Chapter Nine #2
‘Super,’ says Ana. (Our mics are on again.) ‘Then let’s go.’
I take my position at the tea counter.
Nick takes his at the set door.
‘Action,’ Ana calls.
And, unlike last night, Nick says nothing.
But, as I hear him open the door behind me, and feel the weight of his gaze on my back, I do set my cup down on the counter.
Then, chin to my shoulder, I tilt my head in his direction.
I still can’t see him, and for a second more, I wait, stilled by the energy that shoots, like thousands of arrows, through my skin. I pull a slow breath on the sensation, transported to how I felt in front of Iris’s mirror, and her window, when I saw those impossible things.
Vaguely, I’m aware of myself moving, turning to face Nick properly.
Our eyes lock, the camera, lights and crew receding, and I think of Robbie, whose carved name I traced on that cold wooden post. I feel the engraving still, imprinted on my skin.
I picture Robbie, his face on the cover, present pixelating with past, only not static, but alive: his smile filling Nick’s smile; his eyes in Nick’s eyes.
The vividness of the illusion dizzies me.
The memory of that face I saw beneath mine in Iris’s mirror, dizzies me.
The thought of that flare path, and those planes, the voices in the attic, and the laughter in the woods, does.
I have no idea where it’s all coming from.
And I can no longer subdue my fear.
It petrifies me, how uncontainable my own mind seems so suddenly to have become.
But, in a blink, Nick becomes Nick again, looking at me with his eyes that are puffy, and tired, and the wrong colour, but snapping with a love that, just like the vibrations of sensation in my skin, feels too true to be a pretence.
I realise I don’t want it to be a pretence.
I want to believe that he isn’t acting, that he hasn’t strayed, but loves me, me, as much as he says he still does.
I need, very much, to trust that he still can.
That revelation dizzies me, too.
Everything does: me, him, the doubt and silence straining the air between us, and my growing confusion over whether this love I see in him now is genuine, or Oscar-worthy.
He takes a step towards me.
I remain rooted to the spot.
It’s every one of my dreams, all over again.
He draws breath, and even though I know the words that are coming, I still bite my lip, waiting for them.
He smiles.
He knows what I’m doing.
For a beat more, he leaves me waiting.
For that beat, we remain us.
I still remain me.
Then, in a voice that is low, and husky, no hint of Montana, Nick lets the words go.
‘Hello, Clarence,’ he says.
And, as my world spins again, I feel my cheeks move in a smile to match his, but it’s not my smile.
My hammering heart is not my heart.
I don’t think about that though.
I don’t consider anything I do.
Because I’m in.
I’m finally in.
Hello, Clarence.
I’m all Iris, now.
I have no sense of the scene passing.
I don’t think of it as a scene.
Caught up in the heady, giddy joy of this miracle that isn’t mine, but feels completely like it is, I live rather than act this reunion with Nick, who’s Robbie, and could go on doing it with him for hours.
But we don’t have hours.
We have a minute.
Just a minute before Ana calls, ‘Cut,’ wrenching us out of it.
It’s too short.
As I jolt back to reality, I’m left with a certain sense of having been forced from a conversation that was far from over.
I’m still looking at Nick, who’s back by the set door, which he was just about to leave through.
See you in the morning, was what I was meant to have said to him.
‘Don’t do anything stupid now, will you?’ is what actually came out.
So, we’ll have to clear that with Imogen, too.
No one seems to mind, though.
Nick’s grinning at me. And I’ve just heard Ana telling Naomi to circle what we’ve done, so know she must be pleased too.
We won’t go another time.
We really have done this in a single take.
Bam.
Filling my cheeks with air and letting it go, I look around at the crew, who appear pretty jubilant themselves: some of the Americans exchanging celebratory high-fives; a couple of Brits running to an awkward one.
My legs feel weak, like I’ve stepped from a keeling ship back onto solid ground.
I swallow, fighting to reorientate myself in reality.
It’s not a completely unfamiliar struggle; this is hardly the first time I’ve felt the lines blur on set.
I’ve spoken in scores of interviews about how consumed I can become by my character whilst filming.
It’s what Mum’s taken to calling my escape route, a fresh golden ticket to a different mind, a different world, which isn’t entirely unfair.
But it’s also at least fifty per cent bullshit.
Because I’ve never actually left behind who I am before, however much I might have wanted to.
Not like I just did.
So, god, has my need to escape become so intense that my mind is now quite genuinely giving in, giving way, and setting me loose?
Is that what all these illusions, these hallucinations, have been about?
The idea horrifies me.
It’s too wild.
Too uncontrollable.
I don’t want to be set loose.
I return my attention to Nick, and don’t want to escape him.
Was it just an act earlier when he was looking at me the way he was?
I wish he’d look at me again so I could be sure, but he’s been descended on by Ines, with her drops, and Jeff, who’s slapping him on the back.
I turn from him, turn from them all, and catch Ana’s thumbs up from over by the camera. She really is happy.
Everyone’s so happy.
I want to be, too.
All I want is to be happy.
But I’m just so, so scared.
Sad, too, broken-hearted actually, for Iris and Robbie.
Because revelatory as it was to be swept up in their elation just now – to be immersed, however fleetingly, in the delirium of their love story, rather than feeling so battered by my own – it’s beyond awful to remember that their story, their beautiful story, ended so very quickly.
And although I don’t know how that happened, what I feel suddenly quite certain of, with a clarity that spikes through my panic, fear and grief, is that Imogen’s version of events is, most definitively, wrong.
Iris couldn’t have been responsible for them all dying.
I won’t believe it.
Not of her.
Not of the person I just felt.
I bite the insides of my cheeks, and don’t want any of them to have died at all.
They must have, though.
They really all must have.
Yet, as my mind moves back outside, to the dark woods, I picture Iris and Robbie together, full of fragile hope in their old cottage – not as it is now, but as it must have been then – and cannot make peace with the idea that they simply vanished.
I can’t accept the defeatism of Imogen’s author’s note that the truth about what happened belongs to them, and them alone.
Because it surely has to be lurking somewhere still, doesn’t it?
I stand straighter.
I’m right. I know I’m right.
Truth doesn’t vanish.
It just gets hidden.
And, in a rush, it comes to me how much I want to uncover this truth.
I don’t pause to unpick my motive, or consider whether it’s about clearing Iris’s name, or my own curiosity, or simple desperation for another of Mum’s golden tickets: a distraction, any distraction, from everything else I’m too terrified to think about.
I just know that doing this will help me, because I’ll have no peace until I’ve uncovered what really happened to Iris, Robbie, and the rest of Mabel’s Fury’s crew.
The task feels overwhelming.
I have no idea how I’m going to manage it.
But, with a fresh shot of adrenalin, I realise where I should start.
Or rather, with whom I should start.
Tim Hobbs, of course.
Tim, who’s claimed to have forgotten so much of his crew’s last hours, including who took that photograph of them all, but who I now know from Imogen has misremembered plenty about his recollections in the past.
Tim, who’s a hundred years old, and living in a nursing home in York.
Tim, who here and now, under these burning studio lights – on this Hollywood set of a very real world that he himself walked and breathed – I resolve I need to visit.
Just as soon as I can.
Assuming, of course, that he’ll let me.