Chapter 9 Cynthie
“Oh my god, what have you done to your hair?” The woman in front of me stands with her mouth open, eyes wide in a mask of horror.
The wave of optimism comes crashing down.
I lift a hand to the back of my neck, brushing the short, unruly strands. “Er… I had it cut.” I wince.
She steps forward, and I’m enveloped in a cloud of her perfume, which smells delicious. She flicks her own, beautiful curtain of flame-red hair away from her shoulders. “Tell me the truth.” Her voice lowers, her tone hushed. “This is a safe space. Did you do this yourself?”
“No!” My eyes widen. “A hairdresser did it.”
The woman sucks in a sharp breath. “They should be fired!”
“I wasn’t aware that hairdressers could be fired?” I manage. “I thought that was a thing that happened to… um… doctors?”
“Well, we should start doing it. This monster should never be allowed to wield scissors again.”
That seems a little extreme. Hannah, sitting in the corner with her beloved binder in her lap, makes a sound that is suspiciously close to a snigger.
The trailer we are in is currently located around the back of Alveston Hall, but tomorrow it will move—along with everything else—to the National Trust property where we’re doing the first lot of filming.
I thought I was here for a hair and makeup test, but it seems it’s just one more stop on Cynthie’s tour of humiliation.
“Patty!” the man beside the horrified woman says in a soft, northern accent. “You’re scaring her!”
He smiles sweetly at me from underneath a crop of bleached blond hair.
“Don’t mind my friend.” He gestures at Patty, who is staring at my fringe like it’s a war crime.
“She’s very passionate about her work. I am too…
just in a less terrifying way. I’m Liam.
” He leans behind himself and plucks a makeup brush from the counter.
“I’m doing your makeup, and Patty—as I’m sure you’ve worked out—does hair. ”
Patty and Liam are probably a handful of years older than me and Hannah.
Patty is all sharp angles, tattoos, flame-red hair, and perfect eyeliner, wearing black leather trousers, and a David Bowie T-shirt.
She emits a vibe that is frighteningly cool.
Liam looks like a gorgeous cherub, apple-cheeked, blue-eyed, dressed head to toe in white and radiating goodwill.
I wonder if they have coordinated as some sort of double act on purpose: if ever there were to be a devil and an angel on your shoulder, here they are live and in person.
Patty reaches out her hand and takes mine in a firm grip.
“I promise you,” she says, murder in her eyes, “I will find the person who did this to you. I will make them pay.”
“All right, Mr. Neeson.” Liam nudges her in the shoulder. He turns to me, sympathy all over his pretty face. “I expect it was a bad breakup, was it?”
I would love for this conversation to end.
“No, no breakup,” I say, tucking my much-maligned hair behind my ear.
“Honestly? This is my first real acting job and I’m totally out of my depth.
I thought if I got a sophisticated haircut, it would make me feel…
more together. Only that was a disaster, and actually this whole thing has been a disaster, and I am very, very worried that I’m about to single-handedly bring down an entire movie, probably destroying several careers and bankrupting multiple studios in the process. ”
My breath is coming fast now, and I feel perilously close to tears.
“Well, fuck,” Patty says after a moment. “I guess I’d better fix your hair, then.”
“You poor thing.” Liam nudges me toward the chair between them, the one facing the mirror.
“Why don’t you tell us all about it? You wouldn’t believe the problems that get fixed in here…
I swear the UN only needs a hair and makeup department, and the world would be sorted like that. ” He clicks his fingers.
I sink into the chair and Patty brandishes her scissors.
“Sophisticated.” She tilts her head, frowns in concentration.
“I can do that. And the good news is you’re wearing wigs on-screen, so shorter is actually more manageable.
” She gestures to the shelf behind her, which holds half a dozen wigs arranged on mannequin heads. “Go on then, give us the whole story.”
So I do. I tell them I’m a waitress without so much as an A-level in drama, that acting has been my dream as long as I can remember, that I scrimped and saved for a six-week acting class, signed up for every amateur society I could.
I tell them about the casting call and the audition, about the table read and what I heard Jack say.
I tell them about the argument we had afterward, about the week of rehearsals and how anxious I am, and all the time, they fuss over me, playing with my hair, smearing my face with delicious-smelling lotions. Liam takes my hands and massages them.
They make sympathetic noises, and gasp and laugh at all the right places.
“Sounds like Jack is a right monster,” Liam says with a loyalty I’m not sure I’ve earned.
“Not surprising.” Patty pauses in her snipping and leans forward over my shoulder. “I worked with his mother once—my god, what a nightmare. I hear his dad’s the same.”
“Incredible actors, though,” I murmur.
“Oh, of course,” Patty agrees, turning her attention back to her work. “But that’s part of the problem if you ask me: so much bad behavior in this business gets put down to artistic temperament.” She scoffs. “They call it genius; I call it being a dickhead.”
“Was Caroline Turner really awful then?” Hannah asks, obviously delighted by this bit of A-list Hollywood gossip.
Patty rolls her eyes. “Oh god, yes. Nothing was good enough for her. She had a rider that was like a copy of Ulysses . A thousand pages long and made about as much sense.”
“A rider?” I ask.
“Oh, sweets!” Liam coos. “You have to have one! It’s the list of demands the talent make… you know, like ‘I must have a thousand rare orchids arranged in the shape of my beloved dead Pekinese, Alfred, or I can’t possibly work.’?”
“Ah.” I nod. “I think Gayle asked me about that. I said some tap water would be great.”
Patty lets out a bark of laughter.
Liam shakes his head. “We need to work on that. At least ask for a set of crystals—rose quartz for sure, maybe amethyst. When they’re fully charged they’ll help with all this anxiety and negative energy.”
“How do you charge a crystal?” Hannah asks, perplexed.
“ You don’t charge them, silly,” Liam replies, dabbing something shimmery along my cheekbones. “The moon does.”
“Forget moon crystals,” Patty advises. “Go straight for the hard liquor and personal masseuse.”
“You love a Mars bar,” Hannah supplies helpfully.
“Maybe you could ask for some of those. Oh! Or how about crisps and bread so we can have crisp sandwiches like we used to make when we got home from school? You can probably even have branded ones. Oh my god! You can probably ask for Kettle Chips. I bet film stars eat Kettle Chips all the time .”
While crisp sandwiches are an elite snack, I don’t think her suggestions are striking a very worldly, sophisticated note. I wonder what’s on Jack’s rider… Probably a giant pyramid of Ferrero Rocher and gold-plated underpants.
“Anyway,” I say, steering the conversation back on track, and my mind away from Jack Turner-Jones’s underwear, “you were saying about Jack’s parents…” I can’t help my curiosity—after all the pair of them did manage to spawn Satan himself.
“Oh, yeah.” Patty shrugs. “It just sounds like the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. They’re both incredibly rude. You can tell a lot about a person by how they treat the crew on a film set, and Caroline Turner treated everyone like dirt on her Jimmy Choos.”
“Patty,” Liam chides, “you’re not being very discreet.”
“It’s not like it’s a secret,” Patty exclaims. “Everyone knows that they’re terrible.
At this point there are about a hundred books and documentaries and an Emmy Award–winning mini-series about the two of them behaving outrageously.
If you ask me, Caroline enjoyed playing up to the image of the demanding diva. ”
“We haven’t met Jack yet,” Liam puts in, “but obviously we’re already Team Cyn.”
“We should get T-shirts,” Hannah says. “And then we should wear them in front of him.”
I feel something loosen in my chest. God, this is nice. To feel safe and comfortable and to remember that I am a normal human who doesn’t have any trouble making friends. This weird standoff with Jack has clearly thrown me off-balance in more ways than one.
“Of course, the real problem is that the man is so gorgeous he can get away with anything,” Patty says now.
“Boooooo!” Hannah jeers.
“Hey, buddy.” Patty gestures to her with her scissors. “A fact is a fact. He may be a terrible human, but at least it should be no hardship staring at his face all day.”
“You’d think,” I mutter.
“Patty has absolutely awful taste in men,” Liam confides.
“That is true,” Patty agrees easily. “The worse they are, the better I like them.”
“Then you’re going to love Jack,” I grumble.
“The guy she just broke up with…” Liam shudders dramatically.
“Hey!” Patty interjects. “Brian wasn’t that bad.”
Liam catches my eye in the mirror. “Brian had an un-ironic goatee and drove a hearse.”
“A hearse?” I repeat blankly. “As in an actual hearse? Like for funerals?”
“He won it in a bet,” Patty hums, stepping in front of me and leaning in to snip my fringe, “and you know what, you could park that thing anywhere without getting a ticket, and no one ever cut you off in traffic. I’ve never known drivers in London to be so respectful.
Sure… he can only drive twenty miles an hour, but he said he’d never go back to a normal car now. ”
“That is so wrong.” Liam shakes his head as the rest of us burst into laughter.
“Anyway,” Patty says once we’ve recovered. “The question is, after the way he’s behaved… how are we going to even the score with Jack Turner-Jones?”
“What do you mean?” I ask, interested despite myself.
Patty puckers her lips. “Well, I’ve got four brothers, so if you want to talk pranks then I’m your girl. Prank wars on set are a time-honored tradition. George Clooney is an absolute menace.”
I groan. “I would love that,” I say, “but unfortunately, I think I need to try being super professional and mature. Even if he is despicable.”
“Take the high road, babe.” Liam nods. “Karma will get him in the end, anyway.”
“All I’m saying is that sometimes karma needs a helping hand,” Patty replies. “Now”—she steps back—“what do you think?”
I look in the mirror, and my mouth falls open. “How did you do that?” I ask.
“I’m a witch,” she replies, and I’m not sure she’s joking.
It certainly seems possible, because my hair is no longer a tragic disaster, but a very cute pixie cut that makes my eyes look enormous and my cheekbones razor-sharp. Although, that could also be down to Liam and his magic potions.
“Not many people have the bone structure to pull this look off.” Patty eyes me critically in the mirror. “But you have a great face.”
“I’ll say,” Liam chimes in. “The cupid’s bow! The eyes! It’s going to be a dream on camera. You’re definitely giving Audrey Hepburn.”
Once more I’m embarrassed to find myself blinking away tears. “Sorry!” I say mistily, “I know it’s silly, but I feel so much better. At least I won’t be walking around looking like a disaster. One less thing to worry about.”
“It doesn’t sound silly at all.” Patty is brisk.
“There’s a lot of power in what we do, and from now on Liam and I have your back, okay?
” Her hand closes on my shoulder. “Now, let’s have a look at these wigs.
We’ll get them on and style them and take some Polaroids for Jasmine to look over.
She and Logan are already running around like headless chickens.
You’d think having two directors would mean they’d each have half the workload, but I swear the two of them can’t agree on anything. ”
“I want to try a deeper color on the lip,” Liam muses. “We’ve obviously got to keep things natural, but I think more of a rose shade could work.”
“Mmm.” Patty tips her head to the side, observing my reflection with a clinical detachment. “Yes, and don’t you think the darker wigs will be better for contrast?”
As Patty and Liam chat details, I catch Hannah’s eye in the mirror, and she’s beaming.
You look beautiful , she mouths.
So do you , I mouth back. And just like that, it feels like everything is right with the world again.