Beth
Beth
The first play she’s been offered since she officially moved back to the UK is a comedy. Not her usual thing but it felt like fate – for her to be doing something more upbeat for once.
She won’t be playing a lead role, but she has admired both the writer and the director for a while, and she likes the idea of doing something less pressured.
Even if her agent Zoe doesn’t agree.
‘I think it’s a step backwards,’ she says. ‘But it’s your career, Beth.’
She couldn’t quite face doing another TV show – early mornings and late nights and not seeing anyone outside of the production for months on end. Life’s tough working down the tinsel mines, as they say. It’s true – it’s not exactly hard labour but it is exhausting on so many levels. Isolating too.
‘I really liked the script,’ she argues, and Zoe shrugs her shoulders and tells her she’ll see what she can do.
A fortnight later, it’s her first day of rehearsals. They haven’t announced the cast yet, which is quite unusual, and she wonders if it’s because they don’t want all the attention to be on her, rather than the young male lead, who’s only a few years out of drama school.
She’s playing his counsellor. She counted last night – something she hasn’t done for years – and she only has thirty lines. She hardly appears at all in the first half.
They’re rehearsing in London for four weeks, before taking the play on a nine-month tour. She absolutely loves this time, right before a production starts. The sense of possibility and excitement in the air.
She’s early for rehearsals and so she heads to the little coffee shop on the South Bank she remembers from when she used to go to the Globe all the time.
She has half an hour to kill. So she does something that’s becoming a rather shameful habit: she looks up Nick’s new girlfriend on Instagram.
Nick is now on Instagram too. His account is full of pictures of soil and plant tubers and other random bits of horticulture, but every time he uploads a photograph – which is almost every day at the moment – she gets a notification and she loves it. Every time he posts, it’s a gentle reminder that he’s doing OK, that he’s out there, living his best life, as the parlance goes.
Kate’s Instagram isn’t quite as curated. Her page is a messy blur of nights out with friends, interspersed with pictures of nature.
As Beth flicks through her photographs, she can’t help thinking that if they met, she would like her.
She also can’t help thinking that Kate seems good for Nick. The kind of girl he should be with. Light-hearted, optimistic, free.
She smiles, her finger tapping back on Nick’s own profile. Absentmindedly, she clicks on the right-hand tab, the one that shows all the pictures Nick’s been tagged in.
There are plenty of him and Kate and a bunch of other people she presumes are fellow students on his gardening course. But one picture stands out, catching her attention.
Uploaded just yesterday.
Nick, with his arm around a woman with black curly hair.
A woman it takes her a few seconds to recognise.
A woman who was once a girl. A girl who turned away from Beth, who pushed her away at the loneliest time in her life.
Her eyes read the caption, once, twice, three times, her heart racing, stopping her brain from being able to fully assimilate what it says.
Lovely to catch up with this dude in Greenwich today. Parker, you know will always have a special place in my heart. Love you man x
It’s only when she reads it for a fourth time that she finally understands what it says. She drops the phone on the table.
She should ask him, she knows. Why are they so close? How are they so close? Why would Rosa say that Nick will always have a special place in her heart?
One question hurts her most of all. Why does Rosa feel so warmly towards Nick, when her feelings towards Beth are so cold?
And why were they together yesterday, on the anniversary of the fire? Why that day of all days?
But she can’t ask him.
She can’t ask him, because she knows that, deep down, she’s still not strong enough to cope with the answer.