She comes to, disorientated, in the grey yellow light of early morning.
Maisie will still be asleep and Adam has gone home now, leaving a rumpled and cold space in the bed beside her. She feels afraid and alone and longs for Adam’s warmth and chatter as she senses the dark and silent approach of the many questions she has been trying to stifle.
How should she now think of all that time spent obsessing over Scott’s potions and fashions and the holidays and words that inspired her thoughts, her plans and narrative? If he inspired her Medea film, does that make her passion for the subject somehow less truthful? And what of the last sixteen years?
What of that time (Maisie must have been six or seven) when Becky had arranged to meet that man in the garden of a local pub? He’d drunk four pints of cider, she’d smoked a lot of cigarettes and they had talked about soap opera and Big Brother. She wasn’t attracted to his thoughts, his voice, his thin nose or rubbery lips but she still travelled with him in a bleach-smelling lift up to the eleventh floor of a council block overlooking Canary Wharf, and she still willingly took her jeans off while seated on his faux leather couch. She thought she was ready. She’d told herself in the run-up that sex post-rape could free her if only she was strong enough to achieve it.
But she wasn’t ready and so, being thrown back into the very past she was trying to escape at the cider and boiled-sweet smell of that man’s skin, had felt like a failure. The fact of his body coming down hot and heavy on hers, ridiculous to think it now, but she had felt she was as close to death as if she were trapped inside a sandwich toaster. She had asked to leave before things went further, and he let her.
At home she had destroyed ten years of her old school exercise books in a bonfire, incanting Scott’s name as she watched charred black feathers of paper rise to the sky, as if somehow these actions might cauterize the places he was still growing inside her and grant her peace.
It was several years before she tried sex again, that time with a media studies student, still horrible but with greater success – but now, lying in her bed at home, Becky struggles to know whether the last sixteen years would have been any less traumatic had she imagined a faceless ghoul pumping away inside her instead of Scott.
Scott had been like a co-ordinate on a map. He’d given her a diseased kind of security.
Becky comes back to herself remembering Adam. How gently he holds and touches her during sex, how safe she feels safe with him. Perhaps there is no need to reframe her whole past? Perhaps all is well in the present. Perhaps her love of Adam is all she needs now to heal completely. She can choose to think this way and so she does.
Becky arrives at the office and senses immediately that something is wrong. Siobhan glances up briefly and returns to her work, without a word – intent on clearing and sorting, making piles. The next time Siobhan glances up she looks so angry that Becky’s insides ripple, ghost over grave.
‘Is everything OK?’ says Becky, arranging her coat and bag in the crook of her arm.
‘He’s waiting for you in the boardroom. With champagne. Financing is agreed. Contracts ready to sign,’ Siobhan says, opening her desk drawer and yanking it off the runners with a crack.
‘Are you coming too?’ says Becky.
‘No,’ says Siobhan.
‘Please come and have a drink. Emilia was your idea.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Just …’ She purses her lips and holds her palm up, flat and final. ‘I can’t talk to you right now.’
‘Have I done something to you, Siobhan?’ Becky’s insides lurch and she begins to feel a queasy combination of exhaustion and nausea, like the draining aftermath of extreme motion sickness.
‘Of course not. You’d better go in. Your champagne might get warm.’
Becky finds Matthew sitting at the head of the boardroom table. He looks up as she enters. He looks healthier than the last time she saw him. Taut and shining, like somehow he has shed wrinkles, shaved away years.
‘Come and sit down,’ he says, motioning her to a place at the table, laid with a freshly copied version of the Medea script and a pile of contracts marked with coloured Post-its. ‘You need to read the draft agreements. As producer you have some legal duties you’ll need to be aware of. It’s all boilerplate stuff. FilmFour sent some script notes through as well. But first …’ He reaches for a bottle of champagne and two glasses. He opens the bottle and the cork hits the ceiling with an air-pellet pop.
Drink Me.
She takes the proffered glass and holds it mid-air.
‘You look well, Rebecca,’ he says. ‘Success evidently suits you.’
‘Thanks. But can we get Siobhan in on this too?’ she says. ‘Make her a part of this?’
‘I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘She resigned this morning. About five minutes before you came in.’
Becky puts the glass down and sits back on her seat. ‘Why?’
‘She joined at the same time as you. You’re going places and she’s not. She’ll find a job elsewhere without much trouble. I’ve said I’ll help her out there, obviously. I’d do the same in her position. She’s read the writing on the wall and made a move. We’ll hire some more people. I’ll need a PA. You’ll need one as well. And we should get a development person who can report to you.’
‘It’s a shame. She’s been here ages.’
‘That’s why she needs to move on. Don’t feel sorry for her. She’s doing the right thing for her career. You’ll probably end up working with her on things.
