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42
Jack
It was going to be the warmest day we’d had this year; twenty-eight degrees Celsius, apparently, according to the weather lady on Good Morning Britain. An ice-cream van was parked on the corner of Downshire Hill by the playground and excited kids were already queueing up, coming away with luminous lollies clutched in their hands. Over on the heath, the pond sparkled in the morning sun, the five-storey townhouses I coveted reflected on the water. The grass was littered with groups – teenagers on half-term break, families playing frisbee, dog walkers heading up to Parliament Hill. I breathed it all in. In a month’s time, Tom would be back from LA and I’d be living in some shithole. I’d have to seriously start searching for a place this week. Get back on spareroom.com. Although they were sometimes snooty about letting to an actor; I didn’t think that technically fell under the umbrella of ‘young professional’. Sometimes I felt more like a professional barman, which had been fine when I was in my twenties but didn’t feel quite so OK now.
I thought of Rebecca and how nothing ran smoothly, even when you had a decent job like hers. I’d barely bumped into her since I’d seen her at the hospital and she’d mentioned Nathalie. I’d spotted her getting off the bus at South End Green one night a few weeks ago – I’d been off to the hospital to see Clive and she’d presumably been coming home from work. She’d waved and I’d given her a thumbs-up for some bizarre reason, as though we were twelve and she’d just lent me her copy of Beano. I didn’t know how to act around her anymore, now that I knew she wasn’t with the American guy after all. At least I didn’t think she was. Clive, who was clearly in matchmaking mode, had assured me it was over and she’d said she was single. I didn’t entirely trust him to tell me the full story, since he was bizarrely obsessed with what a perfect couple we’d make. Opposites attract, he’d announced proudly, as though he’d coined the phrase himself. You’re like that Chinese saying: Yin and Yang.
Anyway, today I wasn’t going to think about Rebecca. Today I was going to concentrate on impressing Joe, the director of the play I was in. Despite it earning me no money, I thought this might actually have been quite a good move. We were performing in Soho, so casting directors could practically stagger out of their offices and into the theatre foyer. I just hoped they weren’t going to be disappointed with what they saw.
We’d been running the same scene all morning and the atmosphere was tense. Joe wasn’t easy to work with. He obviously had a clear vision in his head, but he seemed to find it difficult to translate that into something we all understood.
‘Could you do that again but with more emotion?’ said Joe, who was sitting on a director’s chair with a pencil behind his ear and a clipboard in his hands trying to look all ‘director-y’.
‘By more emotion you mean …?’ I queried, wanting to get it right.
‘Less shouting, more feeling,’ he replied.
I nodded. ‘OK. Sure.’
We were halfway through our month-long rehearsal period, and I was seriously worried. Joe didn’t seem to like any of the character choices I’d made but couldn’t actually help me come up with any better ones. We’d done absolutely no blocking, so the actress playing my wife just kept wandering aimlessly around the stage, barely staying still long enough for me to actually say my lines to her face instead of to the back of her head. The stage manager had quit on day two and we had a new girl who’d just graduated from Goldsmiths and who permanently looked on the verge of tears. The whole thing looked set for disaster and far from being the big success I’d hoped. I was sticking with it, though, because Alistair had lined up loads of people to come and see me and he was confident that it was going to be a brilliant opportunity to introduce me to the agency and effectively re-launch my career. I already trusted Alistair more than I ever had Chad. He’d rung me several times already to let me know who he’d approached, and what his plan of action was, and he’d even taken me for dinner at The Ivy, a place I’d always wanted to go.
We tried the scene again. This time instead of shouting at her (even if we were supposed to be having a blazing row, according to the script), I tried it in a calm and controlled way, as though I was desperately trying to suppress my inner feelings. Since my character was a law student who exuded confidence and loved the sound of his own voice, I wasn’t sure this was a valid choice, but I’d give it a go. Sometimes things worked out better than you’d thought they would.
‘Much stronger,’ said Joe to me when I went to grab a drink of water. ‘But can you stop moving around the stage so much? It’s distracting.’
Once rehearsals were done for the day, I decided to walk up to Tottenham Court Road and jump on the No. 24 bus up to Hampstead Heath. I sat on the top deck, periodically checking my phone for non-existent messages and people-watching out of the window. I saw someone who looked like Rebecca coming out of Warren Street Station and I swivelled my head to look. I didn’t think it was her. This girl was taller and was wearing trainers, which I’d never seen Rebecca wear unless she was going running. I’d missed her, although it had only been a few days. I’d heard her voice a few times on the landing and had been tempted to swing open the door, to casually ask how she was, what she’d been up to. Whether she might like to have that glass of wine sometime. Once, I’d even had my hand on the door handle, but something had stopped me. Nothing about it felt safe, and since everything else in my life felt new and a bit up in the air, I thought it was best to avoid throwing something else unfamiliar into the mix.
And yet the sound of her voice did something to me. I liked hearing her laughing into her phone, I imagined her listening intently to whoever was on the other end of the line.
The bus terminated at the Royal Free and I glanced up at the wards, making a mental note to pop in and see Clive later in the week. I crossed the road at South Grove, looked longingly at the cakes in Le Pain Quotidien, which each cost about as much as an hour’s work at the pub, and walked up East Heath Road.
Just past Hampstead Heath Station, I saw Rebecca. She was walking down the hill in the opposite direction and she had her head down as though she was in a hurry. It was also possible, I thought, that she’d seen me and wanted to pretend she hadn’t. I bit my lip, stepping out into the road, checking for traffic, intending to cross, but she was walking so fast she’d already passed me.
‘Rebecca!’ I called out.
She looked up and when she saw me, she looked genuinely surprised, so I deduced from that that she hadn’t been trying to pretend not to see me. Funny the assumptions you could make about another person when really you had absolutely no idea what was going on in their head.
I waved, but somehow my feet were rooted to the spot. She stopped, too. One hand was holding onto the strap of her bag, the other was on her hip. She was waiting for me to say something else, probably. A car beeped its horn, which was hardly surprising when I was standing in the middle of the road. I put my hand up as an apology and jogged over to Rebecca. She looked lovely, all flushed from the walk, wearing a smart black dress belted at the waist and red lipstick.
‘Hi,’ I said, breathless. ‘Not at work today?’
‘I’ve got the day off, but I can’t really talk,’ she said, too quickly. ‘I’ve got a second interview for that bereavement charity job.’
‘That’s brilliant!’
She smiled shyly. ‘Wish me luck.’
I nodded. ‘Course! Best of luck. I hope it goes really well.’
She twisted her body to move, but her feet stayed in the same place.
‘We should go for a drink or something,’ I suggested, trying to muster up a smile to make the situation less tense.
‘Sure,’ she replied. ‘Before you go.’
There was less than a month until I had to move out and I hadn’t done anything about finding somewhere else to live. I kept hoping that Tom would extend his stay in New York, but from the messages he’d sent, it didn’t seem likely.
‘Definitely,’ I said, wanting her to stay but also not able to think of anything to say to keep her there. It hadn’t been like that before, that was what had been so nice. I’d had no filter with her, I’d said whatever I wanted. Except how I felt about her; that I couldn’t seem to say.
