My heart began to beat faster again.
But if she felt it too, she showed no sign of it. ‘I’m sorry, Mandie,’ she said. ‘I know I’m being rude. It was just…’
Her voice trailed off. She buried her face in her hands and let out a muffled scream.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ I asked.
She took her hands away. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve just got to…’
‘Sit with it?’
She smiled, just a little, and her shoulders relaxed, a little more. ‘Yeah,’ she said.
Then she reached up and patted her head experimentally. ‘If you are in the market for something to do, you could help me get all this shit out of my hair.’
‘Sure,’ I said. De-mudding someone’s hair was a very safe, very appropriate, very Mummy Mandie kind of task. ‘Lily and Naya and Jess K are all outside. Our bathroom’s free.’
We went upstairs. There was a little monitor room down the hall from our bedroom that always had at least one production assistant in it, and he was very nice to me when I tapped on the door and asked if I could borrow a stool. I put it in front of the sink in our bathroom and sat Dylan down on it, closing the door behind us.
‘Ooof,’ I said, studying her hair. ‘What were you even doing today? Mud wrestling?’
She snorted. ‘Not that far off.’
I started picking the larger clumps of mud out while she told me about the nightmare that had been their group date. They’d played a game called Love Jockey Hockey against the women from the Convent. It was basically hockey but using plastic flamingos instead of sticks and a heart-shaped puckinstead of a normal one, played while wearing giant satiny jockey shirts.
‘I know the producers are always telling us they’re running on a skeleton crew missing half its bones, but surely they could have come up with something better than that,’ I said, gently picking out another clump of mud. It broke apart into a spray of dirt. ‘That sounds like the kind of idea you scribble down quickly in the middle of the night, and then in the morning you look at it and it says something like “cheese bus”.’
‘A cheese bus is a million times better an idea than Love Jockey Hockey,’ Dylan said. ‘I would totally ride the cheese bus.’
‘Maybe that’s something that Mandylan Project Management can work on when all this is over,’ I said, smiling at her in the mirror.
She smiled back, but only weakly. ‘Maybe.’
I loosened another clump with my fingernails. ‘So what happened to Belinda?’ I asked. ‘Flamingo to the face from one of the Convent girls?’
‘I think so,’ Dylan said. ‘Or it might have been the puck. It was a bit of a scrum. I didn’t really see. But…’
She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the edge of the sink and pressing her head into her hands again. ‘Fuuuuuuuck,’ she groaned.
‘Oh, Dylan,’ I said helplessly.
She didn’t take her hands away, but she met my eyes in the mirror, looking at me from between her fingers. ‘I don’t want to be a nurse anymore, Mandie,’ she said. ‘Not wanting to bea nurse is the whole reason I’m here. So why does it feel like this when they don’t let me help?’
‘They wouldn’t let you help Belinda?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not really. I mean, I did some emergency first aid on the field, but that red-headed medic turned up pretty quickly and shoved me out of the way.’
‘I’m sure he looked after her.’
‘That’s part of the problem, though!’ she said. ‘He didn’t! If he did, she wouldn’t be here! She needs to go to a dentist! But she can’t. The only exemptions they have are for hardcore medical issues. They might be able to get her one, but they’d have to send a staff member with her, and then neither she nor the staff member could come back because of the bubble, and then the skeleton would be missing evenmorebones, and…’
She muffled another scream in her hands. ‘I hate this place, Mandie,’ she said. ‘I hate how artificial it is. I hate the rules. I hate how little power I have. I hate how there isn’t a single fucking thing I can do to change it.’
‘You could leave,’ I blurted out.
She looked up.
I was immediately horrified that I’d said it, that my impulses had got the better of me, but I couldn’t stop talking. ‘I know you like to be in control of things,’ I whispered, reaching over and turning on the tap as hard it could go in case someone was listening. ‘I know how hard it must be, having your control taken away. But you’ve still got control over that. You can leave.’
