Murray was going to leaveme.
‘But this is all I’ve ever wanted.’
He gestured around us, at the empty production office. ‘Even when this job is shitty and menial and hard and stupid, I love it. I’m addicted to the adrenaline of it, the thrill of working out how to find the story, how to make it go. I try and imagine myself doing something else, and I can’t. It’s just a void. A wall of static. White noise.’
‘Oh, Murray,’ I said helplessly, because it was the only thing I could say, the only thing that wasn’t falling at his feet and begging himdon’t go, don’t go, don’t leave me.
‘She can’t stay,’ he said, ‘and I can’t go.’
He buried his face in his hands for a moment. When he looked up again, his eyes were wet. It was the first time I had ever seen him cry.
‘Julia and I have been together since we were fifteen,’ he said. ‘She’s so important to me. I don’t know how to be without her. But things have been rocky for a while now, and—’
His voice cracked.
I was up before I could even think about it, so fast I knocked the keep cup over. I wrapped my arms around him as tight as I could, anchoring him to me as he sat in his chair, as if I could keep him here forever if I just held on hard enough.
‘What am I going to do, Lily?’ he whispered into my belly, as my mother’s coffee dripped onto the floor around us. ‘What if I love my job more than I love my wife?’
12Murray
‘If I were a different kind of wife,’ Julia said to me once, when things were still good, ‘I would have a lot of questions about how often you come home covered in another woman’s lipstick.’
‘Sorry, darling.’ I scrubbed at the collar of my shirt in our laundry sink. ‘Lily’s fucking lipstick is ridiculous. It gets on everything.’
‘She should find one with better hold.’
‘You try weaning her offBlood of My Enemies,’ I said absently. ‘Can’t be done.’
I glanced over at Julia. She was leaning against the laundry door, arms folded, not saying anything.
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ I said again. ‘I know what it looks like. It’s not like we’re constantly mashing our faces together. But if she leans over to whisper something to me during filming, and she gets too close…’
Julia sighed. ‘You don’t need to apologise. I’m not accusing you of anything. I know you and Lily are just friends. I likethat about you. I like that your best friend is this very cool, very smart woman who you’re not trying to fuck or undermine. I’m just jealous.’
‘What are you jealous of? How much time we spend together?’
‘No. I mean, yes, that’s part of it, but no. It’s the way you understand each other. The way you’re on the exact same wavelength. The way it seems like you’re telepathic sometimes.’
She crossed the room and wrapped her arms around my waist. ‘This feels like such teenage girl bullshit,’ she said, her voice muffled in my shoulder, ‘but I hate the thought that she might know you better than I do.’
I’d kissed my wife. Told her I loved her. I’d meant it.
She’d been right, though.
Julia and I had grown up together. We’d been each other’s first everything. But we could have stayed married for a thousand years, and she still wouldn’t have known me like Lily did.
And not being in sync with Lily now – not knowing what she was thinking, why she was really doing this – was driving me up the fucking wall.
She was in full Lily Fireball mode, terrorising everyone around her as we shot the preamble to the Episode Four group date. ‘I’m not wearing this!’ she shrieked at wardrobe Tess, flinging the red and black checked satin jersey back in her face. ‘Not a chance in hell!’
‘Please,’ Tess said. ‘Everyone has to wear them. They’re going for a whole jockey look.’
‘I’m not everyone!’
Tess had been working with the eminently reasonable and personable Lily Ong for years. She was visibly shaken to be faced with Lily Fireball.
‘For god’s sake, just put it on,’ Juliet-Dylan said, stepping between Lily and Tess.
