I Know Who You Are(21)
Other than the agent, and the job, we have absolutely nothing in common. For starters, she is beautiful, at least on the outside. The inside is a different story, and one she should learn to hide better. Being a bitch might work out well in some industries, but not this one. Everyone talks, and the talk about Alicia White is rarely good. It makes me realize that I could never be an agent: I’d only want to represent nice people.
Something niggles me, and I feel the need to rewind, not just reset myself. I reach down into the bin and retrieve the ball of crumpled print, flattening the image of Alicia with my palm. I stare at her face, her eyes, her bright red lips. Then I read the final question and answer in the piece and feel physically sick.
What three items of makeup can you not leave the house without?
That’s easy! Mascara, eyeliner, and my Chanel Rouge Allure lipstick.
The name of the lipstick is not new to me. It’s branded in my brain, written in indelible ink inside my mind; it’s the lipstick I found under my marital bed when I got back from filming last year.
Did Alicia White sleep with my husband?
The first assistant director summons me with a knock on the door, I screw Alicia’s face into an even tighter ball and throw her back in the bin before following him outside. We make polite small talk as the golf buggy trundles around the lot. He’s still young and worries about things he won’t when he is older, the way we all did before we knew what life really had in store. I listen to his tales of woe, interjecting the occasional sympathetic word, as we drive along at less than twenty miles an hour. I enjoy the light breeze in my face, and the smell of paint and sawdust that lingers in the air around every film set. It makes me feel at home.
The designers spend months building whole new worlds, then tear them down as though they never were when filming is over. Just like a breakup, only more physical and less damaging. Sometimes it’s hard saying goodbye to the characters I become. I spend so long with them that they start to feel like family, perhaps because I don’t have a real one. My anxiety levels are at an all-time high by the time the buggy turns the final corner. I haven’t rehearsed for today the way I normally would, there just wasn’t time. The traffic of worrying thoughts has come to a standstill in my mind, as though it were rush hour up there, and I’m stuck somewhere I don’t want to be.
We stop outside our final destination: an enormous warehouse that contains most of the interior film sets for Sometimes I Kill. I hesitate before going inside. My mind is so full of everything that is happening in my private life that for a moment I can’t even remember what scene we are shooting.
“Good, you’re here. I need you to deliver something special today, Aimee,” barks the director as soon as he sees me. “We need to believe that the character is capable of killing her husband.”
I feel a little bit sick. It’s as though I’m trapped inside a life-size joke.
I stand on the set of my fictional kitchen, waiting for my fictional husband to come home, and I see Jack smile at me before our first take.
Nobody is smiling by the twentieth.
I keep forgetting my lines, which never happens to me. I’m sure the rest of the cast and crew must hate me for it. I get to go home after this scene, but they don’t. The clapboard sounds, the director says, “Action,” again, and I do my best to get it right this time.
I pour myself a drink I’ll never swallow, then pretend to be surprised when Jack comes up behind me, slipping his arms around my waist.
“It’s done,” I say, turning to look up at him.
His face changes, in exactly the same way it did nineteen times before. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. It’s done. It’s taken care of.” I raise the glass to my lips.
He takes a step back. “I didn’t think you were actually going to do it.”
“He wouldn’t give me what I wanted, but I know that you will. I love you. I want to be with you, nobody else is going to get in the way of that.”
The word “Cut” echoes in my ears, and I can tell from the look on the director’s face that I’ve nailed it this time. As soon as he’s watched the scene back, I’ll be free to go.
I’m chatting to Jack outside in the sunshine when the golf buggy reappears in the distance on the lot. I don’t think anything of it at first, just carry on talking about the time frame for postproduction. But then my eyes find something familiar about the shape of the woman being driven towards us.
This cannot be happening.
Detective Alex Croft is wearing a smile wider than I thought her tiny face could support. The vehicle comes to a halt right in front of us and she climbs out, beaming. Her unsmiling sidekick jumps off the backward-facing rear seat, smoothing down his trousers as though sitting down has caused an upsetting crease.
“Thank you,” Detective Croft says to the driver, “and thank you,” she adds, in my direction.
“What for?” I ask.
“I have always, always wanted to drive around a film studio on a buggy, and now I have! All thanks to you! Is there somewhere we can talk?”
“This is a closed set,” says the director, joining us just when I didn’t think things could get any worse. “I don’t know who you are, but you can’t be here.”
She smiles. “This is my badge and it means that I can. So sorry, I forgot to introduce myself with all the excitement and stardust. My name is Detective—”