by Alice Feeney
“It isn’t as though your face fits with his other clients; it isn’t as though your face fits at all.” She’s right about that part; I don’t fit anywhere, I never have.
“You know he’s going to dump you one day, don’t you? Quite soon I’d imagine. And then you’ll never find work again!” She tilts her head back and laughs like a comedy villain, tiny black-and-white paper words spewing from her mouth, while the page folds into creases around her eyes.
The sound of someone laughing outside my dressing room wakes me, and I realize I’ve dozed off in my chair, I’ve been dreaming. I’ve barely slept for three nights in a row; I’m so exhausted that I fear I might be losing my mind. I tear Alicia out of the magazine, screw up her face, and throw her in the bin, instantly feeling a little calmer now that she’s gone.
Alicia White hates me, but can’t seem to leave me alone. Over the last few months, she has copied my haircut (although I admit it does look better on her, everything does). She’s copied my clothes, she’s even used some of the same answers I give in interviews, literally copied them word for word. Apart from her peroxide-induced hair color, it’s as though she wants to be me. People say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I don’t feel flattered, I just feel freaked out.
Other than the agent, and the job, we have absolutely nothing in common. For starters, she is beautiful, at least on the outside. The inside is a different story, and one she should learn to hide better. Being a bitch might work out well in some industries, but not this one. Everyone talks, and the talk about Alicia White is rarely good. It makes me realize that I could never be an agent: I’d only want to represent nice people.
Something niggles me, and I feel the need to rewind, not just reset myself. I reach down into the bin and retrieve the ball of crumpled print, flattening the image of Alicia with my palm. I stare at her face, her eyes, her bright red lips. Then I read the final question and answer in the piece and feel physically sick.
What three items of makeup can you not leave the house without?
That’s easy! Mascara, eyeliner, and my Chanel Rouge Allure lipstick.
The name of the lipstick is not new to me. It’s branded in my brain, written in indelible ink inside my mind; it’s the lipstick I found under my marital bed when I got back from filming last year.
Did Alicia White sleep with my husband?
The first assistant director summons me with a knock on the door, I screw Alicia’s face into an even tighter ball and throw her back in the bin before following him outside. We make polite small talk as the golf buggy trundles around the lot. He’s still young and worries about things he won’t when he is older, the way we all did before we knew what life really had in store. I listen to his tales of woe, interjecting the occasional sympathetic word, as we drive along at less than twenty miles an hour. I enjoy the light breeze in my face, and the smell of paint and sawdust that lingers in the air around every film set. It makes me feel at home.
The designers spend months building whole new worlds, then tear them down as though they never were when filming is over. Just like a breakup, only more physical and less damaging. Sometimes it’s hard saying goodbye to the characters I become. I spend so long with them that they start to feel like family, perhaps because I don’t have a real one. My anxiety levels are at an all-time high by the time the buggy turns the final corner. I haven’t rehearsed for today the way I normally would, there just wasn’t time. The traffic of worrying thoughts has come to a standstill in my mind, as though it were rush hour up there, and I’m stuck somewhere I don’t want to be.
We stop outside our final destination: an enormous warehouse that contains most of the interior film sets for Sometimes I Kill. I hesitate before going inside. My mind is so full of everything that is happening in my private life that for a moment I can’t even remember what scene we are shooting.
“Good, you’re here. I need you to deliver something special today, Aimee,” barks the director as soon as he sees me. “We need to believe that the character is capable of killing her husband.”
I feel a little bit sick. It’s as though I’m trapped inside a life-size joke.
I stand on the set of my fictional kitchen, waiting for my fictional husband to come home, and I see Jack smile at me before our first take.
Nobody is smiling by the twentieth.
I keep forgetting my lines, which never happens to me. I’m sure the rest of the cast and crew must hate me for it. I get to go home after this scene, but they don’t. The clapboard sounds, the director says, “Action,” again, and I do my best to get it right this time.
I pour myself a drink I’ll never swallow, then pretend to be surprised when Jack comes up behind me, slipping his arms around my waist.
“It’s done,” I say, turning to look up at him.
His face changes, in exactly the same way it did nineteen times before. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. It’s done. It’s taken care of.” I raise the glass to my lips.
He takes a step back. “I didn’t think you were actually going to do it.”
“He wouldn’t give me what I wanted, but I know that you will. I love you. I want to be with you, nobody else is going to get in the way of that.”
The word “Cut” echoes in my ears, and I can tell from the look on the director’s face that I’ve nailed it this time. As soon as he’s watched the scene back, I’ll be free to go.
I’m chatting to Jack outside in the sunshine when the golf buggy reappears in the distance on the lot. I don’t think anything of it at first, just carry on talking about the time frame for postproduction. But then my eyes find something familiar about the shape of the woman being driven towards us.
This cannot be happening.
Detective Alex Croft is wearing a smile wider than I thought her tiny face could support. The vehicle comes to a halt right in front of us and she climbs out, beaming. Her unsmiling sidekick jumps off the backward-facing rear seat, smoothing down his trousers as though sitting down has caused an upsetting crease.
“Thank you,” Detective Croft says to the driver, “and thank you,” she adds, in my direction.
“What for?” I ask.
“I have always, always wanted to drive around a film studio on a buggy, and now I have! All thanks to you! Is there somewhere we can talk?”
“This is a closed set,” says the director, joining us just when I didn’t think things could get any worse. “I don’t know who you are, but you can’t be here.”
She smiles. “This is my badge and it means that I can. So sorry, I forgot to introduce myself with all the excitement and stardust. My name is Detective—”
I read the questions on Jack’s face without his having to say a word.
“I’m sorry, they’re here because of a personal matter. I’ll deal with it,” I interrupt, and wait for the others to walk away, out of earshot. Jack keeps throwing concerned glances over his shoulder, and I smile to try to reassure him that everything is okay.
“Did you have to come here?” I ask when I think nobody can hear.
“Is there some reason why you didn’t want us to?”
“You could have called.”
“I could have, but then I wouldn’t have got to see all this. You’re probably used to it, but for me, well, this is like a trip to Disneyland. Not that I’ve been.”
“What do you want?”
“I think the first question most people in your situation might ask would be ‘Have you found my husband?’”
“Have you found my husband?”
“Sadly no, we have not, but I need your help with something. Is there somewhere a little more private where we can talk?”
Her face lights up like a Christmas tree when we step inside my dressing room.
“There really are lights around your mirror and everything,” she says, beaming.
“There really are, yes. You said you needed my help.”
“I did. I think we
might have got ourselves in a muddle when you gave us your statement, for which I can only apologize. We work crazy long hours, and sometimes we make mistakes.” She takes her iPad from the inside pocket of her jacket. “I had down that after leaving the restaurant, you came straight home, went to bed, and went to work the following morning, presuming your husband had spent the night sleeping in a spare bedroom.”
“That’s right.”
“Except that we didn’t have a note of you going for a drive in your husband’s car.”
“You don’t have a note of me doing that because I didn’t.”
“Really? Sure looks like you…” She turns the screen to face me, before using a small, skinny index finger, with a short, neat nail, to swipe between images. “I mean, I appreciate that the image is a little grainy, compared with what we got from the restaurant, but that looks like you parking his car at the petrol station, and that looks like you paying at the till. See, we only had the credit-card receipt, and I think most people would assume someone was buying petrol. I know I sure did, and this is why I need your help because, according to the records, this woman—the one driving your husband’s car and using his card, the woman who looks a lot like you—well, she wasn’t buying petrol. She was buying several bottles of lighter gel, like the stuff you squirt on a barbecue if you have an impatient personality. So … are you certain that isn’t you? On the screen I mean, I don’t need to know whether you’re impatient.”
I stare at the woman in the photo wearing a coat that looks just like mine, with dark curly hair resting on her shoulders, and oversized sunglasses on her face. “No, it’s not me.”
“It does look like you. Don’t you think it looks like Mrs. Sinclair, Wakely?”
“I thought so.”
“Have you looked into the woman who was stalking me? The one I told you about?” I ask.
“Why? Does she look like you?”
“Yes. I’ve never seen her close up, but she used to dress like me and stand outside our old home.”
“Do you know her name?”
“I already told you, no. At least not her real name.”
“What name did she use?”
I hesitate, not really wanting to say it out loud, but realize that I have to now. “She called herself Maggie. Maggie O’Neil, but that isn’t her real name.”
“How do you know that isn’t her real name?”
“Because Maggie O’Neil is dead.”
Eighteen
Essex, 1987
“Look alive, you need to get up, get dressed, and come downstairs today. I don’t have time to keep checking on you,” says Maggie, bursting into the room in her nightie. She pulls back the curtains, revealing another rainy day behind the bars on the window. She tugs the duvet off my bed and I shiver. I am still wearing pajamas that say AIMEE on the front to remind me of my new name. I’ve been wearing them ever since I arrived here, which I think is three days ago now.
“Why are there bars on the window?”
“To keep the bad men out. There are bad people who try to take things that don’t belong to them, and the bars help keep us safe.”
I don’t feel safe when she tells me this, I feel scared. Then I think about how I don’t belong to Maggie, but she took me.
She opens the white wardrobe and I can see that it is full of clothes. Someone else’s. Maggie takes out a purple top and a pair of trousers, then lays them on the bed, along with some underwear and socks. “Put those on,” she says before leaving the room.
When she comes back, she is dressed and her face is covered in color. Orange on her cheeks, brown on her eyes, red on her lips. She’s wearing a short skirt and long boots. She looks at me in my trousers, which keep falling down, then shakes her head and tuts. She tuts a lot.
“You’re still too skinny, you need to eat more. Take them off.”
I do as she says while she opens the wardrobe again, her hand scraping the hangers along the pole as though she is cross with everything she sees.
“Try these.” She scrunches up some dark blue material, making me put one leg inside, then the other. I’ve never seen anything like it.
“What are they?”
“They’re called dungarees,” she replies, strapping me inside them. I repeat the name without making any sound, enjoying the silent shape the new word forces my tongue to make inside my mouth. “Come on then, I’ve got work to do. Hurry up and get downstairs.”
I’ve never been back down the stairs since I arrived.
I’m not allowed.
There’s even a white gate across the top to remind me.
When Maggie opens the gate and pushes me down the first step, I get scared. I’d forgotten how many steps there were, and I get a pain in my tummy looking down at them all. We didn’t have any steps at all at home, we lived in something called a bungalow, and I think I preferred living down on the ground.
“What are these?” I ask, stepping over one of the orange strips of wood on the floor, careful not to hurt my feet on the metal spikes.
“They are carpet grippers, and the green stuff is carpet liner. Hurry up.”
“Where’s the carpet?” I walk my fingers along the cork wall.
“Carpet costs money, and money doesn’t grow on trees. You have a nice carpet in your bedroom, that’s all you need to worry about. You have the nicest room in the flat, so try to be grateful, Baby Girl.” That is what she likes to call me now: Baby Girl. It is another new name, just like Aimee.
At the bottom of the stairs I think we might be going outside, and I’m worried because I’m not wearing a coat or shoes. But we are not going outside. Instead, Maggie takes out her giant set of keys and starts unlocking the metal door I saw the first night I arrived here. Then she slides the bolts at the top, middle, and bottom. When she opens the door, I can’t see anything, only black, but then she flicks a switch and lights come on all over the ceiling above me. It’s as though we have stepped inside a spaceship.
“This is the shop,” she says.
It doesn’t look like a shop. There are lots of TV screens everywhere, and I wonder how anyone could watch more than one television program at a time. Bits of newspapers are taped to the white walls, next to posters covered with numbers and pictures of horses. There are black leather stools that are taller than I am, and ashtrays everywhere. In the corner of the room is a counter that looks a bit like the ones you see in a bank. It has a glass panel with just a few holes for speaking through.
“You are never to come into the shop when we have customers. You are to stay in the back room.” She unlocks the door that leads behind the counter, where I can see two shopping tills and lots of little bits of paper.
“What does the shop sell?”
“We’re bookmakers.”
I think about that for a little while. “Then where are all the books?”
She laughs. “We don’t sell books, Baby Girl.”
“Then what do you sell?”
She thinks for a moment, then smiles at me. “Dreams.”
I don’t understand.
We walk through another room where there are telephones, a big scary-looking machine, and a dirty-looking sink. Then we’re inside a smaller room, with just a dusty desk, a chair, a tiny TV, and another door with locks that looks as if it might lead outside. She pushes me down onto the chair, and her hand hurts my shoulder.
“Will I be allowed to go home in time for my birthday next week? I’m going to be six on the sixteenth of September.”
“This is your home now, and it is not your birthday next week. Your birthday is in April, and you’re going to be seven next year.”
I don’t know what to say about that. She is wrong. I know how old I am, and I know when my birthday is.
“Do you know what a bet is?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s like I bet you one conker that it will rain today.”
She laughs and I remember how pretty she looks when
she smiles. “Yes, clever girl, that’s exactly what it is. The shop is somewhere people come to place bets, but not about the weather; they mostly bet on horses and sometimes dogs.”
“Horses and dogs? How can you bet on a horse?”
“Well, the horses race, and the people place bets on which one will come first. But they don’t do it for conkers, they do it for money.”
I try to make sense of it all. “What if they lose?”
“Good question. If they lose, we keep their money and buy more carpets for upstairs. Do you understand?”
I shake my head no, and she starts to look cross again.
“If it’s a shop, then don’t you have to sell something?”
“We do, I told you already. We sell dreams, Baby Girl. Dreams that will never come true.”
Nineteen
London, 2017
“I’m afraid I still don’t follow,” I say.
Detective Alex Croft and her sidekick have been in my dressing room for some time now, and it’s starting to feel as if there isn’t enough oxygen in here for the three of us. I keep staring at the door, like an emergency exit I’d like to escape through, but she just keeps staring at me, then expels another sigh before speaking.
“I’m asking you, again, what happened when you got back from the petrol station?”
“And I’ve told you, several times now, that I was never at the petrol station. I left the restaurant and went home to bed, alone.”
She shakes her head. “Did you ever wonder why two detectives were sent to your house when you reported Ben missing?”
“Well, I—”
“It’s not standard procedure, but your husband was deemed to be high risk. Do you want to know why?”
I stare back at her, not sure that I do.
“Because earlier that day he visited the local police station and reported you for assault and battery. Either you really are a great actress, or I’m guessing you didn’t know.”