“It’s your favorite, silly! Biscuits with butter. Make sure you eat them all, we need to fatten you up a bit, you’ve gotten far too skinny.”
I think I look the same as yesterday and the day before that.
I look from Maggie to the plate and back again, unsure what to do. Then I pick up one of the round shapes and can see that it has its own name written underneath it, just like my new name is written on my pajama top. I whisper the letters inside my head: D I G E S T I V E.
“Go on, take a bite,” Maggie says.
I don’t want to.
“Eat. It.”
I take a small bite, chewing slowly. All I can taste is the butter, and it makes me feel a bit sick.
“What do you say?”
“Thank you?”
“Thank you, what?”
“Thank you, Maggie?”
“No, not Maggie. From now on, you call me Mum.”
Seventeen
London, 2017
Today feels like a day of lasts.
My last day driving through the Pinewood Studios gates.
My last time playing this particular character.
My last chance.
I sit in front of the dressing room mirror while other people tame my hair and disguise the imperfections on my face. I’m not feeling myself today, I’m not sure I can even remember who that is. I always experience a period of grief when I stop filming; all those months of hard work and then it’s over, but the finality of this day feels far more ominous than it should. Keeping everything that is happening to myself is taking its toll, but there’s only one more day to get through, and I know I’m not alone. We all make daily decisions about which secrets to decant, and which to keep for a later date, when they might taste better on our tongues.
When I am all alone again, staring into the mirror, not sure who I see, I notice something that isn’t mine. Nina, the wonderful woman who magically transforms my hair, has left her magazine behind. I flick through the pages, more out of boredom than curiosity, and stop when I see a double-page profile piece about Alicia White.
The woman grinning in the enormous, Photoshopped picture went to the same senior school and drama school as me. She was in the year above, but somehow looks a decade younger. Alicia White is an actress too. A bad one. We share an agent now and she always likes to remind me that he signed her first. He’s all she ever talks about, as though we are participants in some kind of unspoken competition. She feels the need to put me down every time we meet, as though she wants to make sure I know my place. There’s really no need; I’ve never had a high opinion of myself.
The sight of her face reminds me of Tony. He asked me to call, but I still haven’t managed to get hold of him. My fingers search for my mobile inside my bag, and I try again. Straight to voice mail. I call the office, which I hate doing, and his assistant picks up on the second ring.
“Sure thing, he’s free now,” she says in a chirpy voice, and pops me on hold.
I listen to tinny classical music, which makes me feel even more stressed than before, and I feel a wave of relief when it stops and he answers. Except it isn’t him.
“I’m sorry, my mistake,” his assistant whispers. “He’s in a meeting, but he’ll call you back.”
She hangs up before I get a chance to ask when.
I return my attention to the magazine, desperate for any form of distraction from the ever-growing list of anxieties lining up inside my mind. Things must be pretty bad if I’m resorting to reading about Alicia White.
I haven’t always had an agent. Until eighteen months ago, nobody wanted to represent me. I belonged to an agency instead, which did little more than send my headshot off for various jobs and take 15 percent when I got one. I always had work, just not always the kind I really wanted. When Ben and I got married, I was the understudy in a play on Shaftesbury Avenue. The lead was sick one night, and I got to perform in her place. My agent’s wife was sitting in the audience, and she told him about me. I owe her a debt that I can never repay, and within weeks of having an agent I