Blurred Lines: The most timely and gripping psychological thriller of 2020

by Hannah Begbie

  The tape recorder clicked to a close. And Becky was free to go.

  Scott asked her later, ‘Didn’t you know what would happen?’ He meant the headlines. Those scathing think-pieces that labelled Becky a Judas, a betrayer of women, an enabler of misogyny. A woman who lied to defend her rapist boss. A woman who let an actress spiral down to attempted suicide, disbelieved and pilloried as an attention-seeker, for the sake of her own glittering career. All the photos of Becky and Matthew together in Cannes. She hadn’t been aware so many were being taken.

  ‘Yes,’ she had said. ‘I knew.’

  The question the papers asked again and again: why did she come forward now? Why speak up unless she’d been found out, or had let it slip to someone, or had been nailed to the truth by some last-minute piece of CCTV?

  There was no doubt left in the public mind; a woman had said she was raped, and there had been a witness. Therefore it had happened. And that meant Becky had beyond doubt witnessed a rape and had chosen to say nothing. She had instead supported the man who paid her wages and promoted her. You’d know when someone is being raped, wrote one commentator. If there was doubt, you’d say something. What is worse, a little embarrassment or letting an attacker go unchallenged? Sometimes the articles made Becky doubt what she knew. Had she coldly calculated the cost-benefit of letting Amber suffer?

  Someone from the hotel in Camber recognized her picture and sold their story – Matthew’s payment for her no-expenses-spared weekend away. The spoils of a war on women, in which she was a collaborator. That sealed things in the public mind. And it did look bad, she knew it. ‘The optics were bad,’ said one journalist.

  She tried to hang on to her truth. And eventually she stopped reading the articles.

  She had chosen to live with it. She gave no interviews, no comments, no quiet inside-briefings to defend herself. There was going to be a trial and, having elected to give Amber the truth, at the cost of near everything, how could she jeopardize Amber’s chance of getting justice? Why try to save herself?

  ‘Was it worth it?’ Scott had asked her.

  ‘Yes, it was. I think so.’

  Then Scott had asked her permission for him to give her a hug, which sounded so quaintly old-fashioned that she almost asked why on earth he’d ask that, before she remembered exactly why he might ask first, and then she was so moved by his thoughtfulness that she couldn’t let him out of her arms, not for five long minutes.

  The film is nearly over, but Becky knows that two more people are yet to visit her from the screen. In an interview ahead of the film’s premiere, Emilia had spoken about how Sharon convinced her to stay in the role, disclosing a new plan for the film’s final scene. It had ‘moved me deeply, as a piece of art. It puts life in all its pain into the heart of the story’, Emilia had said.

  That scene now begins to play.

  Becky has read enough reviews to know that the moment is coming, but it still kicks her in the gut when Medea’s grave is visited by her grieving sister, Chalciope. Played by Amber Heath. A theatrical metafictive flourish.

  On screen, Amber lays flowers then a tender kiss on the freshly dug ground.

  Becky suddenly wishes that she had not seen the film on a day like today, when she was sure to feel even worse later on. That she had allowed herself some time to recover from seeing Amber’s face, beamed ten feet high on the cinema screen, tearful and reproachful, mourning the world’s women lost to betrayal and despair.

  The credits begin to roll and – there she is – Becky’s second visitor.

  Siobhan’s name has ended up in the credits for Medea, thanks to her taking a new job as Development Executive at Julia Peppard’s company, Bottom Line. Siobhan joined them only a few days before Bottom Line announced their deal to acquire all rights in Medea from Kingfisher Films.

  When the news broke, Siobhan had texted Becky: I didn’t plan that one btw. It was the first contact between them since the day Siobhan resigned.

  In a year of thinking things over, it is the slap to Siobhan’s face that still makes Becky feel sick with shame. Its viciousness. The fear behind it. The desire to crush and intimidate anyone who might expose her. She has gone over that moment many times, but still, her inability to take Siobhan’s censure on the chin, instead assaulting her, is something that she cannot forgive herself for.

  The only silver lining is that it gives her a vanishingly small moment of fellow-feeling with Adam. That slap was not the totality of who she is. It is not her whole truth. And so when Adam had asked her to please believe that what he did to her is not who he is, now she at least understands what he means. It doesn’t change much, it doesn’t excuse anything, but she knows what he means.

  A few days after Siobhan texted, Becky had taken the strength gained from a rare good night’s sleep, and the comfort of her daughter sleeping close by, and the sun beaming through a gap in the curtains, and decided to call her. So, without breakfast, without allowing herself time to doubt and unpick the instinct, she picked up the phone and dialled.

  Siobhan had answered after two rings. ‘All right?’ she said, a response so unexpected that Becky was silenced. ‘Beck, are you there?’

  And then the words had poured out. ‘I’m calling because it matters to me what you think. And I want you to know that of all the bad things I’ve done in the last year, the thing I most regret was hurting you. I can’t take that back and I’m not asking you to forgive me, but I want to tell you that when things started happening with Matthew and Amber, I made some really bad decisions. I was afraid of what might happen and what I might lose. I didn’t want my life destroyed by something I hadn’t done. But that was wrong. I should have been braver than that. And I’m so sorry I took it out on you.’

  Enough silence had fallen for Becky to think Siobhan had ended the call until she heard her say, ‘Bit heavy for eight a.m. on a Tuesday?’

  Becky had laughed, sniffing back tears.

  ‘Seriously,’ said Siobhan. ‘I’m feeling sorry for you right now. Some of the stuff they’re saying about you … especially as I know you loved your work and you worked hard. And you did come forward, in the end.’ Becky felt tears on her cheeks and she was glad Siobhan couldn’t see them.

  Becky wanted to tell her more: to drape and underpin and contextualize everything with the details of her own story, to do as Matthew and Adam had, garlanding their actions with good reasons, solid explanations, great excuses, and a bulletproof sense that they ought never to be judged for any pain they had caused. And yet, with Siobhan, she tried to let her apology stand unreserved.

  ‘I’m making my film, Becks,’ said Siobhan. ‘You know the one where, like, if Watership Down was actually a laugh? I honestly think I might get Aniston. Like, comedy Aniston. The best Aniston.’

  ‘I’m pleased for you,’ she said, believing it too.

  The industry had felt like another country then. Its vanities, its ways, its hungers – they had dropped away. On the surface, at least. And Becky had left that behind. So when Siobhan asked her what her next move was going to be, and the reply was that she had been taking long walks, Becky had to work to convince her ex-colleague that this was actually true.

  ‘But you were doing so well!’ said Siobhan.

  Then Amber’s face, drunk or drugged, out of it and miserable, trapped, on its side against Matthew’s rug, stared back at Becky.

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ she replied. ‘Not the way I should have been.’

  It was only later that Becky realized she might have sounded like she just wasn’t moving up the ladder fast enough but then she thought, Siobhan will get it. They hadn’t made plans to see each other. But nor did it feel impossible that, one day, they might.

  Becky watches Emilia’s credit float up the screen.

  The film has attracted four-star reviews across the board. Emilia is a name in the Best Actress race, although some pundits have debated whether the ‘Kingfisher scandal’ will still bite her in the ass when it comes to the voters
.

  Emilia has been canny. Of course she has; her advisors are well-paid to help her navigate things like this. In interviews she has been at pains to emphasize that she refused to do the film while Kingfisher was involved, but after they exited she felt able to at least discuss it with Sharon, who she credits as a ‘visionary director and an unequivocally feminist voice’.

  The divorce of Kingfisher and Medea had been messier in real life. Once Matthew’s trial was announced, the project was dead so long as he was attached to it. Becky had been fired for gross misconduct. Matthew’s legal fees must have been extraordinary, thinks Becky. The company’s back catalogue and existing projects were quickly sold off, no doubt much of it going on the divorce from Antonia, all done within a few short months.

  And then there was whatever he paid his exceptionally-skilled barristers to defend him from the rape charge. All in, it probably cost him more than Medea’s total budget.

  The day Becky received an email from Kingfisher Films’ lawyer informing her that she was no longer in its employment she had dug out her old contract and struggled through terms and conditions she didn’t remember ever having read. A contract signed at a time when she was simply grateful to have the job. She had gone through the four-page document with quivering hands: a trial three-month period, during which either party could decide to terminate … A salary that was paid monthly into her bank account … Standard terms and conditions. She might have caved and taken her termination lying down, had she not been acutely aware of a stack of bills to pay, and her iron-clad refusal to ask Adam for help. She would not let the first neutral words spoken to him be ones asking him for something. So she had knocked back a neat gin and called the lawyer back, stating in very simple terms that she expected a proper redundancy package. She had named her price. And she wanted a guarantee that if Medea was made, she would receive the full bonuses promised to her. The lawyer had outright laughed at the idea Medea might survive this shit-storm, but Becky had been adamant. She said she’d sell her story to the press if the money wasn’t in her account, and a deal memo agreeing Medea payments in her hands, by the end of the day.

  She’d hung up. And to her surprise and relief, she received both. And of course the Medea demand had worked out very well.

  Was it blood money? No, she told herself. She had earned it legitimately. By the time she co-signed the agreement between Kingfisher and Siobhan’s new employers, she had her own lawyer on board. She signed away any right to have her name in the credits, in exchange for a substantial cheque. That cheque had been the deposit for her flat with the view of the treetops.

  Becky spills outside, blinking into sunlight after the darkness of the cinema. She stayed until the end credits finished. A small part of her had hoped that maybe someone might have sneaked a coded thank you to her into the ‘Special Thanks’ section. She might have been alluded to somehow, a wave of recognition made in disguise. But no. Her erasure is complete.

  And what does she think of her film? Or rather, the film.

  No. Her film.

  She thinks she likes it. She thinks perhaps one day, when she can bear to tell the story as a dry account of some things that happened, instead of a searing mea culpa, then maybe she will refer to it out loud as her film. She is glad at least that it exists, to let go of it this way.

  And tomorrow she will go back to work in the solicitor’s office, and set about checking, filing and posting.

  She checks her phone, flicking off Airplane Mode. Amber Heath has texted to say she is running five minutes late to meet her.

  Chapter 29

  Becky kills time, sitting on the steps of a shopping arcade near the cinema, with a cup of coffee, hiding behind her sunglasses.

  She watches as a rowdy group of teenage girls, probably skiving off school, jostle over a phone screen, shrieking with laughter, giving each other endless grief for some slip of the emotions over a boy, a photo, a friend, just life. They are still at the beginning of so much. Becky tries not to nakedly stare at them. The sunglasses help.

  The past year has been hard on her own sweet teenager.

  When the news broke that Amber Heath’s longed-for witness had a name and face, Maisie had asked Becky the question, and Becky had told her, Yes, it was me.

  ‘You were there when it happened?’ Maisie said through her tears. ‘All that time you sat on your hands and didn’t say anything?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you defended him! You said what a good man he was!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘While everyone called Amber a liar for making up a witness?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mum, she fucking tried to kill herself!’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And you were there?’

  ‘I saw two people having sex and I left straight away. I didn’t really understand what I’d seen, other than Matthew on the floor with someone who wasn’t his wife.’

  ‘But she asked you to come forward.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And you didn’t. You lied and said it wasn’t you.’

  ‘I’ve told the police everything.’

  ‘When did you do that?’

  ‘A couple of days ago.’

  ‘But I don’t understand. Why didn’t you say something straight away?’

  ‘I wish I had.’

  ‘No, answer the fucking question! Why didn’t you say anything?’ And with that, Maisie had broken: the forensic questioning gone, and in its place an angry blizzard of accusations and condemnations. ‘What if it had been me? How would you have felt if someone put their fucking stupid career ahead of helping me out while I got raped on a floor somewhere?’

  What could she say to save herself?

  She might have said: listen. I might have had a different life, if Adam hadn’t raped me and then lied to me for sixteen years.

  I might have been less frightened of losing the things I had.

  She might have said: I spent sixteen years believing that I was lying to you when we told you Adam was your father. For most of that time, I blamed a man who turns out to be gay and kind and horrified that I thought that about him. I used to fantasize about killing him.

  I might not have been so warped and wounded.

  You might not have existed.

  I ended up owing too much to two men.

  Two men who knew exactly what they were doing with me.

  And I lost everything.

  Would Maisie have carried on tearing her apart then?

  Becky has rehearsed the moment many times, picturing Maisie as she learns that her father – the man she loves most in the world, who gets her humour, who makes pancakes with her, who kisses her hello and goodbye and with whom she feels safe – broke into her mother, and then lied. And lied and lied.

  No longer the child of two kids who were once in love enough to do it, and then kept her because they loved her, and still love her together. Instead, a child born of violence. A nearly-given-away child. A lied-to infant, daughter of a deceived and broken mother and her manipulative rapist. Her baby face searched for evidence of her paternity.

  What happens when your story collapses? How do you fill the gaps that you are left with? Becky knows something about that, and it is the last thing she wants for her daughter. But it is the price that would be paid for justice with Adam. There is no way around that. If she wants to keep her child as she is today – happy, loved, and whole – then there is no place for the truth.

  And so she makes a choice.

  She chooses her daughter, who in this moment is screaming at her and calling her a terrible person and angrily claiming that she will never forgive her for having done this to another woman.

  Becky chooses her daughter.

  Let Maisie scorn her. Let Maisie reject her. Let Maisie hate her, if she must – but Becky knows she will never reach for Medea’s knives and poisons.

  She will let Adam have Maisie, only for the sake of letting Maisie have Adam.

&nb
sp; She will not knowingly raise her daughter, part of a new generation, to feel broken, at fault and ashamed.

  When Adam stopped coming round to their flat, Maisie of course had her narrative. Becky was the cause and Adam’s absence was the effect.

  Maisie was furious. She demanded that Becky make things right. Unlike Lily, whose parents could apparently not be within a thousand yards of each other, she had a Mum and Dad who hung out. Who liked each other!

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Becky had said, again, as Maisie set off for Adam’s flat, enraged at the new distance.

  Becky had cried. Not for her daughter now, and not for Amber either, but finally for herself.

  Adam had lost nothing but Becky. How could that possibly be fair?

  Maisie’s whole school knew about her mother. Overnight she flipped from being someone who was making a cool feminist film with rising star Emilia Cosvelinos, to a hypocrite, career-prioritizing, woman-trashing, liar-bitch. The woman in the kitchen. The woman who did not come forward (at least not straight away).

  One night, soon after the news broke, she heard Maisie come crashing and tripping back into their flat.

  She waited for her daughter to fall asleep before she poked her head around the door. She smelt the acetone traces of alcohol. She picked Maisie’s school blazer off the bedroom floor and smelt the sharp and sweet herbal scent of weed on it. But what authority did she have left?

  She tiptoed back to her own bed and sat, head in hands.

  Two days later, Becky was waiting at the school gates after a meeting. She’d spent nearly half an hour in the headmistress’s office laying out the case for her daughter as a talented and deserving scholarship candidate, who was going through a rough patch. The headmistress had been supportive. Maisie had never been a problematic student before now. Then Becky had decided to wait at the gates for Maisie, risking the cold shoulder, a stony silence, head in her phone as they made their way home. And so, when she saw Maisie break away from her friends and walk towards her with a not-unwelcoming smile, Becky was surprised.