From Notting Hill to New York . . . Actually

by Ali McNamara

  ‘Yes, and I’m afraid I’ve got no solutions for you this time,’ Sean says. ‘Tracing thrift-shoppers in New York is a bit out of my jurisdiction.’

  ‘Damn, and that brooch would have been worth so much if it was a genuine Tiffany. Eleanor said we could use it to help Sunnyside if we found it again.’

  ‘Do you think she meant it?’ Sean asks. ‘People say all sorts of things when they think the situation is one way, but if we did discover where the brooch was, do you think Eleanor would still be in such a hurry to give it away?’

  ‘I don’t know, but in theory it’s not hers to give away, is it? It’s Dad’s, and Dad gave it to me to do what I liked with. So if we find it, it’s really up to me what happens.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘But since finding the brooch now is looking about as likely as me becoming some sort of … film or television superstar, I really don’t think we need worry too much.’

  Sean smiles as he links his arm through mine. ‘Red, knowing you, I wouldn’t draw the line at anything!’

  Thirty-two

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ I ask Jamie as we walk towards the building where his office and studio are located, just off Lexington Avenue. ‘I’m not sure I’ll be very good on camera.’

  ‘Are you joking?’ Jamie says as he unlocks the outer door to what appears to be a large block of apartments. ‘We couldn’t shut you up last time!’

  Once inside, we climb a small staircase and unlock another door. This is not how I’d expected the studio to be at all. I’d thought it would be somewhere much more glamorous, and had I not known what was inside, I would have assumed it was simply more Manhattan housing hidden behind the plain brick walls.

  ‘This is the office,’ Jamie says, dropping his bag on the desk.

  The office is made up of a very large desk housing several screens, computers and other gadgets that I don’t recognise, a second smaller desk, a sofa, a couple of chairs and a bookshelf with lots of souvenirs and trinkets that obviously have special significance for the office users.

  ‘This is where we do all our editing,’ Jamie explains. ‘When Max and I have made a film about something, we come here to edit it all together before it gets sent to London.’

  ‘It’s a nice little office,’ I say, looking around me.

  ‘Yeah, it’s cool. Look,’ he says, opening a door. ‘We even have a shower through here. All the mod cons.’

  I laugh. ‘Excellent.’

  ‘OK, what we’ll do is take you into the studio in a minute and record you saying your piece. Then we can cut it in with some footage of you talking about the brooch from before, outside Tiffany’s, so people can actually get to see the dragonfly.’

  When we’d told Peter what had happened at the thrift store, he was already one step ahead of us.

  ‘I thought that might happen,’ he’d said. ‘So I’ve come up with a plan.’

  He’d then set about telling us his idea. I would record an appeal for my brooch, telling people the story behind it. ‘Pull on folks’ heartstrings,’ Peter had suggested with a knowing nod of his head, and then he’d assured us he would have it played over his network on some of the news channels to see if we got any reaction.

  And here I am with Jamie, at his office and studio, about to do just that. I’d offered Sean the chance to come along too, but he’d suggested this would be a good chance for Jamie and me to have some proper time together.

  ‘Do you know what you’re going to say?’ Jamie asks while I look about the room nervously. We weren’t even in the studio yet, and I could feel my heart beginning to race.

  ‘Er … I thought I’d just talk about Dad, and how the brooch meant so much to him, and how it got given away by mistake.’

  Jamie screws up his face. ‘This is the US, Scarlett, you’ll need a bit more than that to get them intrigued.’

  ‘What do you think I should say, then?’

  ‘Take a seat,’ Jamie says, gesturing at the white sofa. ‘Let’s have a think. Right, let’s see …’ He sits down next to me. ‘You need to start by telling them how this brooch has reunited a family.’

  ‘You mean Dad and you.’

  Jamie nods. ‘Yeah, me and your father.’

  ‘He’s your father now, too.’

  ‘I know,’ Jamie picks up a cushion from the sofa and twirls it around in his hand. ‘I know.’

  ‘How are you feeling about that?’

  Jamie shrugs. ‘OK I guess.’

  ‘Did you get on all right yesterday, when you spent time together just the two of you?’

  ‘Yeah, it was fine. But it’s gonna take a while. We’ve only just met.’

  ‘Of course. Dad’s OK once you get used to him. He can be a bit brusque at times, but that’s just his way. He says what he means.’

  Jamie smiles. ‘I’d rather he did. I prefer the no-nonsense approach, me.’

  ‘Yes, you do, don’t you? You know, I can’t believe I didn’t notice before how alike you are.’

  ‘There was no reason you should, was there? Any more than we could have known we were brother and sister.’

  An awkward silence sits down on the sofa between us while Jamie pretends to rearrange his cushion.

  ‘I always knew we had a connection, though,’ I say bravely, ignoring the invisible third party. ‘Didn’t you?’

  Jamie looks up at me. He nods. ‘Yeah, but I thought it might be something else for a while. That’s kinda awkward now, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ I screw up my face. ‘But we did realise the other day that we didn’t actually fancy each other …’

  ‘That’s true, I guess.’

  The silence settles back in its seat again.

  ‘I’ve never had a brother,’ I venture this time. ‘What are you supposed to do with one?’

  Jamie shrugs. ‘I don’t know. Never had a sister, either. I guess we’ll just gradually learn what it’s all about as we go along.’

  ‘Sounds good to me. Although I think we’ve been making a pretty good job of it already, don’t you?’

  Jamie grins. ‘Yeah, sis, I think we have.’

  ‘Right, are you ready?’ Jamie asks a little while later, when we’re all set up in the studio with a huge camera facing me, and two big white lights shining down onto my face.

  The studio too wasn’t at all what I was expecting. It was a tiny room, with a big screen at the rear, over which Jamie said we could add whatever backdrop we wanted after we’d finished filming, depending on what looked good. There were two small screens in front of me, one that showed Jamie the TV studio in the UK when he was broadcasting live, and the other what he looked like himself.

  ‘How do you cope with all this?’ I ask him as I sit nervously in the chair waiting for the off.

  ‘You get used to it. You’re lucky, I have an earpiece to contend with as well, with all sorts of nonsense being babbled at me most of the time! Ready to go?’ he asks again. ‘I’ll count down from three, and you’ll see a red light, then you’re on. OK?’

  I nod.

  ‘And stop looking like a rabbit in headlights,’ Jamie laughs. ‘I’m not going to run you over, just film you.’

  ‘You might as well be. I’d be in less distress than I am right now.’

  Jamie gives a dismissive shake of his head. ‘In three, two, one,’ he says. He nods again.

  ‘Hi … er, my name is Scarlett … yes, that’s right, it’s Scarlett, and I would like to talk to you about my dragonfly that’s gone missing.’

  ‘Cut!’ Jamie says, pushing a button on the camera. ‘What was that? You sounded like you were going to talk about a pet.’

  ‘I know, I know, I’m sorry. I’m just nervous.’

  ‘Right, let’s give it another go. In three, two, one.’ He nods.

  ‘Hi, I’m Scarlett, Scarlett O’Brien, you were probably thinking I was going to say O’Hara then, weren’t you, like in the movie?’ I bury my face in my hands even before Jamie has the chance to say ‘cu
t’.

  ‘What are you doing, Scarlett?’ he asks. ‘This isn’t what we rehearsed.’

  ‘I know, it’s just, every time that red light comes on I forget everything and my brain goes to pieces.’

  ‘I know it’s hard, but just try and focus on what we talked about before, OK? Right, one more go then,’ Jamie says hopefully, getting ready to push the button. ‘In three, two, one.’ He nods.

  ‘Hi, I’m Scarlett O’Brien and I really need your help. You see, I’m looking for something, something quite unusual. It’s a green and blue dragon, and it was mistakenly given to the Salvation Army thrift store … What?’ I ask Jamie as he reaches for the off-button again.

  ‘You’re looking for a dragon now?’ Jamie pulls a face. ‘Looper alert.’

  ‘Is that what I said? Damn, this is hard.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re finding it so difficult. When we spoke to you that day outside Tiffany’s you weren’t nervous, you spoke to us really easily then.’

  ‘It wasn’t like this, though, was it? All formal, with lights and buttons and screens; it was just natural.’

  Jamie considers this. ‘Right, one minute.’ He pulls his iPhone from his pocket and taps it a couple of times. ‘Max, hi, yeah, what are you up to this afternoon? Not much? Great. Fancy doing some extra-curricular filming …?’

  *

  ‘OK,’ Jamie says. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Yep,’ I nod.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he asks Max, who’s standing in front of me with his camera on his shoulder, pointing in my direction.

  ‘I’m always ready, you should know that by now,’ Max says, not moving his head from behind the lens.

  ‘Well, Lady Liberty is going nowhere, so let’s go for it.’

  We’ve come down to Battery Park, and we’re standing on the water’s edge with a distant view of the Statue of Liberty behind us. Max and Jamie had decided between them that this would be the ideal place to film me. ‘Having the statue in the background will add to your tale and give it some good old Uncle Sam, Stars and Stripes, Pledge of Allegiance American pride. The viewers will love it.’ Max had said.

  ‘OK, here we go then, roll ’em, Maximilian,’ Jamie calls.

  Max rolls the one eye I can see from behind his camera. ‘We’re on,’ he says calmly.

  Jamie turns towards the camera.

  ‘When Scarlett O’Brien came to New York to trace the history of a piece of antique jewellery, she didn’t realise that that same brooch was in fact the key to bringing together a father and son who had never met.’

  And so the interview unfolds, with Jamie asking me about Dad and himself – carefully leaving out the fact that he is the son in question – and how the brooch has managed to reunite a family, and yet now, because of the selfless act of giving the brooch away at a charity auction, the one memento that the family would so dearly love to have in its possession has gone missing.

  ‘So,’ Jamie says to camera, ‘if you see this brooch, please contact the TVA studios on the number at the end of this film, and help Scarlett fit the final missing piece back into her family’s jigsaw.’

  ‘And cut,’ Max calls from behind the camera.

  ‘Was that OK?’ I ask in relief as the camera and microphone are both lowered. ‘You don’t think it was a bit over the top?’

  ‘Are you kidding me?’ Jamie asks. ‘People will love it!’

  ‘He’s right,’ Max says, putting down the camera. ‘They really go for this family-in-turmoil kinda thing. That’s how the whole Oprah and Jerry Springer phenomenon took off.’

  ‘All right, well, I guess you know what you’re doing.’

  ‘By the time we edit this little baby together, you’ll be a TV star all over the US of A, darlin’,’ Max drawls in a bad Texan accent.

  ‘And this will be a good thing?’

  ‘Of course!’ Max assures me. ‘How can it possibly be bad?’

  Thirty-three

  Max may have been joking, but after he and Jamie have edited a short piece of the footage we shot in Battery Park together with the piece of me outside Tiffany’s, even I find it quite a heart-wrenching couple of minutes to watch. So when Peter arranges for it to be shown at the end of both the local news bulletins and a couple of national ones, it’s then that things really start to go a little mad.

  First, I’m asked to be interviewed by a couple of local news stations, which involves me sitting in a studio much like the one Jamie tried to film me in to begin with, with an earpiece in my ear and a green screen behind my chair. The presenters ask me questions, which I try to answer as coherently as I can while feeling as if my mouth is suddenly filled with cotton-wool balls and my brain stuffed with something similar.

  They want to know about my search, and how I found out I had a brother, and how we’re all getting on now we’ve been ‘reunited’, and the odd thing is, the interviews seem to go fairly well. I don’t make a complete fool of myself or babble on about something quite irrelevant like the movie I watched on cable last night, or the shoes I saw in the window of Saks on the way to the studio.

  But even after all the news bulletins and the interviews, we still have no new leads on the dragonfly. The person who has it can’t live in New York, can’t watch television, or can’t want to be found.

  The madness really starts to take hold when calls like this begin coming in.

  ‘Scarlett,’ Sean says, holding the hotel room phone away from his face. ‘It’s Marsha & Friends – it’s like a daytime chat show here, and they want you to come on their show as a guest to talk about your hunt for the brooch.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sean says slowly as if I’m a child. ‘You, Scarlett. Will you do it? Can you cope?’

  ‘Of course I can cope.’ Being a guest on Marsha & Friends can’t be that different to the local news interviews I’ve done so far, can it? ‘Of course I’ll do it, Sean. Tell them yes.’

  But I may have underestimated quite how different it is.

  ‘So, Scarlett,’ Marsha asks me from her side of the desk as I try to get comfortable on the incredibly hard sofa her guests are expected to sit on. ‘Tell us how this dragonfly brooch we’ve all been hearing so much about brought you here to New York to search for your family.’

  ‘Well, that’s not quite how it happened, Marsha.’

  ‘But didn’t you go across to Ellis Island to try and trace them?’ Marsha asks, leaning in towards me. ‘That’s usually what people go there for.’

  How did she know about that?

  ‘Yes, I did go to Ellis Island as a tourist, and yes, I did search for my family while I was there, but I didn’t find anything out. My friend Oscar did, though, he found he was related to a long line of Italian—’

  ‘So what made you want to begin searching for your family then, Scarlett?’ Marsha cuts me short. ‘Did you have a difficult childhood?’

  ‘No, I had a very happy childhood, actually.’

  ‘Both parents at home?’

  ‘No, just my dad, but—’

  ‘Aha, so you felt the need to search for a long-lost mother?’

  ‘No, I did that last year back in the UK and I found her, and we’re all quite happy now.’

  Marsha opens her eyes wide and I see a glint.

  ‘You searched for your long-lost mother and found her? Tell us about that.’

  I tell Marsha, her audience and the viewing public as quickly as I can about how I’d looked for and found my mother last year.

  ‘And this is how you met your boyfriend? How wonderful is that, ladies and gentlemen!’ Marsha turns to the audience, who burst into spontaneous applause, encouraged by the floor assistant who madly waves her arms in the air at them.

  ‘Is he here?’ Marsha asks.

  ‘Yes, he’s over there.’ I point to Sean sitting in the audience.

  The camera swings around and pans in on Sean who, redder than I’ve ever seen him before, smiles – though I can tell it’s more of a grimace –
at the camera and half raises his hand in acknowledgement.

  I grin at him, and as soon as the camera swings away from him he pulls a pained face back at me.

  ‘So, is this what drove you to help your father to meet with his son, so they could share that same sense of joy and belonging as you’d felt?’

  ‘No, not at all to begin with. I didn’t know about Jamie when I came here to New York. We met accidentally when I was researching the dragonfly brooch, and he filmed me for a TV station over in the UK …’

  I go on to tell Marsha the whole story while her audience sit enraptured.

  ‘But I do know what it feels like when you don’t know your whole family. You feel like you’re not quite complete. A piece of your jigsaw is always missing, is the way I’d describe it. Which is why I want to set up a trust to help people find their lost relatives.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard about this. Tell us more,’ Marsha asks eagerly.

  I tell her about Sunnyside and the children there, and all the other people I think I could help with my idea. And by the time I’ve finished, Marsha actually looks quite moved, and a couple of the women in the audience are dabbing at their eyes with tissues.

  ‘So this would be a charitable organisation?’ Marsha asks.

  ‘In the main, yes. Obviously if someone was able to pay and wanted our help, then the fee would go towards helping others.’

  ‘Well, Scarlett, it may all have happened accidentally for you, but it sounds absolutely fantastic, and I wish you the best of luck with everything. Oh, just one more thing: what will you call this charitable trust, if you manage to set it up? Just so our viewers can look out for it?’

  Oh … I hadn’t thought of a name …

  ‘The Dragonfly Trust,’ I announce off the top of my head.

  ‘Of course, how perfectly apt; let’s hope you manage to trace your mascot again. I’d like to thank you for being such a wonderful guest today.’ She holds up her hand. ‘Scarlett O’Brien, everyone. And remember, if you see that dragonfly brooch, get in touch with us!’