You, Me and The Movies

by Fiona Collins

  I remember Becky drinking more than usual at Gatsby’s, her jumping out of her skin when that Simon came up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder … I thought I was the one who had suffered, who had been through the mill, who needed care and kid gloves and could be arrogant and unfeeling enough to push people away. But all the time it was her, and she hadn’t been arrogant or unfeeling at all, just reluctant to tell her worst experience to someone who wasn’t a real friend any more.

  I hurry home. I have the number for that apartment in Tenerife because years ago Becky and I both went there, for a riotous girls’ holiday – just before I met Felix. The number’s in my ancient black leather Filofax. It rings and rings and I don’t blame it for its Spanish cold shoulder; it probably knows Becky only wants her real friends around her.

  After texting Dominic, asking him to let me know when Becky’s coming back, I’m at a loss. I don’t want to watch the soaps tonight. I flick through my DVD collection and, with a grim smile, decide to torture myself with Imitation of Life. I’d replaced my video of it with the DVD years ago, when I’d had an Amazon voucher. Christian had scoffed at it, on the shelf, next to his Die Hards and his Pulp Fiction.

  This time – the fickle nonchalance of my youth departed, and my current sadnesses bearing down on me like a thick fog – I am overcome. The story of the two mothers and daughters and the tragedy of Sarah Jane denying Annie and then weeping at her funeral swamps me and I sob into the silky back of a linen cushion. Funny how you view things differently, depending where you are in your life. I had been proud of seeing nothing in this film the first time around – now it claws at me on so many raw and painful levels.

  I cry for the person I used to be and who I am now, and I don’t know which of the two is better, and which is worse. I cry for Becky and how I have let her down. I cry for the mother I should have had – sweet, kind, remotely interested – and at the injury of being lumbered with the one I actually got. I cry for all the ways in which I have imitated life and not done it justice.

  And the funeral scene … As Mac once said, ‘wow’. It kills me. Totally wipes me out. All I can think is that I do not want to be at Mac’s funeral. I don’t want to see the practised grim faces of the undertakers, glum and solemn but secretly looking forward to lunch at the chippy. I don’t want to see the dreadful curtains, oscillating – ever so slightly, just there at the bottom – as they close, like they did on the day of my father’s. I don’t want to say goodbye to Mac, not yet.

  I cry for him and I think I’ll never stop. James is right, I need to be prepared, let a little practice-run grief seep out, so I am used to the taste of it, but I hope I’m overdoing it.

  There is hope, isn’t there? Hope that Mac will come round and everything will be OK. As I dry my last tears on a long piece of toilet roll from the downstairs loo, I cling to this hope like a barnacle to a shipwreck. I turn off the telly and reel my way up to bed, done in, telling myself he must pull through, or why has he come back to me at all?

  I awake at half seven to my mobile ringing. My heart jolts in its cage, thrashes about, and I know, from the way the phone is ringing, from the early hour, it won’t be still again for a while.

  ‘Hello?’ I croak, terrified.

  ‘Hi, lovely.’ It’s Fran and her voice sounds weird, like she is a million miles away, across continents. ‘I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but I’m afraid Mac has died.’

  NOW

  Chapter 28

  I fly to the hospital in an old pair of jogging bottoms, grubby trainers and a Spencer Tracy T-shirt, an over-sized, slightly stained duster coat only just staying on my shoulders. I run through the early-morning streets like a ghoul. It’s raining; my curls are soaked to my head. I try to distract myself with thoughts I must look like a blonde Andie MacDowell at the end of Four Weddings and a Funeral, despite all the horrible irony that entails.

  There’s the usual hubbub around the hospital entrance. Faces both relieved and worried coming out; faces both hopeful and worried going in. A man on crutches, laughing with a mate. Not Dominic – he’s probably straddled between a chesterfield sofa and a footstool somewhere having his plaster of Paris stroked. I scuttle through the catacombs, my coat wrapped round me like a superhero’s cape, but it is too late for all that. The only hero was Mac and he is gone.

  I buzz at Ward 10, over and over again, until Fran – looking weary but as though she’s made an attempt to disguise the fact with a chalky coral lipstick I’m sure is against the rules – appears in the frame of the door’s window and it swings open.

  ‘Arden.’

  ‘Please don’t tell me to go to the chapel again, Fran,’ I rush, ‘I can’t bear that place.’

  ‘No, I won’t. Go home now, pet. Go home and grieve for him.’ She places a hand on my arm; I don’t want it there.

  ‘I don’t want to go home!’ I peer behind her, into Ward 10, as though Mac is there and all I have to do is take my seat.

  ‘You have to, my love. You have to go home.’

  Home is where I wanted to escape from, for the second time in my life. I liked coming to St Katherine’s; it gave me a reason and a purpose. I felt needed and comfortable. Home to me is a cold, grey place where all roads lead even if I don’t want them to. I wonder if I can call Julian, if he can come over, but I know he’ll be on his way to work and who wants their mother calling them and begging them to come home because some old bloke she knew a million years ago has died?

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say. I should be going to work today myself, but I know I won’t be able to. ‘Where to go …’ I know I’m not making much sense. I need to call Nigel, call in sick for the day, the week, the life … ‘Will I see you again?’ I ask Fran. It won’t just be Mac who has gone from me, but Fran and James, the people I’ve been with every day. I won’t see them again. I’ll be back alone in my dark, sad world, which I didn’t even realize was quite so dark and grey until Mac blasted in to illuminate it.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Fran shrugs in a kind-nurse way, so I take that as a ‘no’. She meets hundreds of people like Mac, hundreds of people like me; she is not my friend. I’ve made damn sure I don’t have any of those, haven’t I?

  I don’t look back as I walk away, back through the corridors, out through the swish of the double doors into the cold and the morning. I hesitate there, at the front of the hospital. I pull my phone from my coat pocket and text Nigel quickly, saying I won’t be in today. Then I just stand there, completely paralysed.

  There has been no Hollywood ending, not for Mac. There’s no point pondering on what happens next, once the story is over, because the story is over and nothing comes next. I wrap my coat around me but still I don’t move. I have seen my whole life through the prism of the movies, I realize – as a lonely young girl yearning for escape, especially; as an up-for-excitement and self-centred young woman, definitely. Christian put a long stop to that prism – delighting in showing me reality could be very harsh indeed – but encountering Mac again I began to see life in terms of movie moments once more: the framed serendipity of finding him in Ward 10; the thrill of a whispered, nostalgia-evoking line; the wondrous, slow-motion reunion of Mac and Lloyd, father and son … I had even imagined the ready-for-your-close-up miracle of Mac waking from the coma and reaching for me. But movie moments fade to black and wither to nothing – seeing Mac in the hospital was just coincidence; a line from a movie is just a line from a movie; Lloyd is a rather lacklustre prodigal son … and Mac has died.

  I walk home and I let the tears fall, unchecked. He has gone; he has gone, just when he had come back to me. There had been so much to say and be said, so much to remember, and now there is nothing.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket and I ignore it. It buzzes again and I reach to look at it. There’s a text from Dominic, and I run like a ghoul for the second time that morning.

  The airport dash. It happens a lot in movies. It usually involves the hero or heroine – sometimes in a weddin
g dress – hurtling through departure lounges and jumping over barriers and pushing past airline staff to reach The One That’s Getting Away so they can declare their love and stop them getting on the plane. It doesn’t usually involve a bewildered attempt by a deranged and bereaved middle-aged woman in a Spencer Tracy T-shirt to meet her best friend on a flight from Tenerife, without even knowing what she will say to her when she does.

  Becky will be on Flight FR3516 from Tenerife South. After I run back home, arriving dishevelled and quite sweaty, I realize I actually have quite a lot of time, so it’s not really a dash in the end – more an unwieldy schlep. The first part of my quest is a drive to Stansted in my knackered old Golf littered with old Costa coffee cups. I can’t cope with the radio, like James and I had, and my Tom Petty CD doesn’t seem appropriate for how I am feeling – dazed, sad, determined – so I drive in anxious silence, my eyes literally on the road ahead; three foot in front of the bonnet, to be precise. I drive slowly, through arduous London traffic, and, then, the motorway, fearful of crashing.

  Parking is a nightmare. I pay £3.50 to dump my heap in the drop-off area. You’re only supposed to be there for ten minutes and I’ll probably get a massive fine but I don’t care … Of course, I’m running slightly late now and I can’t be faffing about in some Jenga multi-storey and miss Becky. Nor do I want to wait outside for her to come out. I want to be in Arrivals. I want to see Becky coming through the doors and round the corner, with all the backpackers and the red-eyed businessmen. And then I will decide what on earth I’m going to do to make it up to her.

  I head along the concourse, doing a stupid half-run and aiming for the far right end, which has the big yellow sign above it proclaiming ‘Arrivals’. I am aware I am dressed extremely badly. Baby Boom Brexiteers wheeling cases and wearing sombreros in the January chill may think I am a wayward immigrant making for some unseen border. Instead, I walk-run past the window of ‘Arrivals’; there’s a Starbucks, the huge lozenge desk of a taxi office … And then I see her – she’s leaning against the window in a pink coat, her back to the glass, rummaging in her massive bag for something; knowing Becky, a tissue, an Extra Strong Mint or her tin of Vaseline. Her suede coat suckers from the window; she is moving away, not in the direction of the exit but the other way, WHSmiths? I can’t risk her mooching off for a coffee, a cake, a browse for a magazine, where I can’t find her … so I bang on the window, startling a couple of pecking seagulls bickering over the egg mayonnaise part of a Meal Deal on the ground outside and I yell her name.

  ‘Becky! Becky!’

  She pauses, but only to tuck a remnant of tissue into the corner of her bag and zip it up before continuing. I rap again, harder, and shout, ‘Becky!’ She turns and sees me and I try to sum up everything I am feeling in my facial expression – contrition, shame, love and the asking for forgiveness I don’t even know how to formulate – but it all just comes out as a huge, heartbroken grin and she looks surprised, but she smiles too – although it is an uncertain one, not fully executed – and I see her hurrying towards the exit, to the right, and I’m running to it, too, and I’m in and I am flinging myself at her and launching myself into her neck.

  ‘Becky,’ is all I can manage to utter at this point, into what looks like a fluffy purple snood.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ she is saying, and I am close to it but I don’t want to cry – not yet – and she is trying to pull her head free from mine, which is clamped somewhere in her furry collarbone and she says, ‘Let’s get a coffee.’ So we lurch, our arms round each other like in a three-legged race – although it is lopsided and we probably wouldn’t win, as I am leaning heavily on her and staggering a little – into Starbucks.

  ‘I didn’t know, I didn’t know,’ I say, and she makes me give a choked, laughing, truncated sob at the counter by telling the friendly server asking us our names – so they can be scribbled on our drinks – that her name is Kit, and I say my name is Vivian. That kills me as I don’t deserve to be, and the thought reaches me that no one will be rescuing me, not now. We decide to sit down at a just-wiped small, round table. ‘Dominic told me. I’m so sorry about what happened to you.’ The words gush out of me, shame speeding their passage. She nods, settling her coffee named Kit and her muffin down on the table; placing a stack of napkins near my unaccompanied Vivian tea (I can’t eat). ‘And I don’t blame you for not telling me.’ Yet, even now, as I look at her face – Becky’s face, that I know so well, shadowed currently with anguish and apprehension – I am selfish. As I am talking to my friend my brain is screaming, Mac is dead, Mac is dead, Mac is dead, but I can’t think about him, not now. ‘Are you OK? How are you feeling?’

  ‘Yes, I’m OK,’ Becky says. ‘I just had a bit of a wobble. Although I must admit it was quite a big one. Dramatic.’ She attempts a light-hearted grimace, but she is not light-hearted; my friend had a dramatic wobble over something catastrophic and I wasn’t there. I didn’t even know. ‘A bit of winter sun and some sangria has done me the world of good, though,’ she says, running the base of her thumb down the outside of her cup. ‘I can go on now.’

  (Like Mac said I must, I think. I’m thinking about him, I’m sorry. How can I go on, now, when he is not here? How can I even do this, right now, with Becky?)

  ‘I don’t blame you for not telling me,’ I repeat. I am selfish and I am a terrible person. Despite how terrible I’ve been, Becky has tried to be there for me and I have utterly refused to return the favour. ‘I’ve been a useless friend. I’ve pushed you away.’ I swallow down the tears that are near again. I want to tell her about Mac but I am equally desperate not to make any of this moment about me. I need Becky back in my life; I need her more than ever. And if she still needs me – and God, I hope she does – I want to show up for her. I hope showing up for her today will be enough.

  ‘I tried,’ says Becky. ‘With you. I really have tried. But it was exhausting. Every time I reached out, there was just nothing. Nothing at all.’ She sighs, and the look on her face breaks my heart. ‘I just couldn’t tell you about the attack because …’

  ‘… we weren’t close enough,’ I say. My tea is untouched; I flick at the cupboard cuff of my cup. ‘You didn’t feel you could confide in me.’

  ‘Well, no, I couldn’t.’ Her face, again, has a look on it I never want to see again. ‘I’m sorry, Arden.’

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t be sorry! I deserve it!’

  ‘The only people I told were my family and Dominic, as he was around at the time.’

  ‘And he’s been around for you since. I’ve been neither.’

  She nods sadly. ‘You never wanted to meet up, get together. It was like pulling teeth, Ardie! I couldn’t tell you. You’ve been …’ I look down, ashamed, and wait for her to continue. ‘You’ve been bloody awful, Arden!’ There. She is angry with me and I’m glad. I have been bloody awful. But I love her even more for her anger because I know that however bloody awful I’ve been and how weary and exasperated she’s been for trying with me, she has kept trying. ‘Even you coming to Gatsby’s with me, a miracle in itself, us dancing, like old times, it just wasn’t the same. I tried to make it feel like it was, but it wasn’t. You’ve been lost from me. I just couldn’t tell you.’

  Showing up is not enough, I think. So much more is required. I want and need to apologize, to start over, to build a bridge I’m not sure I have the tools for. I simply don’t know where or how to start. ‘I realize now why you were different that night,’ I say. I was a blind idiot; I was blind to everything. How she acted, how she drank … I was blind to her because I wouldn’t let myself see her.

  ‘Yes, I’m different,’ says Becky. ‘I jump at my own shadow, I drink too much, I’m frightened, Ardie. I’m frightened it will happen to me again.’

  She is confiding in me and my heart takes a small leap. ‘It won’t, Becky; it won’t happen again.’

  ‘That’s what Dom says, but it might!’ She looks a little wild, frantic almost. I h
ave never seen my calm, funny, beautiful Becky like this. I wish I had known.

  ‘If it does, we’ll be here to look after you. I’ll be here to look after you. I feel sick that I wasn’t. That I wasn’t there for you.’

  ‘I know Christian made you do everything,’ she says quietly. ‘When you were married to him. Blanking me, hiding from me in your kitchen. Yes, I saw you,’ she says with a sad grin. ‘Sending me that message telling me you never wanted to see me again.’ A very sad grin. ‘I know that wasn’t you, Ardie.’

  ‘No,’ I say, feeling wretched. I take a sip of my tea and welcome its scalding sting. The message she’s referring to fills me with a recurrent horror; the message Christian made me write as he sat behind me, a smiling assassin eating a strawberry Cornetto and tapping his right, bare foot in the air, on a crossed knee. The message he even – shamefully, oh so shamefully – made me believe I meant, as he had chip, chipped away at me until there was nothing left to do except exactly as he told me. But the real horror is how I have behaved since that moment. Since I’ve been free of him. I have been behaving terribly all on my own. ‘But it has been me since, hasn’t it?’ I say. ‘Hiding from you. Rejecting you …’

  I remember that day, some three years after my marriage ended, when I bumped into Becky in M&S. How, shocked by seeing her, I had garbled out a quick apology to her about what happened with my marriage, and with Christian. It had been pathetic, inadequate, embarrassing; surface shallow, a reflecting puddle not a deep, searched pond. I couldn’t bear to go into the pain of specifics. I was too ashamed to explain myself to her properly. And because I had not said a proper ‘sorry’, that shame festered and grew, until it became the disease that separates us now. It has been a grey, cold and uninspiring life since Christian. Devoid of drama, yes, but also devoid of anything. Until Mac showed up. He made me feel again, gave me back some colour and some light. Can I feel my way back to being a good friend to Becky? Not just show up for her but be there, in every sense of the word? For Mac (oh, Mac, Mac) I decide to try.