Maggie’s bedroom is a mess, which seems strange to me, because she looks like such a neat and tidy person. Dirty cups and plates are everywhere, piles of newspapers and magazines lean up against the walls, and clothes are thrown all over the floor. The duvet smells, I’m not sure what of, but it isn’t nice. We all sit and stare at the TV, then my tummy rumbles so loud I’m sure everyone hears it.
‘Do you want some breakfast?’ Maggie asks when the adverts come on.
‘Yes.’ Her face changes and I add, ‘Please,’ before it is too late.
‘What do you fancy? You can have anything you want.’
I look over at one of the dirty plates with crusts on. ‘Toast?’
She pulls a pretend sad face, like a clown. ‘I’m afraid your dad ate the last of the bread.’
I’m confused at first, then remember that she means the man with the gold tooth.
‘Don’t worry that pretty little head of yours, I’m going to make your favourite, back in a jiffy.’
I don’t know what a jiffy is.
Maggie leaves the room and I’m glad she doesn’t close the door. I don’t want to be on my own with John. He looks like he is wearing a rug on his chest, but up close I can see it’s just more hair. He seems to have an awful lot of it. He reaches past me, and I lean out of his way. Then I watch while he picks up a packet of cigarettes and lights one, tapping the ash into an empty cup while he laughs at something on TV.
Maggie comes back with a plate, which is strange, because she said she was going to make my favourite breakfast, which is porridge and honey. My brother used to make it for me at home and I always ate it in my favourite blue bowl, even though it was chipped. My brother said it could still be my favourite bowl, even when it wasn’t perfect any more. He said things that are a little bit broken can still be beautiful.
‘There now, get that down you,’ says Maggie. Her cold bare legs touch my feet as she climbs back under the covers.
‘What is it?’ I ask, looking down at the plate.
‘It’s your favourite, silly! Biscuits with butter. Make sure you eat them all, we need to fatten you up a bit – you’ve gotten far too skinny.’
I think I look the same as yesterday and the day before that.
I look from Maggie to the plate and back again, unsure what to do. Then I pick up one of the round shapes, and can see that it has its own name written underneath it, just like my new name is written on my pyjama top. I whisper the letters inside my head: D I G E S T I V E.
‘Go on, take a bite,’ Maggie says.
I don’t want to.
‘Eat. It.’
I take a small bite, chewing slowly. All I can taste is the butter and it makes me feel a bit sick.
‘What do you say?’
‘Thank you?’
‘Thank you, what?’
‘Thank you, Maggie?’
‘No, not Maggie. From now on, you call me Mum.’
London, 2017
Today feels like a day of lasts.
My last day driving through the Pinewood Studios gates.
My last time playing this particular character.
My last chance.
I sit in front of the dressing-room mirror, while other people tame my hair and disguise the imperfections on my face. I’m not feeling myself today; I’m not sure I can even remember who that is. I always experience a period of grief when I stop filming; all those months of hard work and then it’s over, but the finality of this day feels far more ominous than it should. Keeping everything that is happening to myself is taking its toll, but there’s only one more day to get through and I know I’m not alone. We all make daily decisions about which secrets to decant, and which to keep for a later date, when they might taste better on our tongues.
When I am all alone again, staring into the mirror, not sure who I see, I notice something that isn’t mine. Nina, the wonderful woman who magically transforms my hair, has left her magazine behind. I flick through the pages, more out of boredom than curiosity, and stop when I see a double page profile piece about Alicia White.
The woman grinning in the enormous, photoshopped picture, went to the same senior school and drama school as me. She was in the year above, but somehow looks a decade younger. Alicia White is an actress too. A bad one. We share an agent now and she always likes to remind me that he signed her first. He’s all she ever talks about, as though we are participants in some kind of unspoken competition. She feels the need to put me down every time we meet, as though she wants to make sure I know my place. There’s really no need; I’ve never had a high opinion of myself.
The sight of her face reminds me of Tony. He asked me to call, but I still haven’t managed to get hold of him. My fingers search for my mobile inside my bag, and I try again. Straight to voicemail. I call the office, which I hate doing, and his assistant picks up on the second ring.
‘Sure thing, he’s free now,’ she says in a chirpy voice, and pops me on hold.
I listen to tinny, classical music, which makes me feel even more stressed than before, and I feel a wave of relief when it stops and he answers. Except it isn’t him.
‘I’m sorry, my mistake,’ his assistant whispers. ‘He’s in a meeting, but he’ll call you back.’
She hangs up before I get a chance to ask when.
I return my attention to the magazine, desperate for any form of distraction from the ever-growing list of anxieties lining up inside my mind. Things must be pretty bad if I’m resorting to reading about Alicia White.
I haven’t always had an agent. Until eighteen months ago, nobody wanted to represent me. I belonged to an agency instead, who did little more than send my headshot off for various jobs, and take fifteen per cent when I got one. I always had work, just not always the kind I really wanted. When Ben and I got married, I was the understudy in a play on Shaftesbury Avenue. The lead was sick one night, and I got to perform in her place. My agent’s wife was sitting in the audience, and she told him about me. I owe her a debt that I can never repay, and within weeks of having an agent, I landed my first film role.
Sometimes it only takes one person to believe in you, to change your life for ever. Sometimes it only takes one person not believing in you to destroy it. Humans are a highly sensitive species.
I rest my tired eyes for just a moment, then stare down at the photo of Alicia again. I drop the magazine onto my lap when her face becomes three dimensional and starts talking at me. A catalogue of catty comments she’s said in the past spill from her red paper mouth in the present.
‘Tony took me for a fancy lunch when he signed me, but then I was so in demand, everyone wanted to represent me, not like you,’ says magazine Alicia, before flicking her long blonde hair. The highlighted strands unravel like paper streamers, out of the page and onto my lap.
‘I was so surprised when he took you on, everybody was!’ She continues, then wrinkles her perfect paper nose in my direction.
‘It was good of him to give you a chance, but then he’s always been a charitable man.’ She takes a fifty-pound note from her purse, rolls it up, and lights the end. Then she starts to inhale it like a cigarette, before blowing a cloud of smoke in my face. It stings my eyes and I tell myself that’s the reason they are filling with tears.
‘It isn’t as though your face fits with his other clients, it isn’t