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Alex rounded the corner on to Stamford Street and spotted the glowing tail lights of a dark green sports car, hugging the curb in front of the community centre. Her stomach plummeted like an elevator snapped free of its cables.
Harry—dropping off a flawlessly presented Olivia, not fifty feet away. Her purple and red tapestry Erdem coat fluttered over a long tapered black skirt and Burberry ankle boots, a hastily opened golf umbrella shielding her from Mother Nature’s wrath. Even the downpour couldn’t dampen her aesthetic perfection.
Alex paused beneath her bobbing brolly, hoping its fight against the elements wouldn’t register on their radar. A gaggle of teenagers piling out of a Nando’s restaurant on the main floor of the Coin Street Centre provided perfect cover from the future Mrs. Manville. Once Olivia swept indoors, Harry revved his engine and sped off, propelling a swell of dirty sludge towards the chairs stacked up outside the eatery.
That tiny glimpse rattled Alex’s resolve. Two minutes ago, she was determined to unload to Isabella. Now she wasn’t so sure. Why did Harry have to appear today of all days? She’d spent her post-Christmas week erasing any concern of hurting him. Easy to do at a distance—it was much harder with him smiling in his Jaguar only a few feet away, giving Olivia a peck goodbye. Now he was real again, a friend who didn’t deserve to get hurt in the post-Apocalyptic fallout.
She hurried out of the deluge and into the building. Pausing to gather herself, the elevator jerked open, revealing her three male colleagues. They held the doors, beckoning her to join them on the ascent to the third floor.
“Happy New Year, Alex,” said the ginger one. “Could they save your laptop?”
She fussed with her windblown hair. “Afraid not. The computer guy said he was a genius, not a miracle worker.”
The male trio chuckled sympathetically as the doors opened on their floor. Alex walked behind, taking deep breaths to stifle the acrobatics in her gut. She passed the door to the ladies’ toilets and considered stalling in there with just her anxiety for companionship, but Mark’s words—her words—nudged her legs forward: “You can do this.”
It wasn’t a surprise to discover Olivia sat closest to Isabella. She was welcome to that chair; bad karma had seeped into every fibre. Alex sat down next to Olivia, the only chair still available.
Olivia leaned sideways, as if whispering to an old friend. “Oh, did I take your place?”
“You know you did.” Alex didn’t even blink.
Olivia responded with a snort.
“Happy New Year, everyone,” said Isabella, unpacking a stack of folders from her satchel. “Now that the holidays are over, let’s jump into the process with both feet. We’ll be joined tonight by actresses doing a staged reading of Olivia’s suffragette play. They won’t be off-book, but seeing Olivia’s words come to life will spotlight any problems. And just a reminder, as per Olivia’s instructions, even the male characters will be portrayed by women.”
Olivia shot to her feet. “Actually, during the holidays, I gave the text a makeover. I’ve got revised copies for everyone.”
“You know your work better than anyone,” said Isabella. “If it needs tweaking, I’m all for it.”
Olivia handed scripts to each person. “I’ve highlighted the changes so you can see what’s been improved and modernized. It’s more accessible now.”
Alex flipped past the cover page, her eyes zeroing in on several yellow highlighted blobs. Her eyes widened further and further with each line skimmed. Improvements? That’s what Olivia was calling this bastardization of her story? Vandalism, more like. Jarring new dialogue on the pages interrupted her beloved characters’ conversations, and historical facts were changed. She skipped frantically ahead in the script. Names were modernized for no reason at all—Emily Davison became a trendy ‘Emi’ and Sophia Duleep Singh, the Indian princess who fought alongside her white British counterparts, was renamed ‘Sophie’.
Giving the characters a sugarcoated Hollywood overhaul tore their authenticity to shreds. She turned more pages, shaking her head at the ridiculous updates, oblivious to the troop of actresses assembling in the middle of the U of desks.
Olivia’s haughty tone snapped her back into the room.
“Sorry to interrupt, Isabella. I’m having a difficult time picturing Emi.” Olivia crossed her arms. “Can we swap out actresses? No offence, darling, but you’re a bit too…plus sized. Emi’s the heroine of this story and would be slimmer, you know?”
Alex’s jaw dropped. Two of the men shared a did-I-just-hear-that look, while the third stifled a snicker. The so-called plus sized actress, no bigger than an American size ten and hardly chubby, turned scarlet, her shoulders slumping under the weight of the room’s scrutinizing gaze.
Isabella swallowed hard. “Olivia, we don’t have time to shuffle roles and the suffragettes weren’t striving to be beauty queens, you know that. If your play moves forward into actual performance—and that’s a big if—you can make your casting preferences known then. Ladies, please continue, top of page eight …”
The brunette frowned and fanned herself with the script.
The actresses read on. Alex watched as Olivia pinched her lips together whenever the size ten actress spoke. She noticed how Isabella leaned forward, studying every word, every nuance of the read-through. More than once, she was certain that she’d seen Isabella frown at some of Olivia’s attempts to modernize dialogue, or alter characters, scribbling red notes on the margins of her manuscript.
Alex returned her attention to the actresses reading the now clunky lines. At the end of the first act, they reached a poignant scene—she could remember sweating over every line of the original, playing the roles out in her head a hundred times. Olivia’s reimagining of the scene unfolded. ‘Sophie’ was married to a new character called ‘Kale’.
Alex winced. Naming characters from the early 1900s after today’s trendy veg? She glanced down at the page. ‘Kale’ wasn’t the worst of it. She gasped in horror at the new notes accompanying the scene—Olivia had even changed ‘Sophie’s’ ethnicity. She was no longer an Indian princess. She was now a white socialite from Chelsea.
Are you fucking kidding?
She bit her tongue and tapped her foot impatiently on the floor, watching the hands of the clock on the wall crawl towards the scheduled break, still twenty minutes away. Her temples began to throb under the strain of her now constant scowl.
Olivia’s romcom-worthy love scene veered towards diabetes inducing. It concluded with Sophie the suffragette standing by her man and promising to scale down her efforts in order to keep him sweet.
