Who's That Girl?

by Mhairi McFarlane

  Beep.

  You tell ’em, gal.

  No, YOU tell them, Louis, Edie thought. Pass it along: I’ve had enough. She couldn’t go back, so what did she have to lose?

  There was a question here about how exactly Louis had dodged the draft in this war, but Edie was not yet minded to ask it. She hugged her knees and looked around her room.

  The problem with having a nervous breakdown was, it was giving her bullies what they craved. She got up, getting her dressing gown from the back of the door and tying the cord, slowly but firmly. Simple deliberate actions, one step at a time. She wanted to talk to Hannah, but Hannah did a proper job, she might be in theatre.

  N, can you dedicate Nirvana’s ‘I Hate Myself and Want to Die’ from me, to me later? E xx

  … Not on the playlist. I can do you ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’ by Captain & Tennille which is a very similar sentiment. Are you alright? X

  Not as such, but I’ll get there. X

  Downstairs, there were flowers in the kitchen. She’d had time to kill at St Pancras and gone to Marks & Spencer, cursing Meg for making it so difficult to work out what would look generous and what would look pointed, after their row. She’d put some unseasonal Parma Violet lilac tulips in a jug. In another vase, there was a bunch of tiger lilies, still in their cellophane. She’d remembered the sad bronze-edged bouquet at Margot’s, and hit on a nice thing to do.

  Meg was at the hospice and her dad was out, the house was quiet. There was a window of opportunity to pop round, unseen and unchallenged.

  Once a wan Edie was washed and dressed, she knocked at Margot’s door.

  She felt very ‘best Brownie’ holding her surprise gift.

  Margot didn’t look overjoyed to see her.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I got you some flowers!’ Edie said, and pushed the package forward. ‘To say thank you.’

  Margot accepted them, squinting in confusion.

  ‘For what?’

  Not quite the reaction that Edie had envisaged.

  ‘You set me off on a line of thinking that saved the whole project. About the actor saying what he thought? He nearly walked away from it but I persuaded him to do the book, the way you said.’

  Edie was making an eager beaver please be eager too face. Margot looked bleary and indifferent, even irascible.

  ‘He should’ve had more spine from the start. Kids these days.’

  She walked back down the hallway but didn’t close the door, and Edie awkwardly followed her inside, taking it for a tacit, if not very warm, invitation.

  She could see down the narrow corridor to a galley kitchen where Margot, fag dangling from corner of her mouth, blasted a tap into the sink and dropped the flowers into the water.

  ‘Want a drink?’ Margot called.

  ‘Oh. Er. Yes, thanks.’

  There was the clink of glass on glass as Margot sploshed out something Edie feared couldn’t be a cup of Tetley, given the lack of reassuring hiss of kettle. Margot came back down the hallway and handed it to her. She was wearing a lurid tangerine wrap dress that was drawn into a large ornamental clasp at one bony hip. ‘That’ll put hairs on your chest.’

  Edie vacillated over whether to say ‘No thanks, I don’t drink what looks – and smells, urgh – like brandy at 11 a.m.’ versus the potential wrangle involved in demanding a soft drink, and then having to stay to drink it in the resulting atmosphere. Edie decided to take the course of least resistance and accepted.

  She sipped it gingerly, returning to the seat in the front room where she’d read to a snoring Margot last time.

  ‘What’s the story with you, then?’ Margot said, picking up and tapping her resting cigarette into a swan ashtray.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re a pretty girl, moping around. You obviously don’t want to live there –’ Margot jerked her head at next door ‘– Who would? Something’s brought you here. Or someone.’

  She blew out the smoke and fixed wintery eyes on Edie.

  Edie was stung by the ‘moping.’ She’d been faultlessly polite and upbeat with Margot, she thought. She’d come off as a misery guts?

  ‘I told you why I’m here. The book.’

  ‘Hmm. Yes. That’s what you said.’

  Edie took a swig of the noxious brown fluid and felt self-conscious. She noted her default position, under attack, was to feel guilty, defensive and apologetic. With Margot there was an added Old Lonely Person pity factor.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The man who sent you back from London like a scalded flea.’

  ‘No one. Why should there be a man?’

  ‘Hah,’ said Margot, unperturbed. ‘Have it your way, darling. No man. None at all. Definitely not the man you’re thinking of right now.’

  Edie flared with rankled embarrassment. And yet: Margot was right, wasn’t she? Edie jutted out her chin and told herself: you don’t need to be ashamed. Well, you do a bit, but you can be honest in your shame.

  ‘He was my colleague’s fiancé,’ she said. ‘He and I used to chat at work all the time. There’s this G-chat thing, where you can message each other. Like email but faster. He broke my heart and married his girlfriend. He kissed me on their wedding day and I kissed him back and his bride saw and they split up on the spot. They’re back together now but everyone still hates me for it.’

  Margot raised an already artificially raised eyebrow.

  Hah, stitch that, Edie thought. There’s some of that anecdotal hellraising you’ve been missing.

  Margot tapped her fag.

  ‘Are you in love with him?’

  ‘Er …’ Edie faltered. ‘I thought I was, but not now. Not after what he’s done.’

  ‘You can’t think your way out of being in love. You are or you aren’t.’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s not completely out of my system, I suppose, no. I want answers from him I’ve never had.’

  He definitely wasn’t. Edie had braced herself a few days ago, in a ‘devil makes work for idle hands’ moment, and looked up some of their old exchanges. She told herself it was to reassure her that she hadn’t imagined it all. Actually, it was allowing herself to revisit their rapport. She was struck, however, by how much Jack had been playing a part. As had she. A two-player game where they never shared a rulebook.

  Edie swallowed in the small silence that followed her admission, and hoped Margot would say something pithy and take no prisoners about getting rid of Jack that Edie could adopt as her mantra.

  Instead she took a swig of her brandy and said: ‘It was your fault as much as his. You won’t get over him until you realise that.’

  ‘What?’ Edie said, disbelieving. ‘How? He kissed me?’

  ‘I mean the whole affair. Kenneth Tynan said We seek the teeth to match our wounds,’ Margot said. ‘In some way, this man was who you were looking for.’

  ‘He wasn’t!’ Edie said. ‘That’s very victim blaming. So anyone who’s had a really terrible time … been hit, even. They were looking for it?’

  She was starting to have a lot more sympathy with Meg’s ‘fascist’ verdict on Margot.

  ‘I’m not talking about other people, I’m talking about you. You’re no victim. How old did you say you were? Thirties?’

  Edie nodded with a jerk of the head. She was getting more furiously upset by the second.

  ‘Well forgive me, darling, but he can’t be the first mistake.’

  ‘Oh yeah, any single woman of my age, there must be something really wrong with her. God!’

  ‘What have all these mistakes got in common? Ask yourself that.’ Margot leaned forward.

  Edie glared at Margot and knocked her brandy back in one, almost making her cough, and sullenly didn’t answer.

  ‘They didn’t treat you well. They didn’t take you seriously. Am I correct? You’re choosing men who behave like you do. They treat you how you treat yourself. Badly.’

  Edie took a jagged breath and s
tood up. Being confrontational with old people wasn’t the way she was brought up, it wasn’t in her DNA. But needs must.

  ‘I came round with flowers to say thank you, because I thought it might be nice. Thanks for being so gratuitously horrible about me, when you don’t know me.’

  Margot gave a joyless hiccup of a laugh. ‘I know you, alright.’

  Edie marched out of the room and hoped Margot’s door was a simple Yale latch because she couldn’t stand to ask for help in getting out.

  As she wrestled briefly with the door, Margot called from offstage:

  ‘You need people to like you. Stop caring so much. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Great. Cheers,’ Edie called back, and burst out into the street.

  Why did she try? Everything she did went so hopelessly to shit. Better to do the bare minimum, always, and protect herself from further hurt.

  She let herself back into the house, went upstairs and lay down on the bed. We seek the teeth to match our wounds.

  Was that true? Hannah had said Jack was to blame, but Hannah was her best friend. Elliot had pointed out that her hopes with Jack were almost certainly going to be dashed. But Margot had flat out said it: Edie had consorted with a taken man, and got her dues. On reflection, she realised how passive she’d been with Jack. She took no interest in him until he took an interest in her, and then he’d set the pace the whole way. She’d vaguely assumed she didn’t have the right to ask him what was going on. She certainly didn’t have the guts. She had sat back and waited to be told what – and who – she was worth.

  Edie didn’t know how much time had passed by the time she heard the scrape of the key in the door and her father’s tread on the stairs.

  She’d received an email from Elliot’s agent. Would she visit him on set to do the interview, tomorrow? He should have some time free in the filming schedule.

  Yeah sure, not like she had anything better to do.

  She rolled off the bed and went to ask her dad what he fancied for the dinner that she would cook, and barely eat.

  33

  Edie was unlikely to forget how she spent the last day of her thirty-fifth year: staring at an apparently unconscious naked woman on a pyramid of rubble, in a cemetery.

  She’d picked her way to it along the graveyard’s quiet path, under a beautiful green canopy of leaves. Edie used to come to Arboretum Park when she was a moody Goth teenager. She’d look at the names and ages on the headstones and think about how short and brutal life was, then ponder whether purple suited her and what she fancied for tea and potter home again.

  Today she had to get past one of the walkie-talkie army to gain admission to the set. The site, set on a slope, was a swarm of activity, with the TV crew centred around a lissom twenty-something blonde model, dusted post-mortem grey by make-up artists. Her body, as pale and still as marble, naked but for a strange Elastoplast thing over her crotch, was draped atop the heap of Styrofoam stone. Onlookers with headsets and clipboards shouted the occasional instruction, sometimes prompting the corpse to magically stir and adjust the angle of her arms or legs.

  It looked bloody uncomfortable, as well as exposing. Edie was shocked by the public nudity for about seven to ten minutes and found shock was like awe, not sustainable. Especially when the attitude of those around her to a spread-eagled unclothed woman was complete indifference.

  The mini mountain the not-dead body was lying on was surrounded by zigzags of a strange white substance, which a runner told Edie was the serial killer’s trademark pentagram of salt.

  There was also blue and white police tape, flickering in the light breeze, and a cluster of police cars. Actors in high- vis tabards milled around, drinking coffee from cardboard cups.

  It was a bright day, but a persistent mizzle was cast on the area by a rain machine, a rig of pipes spewing a watery mist overhead. Wasn’t the promotional bumpf she read about how this show was going to expose the gritty truth of crime in the regions? Maybe Edie had missed it, living in her London ivory tower, but she didn’t recall many serial murderers in these parts staging elaborate crime scenes with piles of rocks, supermodels and bags of Saxa.

  There was a slight hush in the chatter and a sense of heightened tension as Elliot and Greta Alan appeared on set, emerging from giant sleek trailers parked a hundred yards away. Archie went in serious conference with them, headphones round his neck, arms gesticulating.

  Elliot had his hands thrust in his pockets and was listening intently. Edie felt the strange sensation of wanting to call to Elliot – yoo hoo, it’s me! – when seeing him in work mode, the way parents waved at children in school plays.

  He looked different, in character. His hair was short but tousled, he had a five o’clock shadow and a black leather jacket with hooded top underneath.

  His co-star Greta was a tiny porcelain doll with flame hair, in Coke-can-sized curls. Her improbably narrow waist was accentuated in a nipped-in jacket, charcoal pencil skirt stretched tight across slender hips. She was wearing a large pair of beige Ugg boots, stovepipes on her stalk-like legs. She leant on a lackey and swapped them for violently spiky black-and-scarlet Louboutins when about to walk into shot. They were just the thing for tottering after murderers: chasing a toddler would’ve been difficult.

  After the clapperboard went down – action! – Elliot and Greta picked their way up the slope, towards the body. An actor dressed as a chief constable spoke to them.

  Edie was too far away to hear much of the dialogue, though she felt she could guess what was being said. Elliot was clearly the sort of maverick to try to roll a naked body off a tower of rubble before forensics were ready, and tangle with the uniforms. And then have a heated argument with the Scully to his Mulder, and stride away in an alpha male strop.

  Edie might be pre-judging, but from this one encounter with it, Edie thought Gun City looked like clichéd toss.

  The only real point of interest was Elliot. Edie watched the way his posture altered when he was in character. The set of his jaw seemed different, he moved in an un-Elliot-like way, somehow. Edie didn’t have an opinion on whether he was a particularly good actor but it was interesting to see the change take place.

  However, even Elliot’s tarry-haired beauty couldn’t enliven the experience of seeing the same process repeated twenty-four times. My God, but the hanging around was mind-numbing. The circulation slowed in Edie’s legs.

  There was nothing for it but running down the battery on her phone, yet with her social media accounts still disabled, there wasn’t much to see. A text pinged from Nick and she opened it eagerly. Nick was a good correspondent, he had a great way with a one-liner.

  When she read his text, her face fell.

  E. I don’t know whether you know about this but I felt I had to tell you. I looked for you on Facebook because I wasn’t sure if you’d come back on. I found this group. What an utter shower. I’ve reported it as abusive, you should too. Nx

  It was a Facebook ‘fan’ page with 71 Likes. ‘The Edie Thompson Appreciation Society.’ There was a photo of her used as the profile – the one from the wedding, in the red dress. It was billed as: ‘For people who love the work of Edie Thompson, the world’s best wedding guest.’

  Was she really still such a point of fascination for these people, for a moment’s stupidity, however ill-timed? Did they think the kiss was part of a full-blown affair? She struggled to put faces to most of the names here, and felt how tawdry and mean-spirited it was. There were various sarcastic and spectacularly unfunny, vicious conversations on it: ‘12 reasons Edie should become a wedding planner!’ with gifs. And – surprise – there was the atrocious Lucie Maguire, giving it some welly. It was jolting, it was also repulsive, wearying. She’d done a bad thing but these weren’t good people. Or if they were, they were hiding it well.

  And then she saw it. Eight words, glowing black on white, buried in an otherwise same-same conversation about her crime of husband theft. Edie had to re-read it five times to be sure this
comment existed, and her eyes weren’t deceiving her. She didn’t know the man who’d posted it, only that ‘Ian Connor’ knew something about her he couldn’t possibly know.

  Edie knew, however long she lived, she would never understand how someone could have thought and typed those words, and hit ‘post’.

  She stared into the middle distance, seeing nothing. She stared and breathed and stared and shifted from foot to foot and texted Nick brief acknowledgement, put her phone back in her pocket and looked at the birds in the sky above and breathed some more. There were people around, but thankfully no one near enough to start side eyeing her in curiosity. Suddenly, Elliot was in front of her, filling her field of vision.

  She tried to focus on him. She thought he might be aloof at work, but the opposite was true: he looked excitable and boyish.

  ‘Hey there! You’re not too bored, are you? Did it look OK?’

  ‘Sure,’ Edie said, absently. ‘Very OK.’

  ‘That’s a relief.’

  Edie got her phone back out of her pocket and stared at it, dully, and re-pocketed it again. What was Elliot saying? She should try to concentrate. Concentrate. Forget that thing you just read …

  ‘You alright? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Elliot said.

  Without consciously deciding it would be a good idea to tell Elliot Owen, Edie started speaking.

  ‘There’s a group about me on Facebook. People who hate me, because of the wedding, saying harsh things, taking the piss,’ she paused. ‘And someone’s said … they’ve said …’

  Edie breathed in, and out. She felt tears brim and course down her face, though she hadn’t known she was that close to crying. There was no warning. In an instant, her eyes welled and over-spilled. A facial flash-flood.