Chapter Ten
Miranda
It was a January afternoon, earlier in the year, when Bonnie first popped her head round Miranda’s dressing room door to introduce herself. ‘Hello,’ she’d said cheerfully. ‘I’m Bonnie.’ They’d been in the midst of a bleak spell, with sub-zero temperatures at night and brilliant glittering frost every morning, and Miranda’s first impression was of how wholesome Bonnie appeared, with her nose red from the cold, her cheeks flushed, a damson-coloured woolly hat flattening her hair. A sweet little chipmunk in human form, she’d thought as she smiled back politely.
‘Miranda,’ she replied. ‘Nice to meet you.’ As Amberley Emergency was a drama set in a hospital, there were new actors coming and going in each episode of the show and, although Miranda tried to be professionally pleasant to everyone, their names and faces tended to get dumped from her brain the second shooting was over.
The chipmunk had a dimple in one cheek when she smiled, and neat white teeth. ‘I’m soon to be your– or rather, Doctor Kelly’s– new worst enemy on the ward, gobby little Nurse Bell,’ she went on. ‘Ithought I’d drop by and say hi before we start tearing chunks out of each other in rehearsal tomorrow.’
Miranda laughed. She could always get on with women on a surface level, after all; it was just that none of them seemed to view her as best-friend material. (‘You can be quite. . . cold?’ her sister Imogen had once ventured after a few too many mulled wines one Christmas when Miranda drunkenly voiced her fears. ‘No, not cold,’ she’d amended rapidly, as Miranda blanched. ‘Brusque. Just a tiny bit brusque.’ Was it brusque to refuse to put up with people who annoyed her, though, or did that merely indicate high standards?) Whatever, Bonnie seemed inoffensive. Not a diva, not a whinger, not obsessive about weird things– and God knew the cast already had its fair share of that sort. (She had learned the hard way, for instance, always to steer clear of Sienna during Mercury retrogrades because she never shut up about it. Ditto Jason whenever a new series of Real Housewives dropped.)
As the weeks went by, Bonnie proved to be a step up from merely inoffensive. She was patient with Geoff’s perfectionist directing; collaborative and unstarry amidst her fellow actors, and fun to gossip with while they waited around backstage with vapes and coffees. The two of them were in page after page of scenes together, with Bonnie playing a new nurse who frequently clashed with Miranda’s doctor character, and Miranda was soon looking forward to their two-handers as being the best part of the week. When the episodes were broadcast, the public responded well to the chemistry between them too, and viewing figures rose steadily. Devotees of the show started to proclaim themselves tribally for TeamKelly or TeamBell on social media, and even neurotic Geoff managed an occasional ‘Well done’ or ‘Good work’.
Winter rolled into spring, and a friendship developed that saw the pair of them close out the long days on set with a glass or two of wine in one of the nearby bars after work. They messaged each other stupid jokes and cat gifs, formed in-jokes about their colleagues and took to confiding in one another. Bonnie would turn to Miranda for advice about her on-off boyfriend Harry and her scarily overbearing agent Stella, while Miranda poured her heart out, first about Ryan, the YouTuber she was seeing (loaded but loved himself), then Max the Championship footballer (sexy and fit but not the sharpest knife in the block). Then, when that fizzled out, she made the mistake of telling Bonnie about Felix, which was where everything started to go wrong. How could she have been so dumb?
‘Hi,’ comes a voice just then, and Miranda is dragged back into the present: Monday, Kefalonia; a quiet beach, far from prying eyes. That was what she’d hoped anyhow, but when she turns her head, it is to see that a woman with a jaunty blonde ponytail has appeared, seemingly from nowhere, and is now leaning over her sunlounger. They can find you anywhere, these people, she thinks, heart sinking.
‘It is you, isn’t it?’ the woman goes on. ‘I’m such a fan of the show! I’m like SO in love with Todd Collins! Can Ihave a selfie with you?’
‘Oh,’ says Miranda, who is wearing a bright orange bikini, and suddenly feels all too conscious of her pale rounded tummy and the amount of feta and wine she’s put away in there recently. ‘I’d rather you didn’t, to be honest, if—’
‘It’ll only take a minute,’ the woman says, already crouching down beside the sunlounger and holding up her phone. ‘My mum is going to be psyched about this!’ she goes on, seemingly oblivious to Miranda’s tense unwillingness to co-operate. ‘She absolutely loves Todd as well. Have you and Nurse Charlotte made up yet, by the way? What did she do anyway?’
‘Really– please– Ijust want some priv—’
Too late. No privacy allowed. The woman is tilting her head towards Miranda, so close that Miranda can smell her coconut sun oil, then she’s pouting into the camera, click click click, done. For fuck’s sake, thinks Miranda as the woman thanks her effusively then scuttles away to a cluster of sunloungers nearby, where a group of other women fall on her like jackals, wanting to see the results. She feels like pulling her towel over her head and leaving it there for the rest of the day. She should have worn the bloody wig, but it’s so hot today, and she was hoping to swim later, and. . . oh God. All she can think about is the images now on the woman’s phone and what she might do with them. Miranda really doesn’t want pictures of her frowning, arguing, looking a bit bulgy and sweaty in her bikini, popping up in social media feeds, being passed around, commented on, laughed at. It’s all a big joke to them, a bit of fun, but for Miranda it’s like having someone tear off yet another piece of her flesh. Now she can’t even get up and go for a swim for fear of the woman and her friends filming her getting in or out of the water in her bikini. Ididn’t know you could see whales in Kefalonia lol ,
she imagines them captioning gleefully with cry-laughing emojis. Is there nowhere she can hide?
She puts her earbuds in but swears she can still hear distant high-pitched laughter. Sometimes it feels as if she’s been on the outside of a cackling female group her entire life, paranoid that the joke is on her. I’m just not much of a girly girl ,
she would say loftily in the past, pre-empting anyone noticing that she didn’t have a squad of BFFs on speed-dial. Who needs them anyway, she’d told herself, when she was always so busy bouncing between one boyfriend and the next throughout university and her twenties. Besides, she always had her sister, Imogen, as number one confidante and cheerleader. Until Felix came between them, anyway, and then Bonnie made everything a million times worse.
She’s been trying not to think about Imogen, but it’s impossible to cut a sister out of your mind when your whole lives have been bound up together, from the small pink bedroom they once shared as little girls to the in-jokes that have built up between them, layer after layer, like sedimentary rock, over the decades. It’s as if their lives have been one long conversation, pinging back and forth until now, when she no longer knows what to say. How many times can you tell a person you’re sorry before you give up?
She’ll come round, Seb, their younger brother, messaged the other day, but he’s always been on the outside of their close bond, he can’t possibly understand what the loss means to her. She’d feel sorry for him but of the three of them he’s the one who’s most together, with his diamond league job in Silicon Valley, his ranch, his icily beautiful partner Gabrielle (not Gabby, never Gabby), who always buys Miranda and Imogen expensive skincare sets for Christmas. (‘How long before she cracks and just gives us Botox vouchers, do you think?’ they have sniggered in private before now.)
There are two blonde women staying at the hotel, Dutch at a guess, and you can tell they are sisters– from their similar appearances, but also from their body language, so natural and easy with one another. She misses that. ‘What are you two giggling about now?’ their mum, Tracey, was always saying throughout their childhoods, often in exasperation, when Miranda and Imogen were whispering and tittering about their parents. They called their mum ‘Trufflepig Tracey’ or ‘Truffs’ for short (it was to do with how loudly she breathed whenever her reading glasses had slid down her nose). They called their dad ‘The Pun-Gent’ (later ‘The Punge’) because of his penchant for terrible jokes. Then, when Tracey gave him some awful (in their opinion) new aftershave for his birthday one year, he became ‘The Pungent Pun-Gent’, which was quickly shortened to ‘PP’ and then ‘Peeps’.
‘Maybe you shouldn’t have called us such stupid names, then,’ Miranda would retaliate if either of them dared complain. Imagine being so into Shakespeare that you christened your poor children Miranda, Imogen and Sebastian! It had been particularly hard being a Miranda in secondary school, when the boys started calling her ‘Randy’; an ironic, mocking nickname that couldn’t have been less appropriate for virginal, awkward, heavy-period-suffering Miranda. ‘Miranda is a beautiful name!’ her mum would cry whenever she moaned about it. ‘Yes, and it could have been worse, we nearly christened you Swanhilda,’ her dad would add, with a secret wink at her mum. God knew what that was about.
Anyway. This is all irrelevant, seeing as she and Imogen will probably never make up stupid nicknames for anyone again, and her parents probably secretly hate her now too for ruining Imogen’s life. ‘We’re not taking sides!’ Tracey had cried when Miranda had all but accused her of this. ‘Ican’t bear for you both to be so unhappy. Imogen’s very upset, you know.’ Oh, Miranda knows, all right. Not an hour goes by without her dwelling on just how upset Imogen is.
Hold your head up high kiddo, her grandad messaged her this morning. PS you look smashing in that airport photo on the Sun website! Super dress!! It’s very sweet that he has taken it upon himself to send Miranda these daily pep talks but kind of dispiriting, too, that the one and only person in her corner is an 87-year-old dementia-sufferer in a retirement facility in Devon.
‘Excuse me,’ comes a breathless voice just then. Trying not to groan in irritation, Miranda turns her gaze wearily, to see a tall middle-aged woman in a navy one-piece looming over her, beaming. Then the beam slides away. ‘Oh– sorry,’ says the woman, who then laughs self-consciously. ‘Iwas going to ask if you were Miranda Vallance, you know, the actor, but you’re not, of course. My bad! Sorry to bother you.’
It’s all Miranda can do to muster the thinnest of smiles. ‘No worries,’ she says through gritted teeth.
The woman lingers, apparently in no hurry to move on. ‘Ishould be glad really,’ she goes on conspiratorially. ‘That you’re not her, Imean. She comes across as such a bitch, doesn’t she? Nasty cow, she probably would have slapped me too!’
‘Probably,’ Miranda agrees, a hysterical laugh building inside her. The woman trudges off across the sand, her words reverberating in Miranda’s head. Nasty cow. Bitch. The exchange has left her feeling on a knife-edge, as if it’ll only take one more unkind comment, one further intrusion, and she’ll lose it. ‘Watch out, world,’ she mutters under her breath, rolling resignedly onto her front.