by Alice Feeney
I’ve tried awful hard not to kill things since then. I step over ants, pretend not to see spiders, and when my brother takes me fishing, I empty the net back into the sea. He says our daddy was a kind man before I broke his heart.
I hear them, down in the shed together.
I know I’m not allowed, but I want to know what they are doing.
They do lots of things without me. Sometimes I watch.
I stand on the old tree stump we use for chopping wood, and peek through the tiny hole in the shed wall. My right eye finds the chicken first, the white one we call Diana. There is a princess with that name in England, we named the chicken after her. Daddy’s giant fist is wrapped around its throat, and its feet are tied together with a piece of black string. He turns the bird upside down and it hangs still, except for its little black eyes. They seem to look in my direction, and I think that chicken knows I’m watching something I shouldn’t.
My brother is holding an ax.
He’s crying.
I’ve never seen him cry before. I’ve heard him through my bedroom wall, when Daddy uses his belt, but this is the first time I’ve seen his tears. His fifteen-year-old face is red and blotchy and his hands are shaking.
The first swing of the ax doesn’t do it.
The chicken flaps its wings, thrashing like a banshee, blood spurting from its neck. Daddy clouts my brother around the head, makes him swing the ax again. The noise of the chicken screaming and my big brother crying start to sound the same in my ears. He swings and misses, Daddy hits him again, so hard he falls down on his knees, the chicken’s blood spraying all over their dirty white shirts. My brother swings a third time and the bird’s head falls to the floor, its wings still flapping. Red feathers that used to be white.
When Daddy has gone, I creep into the shed and sit down next to my brother. He’s still crying and I don’t know what to say, so I slip my hand into his. I look at the shape our fingers make when joined together, like pieces of a puzzle that shouldn’t fit, but do; my hands are small and pink and soft, his hands are big and rough and dirty.
“What do you want?” He snatches his hand away and uses it to wipe his face, leaving a streak of blood on his cheek.
I only want to be with him, but he is waiting for an answer, so I make one up. I already know it is the wrong one.
“I thought you could walk me to town, so I could show you the red shoes I wanted for my birthday again.” I’ll be six next week. Daddy said I could have a present this year, if I was good. I haven’t been bad, and I think that’s the same thing.
My brother laughs, not his real laugh, the unkind one. “Don’t you get it? We can’t afford red shoes, we can barely afford to eat!” He grabs me by the shoulders, shakes me a little, the way that Daddy shakes him when Daddy is cross. “People like us don’t get to wear red bloody shoes, people like us are born in the dirt and die in the dirt. Now fuck off and leave me alone!”
I don’t know what to do. I feel strange and my mouth forgets how to make words.
My brother has never spoken to me like this before. I can feel the tears trying to leak out of my eyes, but I won’t let them. I try to put my hand in his again, I just want him to hold it. He shoves me, so hard that I fall backwards and hit my head on the chopping block, chicken blood and guts sticking to my long black curly hair.
“I said fuck off, or I’ll chop your bloody head off too,” he says, waving the ax.
I run and I run and I run.
Five
London, 2017
I run from the car park to the main building at Pinewood. I’m never late for anything, but the unscheduled police visit this morning has thrown me off-balance in more ways than one.
My husband has disappeared and so has ten thousand pounds of my money.
I can’t solve the puzzle because no matter how I slot the pieces together, too many are still missing to complete the picture. I remind myself that I have to keep it together for just a little while longer. The film is almost finished, just three more scenes to shoot. I bury my personal problems somewhere out of reach as I hurry along corridors towards my dressing room. As I turn the final corner, still distracted, I walk straight into Jack, my co-star in the film.
“Where have you been? Everyone is looking for you,” he says.
I glance down at his hand gripping the sleeve of my jacket and he removes it. His dark eyes see straight through me and I wish they didn’t, it makes it almost impossible to lie to him, and I can’t always speak the truth; my inability to trust people won’t allow it. Sometimes, when you spend this long working with someone, when you get this close, it’s hard to hide the real you from them completely.
Jack Anderson is consciously handsome. His face has earned him a small fortune, and more justifiably than his intermittent acting skills. His uniform of chinos and slim-fitted shirts are cut to flatter and hint at the muscular shape of him underneath. He wears his smile like a prize and his stubble like a mask. He’s a bit older than me, but the gray flecks in his brown hair only seem to make him more attractive.
I am aware that we have a connection. And I am aware that he is aware of that too.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Tell it to the crew, not me. Just because you’re beautiful doesn’t mean the world will wait for you to catch up with it.”
“Don’t say that.” I look over my shoulder.
“What, beautiful? Why? It’s true, you’re the only one who can’t see it, which just makes you even more enchanting.” He takes a step closer. Too close.
I take a tiny step back. “Ben didn’t come home last night,” I whisper.
“So?”
I frown and his features readjust themselves, to reflect the caution and concern most people would display in these circumstances. He lowers his voice. “Does he know about us?”
I stare at his face, so serious all of a sudden. Then the creases fold and fan around the corners of his mischievous eyes, and he laughs at me. “There’s a journalist waiting in your dressing room, too, by the way.”
“What?” He may as well have said assassin.
“Apparently your agent arranged the interview, and they only want to speak to you, not me. Not that I’m jealous…”
“I don’t know anything about—”
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry, my bruised ego will regenerate itself, always does. She’s been in there for twenty minutes, I don’t want her writing something shit about the film because you can’t set an alarm, so you might want to be a little more tout suite about it.” He often adds a random French word to his sentences, I’ve never understood why. He isn’t French.
Jack walks off down the corridor without another word, in either language, and I question what it is about him that I find so attractive. Sometimes I wonder if I only ever want things I think I can’t have.
I don’t know anything about any interview, and I would never have agreed to do one today if I had. I hate interviews. I hate journalists; they’re all the same—trying to uncover secrets that aren’t theirs to share. Including my husband. Ben works behind the scenes as a news producer at TBN. I know he spent time in war zones before we met; his name was mentioned in online articles by some of the correspondents he worked with. I’ve no idea what he is working on now, he never seems to want to talk about it.
I found him romantic and charming at first. His Irish accent reminded me of my childhood and bred a familiarity I wanted to climb inside and hide in. Whenever I think it might be the end, I remember the beginning. We married too fast and loved too slowly, but we were happy for a while, and I thought we wanted the same thing. Sometimes I wonder whether the horrors of the world he saw because of his job changed him; Ben is nothing like the other journalists I meet for work.
I know a lot of the showbiz and entertainment reporters now; the same familiar faces turn up at junkets, premieres, and parties. I wonder if it might be one of the ones I like, someone who has been kind about my work before, someone I’ve met. That might
be okay. If it’s someone I haven’t met before, my hands will shake, I’ll start to sweat, my knees will wobble, and then, when my unknown adversary picks up on my absolute terror, I’ll lose the ability to form coherent sentences. If my agent had any understanding of what these situations do to me, he wouldn’t keep landing me in them. It’s like a parent dropping a child who is scared of water into the deep end, presuming that the child will swim, not sink. One of these days I know I’m going to drown.
I text my agent; it’s unlike Tony to set something up and not tell me. Other actresses might throw their toys out of their prams when things don’t go according to plan—I’ve seen them do it—but I’m not like that, and hope I won’t ever be; I know how lucky I am. At least a thousand other people wish they could walk in my shoes, and they are more deserving than I am to wear them. I’m still fairly new to this level of this game, and I’ve got too much to lose. I can’t go back to the start, not now, I worked too hard and it took so long to get here.
I check my phone. There’s no response from Tony, but I can’t keep the journalist waiting any longer. I paint the smile I have perfected for others on my face before opening the door with my name on, and finding someone else sitting in my chair, as though she belongs there.
She doesn’t.
“I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting, great to see you,” I lie, holding out my hand, trying to keep it steady.
Jennifer Jones smiles up at me as though we are old friends. We are not. She’s a journalist I despise, who has been horribly unkind about me in the past, for reasons I’ll never understand. She’s the bitch who called me “plump but pretty” when my first film came out last year. I call her Beak Face in return, but only in the privacy of my own thoughts. Everything about her is too small, especially her mind. She leaps up from the chair, flutters around me like a sparrow on speed, then grips my fingers in her tiny, cold, clawlike hand, giving my own an over enthusiastic shake. Last time we met, I’m not convinced she had seen one frame of the film I was there to talk about. She’s one of those journalists who thinks that because she interviews celebrities, she is one too. She isn’t.
Beak Face is middle-aged and dresses as her daughter would, had she been willing to pause her career long enough to have one. Her neat brown hair is cut into a style that was almost fashionable a decade ago, her cheeks are too pink, and her teeth are unnaturally white. She’s a person whose story has already been written, and she’ll never change her own ending, no matter how hard she tries. From what I’ve read about her online, she wanted to be an actress herself when she was younger. Perhaps that’s why she hates me so much. I watch her tiny mouth twitch and spit as she squawks fake praise in my direction, my mind already racing ahead, trying to anticipate the verbal grenades she plans to throw at me.
“My agent didn’t mention anything about an interview…”
“Oh, right. Well, if you’d rather not? It’s just for the TBN website, no cameras, just little old me. So you don’t need to worry about your hair or how you look at the moment…”
Bitch.
She winks and her face looks as if it has suffered a temporary stroke.
“… I can come back another time if—”
I force another smile in reply and sit down opposite her, my hands knotted together in my lap to stop them from shaking. My agent wouldn’t have agreed to this unless he thought it was a good idea. “Fire away,” I say, feeling as if I really am about to get shot.
She takes an old-fashioned notebook from what looks like a school satchel she probably stole from a child on the street. I’m surprised; most journalists I meet nowadays record their interviews on their phones. I guess her methods, like her hair, are stuck in the past.
“Your acting career started when you got a scholarship to RADA when you were eighteen, is that correct?”
No, I started acting long before that, when I was much, much younger.
“Yes, that’s right.” I remind myself to smile. Sometimes I forget.
“Your parents must have been very proud.”
I don’t answer personal questions about my family, so I just nod.
“Did you always want to act?”
This one is easy, I get asked this all the time, and the answer always seems to go down well. “I think so, but I was extremely shy when I was a child…”
I still am.
“There were auditions for my school’s production of The Wizard of Oz when I was fifteen, but I was too scared to go along. The drama teacher put a list of who got what part on a notice board afterwards, I didn’t even read it. Someone else told me that I got the part of Dorothy and I thought they were joking, but when I checked, my name really was there, right at the top of the list—Dorothy: Aimee Sinclair. I thought it was a mistake, but the drama teacher said it wasn’t. He said he believed in me because he knew I couldn’t. Nobody had ever believed in me before. I learned my lines and I practiced the songs and I did my very best for him, not for me, because I didn’t want to let him down. I was surprised when people thought I was good, and I loved being on that stage. From that moment on, acting was all I ever wanted to do.”
She smiles and stops scribbling. “You’ve played a lot of different roles in the last couple of years.…”
I’m waiting for the question, but realize there isn’t one. “Yes. I have.”
“What’s that been like?”
“Well, as an actor, I really enjoy the challenge of becoming different people and portraying different characters. It’s a lot of fun and I relish the variety.”
Why did I use the word relish? We’re not talking about condiments.
“So, you like pretending to be someone you’re not?”
I hesitate without meaning to, still recoiling from my previous answer. “I guess you could put it that way, yes. But then I think we’re all guilty of that from time to time, aren’t we?”
“I imagine it must be hard sometimes, to remember who you really are when the cameras aren’t on you.”
I sit on my hands to stop myself from fidgeting. “Not really, no, it’s just a job. A job that I love and I’m very grateful for.”
“I’m sure you are. With this latest movie your star really is rising. How did you feel when you got the part in Sometimes I Kill?”
“I was thrilled.” I realize I don’t sound it.
“This role has you playing a married woman who pretends to be nice, but in reality has done some pretty horrific things. Was it a challenge to take on the part of someone so … damaged? Were you worried that the audience wouldn’t like her once they knew what she’d done?”
“I’m not sure we want to give away the twist in any preview pieces.”
“Of course, my apologies. You mentioned your husband earlier…”
I’m pretty sure I didn’t.
“How does he feel about this role? Has he started sleeping in the spare room in case you come home still in character?”
I laugh, hoping it sounds genuine. I start to wonder if Ben and Jennifer Jones might know each other. They both work for TBN, but in very different departments. It’s one of the world’s biggest media companies, so it has never occurred to me that their paths might have crossed. Besides, Ben knows how much I hate this woman, he would have mentioned it if he knew her.
“I don’t tend to answer personal questions, but I don’t think my husband would mind me saying he’s really looking forward to this film.”
“He sounds like the perfect partner.”
I worry about what my face might be doing now and focus all of my attention on reminding it to smile. What if she does know him? What if he told her that I’d asked for a divorce? What if that’s why she’s really here? What if they are working together to hurt me? I’m being paranoid. It will be over soon. Just smile and nod. Smile and nod.
“You’re not like her then, the main character in Sometimes I Kill?” she asks, raising an overplucked eyebrow in my direction and peering at me over her notepad.
“Me
? Oh, no. I don’t even kill spiders.”
Her smile looks as if it might break her face. “The character you’re playing tends to run away from reality. Was that something you found easy to relate to?”
Yes. I’ve spent a lifetime running away.
A knock at the door saves me. I’m needed on set.
“I’m so sorry, I think that might be all we have time for, but it’s been lovely to see you,” I lie. My phone vibrates with a text as she packs up her things and leaves my dressing room. I take it out as soon as I’m alone again and read the message.
Tony: We need to talk, call me when you can. And no, I didn’t arrange or agree to any interviews, so tell them to bugger off. Don’t speak to any journalists before speaking to me for the time being, no matter what they say.
I feel as if I might cry.
Six
Galway, 1987
“There now, why are you spoiling that pretty face with all those ugly tears?”
I look up to see a woman smiling down at me outside the closed shop. I ran all the way here after my brother shouted at me. All I wanted was to look at the red shoes I thought someone might buy me for my birthday this year, but they’re gone from the window. Some other little girl is wearing them, a little girl with a proper family and pretty shoes.
“Have you lost your mummy?” the woman asks.
I start to cry all over again. She takes a crumpled tissue from the sleeve of her white knitted cardigan, and I wipe my eyes. She’s very pretty. She has long dark curly hair, a bit like mine, and big green eyes that forget to blink. She’s a bit older than my brother, but much younger than my daddy. Her dress is covered in pink and white flowers, as if she were wearing a meadow, and she is the spit of how I imagine my mummy would have looked. If I hadn’t killed her with a wrong turn. I blow my nose and hand back the snotty rag.
“Well now, don’t you be worrying yourself, worrying never solved anything. I’m sure we can find your mummy.” I don’t know how to tell her that we can’t. She holds out her hand, and I see that her nails are the same color red as the shoes I wish were mine. She waits for me to hold it, and when I don’t, she bends down, until her face is level with my own.