Chapter Eight
I’m on my own most of the morning. Emma remains in her room, sipping Dioralyte and popping antibiotics, whilst everyone else is busy shooting.
I don’t go down to the set to watch. I’m pretty glad to have this reprieve from it all.
And although I do drop in to check on Emma, I don’t stay with her long, because it’s obvious how much she needs to sleep.
‘Call me if you need anything,’ I tell her as I leave.
‘Ditto,’ she says. ‘And no beating yourself up, ok?’
I’ve filled her in on the mess that was yesterday. I didn’t plan to bother her with it, but she asked how it had gone, distract me, please, and, before I knew it, out most of it came. Not what happened at Iris’s window (I still can’t talk about that), but everything else.
‘Felix won’t stay mad,’ she assures me.
‘Won’t he?’ I say, with an uneasy frown.
You shut me out, he said. Turned so cold, so fast.
I truly haven’t remembered it like that. But now that I’ve gone back over it all through the lens of his words, it is looking … different. He was so great, all summer, and I was so devastated by the violation of those photos – appalled, like he said – that I think he probably is right.
I think I couldn’t look at him, after they broke.
We only had a few days of shooting left. I’m not sure I even said goodbye to him before I flew off.
I must have though.
Didn’t I?
‘I screwed up,’ I say, as much to myself as Emma.
‘You get a pass,’ she tells me. ‘Felix knows that. He’ll come round. And you’ll sort everything else out. But you could use some rest too. So, take it, yes?’
‘All right,’ I say, since she’s sick, and I want to placate her.
Rest isn’t on my agenda though.
I’ve got way too much to do.
First, walking back to my room, I pull out my phone, texting Felix before I can change my mind.
I never wanted to shut you out, and if I could do it all again differently, I would. I’m really sorry for you not talking to me for the past three months. I’m sorry for all of it. No excuses. I miss you.
Hitting send, I feel instantly lighter.
I have no idea how he’s going to respond. I hope Emma’s right, and that he’ll come round, but regardless, it’s such a relief to have taken this step back towards him.
My initial intention, when I reach the room, is to grab Nick’s car keys and drive to Heaton.
My grandparents didn’t live in the village itself – their house was just outside it, on one of those post-war estates built by the government to replace all the homes that had been destroyed by the bombing – but I’d obviously have been in and out all the time.
It might well even have been in Heaton that I used to visit Mrs Ellen with her jar of Rich Teas.
I can’t be sure, and haven’t asked Mum, knowing we’d only end up in another argument about Mrs Ellen’s existence.
What I am certain of is that I feel a whole bag of emotions at the prospect of returning there – apprehension, curiosity, anxiety – so don’t want to be doing it for the first time in costume, about to shoot.
I need to at least try and get my head straight first.
I’ve told Nick that I’m planning to go. Unlike the movie’s publicity department, he knows all about my past here, just like I know he was born and raised in Montana, by a mum called Lola and a dad called Brad, who are both great, and kind, and fun, and cried, happy tears, when we told them we were having a baby, and who I have no doubt cried again when Nick broke it to them that he now never will. At least, not with me.
Nick’s their only child. They still live in the house he grew up in, whereas I’ve never had one of those.
Mum did her best for us when she first brought me down to live in London; she was actually a bloody superhero, barely twenty-three, grieving her parents, and working full time in a law firm, before retraining in psychotherapy, all the while moving us from rental to rental, regrouping each time a landlord sold our flat, or hiked the rent too much, somehow always managing to keep me in the same school catchment.
She met Phil when I was nine, but I was fourteen before we moved in with him in Highgate.
Phil says convincing Mum to do that was the hardest he’s ever had to work at anything.
Mum’s told me she was scared of letting me depend on him, in case he vanished, like my father.
Which Phil of course never did. He’s been the kindest and best dad I could have hoped for; I’ve never felt like he’s loved or treated me any differently to Hannah or Lisa – neither of whom were born on a kitchen floor, but in the maternity wing of the Whittington.
They’ve asked me, over the years, about Mum’s parents, our grandparents: what they were like; what Mum was like, when they were around.
‘I’m not sure I really saw her that much,’ I’ve told them truthfully, and don’t blame Mum for that. Like I say, she did her best, and her best was pretty amazing.
I can’t remember much about the January afternoon that Nan and Grandad died, skidding on black ice, head on into a tractor, driving the three of us home from a trip to York.
I have no recollection of what we’d been doing in York, or the crash itself.
What I do recall, vividly, is that it was the tractor’s driver who extracted me from my backseat booster, with arms that shook, and blood pouring from his head.
‘You’re safe,’ he said, wrapping me in his coat. ‘Someone was watching over you.’
I didn’t have a scratch on me.
Everything’s hazy after that. I don’t know who called the ambulances, or how long it took them to appear, or whether I went alone to the hospital, or with the tractor driver.
Mum says a woman from social services looked after me while the hospital staff tracked her down.
It took them hours, apparently, and I’m not sure what I did while I waited for those hours to pass.
It’s all a blank until the moment Mum arrived, rushing into the room I was in, her pale face wet with tears.
She came straight to me, bundling me up to her, and hugged me for so long, and so tight, that in all I’ve forgotten, I’ve never forgotten that.
‘You mightn’t have forgotten much else either,’ said Mum the other night at dinner. ‘It could well be waiting, ready to resurface when you get back there.’ She turned to Nick, her expression imploring; scared, almost. ‘You will look after her, won’t you?’
‘If she’ll let me,’ said Nick.
‘I don’t need looking after,’ I said, and at the time, two hundred miles away in Highgate, I didn’t believe that I did.
I still don’t want to believe it.
Don’t want to be a worry.
But as I stand by Nick’s side of the bed, his keys in my hand, I discover I don’t want to go back to Heaton.
Not yet.
And maybe, actually, not alone.
Instead, I spend most of the morning down in Doverley’s empty dining room, resolutely not waiting for Felix to reply to my message, but parked at a table with my worn copy of The Bomber Boys novel, combing over the scene Nick and I massacred last night.
Because it hasn’t felt miraculously better for the light of a new day.
If anything, it feels worse, now I’m looking back at it: too fraught, and stiff, and overdone.
Can I please see it? I texted Ana, when I woke.
Nope, she replied.
So, it’s as bad as I think? I said.
Nothing’s as bad as you think, she told me, with a smiley emoji that did nothing to reassure me. Ana never uses emojis.
It’s definitively as bad as I think.
But no matter how many times I reread the passage in the novel, I can’t find anything there to help me work out how we should fix it.
There’s no dialogue – that much I already knew – but now I return to the pages, I realise there’s also weirdly a lot less description than I’ve held in my mind.
In my mind, this first meeting between Iris and Robbie has lived so vividly that it stuns me how sparing Imogen’s portrayal of it actually is.
The scene, like all of the novel, is written in Iris’s retrospective voice. She’s already dead – not that Imogen reveals that until the end of the book – and narrating what is in effect a novel-length letter of contrition to Robbie’s unreachable ghost.
When you said my name, it sent me still, she tells him.
As I met your stare, I saw you as you were, and a thousand other ways, too.
Present pixelated with past, and every moment we’ve known coursed through my mind.
It was a glorious show, but one that played out as a subtext, no match for the reality of you, there, with me …
I read on, skimming over the remaining couple of paragraphs – how Iris and Robbie start talking, then stop, because there’s too much to say, and don’t kiss, because they daren’t, not yet – and find myself frowning, irritated by how unconvinced I suddenly am by this now too.
Probably because I’m viewing it through the lens of my own and Nick’s stilted performance.
I throw the book down, stare at it for several seconds, then pick it back up, flicking to the author’s note.