‘You should write a film about us lot.’ Barbara’s face is dead serious despite the fact she’s dressed like the dusty undead mother of the bride and knocking pints back like she’s dying of thirst. ‘Don’t you reckon, Trace?’
The landlady is beckoned over and Barbara repeats her new idea. The thick taste of failure still clings to my throat and I have to speak quietly so as not to unleash too many emotions. ‘Can I have a lemonade please, Tracy?’
‘You not keen on the idea, Bea?’ Not a beat of the conversation is dropped as she sprays my drink into a plastic cup without breaking eye contact.
I scan the room, checking out my muses. Inspiration is thin. Bill is leaning over the fruit machine with his pint sloshed down the leg of his trousers in a way that to anyone having missed the lager-filled shower we’ve all just had, it would look suspiciously like he couldn’t be arsed to get up and visit the facilities. The ladies that run the local preschool are letting their hair down and won’t stop singing show tunes rather badly (despite the fact that the jukebox is still slogging its way through Iron Maiden’s entire discography that Cerys, Tracy’s daughter, queued as soon as she got home from school). The local farmers line the bar in theirSchöffels, talking a little too intensely about the weather. And Jimmy sits in his usual spot in the corner, taking it all in.
‘I don’t even think Shakespeare could do this place justice. New York is somewhere that has to be seen to be believed.’ Tracy gives me a knowing look.
‘What are you writing at the minute, Beatrice?’ Barbara asks, and I don’t have the heart to tell her the truth.
‘You know, this and that.’ I’m purposely vague. How can I tell them that I haven’t so much as touched my laptop in six months, and I haven’t written in even longer? How can I tell them that my mind is suddenly empty of any sort ofcreative thought and yet two years ago I was supposed to be the next best thing?
Returning home a failure is embarrassing enough, but returning home a failure when everyone still believes you’re to be the next person to put their tiny hamlet on the map, now that is a kind of shame that I can hardly put into words. I am a failure. I left my home eight years ago with the thought that I would never return, that by twenty-six I’d have a few blockbusters under my belt and be posting photos of my Miami pool on Facebook rather than fishing my phone out of a cowpat for the third time this week. Well, perhaps not Miami, or a blockbuster, but at least earning enough money in the film industry to keep up my rent on my tiny London flat. I can’t even afford Grimsby these days.
No, this ‘hot, young screenwriter’, as theDaily Mailonce called me (and we all know that they’re a paragon of truth) came back home to live with her grandparents two years ago, left a career and a life in London, to work days on Big Apple Farm and work nights in the Big Apple pub. It must have been some mammoth apple back in the day seeing as just about everything in this square mile is named after it. But that’s what people quickly come to realise about this place; it’s repetitious, uninspired, and with nothing else to shout about apart from an over engorged fruit and a bloke that lived here thirty years ago who’s now on the telly.
The people of this place are filled with too much optimism, too much hope for something special to come along and make their struggles feel worthwhile, so they refuse to admit that my chance at my dream is over, and I really am nothing special.
‘Actually, Tracy, can you just stick a gin in there, please?’ I hand my cup back to the barmaid and she adds a double measure. No one knows you better than the person serving you drinks, and I’m grateful that Tracy shifts the conversation.
‘You seen how dear they’re selling them tates for up on the corner of Johnson’s farm there, Barbara?’
‘Oo I know, four quid! I’d want ’um to be plated in gold for that price.’
Raising my plastic cup in thanks, I escape into the pub whilst Barbara is preoccupied with talking about the price of potatoes back in 1960.
Weaving my way back across the room, I finally manage to find a space just big enough to sit down on the carpet in front of the TV. I used to do the same at home on a Saturday morning when I was a kid: sit right in front of the huge box TV so close that I could feel the static pulsing from the screen. Mum would always tell me off. ‘Your eyes’ll go square,’ she’d shout from the kitchen, so I’d shuffle back an inch or two on the ugly patterned carpet, without taking my eyes off the TV.
I’d watch film after film, VHS when I was really small, then DVDs. Mum and Dad worked long hours and there was never much time, or money, for going out, so I’d explore the world through the screen. Learn things that no one in New York could ever teach me. Sometimes I’d catch snippets on Film4 when they’d play the same films over and over on a cycle for weeks and I could just about piecetogetherPollyannaandBack to the Futureafter catching them both repeatedly in different places in the run time, thanks to the pigeons nesting on the aerial and interfering with the signal for years as Grandad never had the heart to shoo them off. That was all I had ever wanted to do, to be a part of that whole world – actress, writer, tea-maker, any department that would have me I’d be happy with, just as long as I got to live the magic of film every day of my life.
But my dad worked on the docks, and Mum worked at the local primary school. We lived in Lincolnshire, where the buses hardly come and the only regular train goes to Skegness and back, and every one of our industries have struggled for as long as I can remember. Ten-year-old Beatrice could never understand how much that would make a difference. Ten-year-old Beatrice was so taken by the script of Joe Wright’sPride and Prejudice, so taken by the vibrancy of Baz Luhrmann’sRomeo & Juliet, so taken by the immensity of Peter Jackson’sThe Lord of the Rings, and so in love with the magic of film that nothing felt impossible.
‘Do you have any advice for anyone looking to get into the film industry?’ the interviewer on the screen asks and hands the microphone to Edward Cavendish.
He beams, and it’s obvious he hasn’t been on the waiting list for our local NHS dentist, as his teeth are perfectly aligned and white, not like the greying gravestones you often see in this neck of the woods. ‘So many people will tell you that this industry is all about connections, who you know, who can give you a chance, but something that cannot be formulated, and that sets people apart from therest, is connection with an audience. If you can connect with an audience, make them feel seen, make them feel at home, you don’t need Steven Spielberg on speed dial. And hard work: put yourself out there, make yourself seen, don’t give them the chance to ignore you.’
I sit, on the beer-stained carpet of the Big Apple pub in New York, Lincolnshire, feeling that warm tingle in the pit of my stomach that I used to feel watching Lucy step through the wardrobe to Narnia on my purple box TV. But this time I’m twenty-six, not ten. This time I’m ignoring my reality to allow the excitement for the future to bubble in me for the first time in so, so long. This time I’m watching a man who grew up on the farm I now work on win awards in ways I never knew possible for people like us.
Anything is possible at the BAFTAs, and for one night only, I’m going to allow myself to dream like I did all those years ago.
Chapter 3
Arthur
‘Oh Christ, Ed, there’s another one.’ Mum flaps back into the kitchen with another article open on her phone. The headline reads:Cavendish’s jealous, drug-filled row.Her accent comes back in full force when she’s not talking to the international press and even more so when she’s stressed; so when she starts sounding like Guy Martin, that’s when I know I’m in a whole lot of trouble.
My dad sits opposite me at the dining table in stony silence. He’s hardly spoken since the events of last night, and I’m not surprised. The whole ‘everyone thinks my son is on drugs’ thing probably puts a bit of a downer on the award that has since been discarded at the bottom of the stairs. No matter how much I assure them that it isn’t true, that I didn’t so much as look at anything illegal last night, because I can’t explain the reason for my little meltdown, of course no one believes me. I don’t have the energy to fightit either. Though I’ve slept for what feels like an age, every inch of me is exhausted. It’s as if my soul has been sucked out, and my whole nervous system has short-circuited, leaving my body intact and yet completely empty.
‘What do we need to do? Make a statement? Send him to rehab? Give him a clip round the earhole?’ Her makeup is still painted on her face from last night and has hardly budged, even though she compulsively rubs at it as though trying to manually erase each one of her memories.
‘Mum, you know I’m here, don’t you? And I can hear you.’ She paces up and down the kitchen and stops to give me a hard stare. Dad still says nothing. ‘I never took anything. You believe me, right?’
‘I don’t know what to believe.’ Mum only shakes her head, finally slumping down beside her husband in defeat.
‘It was Charles. He was asking for it as soon as he started talking about Lizzie.’ At the mention of my sister’s name, my father shifts in his seat to straighten out his posture.
Sucking in a breath, the voice that comes out is one he reserves only for seriousness, or his voiceover work on that documentary he did about bigfoot back in his early days before he could afford to turn jobs down. ‘You are twenty-five years old, Arthur. Listen to yourself. When are you going to grow up? Take some responsibility for yourself for goodness’ sake and stop acting like such a spoiled brat.’
