script and compares the two. I watch as his shoulders slump and he sits back in the chair and covers his face, defeated. Finally, he looks at me, in obvious despair, then turns slowly and says, ‘Harlow, can I have a word?’
She looks excited. Buoyed no doubt by her impressive performance and how relieved everyone is that this movie is back on track. He stands up, the legs of the chair scraping across the wooden floor, takes her by the wrist, and pulls her out of the room with strong, purposeful strides, slamming the door in their wake.
I’m left sitting here alone, across from Lucinda, who is flicking through the script, too. After reading a page or so, she looks up at me through that perfect fringe and says, ‘I never knew he could write like this,’ which I assume is meant to carry some sort of subliminal message about the source of his inspiration.
This would all be awkward enough, but it’s clear we have bigger problems, because the room falls silent as people realise, in the manner of dominoes, that there is an enormous row erupting outside. We only hear bits of it as Beau and Harlow compete with the noise from the bar downstairs and the Sydney traffic outside the window.
Harlow’s voice is heated. I’m sure everyone catches the wordsdrowning in writer’s blockanddistracted for days, because half the room looks in my direction.
Beau’s voice is too low and muffled for me to understand through the closed door. Next Harlow is shrieking something about how this is thepivotal scene for the entire film, while Lucinda practically cranes her neck to see the exchange. And then her eyes flick back to me.
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.
She spins her annotated script around and pushes it across the table. ‘You tell me.’
I slide it towards me and read through the scene that Beau and Harlow are raging over. It’s clearly the powerful midpoint reversal in the plot. The part when the hero first reallyseesher. When she first lets him in. The part where she turns herself inside out and shows him everything.
‘Okay, everyone,’ the producer calls, clapping her hands. ‘That’s time. Someone drag them back in here, will you? Let’s take it from the clifftop.’
It’s the part where she trusted him …
57
FRASER
Mention of our prior engagement was a leap, but if I don’t pull out all the stops now, this woman is going to walk out of my life and leave. Not in the same way that Audrey did, but the impact is going to be devastating.
‘How set are you on moving to Ireland?’
She frowns. ‘Fraser, what’s this about?’
It’s one of those critical moments when you know there will always be abeforeand anafter. My next sentence has to clamber over my loyalty to Audrey just to make it out of my mouth, because what I’m proposing here is not some random fling. ‘I just wondered … whether there was any turn of events in which you might delay.’
Rachael’s sigh seems several years in the making. ‘Delay? What’s that? The cousin of place-holding?’
I take the passport application from her hand, heart thumping, and place it on the coffee table. ‘I’ve got a custody agreement with Maggie that means I can’t move from here until Parker is eighteen. I also couldn’t take Parker with me. But there’s an academic position at Trinity College in Dublin that would be a dream.’
She looks at me blankly. ‘Don’t be offended, Frase, but a big part of the attraction of Ireland was how far away it wasfrom you, so I could start a new life. I wasn’t imagining us taking our existing arrangement on the road—’
