Beth
Beth
She wakes to the sound of a phone ringing. A digital pip-pip-pip, not the solid, traditional ring.
She lifts her head from the pillow, frowning. The room is very, very dark. And then she remembers: she’s in Nick’s flat. In Nick’s bed.
Where is he?
A digital clock beside the bed tells her the time. Nearly 11 a.m.
‘Shit!’ she says, sitting up. Her brain scrambles to catch up. To work out what has happened.
Then she remembers it all: a rushing horror show of pictures from last night. Paulo, drunk and ranting. Paulo, spittle in his teeth as he threw the remote at the wall, smashing it in the process.
The pip-pip-pips subside. Whoever was calling, she has missed them. But then she hears something else: a clicking sound, followed by a voice. She can’t tell where it’s coming from.
It’s so dark in this room.
‘Hi, Beth, it’s me, just wanted to check you were OK. I think your phone has died. It went straight to voicemail. There’s a bunch of chargers in my bedside table. Anyway, call me when you get this. Bye.’
She can’t work out where the answer machine is, or how come she can hear it in this room that’s more like a cave.
She wanders in the direction of the window and wrenches aside the heavy black-out curtains. They are silk beneath her fingers. She wonders briefly how much this place must cost Nick to rent. Or does he own it?
The thought hadn’t occurred to her before. But it’s possible, isn’t it? He’s made a success of himself despite… everything.
Behind the curtain is a wall of window, revealing a floor-to-ceiling view of Canary Wharf. It’s vast, incredible, stretching all the way to Tower Bridge. She’s so high up it makes her feel dizzy. She leans a hand against the glass to steady herself, tries not to look down.
11 a.m.
She was meant to be doing something today. What was it again?
She has an audition! Just a commercial. A yoghurt ad, if she remembers rightly – but even so. The money is good.
She unearths her phone under the pile of clothes she left on a chair and, after throwing everything out from the small wheelie bag she brought with her, finds her charger too. She leaves the phone to charge while she goes into the bathroom and runs a brush through her hair, splashing water on her face and cleaning her teeth.
She doesn’t have time to think about last night. If she’s quick, she’ll make it to the audition. The page of script she needs to read is folded up in the bottom of her handbag, and she runs through the lines – all four of them – as she sits on the toilet.
Thick and creamy?
Organic and fat free?
You’re kidding!
It’s too good to be true.
She mimes taking a spoonful of yoghurt, widening her eyes at the imagined deliciousness of it.
She wants to cry. This is what it has come to: all her hopes and dreams. Years studying her craft. And now she has to pretend that she’s having an orgasm over a yoghurt. And the most depressing thing is that the pay for this ad is more than she has earned from acting all year.
She needs this job. Oh God, she really needs it.
Her stomach is rumbling as she goes through to the kitchen. Nick has tidied up; the surfaces are gleaming. He has always been fastidiously neat, a man of few possessions. Looking around this anonymous flat – actually, apartment feels like a more appropriate description – you’d be forgiven for thinking he didn’t actually live here at all.
Perhaps he spends most of his time elsewhere.
What was her name?
Celine.
She swallows, her cheeks flushing as the memory returns in waves. The pair of them last night, in the bathroom, him in his boxer shorts, her pulling him towards her and then the way he held her afterwards. As though she was his sister.
She shakes her head. She can’t allow these thoughts to flood in. Not now.
Intrusive thoughts. That’s what they are. But the more you fight them, the stronger they get.
‘Focus!’ she hisses, to herself.
She opens Nick’s fridge, in search of… She’s not sure exactly, but something to ease the ache of hunger. There’s some milk, butter, 90 per cent dark chocolate and, somewhat incongruously, a jar of raspberry jam. Three bottles of wine. One bottle of Mo?t.
‘Fuck it,’ she says, opening cupboards now, because surely he’ll have a tin of something? Baked beans, even. They would do. She will eat them cold if she can’t find a saucepan.
But the kitchen is tiny – just a cluster of glossy black units in the corner, and in the cupboards she finds only a long neglected mix of spices, and some coffee.
In one drawer, she unearths a small plastic bag of white powder. Her heart sinks a little.
Nothing to eat.
‘Jesus Christ, Nicholas,’ she says, trying to convince herself that she’s OK.
Trying to play a role in her own life, as she so often does. As if her life was a TV show, and she was the lead. Some kind of weird disassociation. She has never really got to the bottom of it.
She imagines a camera swooping above to look down on her. From nowhere, a voiceover begins in her ear. The voice belongs to that Hollywood man, the one who does all the trailers: slightly sardonic, booming in familiar deep tones:
It was another bad day for Beth. Alone, in Nick’s flat after she propositioned him – and was turned down. But little did Beth know, that the day was about to go from bad to worse…
It’s not funny. Stupid voice.
She goes back into the bedroom and yanks her phone out from the cable, hoping it has enough charge to see her through the day. Only then does she notice that Nick has left her a note, propped up on the tiny dining table.
The voice threatens to re-emerge, ready to narrate this surreal experience for an invisible audience, but she manages to silence it this time.
She picks up the note, and as she does so three ￡50 notes slide out and onto the floor.
She frowns, looking down at Nick’s scrawling handwriting.
Hey Beth, just in case you need it. I’ve left a key too. Call me when you wake up. Please don’t go back to him. You deserve better. You deserve The Best. Nx
PS if you want coffee then Black Sheep Coffee is the best. By the station.
She looks back at the table and sees the spare key there. The keyring is plastic, a bright green logo on one side and the words WHARF LETS on the other.
She squeezes the key in her hand, and then she picks up the ￡50s and folds them neatly in half.
She will pay him back one day. She tries to swallow the feeling that she’s gone from relying on one man to relying on another. She would do the same for him, anytime, if she was in a position to do so.
She takes a quick glance behind her, at Nick’s soulless, immaculate home, and then, with one last check that she has everything she needs, she leaves.
*
In the end, she only risks a takeaway coffee from Black Sheep. There are some issues on the Jubilee Line and she doesn’t have as much time as she thought to get to the rehearsal space for the audition.
Nick is right though: the coffee is good. Strong and hot. She has only recently started drinking coffee, having never particularly cared for it. But Paulo had insisted she try it and she wanted to please him because he was hard work when he wasn’t pleased.
On the train, she sips the coffee and looks over her lines, even though she’s been practising them all morning now, and there are only four, so it’s not exactly a MENSA challenge.
When the train pulls into Southwark, she gets her phone out and looks at it properly for the first time since she plugged it in to charge. The missed calls have already come through: twenty-one from Paulo, plus a flurry of texts.
He is so predictable. She feels sick at the thought of facing him again. She will have to do so at some point, but she can’t bear it. She just wants to run away. Now she knows how Nick felt.
The audition. She has to pull herself together.
She has to get this job.
If she can only get this job, then things will get better. She just knows it.