Chapter Five
Lila
The weekend before principal photography began, the production invited everyone in the main cast and crew to an “ice-breaker”. It was pretty obvious that it wasn’t optional when Sibyl made sure she had eyeballed all of them to be dressed appropriately and on their best behaviour.
Lilahadto go. She was going to do it, and she wasn’t going to let herself agonise about making excuses. The whole point of the ice-breaker was to meet and get to know the other people she would be working with. Instead of being the odd one out, a specimen to be examined, as she felt in London, there were plenty of other people coming together who had never spoken before.
Thinking aboutthatwas a good start. Something to take the edge off the roiling serpents in her stomach. She tried her very best to push the image of her sitting on her own while everyone chatted and laughed around her out of her head, but it still rested against her skin uncomfortably, like sand in her shoe that she had no way of removing.
She should concentrate on something else. Sibyl had stressed that everyday working attire was meant to be practical and plain, so it didn’t distract the actors, so tonight was at least a chance to wear some colour and spend a little extra time doing her own makeup.
‘Ooh, hey sexy,’ Ruth said, raising her eyebrows when Lila came out of her room. ‘I love how you’ve done that smoky eye technique – really brings out the green.’
‘Thank you.’ Lila blushed, a smile springing to her lips at the compliment.
The whole reason Lila had taken the course on makeup in the first place back in New York was because of the comfort she found in putting it on. As a person who always felt wishy-washy and faded, getting to put colour on her face, exaggerate her eyelashes, make her silent mouth at leastlookbold even if she couldn’t bring it to speak boldly, was like doing some kind of alchemy. Like it helped her get into character, the way Rowan had described it back in the stockroom. It was a lie, but it was a socially acceptable one, and it helped her to hold her spine a little straighter, to feel like there was a layer between the real her and the world.
Ruth got up from her seat at the little table where she’d been texting and slung her cell phone into her handbag. She came right over and turned Lila into the light filtering in through the shutters on the door. She nodded again after the appraisal. ‘Yeah, really nice. Could I borrow that colour one time?’
‘Of course.’ Lila’s voice came out pitched ridiculously high in her excitement that they were bonding over some common ground.
All week, once they were back inside their apartment at the end of the day, they had kept to themselves. Ruth would take a shower and then leave to go see some of the other crew, presumably for dinner. Lila wasn’t invited and she was never sure whether she wanted to be or not. As the door closed and she was left in the cool, quiet of the apartment, that familiar tug of loneliness would assail her, but it always coincided with a touch relief that made her wonder whether she really did want to fix her social anxiety.
Yes, because it was flat-out painful trying to navigate the world this way, every day.
But, if she everdid, would she want to go out and fill her time with people? She needed the quiet sometimes – like Rowan had said to her, sometimes you just weren’t in the mood. But how would she ever know whether that was just her version of normal or if she was sliding into a habit of avoiding people again?
Sometimes it felt like she didn’t have any kind of clue about who she really was.
Also, she needed to stop thinking about Rowan in that stockroom.
She cleared her throat. ‘Help yourself. Whenever you like.’
Ruth chuckled. ‘You may come to regret that offer. I have a voracious appetite for new product. C’mon, let’s go grab that minibus.’ She led the way out of their apartment and down the steps, their heels clacking on the stone. ‘Nice dress – I’d be asking to borrow that too, but I know it’d never fit. You must still be able to shop in the teen department.’
Lila wasn’t sure what to say to that. Shewassmall. Sometimes she did have to buy pants from the junior section, so they didn’t trail on the ground but…was admitting that annoying? Like she was boasting? Luckily, Ruth just continued talking. ‘I thought all you owned was shorts and T-shirts.’
‘I really do need to buy some more clothes. I don’t think I’ve got enough to deal all the possibilities of the season here. Especially if we’ve got night shoots too.’
‘Oh yeah, we definitely will. Have you not seen the screenplay?’ When Lila shook her head, Ruth waved a hand. ‘Well, don’t worry. We could go shopping next weekend. Make a trip of it into the nearest town? What d’you say?’
Lila let out a little breath of relief. ‘Yeah, I’d really like that actually.’
‘Great. Ooh, look, there’s our ride.’ Ruth hurried off towards the group crowded around the minibus at the top of the hill.
At first the bus headed back up to the main highway but after twenty minutes or so, the road wound back closer to the coast as they made their way into the bustling city of Messina. The winery was up a hill deeper inland with a beautiful view down into the port and when they climbed out of the minibus, gathering on the sandstone terrace before they went inside, Lila gravitated to the edge, finding a moment of peace separate from the bustle of the crowd she was supposed to be part of.
All her senses were firing; the air balmy on the bare skin of her arms and the sun-warmed stone beneath her hands as she leaned on the balcony’s edge, the sound of her colleagues’ chatter in the background, the smell of tomatoes and brine mingling on the faint breeze, and her eyes almost assaulted by the view: pastel buildings with their earthy red roofs, broken up by the occasional church spire or deep green foliage, running all the way down to the navy blue of the sea below, bright white cruise ships and a glint of gold from a statue right at the end of the port. And beyond that the misty green and pale brown shape of the Italian mainland.
She wanted to stand out there all night. But socialising called and the inside of the winery was beautiful too. Doors were flung open along the whole terrace and they went into a long room separated only by the rustic brickwork of archways.
She followed Ruth to a table with Jackie and Sibyl. It had taken all her powers of denial this week to ignore the fact Sibyl had seen her with blood on her pants and to stop herself from imagining the mortifying conclusions the woman must have come to. Lila had pushed it down as far as it would go, even though she knew in the long run, that wasn’t the best solution. It was the children’s version of dealing with her problems: if she shut her eyes then she became invisible.
It helped that Sibyl had been in lots of meetings, while they’d organised and cleaned the makeup trailer at the unit base, where all the kit, wardrobe, cast trailers and offices for the production were parked up, just outside of the city of Catania.
After a quick hello, a hush gathered throughout the room as a short man in a black baseball cap stood up near the bar to address everyone. Lila guessed that made him Wesley Hannover, the director – or maybe one of the producers? She wasn’t sure if they came out to oversee filming and he didn’t bother to introduce himself. There was so much she really didn’t know about all this. Like Ruth mentioning about the script. Did sheneedto know that? It probably helped.
She forced the thoughts away and concentrated on just being there in the moment, not letting her mind run away with itself.
