Chapter 31 #2
When she awoke the next morning, her head throbbed with the discomfort of a broken night’s sleep.
Her shoulders were stiff from tossing and turning.
As she examined the day ahead she felt her mood sour.
Today she was due at Fallen for another day of pre-production meetings and wardrobe fitting: a full day of embodying Estella Grant, when all she wanted right now was to escape her clutches entirely.
What use was Estella cutting her loose when Ellie still ate, drank and breathed her?
She stumbled out into the kitchen to grab a cup of the coffee she could smell brewing.
She was looking forward to a bit of familial comfort, the distraction of her sister’s sass and her nephew’s sweet goofiness, only to find neither.
Zara looked exasperated and Arthur sat stony-faced at the table, his phone in hand.
“Can you just eat, please?” Zara sighed at her son. “You need to be at the bus stop in ten minutes.”
“This is rank,” Arthur protested, pushing away his regular bowl of Weetbix. “Kyle has eggs for breakfast every day. We should be eating more protein.”
“You’re being rude, and eggs are expensive,” Zara said tightly. “And your mother is a shift worker. I’m not cooking you eggs every day when you can pour yourself a bowl of cereal.”
Arthur pushed back his chair and got to his feet. “Typical. You don’t give a shit about what I need.” He stormed out the room, ignoring Zara as she yelled after him to come back. Ellie winced and held up her hand to stop Zara in her tracks, then followed after her nephew down the hall.
She found him in his room, angrily shoving his laptop in his schoolbag and heading for the front door. “Woah, slow down kiddo, what’s gotten into you?”
“I’m going to be late. Leave me alone.” He pushed past her roughly and pulled the door open.
“Arthur—” she reached out to stop him and he wrenched his arm free.
“Forget it!” He flounced to the front gate and she watched him all the way down the street to the corner where the school bus would stop.
She stayed, keeping him in view until the bus arrived, leaning on the gate and feeling stung.
She remembered his meltdowns as a toddler, or his floods of exhausted tears when he first started school.
Kids could feel monstrous at times; maybe this was just what teenage hormones were like?
God knows Ellie hadn’t exactly been a dream herself.
“Christ almighty,” said Zara glumly when Ellie came back down the hall. “Spare me from the next five years.”
“He’s a good kid.” Ellie couldn’t help defending him. “Puberty sucks.”
“Kyle sucks,” Zara said. “Don’t know who the kid is, but he’s all Arthur talks about since school started back. Apparently, he’s into building muscle. He’s fourteen.”
“Yikes.” Ellie’s hackles went up. “I read an article about teenage boys and body dysmorphia a while back. It said they’re abusing steroids earlier and earlier—”
“Jesus, Ellie stop!” her sister cried. “I can’t do this right now! He’s not using fucking steroids, he’s just being a crabby kid who needs to go to sleep earlier and not stay up on his goddamn phone. Can you please not give me another thing to worry about this morning?”
“Okay. Fine. Sorry.” Ellie was being stung by everyone this morning, but she tried to hide her annoyance.
Her sister got this way sometimes, all sharp edges and tension.
Ellie poured the remains of her coffee into a to-go cup and went to get dressed.
Spending the day impersonating a woman who no one would mess with suddenly felt infinitely more appealing.
Still, Ellie couldn’t quite shift her sense of responsibility when it came to her sister and her nephew.
Those roles had been blurred since the beginning, when Ellie was in drama school in Sydney and came home to her share-house one evening to find her sister was sitting on the doorstep, after a 12 hour bus ride from Melbourne, seventeen and pregnant.
Ellie was nineteen but had felt forty ever since.
The two of them had figured it out together, their mum’s reaction something akin to a shrug.
Ellie, Zara and baby Arthur had lived together for three years, all the roles blurring while Ellie scored her first acting job on Australia’s favourite soap opera, and Zara found her feet as a new mum.
Ellie tried to tell herself that it was good, it was growth, it was right, when Zara moved back to Melbourne with Arthur, having met a guy online who wanted to give them the world.
Her heart just about broke, kissing Arthur’s little chubby cheeks goodbye, but after all, she was his aunt, not his mother.
Within six months the dream had crumbled, the guy in question deciding parenthood wasn’t really for him.
Ellie and Zara’s mum declined to help out, making it clear that Zara had made her own bed, and besides, she had a plane to catch to Thailand.
Arthur had finally settled into preschool, and so, Ellie, afraid for her sister’s crumbling mental health, had quit the soap opera and headed back to Melbourne.
It might not have been the best career move for an aspiring actor, but she’d never regretted it.
Zara had eventually gotten back on her feet and Ellie got to stick close while her nephew grew.
She was the best kind of aunty, she figured.
One that was always around, but who you could tell anything.
With all that playing over in mind, Ellie sighed to herself but didn’t return to her blessedly peaceful apartment that night, going back to Zara’s again so she could figure out what the hell was going on.
She shared a glass of wine with her sister after Arthur had gone to bed.
Zara looked tired and drained. “So, I asked Arthur to invite Kyle over,” Zara told her, “cos I really want to meet this kid. Arthur told me there was no way. Apparently, he’s embarrassed that I’m a single mother, that we live in a rental and that I’m a quote, ‘shift worker,’ which apparently is a dirty word.
The kid’s in a state school,” she said glumly.
“It’s not like he’s surrounded in rich kids.
I’m not sure when my very existence became a humiliation he had to bear. ”
Ellie could see how hard her sister was trying. “All kids think their parents are embarrassing at some point,” she soothed her. “It’s just a gross phase. I’ll chat to him.”
Ellie strategically volunteered to drive Arthur to school the next morning, and on the way there, she tried to press him on it, to figure out what was going on.
“Women aren’t supposed to have to work, though,” he groaned.
Ellie blinked rapidly, unsure she’d heard what she thought she’d heard.
“Mum should really be at home, taking care of me, since that’s her literal job?
She should have a husband, so she doesn’t have to worry about money, but she won’t get one.
It’s embarrassing, okay? Kyle’s mum hasn’t worked since he was born, and she at least still cares about being pretty—”
Ellie almost crashed the car in her haste to make the words stop.
“Arthur! Where in the world is this coming from? You’ve been surrounded by working women your whole damn life.
It’s why you have a roof over your head!
” Her mouth hung open, entirely lost at the shock of his new world views.
“Not to mention I’m gay, so how’s me not having a job supposed to work? Do I need a husband too?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Arthur muttered, though his face had gotten red. He looked confused or perhaps like he was holding something back that he badly wanted to say. They were almost at the school drop-off zone, kids in the same uniform all flooding in the gates.
“Kiddo,” she said quickly, even as she slowed the car, trying to figure out how to reach this new version of her nephew. “I remember what it’s like when your friends are everything. But you’re all just kids. Kyle doesn’t know any better than anyone else, you know this right?”
“You don’t even know him,” Arthur said, his eyes fixed out the window, dying to escape.
“I know,” Ellie said. “But maybe it’s a good idea to make more friends? Like, maybe also some girls in the mix? Just to make sure you’re getting to hear different points of view.”
The car stopped, and Arthur grabbed the door handle instantly. “Oh sure,” he said tightly as he leapt from the car. “You want me to be a simp? That’ll go really well for me in Year Nine.” He shut the door in her face and walked away, not looking back.
Ellie’s eyes stung. She watched his long gangly limbs and the vulnerable back of his neck as he joined the throng of teenagers entering the school.
She didn’t even know what a simp was. She put the car into gear and drove on, trying desperately to reassure herself that teenage angst was normal, that Arthur was a good kid, that he’d find his way eventually.
She’d talk to Zara again, and they’d figure out how to reach him.
It was going to be okay, of course it was.
It was late by the time she finally headed for home.
The day had been kind of fun; meeting with wardrobe was one of her favourite parts of getting to impersonate a character.
In a sick kind of way getting to dress like Estella made her feel like she still got to be close to the woman.
It felt, at times, like the best kind of secret, sliding a slinky dress over her body and knowing exactly what the real Estella had looked like deliberately sliding her dress up.
Then, Ellie imagined what Estella might feel in real life, watching Ellie on her screen in a dress she all but spilled out of. Would it turn her on?
The thought that maybe now, all things considered, Estella might not watch the show at all darkened her mood all over again.
She would. Surely she wouldn’t be able to help herself.
Because by then, Ellie would be a distant memory.
That was even less comforting to contemplate; Estella Grant smirking to herself at the thought she’d once fucked the actress who’d played her on TV, with no more weight to the memory than a bit of fun, while all the while Ellie would be even more wound up in her.
Because the series hadn’t even started filming yet.
She had so many days ahead of her where Estella had to be all she thought about: reading a script about her life, learning lines to say in Estella’s voice, embodying her for the cameras over and over again.
And then, after that would come all the post-production publicity, photo shoots, interviews…
how long would Estella Grant haunt her life? Would Ellie ever escape her clutches?
When the day ended, she and Sophie had gone out for dinner and drinks.
She’d warned Soph about Jimmy Jenkins, and the two had made a pact to look out for every single woman on set.
Sophie told Ellie about how she’d tried again, fruitlessly, to contact Alison Hartmann, to try to gain if not her blessing for the portrayal, but just to tentatively reach out, to see if a door there might ever creak open.
Alison had once tried to sue Fallen to prevent the series going ahead, and Sophie was under no illusions that Alison would ever respond to her overtures.
She didn’t feel great about it, but hell, a great role was a great role.
It was the closest Ellie had come to spilling the beans on her experience with Estella, but she recalled Hugo’s concerned censure when she’d told him about it, and that was before Ellie had crossed the ultimate line and had sex with the woman she was studying.
She couldn’t bring herself to breathe a word of it to her colleague, already anticipating the shock and worry in her friend’s eyes, especially because there wasn’t a single word Ellie could say in her own defence. It was, after all, indefensible.
She got out of the Uber across the road from her apartment block.
She had absolutely no urge to spend the night at Zara’s tonight.
God, sometimes it was such a guilty relief that Arthur wasn’t her own child.
Ellie couldn’t wait for a relaxing bath, maybe in candlelight, then to curl up in her peaceful, neat, tidy apartment and make her own coffee in the morning where no one would bother her. What a dream and a privilege…
She crossed the dark street and ducked between two parked cars to get to her building entrance.
She found herself colliding with a body coming the other way and had just enough time to recoil in surprise at the heft of him, the scent of the strong cologne naggingly familiar in her nose, the word sorry, right on her lips even as she felt a sharp blow to the side of her head.
She took a heavy hit to the stomach that bent her in half and tasted a mouthful of blood before the whole world went black.