by Jane Fallon
‘Hardly your fault,’ she says, laughing. ‘Just bad timing. How long can you survive?’
‘Not that long. Just put me up for everything, I don’t care.’
‘I always do,’ she says, which hardly fills me with confidence.
Before I leave I ask her to pay my final cheque from the show into a solo account I set up at the bank this morning. She doesn’t ask me why, and I’m grateful.
Bizarrely, as I’m walking down Rosebery Avenue, having left her office basically saying I’d do anything in the short term, including cleaning her house, if it’d earn me a bit of money (she refused), two American women – I assume tourists – accost me.
‘You’re Yvon!’ one of them squeaks. I can’t help it, I’m flattered. This has happened a few times on the New York streets since the series started airing. Yvon is my character’s name, in case you hadn’t guessed.
She’s got me by the arm so I have to stop. ‘I am,’ I say, blushing. It hasn’t happened often enough that I’m in any way blasé about it.
‘Oh my God, we love you,’ the other one says. ‘It’s our favourite show, we’re obsessed.’
‘Is it Michael?’ the first one chips in. ‘You can tell us.’ People are forever speculating on who the killer might be. There are whole forums dedicated to different theories.
‘I really can’t,’ I say. And I don’t just mean I’m not allowed. I don’t know. No one does. Well, except for the producers and, I assume, the actor playing the role. Maybe not even them yet. Cast parties inevitably descend into ‘Is it you? Go on, you can tell me,’ when we’ve all had a few drinks. It suddenly occurs to me that I’ll find out next week when I go back to film my demise. Mine will be the first murder that will happen on screen. All the rest have been shown through the eyes of whoever discovers the body, killer long gone. It hits me that it’s quite a big deal. The forums will go nuts.
The ladies grab a selfie with me and go off happy. I feel a bit better knowing my death will be a landmark event for the show, a watercooler moment. It makes me hopeful that I’ll stand out more as an actress because of it. People will remember my character, at least.
I’m brought swiftly down to earth by the first of three more flats Kat has lined up for me to see. This one is in Camden, in one of the less salubrious streets, and I arrive to find her standing outside, clutching her bag to her chest as if she thinks it might be wrestled from her by a passer-by at any moment. We climb over a comatose youth who is using the front bin area as a bed. It’s a slight improvement on yesterday, though – as evidenced by the higher rent – but it’s still, well, how can I put this … an absolute shit hole.
‘We’re going to have to go further out,’ Kat says as we leave, barely three minutes after we’ve arrived. ‘Much, much further out.’
‘I suppose so,’ I say reluctantly. I had been clinging on to the hope that I would be able to find something that would still allow me to walk to the West End on a nice day. It was something I did whenever I could from our flat in Gospel Oak, even though it took the best part of an hour. Losing that freedom would feel like moving out of London.
‘Let’s just look at these others, anyway, as we have the appointments. They’re close to each other and I’ll be interested to see what you think of the last one.’
‘If I can just find something that doesn’t have the toilet in the living room, I’ll be happy.’
‘You should have said. That’s been my main requirement, the need to be able to open the fridge while you’re sat on the loo. That and a crackhead sitting on the front step.’
‘Very funny.’
Kat treats us to a taxi north to our next destination, off the Finchley Road. While we idle in traffic she takes a phone call that puts into perspective how grateful I should be that she’s taking time away from her paid work to help me.
‘The point is they’re cash buyers with no need to sell their current home,’ she says, her accent going up two notches on the poshness scale. ‘So we feel twelve point five is a fair and appropriate offer. Okay … okay … Yes. I’m showing them something on Winnington Road this afternoon, so a swift response would be much appreciated.’
‘Twelve point five … that’s twelve and a half million, right?’ I know I’m sitting there with my mouth open, but I can’t help it. How did my snippy friend become someone who works for people who have twelve and a half million pounds lying around they can pay cash for a house with?
She nods. ‘Right.’
‘And, if they buy it you get … what?’
She pushes her glasses up her nose. ‘One per cent.’
‘Unreal.’
‘But it can take months to find them the right thing. Or they can change their mind and decide they’re not moving after all, or they’re emigrating or something.’
‘And then you get nothing.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Crazy.’
Flat number two might be the worst we’ve seen yet. There’s cardboard on one of the windows and it’s furnished with what I can only describe as the ‘bad jumble sale from the eighties range’. And it smells. What of, I couldn’t tell you, but none of it pleasant. It’s also the cheapest we’ve seen, so I’m tempted, just to have a roof over my head.
‘I assume you’ll replace the window?’ Kat says to the shady-looking man showing us around.
He shrugs. ‘Not my problem.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ she snarls as we leave, her kitten heels click-clacking on the pavement.
‘Can we get a coffee before we see the next one?’ I’m knackered, and I know I’m dragging my feet like a toddler.
‘No time.’
I follow her back on to the main road and we turn right, moving further away from the Tube. We walk for what seems like for ever. And then we get on a bus.
‘Are we still in London?’ I say facetiously at one point, and she just scowls at me. Once we reach our stop, we start walking again. Eventually, after God knows how long, she stops short outside some kind of rundown haberdashery store. She consults her phone.
‘Here.’
‘This is a shop.’
‘Upstairs. Obviously.’
I follow her in. I’ve always loved fabric shops. It feels as if there’s a world of possibilities in all the different colourways and textures. Not that I’ve ever made anything in my life. But there’s something quite romantic about the idea. Not so much in here, though, which is like an assault course of brightly coloured chaos. There’s a tiny old woman hidden among the rolls at the back and a younger one – mid-thirties, I’d guess – at her side.
The younger woman approaches us with a smile on her face. It’s the first time anyone at any of the properties has done anything but scowl so I’m immediately suspicious.
‘Kat?’ she says, and extends a hand. ‘Fiona Sheridan.’
She tells us the tiny woman owns the building but barely speaks any English so she’s going to show us around. She’s a lettings agent for a local firm and I can tell she’s in a hurry because she has bigger fish to fry than anything I can afford.
We exit out into the street again and in through another door. Kat and Fiona make polite conversation as we pick our way through the narrow hall that doubles as some kind of stockroom and up some creaky wooden stairs.
‘How long has the shop been here?’
‘Since the forties,’ Fiona says. ‘Mrs Lam and her husband started the business, but he’s not around any more. Obviously, if they hadn’t bought the building, then they never would have been able to –’
She interrupts herself as we round the first landing. ‘This is another flat. There’s a young couple live there. We’re up one. It’s too much for her, really, so she’s going to sell up at some point … right …’
We all come to a stop on the top landing as she wrestles with the lock. ‘It’s a bit run-down but … you know … that’s reflected in the price …’
To say the place is a tip would be an insult to the refuse industry. It cle
arly hasn’t been redecorated since the seventies and there’s junk everywhere. Fiona has the good grace to look embarrassed.
‘The last tenant lived here for ever, but she never really looked after the place. She’s gone into a care home and her family were meant to be clearing everything out, but they just took all the good stuff. It just needs taking to the dump …’
I can see there’s more than one room, though, which is a first. On closer examination, there’s a bedroom at the back with just enough room for a bed and not much else, a largish living-room-stroke-kitchen at the front and a bathroom crammed with an old bath and toilet in-between. In terms of volume, it’s a palace, compared to anything else we’ve seen.
Fiona seems keen to offload the place. I imagine she’s ticking up the commission she would earn in her head and trying to work out if it’s worth her time being here at all. ‘Mrs Lam just wants someone nice in. Someone who won’t give her any trouble.’
‘I’m nice,’ I say. ‘How long’s the lease?’
‘Six months. Like I said, she might sell up, so no guarantees of any longer, but if she doesn’t …’
‘I should take it, shouldn’t I?’ I ask, turning to Kat.
You would think Kat would be relieved. We could tie this up and she could get back to her million-pound mansions. Instead, she just looks a bit furtive and guilty.
‘Do you mind if we just have a quick chat?’ she says to Fiona.
‘No problem. I’ll wait downstairs.’
‘What?’ I say, once I think she’s out of earshot. ‘This is by far the best thing we’ve seen and, given we don’t have much time –’
She interrupts me. ‘It’s way over what you want to pay.’
‘What? Why did you bring me here, then?’
‘I wanted to prove a point. I thought you still wouldn’t think it was good enough and then, when I told you you couldn’t even afford this, you’d agree you had to completely rethink the areas you were looking in. I wasn’t expecting you to want to take it.’
‘We’re so far up the fucking Finchley Road I’ll need a Sherpa to find the Tube. How can I not even be able to afford to live here?’
‘That’s why most people share. Or move out to places the Tube doesn’t even go to. That brings the cost right down.’
‘I was sharing!’ I realize I’m shouting, but I can’t stop myself. ‘I was sharing with my boyfriend. I had a beautiful flat in a lovely part of London and now I can’t even afford … this …? Is that what you’re telling me?’
Kat blinks. ‘I guess so. It’s only a blip, though, Amy. You just need time to get your next big break and then things’ll turn around again.’
I sit down on a fusty-smelling chair. ‘I’m never going to get another break. Do you have any idea how many out-of-work actresses there are? Most of them, that’s how many.’
‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have brought you here. I just thought it’d be educational.’
‘How much over my budget is it?’
‘A hundred,’ she says, trying to sound casual.
‘A month?’
‘Um … a week.’
‘Fuck’s sake.’
‘I suppose your ISA would cover the deposit and the first couple of months …’
‘But that’s all I’ve got!’
‘If you work in the call centre until some acting work comes up, would that pay the rent? Just until you can get your hands on your joint savings?’
I put my head in my hands. ‘Just about. If I did every shift I could get. And didn’t eat. Fuck.’
‘You can come and eat with us. Any time you want.’
‘Thanks. You’re going to regret saying that.’
‘What do you want me to say to her?’
I go back to New York in three days and, when I return, I’m going to need somewhere to run to once I’ve dropped my bombshell on Jack and Mel. I don’t have time for this.
‘Tell her I’ll take it.’ Shit.
‘You know what really pisses me off?’ I say to Kat on the long trek back down towards the Tube. Fiona has agreed to accept me so long as I can come back with the deposit tomorrow and some kind of a reference. I’m pretty sure I’ll have to turn around as soon as I get home to get back here on time. At least I didn’t have to fight for the place, because Kat, with her estate-agent contacts, had heard about it before a listing had actually been posted anywhere. After a bit of a kerfuffle, while I stood on the pavement like a spare part and Fiona, Kat and Mrs Lam huddled in the shop, Kat told me she had negotiated £25 a week off.
‘So long as you take the place as is.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘They won’t clear the crap out. That’ll be up to you.’
‘Fine.’ I knew I should be sounding more grateful. Left to my own devices, I probably would have ended up having to move down to Wiltshire, tail between my legs, into my mum and dad’s spare bedroom, the oldest teenager in town.
‘And thanks, by the way.’
‘It was nothing. I wouldn’t have wanted to leave you trailing around on your own.’
I felt bad. Now I came to think about it, I couldn’t remember Mel ever taking time out of her own life to make sure everything was okay in mine.
‘I mean it,’ I said to Kat. ‘I really appreciate it.’
Kat huffed, and I remembered she never could deal with praise.
‘Whatever,’ she said, with all the sophistication of a sulky fourteen-year-old. ‘Like I said, it was nothing.’
‘What?’ she says now. She’s out of breath, trying to keep up with me in her clicky heels. I slow my pace down.
‘All the stuff I bought that I’m going to have to buy again. Duvet covers and towels and all that crap. Saucepans. I mean, if I just walk away, I’ll have nothing.’
‘Once you tell him you’re leaving, you can negotiate all that stuff, can’t you?’
‘Once I walk out, that’s it. I don’t want anything to do with either of them ever again. I’ll just take what I can carry. My clothes and stuff.’
She looks at me as if I’m crazy. Before Kat met Greg she had already been divorced. She and her first husband worked out a very civilized division of all their chattels, right down to the teaspoons. I remember being impressed and horrified in equal parts.
‘Do you have the key on you?’ she says, as she spots a cab and flaps her arm out.
‘Yes, why? Oh … no …’
‘Gospel Oak, please,’ I hear her say to the driver.
She piles in and I follow, grateful to sit down. ‘We can’t.’
She looks at her watch. ‘They’ll both be at work, right?’
‘Yes … but …’
She leans forward and gives the driver the name of the road. ‘You shouldn’t make this any more difficult for yourself than you have to. If you’re going to be struggling financially for a while, then at least take what’s yours. We’ll just get a starter kit.’
This time, I make Kat ring on the doorbell while I hide behind a bush over the road. If, for any reason, either Jack or Mel is there, she can claim to have been in the area and thought it might be nice to check how he was doing in my absence. They’d think it was a bit odd, given that neither of them is particularly fond of her (Jack always referred to her as ‘your arsey friend’), but they wouldn’t think it was suspicious.
Safe in the knowledge the flat is empty, I leave my hiding place and follow her in. Oscar saunters over, more blasé about seeing me now, and I break off a tiny piece of Cheddar from a lump I find in the fridge.
‘That’s not good for him, you know,’ Kat says. She’s headed straight for Jack’s laptop again.
‘It’s not as if Mel’s going to be feeding him any treats,’ I say, stroking his head. ‘Why are you on there again?’
‘Just checking Colby Sachs haven’t been back in touch. I want to know if we got away with it.’
‘Now I’m here, I don’t know what to take.’ I look around. There are so many things we bought over the years
. So many memories. The Warholesque painting of a cat that was the first real piece of art either of us had ever owned (we used to walk around the Affordable Art Fair in Hampstead every year, moaning about how un-Affordable it all was), and which reminded us so much of Oscar we had to have it; the huge grey vase that we only splashed out on because Jack managed to chip a chunk off the base in the shop and we felt so guilty we thought we’d better buy it, both nearly crying with laughter at the counter; the collection of neon-haired trolls haunting our bookshelves, added to whenever we could find one in a vintage shop because they reminded us both of being kids.
‘Just the basics,’ Kat says. ‘The things you’ll need to live but you don’t want to have to go out and buy all over again. The things that are obviously yours you can sort out with him later. I hardly think he’s going to argue about a framed photo of your mum and dad. Today is all about setting up your bolthole with the boring but costly stuff.’
I open the trunk at the end of our bed where we keep the clean covers and start rooting through.
‘ “Come back, all is forgiven,” ’ Kat says from the other room. I have no idea what she’s on about, so I peer around the door. She’s reading something aloud off Jack’s laptop.
‘ “Haha! I have a stinking hangover. Be over when I can face getting up,” smiley face.’ She looks up and sees me looking. ‘Twitter.’
‘Let me see.’
‘There’s only two more. Both from Sunday. Her again: “On my way. Everything was okay, wasn’t it? Sure A. not suspicious? I have big memory gap …” ’
And then him: “All fine. Did sleep through her leaving though!” ’ She pushes her glasses up her nose. ‘That’s it.’
‘Fuckers.’
I root out a teal-coloured duvet cover with a cute pattern of white birds and trees on it. I remember it cost a fortune but, when I put it on the first time, Jack said it gave him nightmares when he half-woke up in the early morning and wondered what was crawling over him – so we never used it again. I know he won’t miss it. I have no idea how well Mel has acquainted herself with my stuff, so there’s a chance she might, but I decide it’s so unlikely it’s a risk worth taking. I add a couple of plain white sheets and pillowcases, not that I have anything to put them on. And a big bath towel.