Lucky Break (23 page)

‘It's the stunt man,' Steve said, as Dan examined his wounds. ‘He's pissed off because you took his job. Now he won't be paid his rate.'

‘What?' Dan shifted his weight. ‘Someone could have warned me.' His coccyx was bruised and it was painful to walk. ‘Bastards,' he muttered, and he checked his phone again. Jemma would be on the plane soon, if she was getting on it, if she wasn't someone's prisoner, if she wasn't . . . He closed his eyes and mumbled a prayer. Please, he directed his thoughts towards the harsh blue cloudless sky, beyond which he hoped a white-bearded God was listening. Please let them be all right. Look after my baby, and I promise . . . what would he promise? That he'd never take another job away from home? That he'd . . .

‘Dan?' It was a woman's voice. Dan snapped open his eyes. ‘Sorry to interrupt but I just wanted to let you know, it's fine to take the Land Rover if you want to pick Jemma up from the airport yourself.' It was the director's wife and she had her baby in a pushchair. ‘Here are the keys,' she dangled them for him, ‘and tell her, well, I'm just along the corridor from you, so I'm sure we'll meet.'

Dan nearly put his arms around her. ‘Thanks so much.' He took the keys.‘I can't believe . . . I mean . . . it's hard to imagine them actually arriving. You know what I mean?'

‘I know,' she laughed. She bent down to adjust her baby's bonnet. It was white today with an embroidered trim. ‘Sometimes I can't really believe we're here.'

She pointed across the tented city. ‘The car's over there. The green one. I put a baby seat in the back. See it?'

‘Yes.' Dan thanked her again. He'd have liked to have stayed talking but he couldn't think of anything else to say. He couldn't tell her about the phone call. Didn't dare see her reaction in case it was bad. ‘What?' Her eyes might fly open, and his bruised body would turn to jelly and his hands, already trembling, would begin to shake.

 

The car jumped forward when he turned the ignition. Some idiot had left it in gear. He tried to breathe, steering the four-wheel drive slowly past the maze of other vehicles, tanks and props and trailers. Eventually he was out through the gates and on to the dirt track that turned to tarmac and led onwards to the airport. It was half past six and the town was already closed. The shops, which seemed mostly to sell furniture, cheap wardrobes and three-piece suites, were all shut up. There was nowhere to buy clothes, or food, that he could see, and only three places to eat. A glass-and-steel coffee shop that sold fizzy drinks and waffles, a dingy pizza place where he'd waited an hour once while they defrosted some fish, and one smart restaurant where every dish came with a ‘panache' of vegetables and a ‘drizzle' of extra virgin olive oil, and even the bread was baked with paprika and garlic. Maybe he'd take Jemma there, and they could laugh over the menu. Maybe . . . There were very few cars on the road. He was still in his uniform. He hadn't had time to change, but it felt good to drive without a camera trained on him. Maybe he and Jemma could hire a car one Sunday and set off on a trip. They could get a baby seat of their own and head out across the desert. Dan turned off the road and pulled up in the car park. There were a few other cars already there and a scattering of people waiting in the oblong building. The runway stretched before them and he remembered how surprised he'd been four weeks before, getting off his plane and finding the mini-van that was there to collect him parked just yards away. He breathed in the sharp air. Dust and cold and space. Africa. He could feel the vastness of the continent stretching away on every side. A speck appeared in the distance. Everyone tensed, squinting, shading their eyes as it turned into a plane. Soon the roar of its engines could be heard as it rattled through the sky. Its wheels were out, its nose pointed earthward, and for a moment the plane seemed to be racing towards them, suicidal, as they stood huddled together at the glass. But just in time it landed, screaming as it hit the ground.

Dan forgot about his bruised leg, the possible cracked rib, the ache in his coccyx as he rushed out on to the runway. The staircase was attached, the door was opening, and the passengers began to appear. Three African businessmen, a big raw Boer, a family with teenage children and then Jemma, Honey in a sling, her eyes fixed on the metal steps as she climbed down.

Dan stood where he was. He saw her look around, take in the dome of the darkening sky, the low arrivals hall, their bags already being unloaded onto the ground. He took a step forward, but she didn't recognise him. ‘Jem,' he called, and he saw her start, and imagined for a moment what she must be seeing. A soldier in brown camouflage, his face smeared with real and fake blood, the edges of his moustache hanging down like a bedraggled moon. ‘Dan?' And she was in his arms.

‘You're all right,' he held her. ‘Thank God, you're all right.'

‘But you . . .' she put a hand up to his face. ‘What happened? What happened to you?'

‘Shhhh.' He kept her close, their baby's warm, padded body between them, and they stood there on the tarmac as the last of the passengers trailed by.

Slow in Summer

Charlie stood in front of the bathroom mirror and examined her face. ‘Oh God,' she murmured, peering closer, but there was no denying it, there they were. Three spots pushing up under her usually smooth skin. One on her chin, one on her jawbone and worst of all, one in the middle of her cheek.

‘Why, why, why,' she howled, but quietly, because she didn't want to wake Ian, the lodger, who might stumble out of his room and witness her humiliation.

She leant into the mirror again and, knowing she shouldn't, she attacked the biggest spot, squeezing it hard, rubbing it, and then when it only darkened and grew larger she changed her tactics and doused it with cold water. The others she stared at, turning her face right and left to catch the light, frowning, smiling, pouting, but whichever way she looked, they were still there. ‘Fuck!' She felt like sobbing, but instead she took a deep breath and began applying foundation. She added mascara, lipstick, and then taking a wad of tissue, she smudged the lipstick off again. Shit. She stared at herself coldly; it's only six in the morning, and anyway, once she reached the film set, Lauren, the make-up woman, would scrape back her hair, wipe her face clean and reveal the truth.

 

‘It's nothing to worry about,' Lauren said dutifully. ‘I hardly even know what you're talking about.' She peered into the mirror at Charlie, already in costume as Melina, a girl from the South Sea Islands, brought into the country as a slave, but now, through her own ingenuity and astounding beauty, the wife of a country squire.

‘I just don't understand it.' Charlie felt despairing. ‘I've always had good skin. Why this, now?'

Lauren swivelled her round so that she could stare with professional scrutiny into her face. ‘Little outbreaks like yours,' she conceded, ‘they're not at all uncommon. Acne can be caused by any number of things. Food allergy. A change in cosmetics. Genetics. Stress.'

Charlie shrank away from the word ‘acne'. Honestly. She only had three spots! ‘I don't know,' she hesitated. ‘I guess I am quite stressed about this part, I still don't really know who Melina is.' But then a new job was always stressful. Not that the alternative of no job was any better. The best moment in an actor's life, Rob had once told her, was the day the work was offered. After that it was all downhill.

‘The good news . . .' Lauren was still squinting at her, ‘is no one will ever know. You wouldn't believe the repair jobs we have to do on some people, really, some of the problems we see.' And as she worked, smoothing and moulding, fluffing and patting, she lowered her voice to tell Charlie about rashes, cold sores, spots and boils on the most celebrated faces.

With every new story Charlie felt increasingly alarmed.
And you'll never guess what I spent all morning doing
. . . she could imagine Lauren whispering to whoever took her place in the make-up wagon next . . .
covering up Charlie Adedayo-Martin's appalling break-out. Like the surface of the moon, it was
 . . .

‘There, my beauty,' Lauren patted her. ‘All done.' And Charlie thanked her dolefully and moved along three seats to where Jilly was ready with her wig.

 

Later, her auburn hair wound into a loose bun, Charlie picked up her long skirts and stepped through the early morning sunshine to her caravan. As she pulled open the door she held her breath against the smell of the bright blue disinfectant they used to douse the toilet, which permeated every synthetic fibre of the built-in furniture. The caravan was large – a sitting room with a pull-down double bed, a kitchenette, a loo and separate shower – and as a sign of her elevated status, it was just for her. I'd have happily
lived
here a few years ago, she muttered when she was first shown round, although it wasn't long before she noticed it was smaller than her co-star's caravan – Ben Trevelyn, who, although he had half her lines, was being paid roughly twice as much.

Charlie slammed the door shut and looked at herself in the full-length mirror. Not just at her face but at the line of her body in her pleated skirt and waisted shirt and the hair pulled softly up to show off her neck. ‘He'll just have to film me in long shot today,' she shrugged, remembering the director's appreciative glances, and she shouted, ‘Come in!' to Matty, the runner, who was knocking on her door with a polystyrene cup of coffee and a bacon roll.

 

‘Cut!' It was early afternoon and the director and the lighting cameraman were in conference, heads bent together, gesticulating, concerned.

What's the problem? she wanted to ask Lauren, who had run forward, a finger ready with a dab of concealer, but she couldn't bring herself to say it. She already knew . . . The problem was her. Eventually they started up again and shot the same scene from another perspective. ‘Get as much cover as you can,' she heard the director hiss, and then, an hour earlier than expected, she was told she wouldn't be needed any more that day. They were going to get some landscape shots while it was still so bright.

‘You all right, sweetie?' The director approached. ‘You don't seem very focused today. Big scene tomorrow, though.' He patted her arm. ‘OK?'

‘OK,' Charlie said cheerily, ‘see you all in the morning,' but she felt her stomach lurch.

On the way home she sat silent in the back of the car, warding off conversation with her driver – every detail of whose life she already knew – by pretending to sleep. But she wasn't sleeping. Her eyes were open, just a fraction, enough to see the men and women on the streets, at bus stops, in cars, pushing babies, all of them, although they didn't need it – didn't even care – with perfect, unblemished skin.

 

When Charlie arrived home, her lodger, Ian, was in the kitchen, making himself a nut roast. Two weeks before he'd been offered an advert, and now he was on a diet. Having never dieted before and knowing nothing of the myriad choices available to dieters, he'd simply opted to miss out lunch and buy a three-week supply of instant nut roasts from the health food shop under the bridge. He'd given Charlie the impression that he'd been asked to diet, that the producer of the commercial (a woman) had told him that he'd be expected to walk bare-chested along an Algarve beach, and even though the advert was for a sickeningly sweet breakfast cereal, she still hoped to see him svelte and defined in his trunks.

Charlie watched him pour boiling water into the mixture and turned away to avoid the smell, but however disgusted she was with this repetitive meal and Ian's dogged observation of it, she couldn't help but admit that it was working. When she'd rented him the room, only a month before, he'd been a heavy-set, unexciting man in jeans and a sweatshirt, a lodger she thought she could safely rely on for a weekly influx of cash without being in any way distracted, but now, with his jeans hanging a little more loosely, his faded T-shirt flat against his stomach, she found herself uncomfortably aware of him.

‘Hi,' she said, coolly, tugging at her hair in an attempt to hide the already hidden spots. ‘How's it going?'

‘Fine.' Ian slid the foil baking tin into the oven. ‘Beautiful day today.'

‘Yes,' Charlie nodded. She'd spent most of it in the drawing room of a country house near Watford, attempting to avoid the shafts of light that fell through the half-drawn curtains, arguing archly with an admirer who was imploring her to run away with him. For every one of her tart replies he became more genuine, more passionate and desperate, offering his heart to her, his very soul, if she would only consider him, so that it seemed by the end of the scene that they were speaking two different languages, were standing on either side of a wide, intricately carpeted divide.

Ian checked his watch. Charlie knew from the night before, and the night before that, that his nut roast would take fifty minutes. Fifty minutes! She was irritated and impressed by his organisation. If she was hungry, she'd pull something out of the fridge right there and then, and if she wasn't, she probably wouldn't bother to eat at all. And what if someone called and invited her out at the last minute? All that planning, and chopping. It was hardly worth the bother.