Not Without You

by Harriet Evans

  The room is filled with flowers. Not white roses, this time. Flowers of every colour, bouquets, plants, bunches tied with string, a huge riot of colour. There’s even a row of lavender bushes shaped into an S. They hide the furniture in the room.

  Tina sneezes. ‘I’m going to make sure your bags are OK,’ she says. ‘Oh, by the way—’ she points to the corner of the room. ‘Carmen and Deena have been sorting some mail out for you. You might want to check it out.’ She gives me a little smile, and walks out.

  I look over to where she’s gestured and stare. I hadn’t noticed what else is on the floor. Like Santa’s grotto, there are ten or so sacks, all filled to the brim, cards, postcards, letters spilling out onto the carpet. I kneel on the ground, my fingers fumbling on the envelopes, as I tear them open: more bad news, more hatred? Give it to me now. I can take it. I open the first one, written in crazy felt-tip pen writing, every letter of my name a different colour. I swallow. I don’t know if I want to read this.

  Dear Sophie,

  My name is Sophie too. I love The Bride and Groom. I want a dress like yours wen I am older. I am sorry you are ill. I love your films, you are pretty. Get well soon love Sophie aged 8 and a half

  I pick up another.

  Dear Sophie,

  I’ve never written a letter like this before: I just wanted to say that I was really sad to hear about your accident and I hope you get better soon. My friends and I have a Sophie Leigh club where, no matter where we are, we meet in New York when you have a new movie out, and then we go drink rose wine (has to be rose) and catch up afterwards. Last time my friend Selina flew in from Buenos Aires just to see The Blue and Gold Dress with us. I guess we all really love your movies, and you’ve brought us together. Every time I’m feeling down, if I switch on the TV and one of your movies is on I always feel better. So take care of yourself, and get well soon.

  Yours,

  Melissa Fitzpatrick

  Hi Sophie,

  My daughter was extremely ill last year and spent a lot of time in hospital. The only thing that cheered her up was watching DVDs of your films on her laptop. She is back at home now and getting much better every day, but when she heard about your accident she, and I, wanted to write to give you our love and send you our thanks. What happened to you is terrible. If you ever want a break, please come to Bournemouth. You’d be very welcome.

  Love from Joyce and Eliza Darling

  Hello lady,

  I love your films, you’re funny. It sucks what happened to you. I want to send you love and strength. Remember what Martin Luther King Jr said. ‘We must constantly build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.’ Peace.

  Lila,

  Long Beach

  Tears run down my face, and I brush them aside, smiling. I seem to spend my whole time in tears, lately. I pick up the next letter. There must be a thousand pieces of mail here. How am I going to answer them all?

  Hi Sophie,

  Can you send me a photo of your face? My Friend Misha says it is messed up and you will never see again and all the bones have been Sucked Out of It. Get Well Soon Zac

  Yeah, Zac – maybe not.

  I’m looking up and smiling again, and then something outside catches my eye.

  I scream. There’s someone lying there. At the noise Tina comes rushing in, to find me laughing, clutching my face, a sack of letters spilling out onto the carpet behind me

  It’s Deena. She is asleep on the terrace. She’s dragged my favourite rug – sourced from Turkey by a specialist LA interiors company – out by the pool and there she lies, her nut-brown, stick-like body almost naked and immobile, glistening with oil in the midday sun. Her mirrored shades are the blue of the sky.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ says Tina, dashing forwards and shaking her. ‘Deena! Deena, you can’t be here. What are you doing here? I told you to leave.’

  Deena doesn’t move.

  ‘Deena!’

  She shakes her one more time. My heart contracts, my stomach lurches.

  ‘Deena!’ I call, and I hobble forwards, ignoring the helicopters.

  We crouch down beside her. I pull off her glasses. Her eyes are closed. And then they open, slowly. Tina and I groan with relief.

  ‘Hey, kiddo,’ Deena says. She pulls the shades back over her face. ‘You’re back.’ I nod, and she grimaces as she looks at me. ‘Wow. OK. They really messed you up.’ She closes her eyes again. ‘So how you doing?’

  I shake her. ‘Deena, are you OK?’

  ‘Sure … Sure …’ she mumbles. ‘Tired.’

  ‘She’s out of it,’ Tina hisses.

  She bends down and touches Deena’s shoulder lightly.

  ‘Leave her,’ I say. ‘She’s sleeping it off. Whatever it is.’

  Deena props herself up on her elbows, and looks up at the helicopters. There’s two overhead, one lower than the other, lights twinkling in the sun. ‘Hey, guys,’ she says, looking upwards. She raises her middle finger. ‘Sit on this, you fuckers!’ she yells. ‘Screw you! Screw the hell out of you you fucking idiots!’

  Tina and I turn away from the cameras, but Deena calls to us, ‘They won’t use that, trust me. It doesn’t go with their story.’ She stands up in one fluid movement, opens the miniature fridge that stands under the canopy and pulls herself out a beer. ‘You guys want one?’

  Tina and I stare at each other, then we nod. ‘Great,’ Deena says. ‘Then we’ll go inside. Douches.’

  She cracks the lids against the grey stone wall and the caps fly off, leaving a chalky line on the stone. I notice several similar marks that definitely weren’t there before.

  ‘Use a bottle opener, Deena,’ I say, holding the door open. ‘If you’re going to stay here … OK?’

  ‘Sure,’ she says. She hands us each a bottle and we clink the rims together, in the cool, calm room. ‘Welcome back, kiddo,’ she says. ‘So you got burnt, hey. You’ll be all right. You’re a clever kid. Welcome to the scrapheap. I think you’ll like it.’

  I look out onto the pool, out to the hills and the houses and the valley below, the helicopter juddering just above, blades slicing into the sky like it’s clinging on for dear life to something we can’t see. We drink our beer in silence.

  EPILOGUE

  Three months later

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? That’s what you always want to know at the end of a film, isn’t it? Did they live happily ever after? You don’t want to see the wigs and fake eyelashes being peeled off, the cranes being dismantled, the set being taken down, the shop signs in the studio’s fake city streets being painted over so they can be used as backdrop for a new legal drama, or a thriller, or another romcom starring another perky, hopeful girl like I once was, or Deena, or Eve. Or Tina, or even Sara.

  There’ll be another one. Thousands of girls every year, piling into this town with the old dream of fame in their eyes, to be exploited in a thousand different ways. Some of them will work out how to use whatever it is they have to their advantage, but most won’t. Maybe some of them won’t even notice, and might not mind.

  Alec Mitford came last week. He stayed here, in fact. We had a blast. We recorded some new dialogue, did the looping for the last couple of scenes for the film. The studio’s throwing money at a digital solution using unused footage of me mixed with my voice.

  I have to hand it to Alec; he was great. He came in, stared at me and said, ‘God, you look fucking awful.’ Not for him the vast hand-tied bouquets, the gift baskets, the trinkets and baubles that keep arriving, weeks after it’s happened. He gave me a turquoise-and-grey Liberty scarf, wrapped in beautiful purple tissue. ‘I didn’t know how mashed up your face was. I thought you might need something pretty to hide it behind,’ he said and I burst out laughing. I was wrong when I thought I had no friends. Deena is, bizarrely, my friend. And Alec’s a friend. He really is someone you’re glad to have in your corner. I realised something else, too, what had been bothering me all along: I’m sure he’s gay. I wanted to ask him, but I didn’t have
the nerve. Maybe that’s what he was trying to tell me before we spent the night together. I’m sure he knows it. In a way I hope he’s not. Because if he is, he’s hiding it, and I hate to think things are the same as when Conrad Joyce killed himself, over fifty years ago. Nothing does change much in Hollywood, does it?

  But it was great to have him here. At night when the helicopters had given up we’d sit out on the terrace, candles surrounding us, and talk for hours, chatting about the film, about who he’d seen out at the Ivy the previous week, how he’d said hello to Jason Isaacs, what he’d heard about various industry people we both know, but mainly about how great he was for coming to see me. When I said, ‘What do you think they’ll do about me, in the film?’ he said, ‘Darl, haven’t you realised? It’ll be box office gold, now. Your last film before – all this. Eve Noel’s first film for half a century.’

  ‘Is she great? Tell me she’s great.’

  ‘She’s amazing. She’s got T.T. on his toes all right. Never misses a cue, or an angle. Knows everyone’s names, polite as anything. And she looks extraordinary. She glows. The camera wants to snog her, it loves her so much. I’m telling you, she’s stealing the film from right under you. Better get that face mended and get back out there, love.’

  I smiled and changed the subject.

  So my face? My face is not great. The injuries will be unnoticeable again in a few years they say, maybe five to ten. I have to have three more operations, one on the cheekbone, something about a comminuted fracture around the eye and one for my jaw which is kind of uneven, and one on my ankle. I’m still limping. And I get tired, really tired. I don’t go out much either; I’m afraid. I don’t know what I’m afraid of. I suppose it’s the future, but lying in bed all that time in hospital has taught me to be afraid of what might happen that’s out of your control. I hate myself for it, because it’s kind of self-indulgent. I’m not Rose. I didn’t have my life completely, wholesale taken away from me like that. So what if a girl who used to be beautiful isn’t any more? What does she lose? Adoration? Well, I had that, and it wasn’t much to write home about. Money? I’ve got all I need. Fame? I’ve had fame and I know it doesn’t bring you anything really worth having. But still, I’m scared. Scared to be a different person from the Sophie I used to be, even though she’s gone now, she doesn’t look like me any more.

  Artie has ‘let me go’. He thinks I need someone with more dedication than he can give to me and that I have a ‘different focus to his’. That’s fine, to be honest. I think we were going different ways long before all of this began. It’s a relief, not having to fold myself into the person he wanted me to be. Tommy’s on my side though, in fact he’s raring to go. He’s lined up several TV interviews, a People magazine front cover, and a huge book deal, just waiting for when I want to do them. The thing is, I’m not sure I want any of that. I don’t want to be tragic Sophie Leigh. I want to be Sophie Leigh who does something great and oh, by the way, one eye is slightly higher than the other and she has a couple of scars and a very slight limp – she was attacked years ago but it’s well in the past now.

  Sara’s trial is set for early next year. In a strange way I’m looking forward to it. I want to look at her, hear her try to explain why she did it. I’ll be scared, but I think it’ll be good for me to go through these last four months again and work it all out. I hope she doesn’t end up in jail. It won’t help her. At the same time, I don’t exactly want her free to roam the streets again.

  What else? Well, the other new thing is scripts. Tommy’s starting his own production company. He’s begun giving me scripts to read and make suggestions on, because I’m stuck in the house and bored, and I’ve already given notes on one that’s got a big development deal from Twentieth Century Fox, thanks to me. It’s easy when you know how, and all those years watching movies and making movies has taught me how. Elevate the next draft so it’s less mumblecore and more JenAn. Reconfigure the leading man so he lost his wife two years before. Lose the subplot and make the heroine’s sister a closet lesbian – that’s how you get to the third act. Have the star of the picture go to England and find herself and her real-life heroine. How does it end? Like I say, I don’t know.

  So three months after I came back to LA it’s coming up for Thanksgiving and I’m sitting in the garden, wrapped in a blanket, scribbling on a pad again. My handwriting is extremely fast since the accident, it had to be. Now I write all the time. It’s early in the morning, and a little chilly for LA. I’m talking to Tony Lees-Miller.

  ‘I’ll see you next week,’ he says. ‘We can iron out the details then.’

  ‘No first-look deals,’ I say. ‘They’re awful. And could I have the scripts messengered over here every morning? I can’t read on an iPad yet, it does something strange to my eyes.’

  ‘It’s done,’ he says.

  I hesitate. ‘Are you going to announce it?’

  Tony laughs. ‘Sure we are. But low-key. This isn’t novelty. It’s business. We’ll just say, “Canyon Pictures’ new head of US development is Sophie Leigh, taking a break from starring in movies herself to developing and producing them.” We’ll do it after they announce the Oscar noms. People’ll see it but they’ll move onto other things.’

  ‘OK,’ I say. ‘I hope you’re right. I hope they won’t laugh.’

  ‘I think they’ll hope like me that one day you’ll go back to acting. It’s not over for you. You just need a break from it, a chance to do something else. You’re good. There’ll always be parts for you.’ I can hear him chuckling on the other end of the phone. I picture him in his large corner office over Leicester Square, late autumn light flooding the pedestrians below. ‘Besides, you know, the one thing I’ve learned in life is that people are much less interested than you realise, Sophie.’

  ‘I know it, believe me. I’m the least interesting person in Hollywood these days. Not a letter or a helicopter or even a fruit basket for weeks now. They’ve moved on.’

  We say goodbye and I pick up my work tray, then wrap myself up in the blanket again, looking out at the view. Morning is my favourite time now. I don’t sleep so well any more and so I like to get up, read, do something, to keep me from thinking too much. I have a portable desk, like a breakfast tray, that I bring out onto the terrace with me when I’m reading, and write things down. And I write things down all the time now, like Eve. Maybe one day I’ll tell my story too, as well as hers. There’s a photo attached to the corner of the desk. I’ve had it laminated so it doesn’t get ruined. It’s of two little girls, Rose and Eve, arm in arm and squinting at the sun. They are in matching dresses and their hair is curling black, flashes of silver in the light. On the back Rose has written:

  We have each other and we have you, Sophie dear.

  I like the fact there’s a photo of the two of those girls in this house now. It feels right.

  I take a sip of my coffee. As I’m reaching for an apple, my phone buzzes.

  ‘Hello, Miss Leigh,’ says Lance, the new, scary security guard, six foot three, shaved head, hails from Montana. ‘Someone at the gate for you.’

  I stay still. ‘Who’s there? It’s not even seven yet.’

  ‘Uh … ma’am, it’s Patrick Drew. Can I let him in?’

  I start and my coffee cup flies out of my hand. ‘Who?’ I look down, almost surprised to see the black liquid from my cup staining the cream blanket.

  ‘Patrick Drew.’ There’s a crackle. ‘He says … Ma’am, he says he won’t stay long. He’s just coming for coffee.’

  I begin to laugh as I’m dousing the blanket with water. There’s something about this man: I can’t see him without having some accident in some way, whether it’s perspiration, coffee spillage, or full-on hospitalisation. ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Let him in.’

  It’s about a minute until he appears, but it seems like an eternity. He comes straight towards me and we stand awkwardly, facing each other.

  ‘Hi,’ he says. I drink in the sight of him, his firm jaw, dark brown e
yes, the broad shoulders, the slightly uneven brows that give his beauty its charm and distinction. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Sorry – I had an accident,’ I murmur, and sit back down, covering myself up with the stained blanket.

  ‘Another one?’ He drops his hand onto my hair, lightly. ‘It’s good to see you, Sophie.’

  ‘And you. What are you doing here? It’s barely light.’

  ‘I’ve been up for hours,’ he says. ‘Drove back down from my folks late last night and I haven’t slept. I had this idea, and I thought I should come ask you about it.’

  Carmen hurries out from the kitchen. ‘Hey. Sophie. Morning. You want some breakfast?’

  ‘Hey, Carmen. Yes, please, scrambled eggs and bacon. Patrick?’

  ‘That sounds great.’ He turns to Carmen. ‘Thanks.’

  Carmen actually rolls her eyes at him and blows him a kiss. He smiles; he must be used to it, mustn’t he? After she’s gone he turns back to me. ‘Your face is healing well. I didn’t know what to expect. How’s your ankle?’

  ‘It’s fine. I have some operations soon. We need to let the cheekbone knit together to see how it’s going to settle down. I say “we”. I mean “people who know what they’re talking about” obviously, not me.’ I am used to talking about my injuries now, but I have to do it in this way. Slightly jokey. ‘And I’m walking short distances again.’

  Patrick sits down and pulls the chair so he’s next to my lounger. He puts his hand on the armrest, and says lightly, ‘You know, you’re different.’

  I laugh. ‘Well, duh.’

  ‘No, I mean, like you’ve changed. You’re a different person.’

  ‘Well, that’s being stamped in the face for you.’ I’m trying to keep my voice light; there’s a ball of something hard in my throat.

  Over in the guest house I see one of the windows opening. There’s a vague sound of swearing as something clatters to the floor. Deena is awake. Patrick takes my hand.

  ‘It’s going to be OK, you know. You were that person before. You still are.’

  ‘I wasn’t like this. Scared of everything, sad about everything. I can’t watch the news, or think about the future.’ I shift away from him, suddenly cross. ‘So don’t talk like you’re in a movie, Patrick.’