AllFreeNovel
Share Us
36
Jack
I saw her as soon as I walked up the steps from the platform at Hampstead tube. I followed her and about twenty other people into lift 4. We all stood in silence as the lift began to move, whisking us up to street level. I tried to catch Rebecca’s eye, but she was reading something on her phone, frowning as she strained to see in the dim light.
The lift doors opened and everybody filed out, Oyster cards at the ready, buzzing themselves through the barriers. When we got out onto the street, I lengthened my stride, catching up with her in a matter of seconds, not caring that I’d meant to pop to Tesco on the way home.
‘Hey,’ I said, falling into line with her.
‘Oh, hi,’ she said, clicking off her phone and sliding it into her bag. ‘How are you?’
‘Great, actually,’ I replied, grinning.
She laughed; a pretty, tinkling sound. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I got a guest spot on Accident & Emergency.’
Interesting that Chad had finally pulled this off just as I was seriously considering signing with Alistair. Don’t get me wrong, it was great to finally be working, but it didn’t change the fact that my relationship with Chad was long past its sell-by date.
‘No way!’ shrieked Rebecca, almost as excited as I was.
I followed her left down Flask Walk, pulling my hoodie out of my bag and slipping it on. The wind had picked up while I’d been underground and it felt much chillier now.
‘What’s the part?’ she asked.
‘I’m playing a teacher who takes his class on a school trip and one of them nearly drowns and then the parents blame me.’
I’d already started my character work; it was just the sort of role I could get stuck into and make my own.
‘Juicy!’ she said. ‘When do you start shooting?’
‘Next week,’ I said, holding out my palms because I thought I felt a drop of rain.
I heard the tinkling noise of a fairground ride, which must have carried over from the East Heath car park, where I’d spotted them setting up this morning.
‘Can you hear that?’ I said. ‘Do you like fairground rides?’
I thought of a particularly scary-looking ride involving a tilted cage I’d spotted earlier. ‘I’m a bit of a wuss when it comes to things like that. My brother, Dom, used to get annoyed with me when we went to Thorpe Park for a day out and I refused to go on anything except the log flume.’
‘I’m the same,’ she said. ‘No way I want to put my life in the hands of a machine that’s only been put up the night before and may or may not have been properly checked.’
‘My thought exactly,’ I said.
‘How old is your brother?’ she asked.
I’d thought about Dom off and on since I’d seen him at London Bridge. He hadn’t turned up for dinner at Mum and Dad’s that weekend, avoiding me, no doubt.
‘He’s thirty-three next month,’ I said.
‘Do you get on well?’
I shook my head. ‘Not really. Actually, I bumped into him in town recently and he was kissing a woman. Which would be fine if it had been Theresa, his girlfriend. They live together,’ I explained. ‘So I guess he’s having an affair or something, I don’t know.’
I instantly regretted bringing this up in case it triggered something for Rebecca – for all I knew, her douche of an ex-boyfriend had done the same thing to her.
I looked across at her. ‘You probably don’t want to know all this.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s fine. So go on, how did he react when he realised he’d been caught out?’
