‘I heard that one,’ Madeleine laughs. ‘And when one of the kids, Lottie I think it was, asked for a present, the client gave her his cigarettes and DB was like, let me get you some wrapping paper for those!’
‘I love DB,’ says Becky again, and she really feels it.
‘He’s rather cross with Matthew. You know that, don’t you?’
Becky hesitates as if feeling her way round the edges of a concealed and sheer drop beneath her. ‘There were a few calls before we left.’
‘Do you know why?’
‘Do you?’ Becky asks.
‘The difference between us is that it doesn’t matter to me why he’s angry. I don’t have a film with him … But you do, and Matthew’s been a rather naughty boy.’
Becky feels the heat of Madeleine’s expectant gaze on her as she struggles to link the facts in the right order: looping back to the woman on Matthew’s kitchen floor around to DB’s irritation, Antonia’s rage and where she finds herself now …
‘It’s clear you don’t know,’ says Madeleine flatly. ‘Well, it’s not fair to gossip, but I’d advise you to talk to him. If it really is your movie, you don’t want a stink around it. Not when nobody’s under contract yet. Sorry to patronize. I’m sure you don’t need advice.’
Madeleine detaches herself with a soft squeeze to Becky’s forearm before she goes. A message has been delivered, but what is it? A grim grittiness now sits in Becky’s belly. Has she done something wrong? Becky feels around those dark discomforting areas, searching for something that could give her new information, feigning distraction at something going on across the bar, trying to push back the energy emerging from a buried and ignored place deep within her, feeling it swell and grow, powered on by alcohol as if it were petrol. Soon she feels that same energy gather to a sharp, metal spade-tip point and begin its work excavating. She sips her drink and tries to think of all the reasons that DB might be angry with Matthew. Mentally she scrolls through DB’s client list. Has Matthew dumped one of his actors from a film? Riled him or her with a disrespectful deal?
She tries to remember details about the woman on the floor: her long neck and spun-gold hair. She momentarily catches hold of an image – a chignon-twist – but she can’t place exactly where she saw it. Laid out on a table somewhere as a headshot or photograph elsewhere? In a magazine? One of the stills from this week’s Radio Times television preview about that new drama? But as quickly as the image arrives, it is washed away with the alcohol and the interruption:
‘Hey, good to see you. It’s all been kicking off for you in the last twenty-four hours, hasn’t it?’
It’s the journalist from yesterday, Alex. His eyes are a little glazed, and he leans in, enough for her to smell spirits on his breath. ‘So this friend who recommended, whatever, the galleries here,’ he says. ‘What was he? Like a special friend?’
It takes her a few moments to connect with what he’s asking and then she remembers: Scott and the Bonnard Museum. Scott had complained on his Instagram feed that there weren’t enough Bonnards in the Bonnard Museum. He’d wanted to see his favourite painting, Nude In The Bath, which wasn’t there, was never going to be there, actually; something he’d have known if, like Becky, he had bothered to look it up. Becky had stared at the digital image of Nude In The Bath for an age. A body in the bath, stretched out for all to see. A woman’s body, looking like a corpse. His comments had seemed so mocking and victorious; as if, despite everything, he could still take what he wanted from a woman, ogle and gaze and leer at her body like he fucking owned her, like she existed just to sate one of his many appetites. Becky had slammed her fist so hard on the sideboard that it bruised the soft fleshy bit of her hand, tenderized it like one of Scott’s stupid fucking steaks.
Alex leans in again then, suddenly and close, in a way that she had not been expecting.
And she flinches, like he has hit her.
He collects his drink from the bar top behind her and then makes a show of creating a wide berth between them. She can see that he is hurt, because his eyes seem to turn to stone, a dark offence, like she has accused him of something terrible.
‘I …’ There aren’t words to explain her reaction so instead she turns and pushes her way toward the outside. Her foot catches on someone’s bag strap and she falls to the ground.
The flesh on her upper arm is gathered and pinched and she panics at this sense of being held and caught like a fish on a line, and she tries to shake it off by punching her arm outward in a well-mastered jab. It looks like she is defending herself from something. She looks up at the person holding her and it is Alex, surrounded by a sea of shiny, painted, concerned faces.
‘It’s OK, God, I’m just trying to help you up,’ he says.
She gets to her feet and, before she can stop herself, the panic overwhelms her completely, driving her out of the bar – without a thank you or goodbye or sorry or excuse me. Shame runs cold in her blood at the thought of what people will surely be saying about her now and in the morning: that fledgling producer who doesn’t know how to control her appetite for alcohol, so drunk, probably got carried with it all, quite embarrassing for the poor girl. Bless.
She runs down to the seashore where lights are bouncing off the water now, where glasses are being clinked for dinner and charcoal burnt to fire orange for fish and meat. She finds a place far from
