Chapter Twenty-One
I didn’t want to speak too soon, but it was starting to feel like my co-star was a whole new Josh.
It had been a few weeks and he had managed not to mess anything else up, didn’t seem like he was arriving with a hangover, he knew his lines, hadn’t lost any more highly valuable items, and most importantly, didn’t push me into any more rivers.
I’d finished in makeup and had swung by craft services for some breakfast to eat in my trailer, picking up Carrie on the way, when I was greeted by the sight of Josh dunking a ball into the basketball hoop outside his trailer.
He was, for some reason, shirtless, his skin retaining its LA tan despite several weeks in the British gloom.
‘Hey, Emily!’ he called to me, and I raised a hand in greeting. He raised his in return, his bicep flexing almost involuntarily to produce a fairly startling effect. ‘Hey, Carrie!’
‘I feel like Josh is around earlier and earlier these days,’ I murmured to her as we entered my trailer, trying not to dwell too much on Topless Josh.
‘Christ, is that all you have to say about what we just witnessed?’ Carrie whispered to me. ‘He’s so ripped! That body, my God!’ she added. ‘Shouldn’t be allowed.
‘Carrie! No! Do not encourage me to look at him like that!’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’
‘Anyway,’ I said, trying to get her back on track. ‘Do you think I’m right, about Josh being . . . better?’
‘Everyone’s talking about it, how he’s got way more punctual all of a sudden.
No one’s waiting around for him anymore, he’s always right there when you need him.
He’s even been reading the call sheet – Maria couldn’t believe it.
She’d been putting silly messages in there as a joke, knowing no one actually read it properly, and he went up to her and told her it wasn’t very likely that Elvis Presley was visiting the set that day since he’d died in 1977! ’
‘Well! That’s certainly a turn of events,’ I said, sitting down to my fruit salad.
‘While we’re on the subject of, shall we say, human behaviour—’ I didn’t want to call it gossip and this sounded more respectable ‘—when I came in this morning, Darcy was getting out of a local taxi rather than being dropped off by her driver. Do you think she’d stayed at Josh’s?
’ The fact he’d left the script in a taxi after hanging out with her had played on my mind, I had to admit.
‘Oh no.’ Carrie shook her head knowingly. ‘I’m already up to date on this, girlie. The assistants’ WhatsApp group was aflame this morning.’
‘And you weren’t going to tell me?’
‘I was building up to it! Anyway, Darcy had to come by taxi this morning because she was so awful to her driver yesterday that he refused to drive for her anymore, told the company how awful she had been, they refused to let another one of their drivers be “subjected to that sort of behaviour” and threatened to leave the whole production driverless if she didn’t apologise. ’
I gasped in horror at the thought of being rude to Mike, the person who cheerfully bookended my days for months on end, come rain or shine. ‘So now she has to take a taxi?’
‘Well, only for today, the hope is she’ll say sorry. Do people like her say sorry?’ Carrie grimaced.
‘This is crazy! I mean, this is a company that’s used to ferrying around celebrities . . . if they can’t handle Darcy then she must be pretty bad.’
‘She was having loud phone conversations in the back seat mocking what he was wearing! She yelled at him for being on time, said he was rushing her! I even heard she had a go at him for observing the speed limit because they were going to be late when she had kept him waiting for forty minutes!’
‘I wonder if she thinks this is some kind of girl boss persona,’ I mumbled, trying to understand what would motivate someone to act like this.
‘I think she’s just a bit of a dick, mate.’ Carrie shrugged, stealing a strawberry off my plate. ‘Anyway, you’re due on set in ten, let’s mobilise!’ She clapped her hands and jumped to her feet.
Later that day, I was sitting and reading in an E-Z UP tent between takes when Tommy came in and joined me.
‘Has Josh’s new-found professionalism cramped the party style a bit?’ I asked him.
‘Well, it’s certainly a new look on him, I’ll give you that,’ Tommy said, running a hand over his closely shaved head with a big paw-like hand. ‘But what do you mean about partying?’
‘You know, the lot of you going out after we wrap, getting the drivers to take you into London and all that,’ I said, as lightly and casually as I could manage.
‘You say that like we’ve been doing it all the time!’ He laughed.
‘So, you haven’t all been going out in the evenings?’ I asked, holding my breath. ‘Hanging out together? Like when we went to that club in Soho that night?’
‘Er, not really. Sometimes me and Max will go to the pub and play darts with some of the crew while eating scampi fries but that’s about it. That night out we had when you wore those suspender things was kind of a rarity.’
‘Oh.’
‘Speak of the devil,’ Tommy said as Max opened the flap of the tent and entered, holding a giant milkshake.
‘Ruh roh!’ Max said in a Scooby Doo voice, taking a sip of the milkshake. The sight of it made me smile, him in his borderline steampunk costume clutching this iced monstrosity. He sat down in a spare chair across from Tommy and me.
‘We were just talking about post-work fraternising. Emily’s feeling a little insecure,’ Tommy said, switching into naughty boy mode as soon as Max was in the picture.
‘Why? You think we’ve been hanging out without you?’ Max asked.
‘Well, I know you were hanging out without me. That night everyone went to Shoreditch just before we started shooting?’
Tommy furrowed his brow, trying to remember what I was talking about. ‘Oh, that? Were you not invited?’
‘You bloody were there!’ Max protested, before having second thoughts. ‘Weren’t you?’
I shook my head. ‘I wasn’t! I really wasn’t!
And I assumed it was . . . I don’t know, intentional.
That Darcy had organised some big thing to show how cool and fun she was.
And that no one wanted me there.’ I wanted the ground to swallow me up for even saying it out loud but for some reason it felt like the right moment to get it off my chest.
‘Get outta town.’ Tommy pushed gently at my shoulder. ‘Everyone thought everyone else had asked you. No one was trying to leave you out.’
‘And was it not fun? Why haven’t you all been out since?’
‘Eh, it was all right. The place she took us to was kinda not my vibe. I don’t know if it was really any of our vibes, to be honest. I kind of prefer the darts and scampi fries in the pub.’
‘Those are some top quality nights, mate.’ Max lobbed the empty cup into the bin. ‘Wouldn’t change ’em for the world.’
‘It was like she was trying too hard, you know, trying to make it all wild and crazy when we just wanted to hang.’ Tommy shrugged.
‘Much as I hate to admit it, it would have been way better if you’d have been there.’ Max sucked pensively on his straw. ‘Might have actually had some good chat rather than just posing for endless photos with stupid drinks.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘You don’t have to say that just to make me feel better. I know I’m not fun like Darcy, no one has to pretend for my sake. I promise you won’t hurt my feelings,’ I said, although I knew that was a lie, and that I was very capable of getting my feelings hurt over stuff like this.
‘It’s not even like that,’ Tommy laughed.
‘It’s not even about people not wanting to hurt you or wanting you to feel secure.
It’s just that she can be well annoying and you’re, er, not.
I mean, not all the time, anyway. At least you take a break once in a while. She’s an always-on kind of annoying.’
I laughed despite myself. ‘Do you really mean that?’
‘Er, yeah,’ they both said, simultaneously, before Tommy added, ‘It’s like she’s putting it on, like she’s so awful it must be acting.’
‘And you’re really not just trying to make me feel better?’
‘When have we ever tried to make you feel better?’ Max asked, incredulously. He had a point.
Maria stuck her head in the tent and sighed, exasperated, at the sight of the three of us sitting around. ‘Tommy, you’re meant to be rehearsing the fight with the combat coordinator!’
‘Oh, shit, is that the time?’ He quickly leaped to his feet and was out of there.
‘Anyway, I’m gonna dash to the medic tent to ask about a boil on my bum,’ Max said, engaging in the time-honoured tradition of taking any random non-film-set-related ailment to the medics while you were here. ‘Catch you later.’
‘I’m sure they’re really going to enjoy that.’ I grimaced.
‘What? It could be worse, I could be showing them my—’
‘Max!’ I put my fingers in my ears.
‘God, you’re such a prude!’ He laughed and dashed off in the direction of the medics. Good luck to them.
Maybe Darcy wasn’t quite so popular, maybe everyone wasn’t hanging out without me. Maybe I wasn’t so perceptive after all.
‘Crew WhatsApp group is on fire today,’ Carrie murmured to me as we stood watching one of the monitors that afternoon.
They were filming a scene in Alder’s workshop, another vividly realised space plucked directly from the book, festooned with tiny little cogs and contraptions in wood and metal completing almost-impossible movements.
Max’s character, Alder, was showing Rowan and Cinder (also known as Josh and Eve), some new tracking device he had been working on.
Linderley was elsewhere, sneaking around the High Council’s Sky Lodge in disguise, so I wasn’t needed for the scene.
‘Oh?’ I asked, sure that it would be some internal crew politics that I was never meant to know about in the first place.