Becky takes out her phone to turn it onto airplane mode. There is a message for her, confirming her meeting for later in the afternoon. Her stomach tightens. She realizes that she is biting her fingernails again. She taps in a quick reply, confirming.
They are to meet on a bench on the north side of the garden in Arlington Square. It’s a school day and they’ll have the place to themselves.
Becky looks up as the official certification card is shown. Medea, rated 15. Becky wonders if they went back and forth to get it there, if anyone ever actually walks out at the warning of strong language and violence, and if she should do it now. But then the film begins.
As the opening titles play, there is the sting, no less keen for its anticipation, of seeing the name of her director – no, not her director, simply the director – float into view.
A film by Sharon McManus.
Everything inside her feels it is flapping and fluttering like a pigeon being chased by a stamping foot. She eats four chocolates in a row, as if they will give her ballast.
They have kept her idea for the opening credits, letting names in a canary-yellow font float against stormy waters.
A Bottom Line film
In association with FilmFour
Emilia Cosvelinos
Becky notes that Sharon’s name has been added alongside that of the original screenwriter. She is a co-writer now, as well as director. So that’s how it went after she left the job, thinks Becky. Perhaps it was part of the price extracted for Sharon’s staying on the project? More credit, more money.
But after the titles fade so does the sting, and she finds herself enjoying it more than she’d anticipated. Mostly she is pleased that it works, this artfully modernized tale of a woman who exacts revenge on her husband by murdering their children and who then, intoxicated by the ease of it, murders the husband for good measure.
Most of the last script Becky saw has made it to the screen.
Medea buries her husband’s body and takes control of her husband’s business, and then the town, absorbing and supercharging all his old business relationships, not least the one he had with his best friend who Medea now sleeps with.
Medea understands perfectly well what her legacy will be when she is found out, which she knows must happen, but still she refuses to run. Up on the big screen, Emilia/Medea is surrounded by a group of men decrying the ways in which she has betrayed them. Medea counters that she spent a lifetime being betrayed and, in tolerating it, betraying herself. She is magnificent in her contempt for them, even as they close in on her, intent on their revenge.
Becky waits for Medea to be strung up by the men. Only Sharon must have changed the script because now the men paw and rip at Medea’s clothing, groping and slapping her flesh, screaming at her to repent. And Medea doesn’t give them anything they might want from her, no fear or contrition or submission or shame. She scorns them. She pours fresh humiliation on them, naming their shortcomings as they cover her with their hands, half of which punch and slap, while the other half grab for breast and crotch. Their violences overlap, arms pushing against arms to get at her, clenched knuckles smashing down on the spread fingers of their brothers.
She is the question they cannot solve and it maddens them. They see their own wives in her, in those moments of disdain they catch and ignore but cannot quite forget. She is the short-skirted shop-girl who mocks their hungry glances. With their fingers crowding and cramming up inside her they still cannot have her. She has killed her husband’s children, the children she bore him, and yet she refuses to appear insane. Where are her tears? Why doesn’t she beg? With punches to her ribs and mouth they look for the contrition that will let them sleep easily again, by their wives and mistresses, and across the hallway from their daughters, but finding nothing, and losing hope they walk away loudly naming her a Crazy Bitch, in the hope that it might after all be true.
Medea’s body turns in the wind. She seems foreign to Becky, in a way that is new to her. She had been so certain, once, of the meaning of the Medea they had crafted from draft to draft, refining and testing each turn until the character’s pain and complexity and her terrible crime was all worked through and mapped, scene by scene. It had made sense then, on paper. But all of that has gone now. The camera lingers on Medea’s face, her eyes still open, pooled with blood from her injuries, yet seeming still to see. She looks dead ahead, scanning the horizon as if she is looking for someone. But who? She knows where her children are. Those that were coming for her have arrived and departed. The leaves on the tree above her bow and ripple. Her body turns to distant rooftops, a church spire, a young girl in the distance, looking at her.
‘I want to report a rape,’ Becky had said.
Becky remembers the sharp pivot to soft kindness in the officer’s voice when she said, quickly, ‘I’ll go and get someone.’
Moments later Becky was seated in an interview room with white-painted cinderblock walls and cloud-grey linoleum floor.
A detective had entered, ‘Detective Inspector Whitecross,’ she’d said, but Becky didn’t say anything in response. All she could focus on was the fine telephone wire of dried tea on the rim of the Detective’s mug. She was thinking about Maisie. How would Maisie cope when she found out? Would she have to find out? Might she be spared?
DI Whitecross offered her tea, by way of a gentle reminder that
