by Leah McLaren
She must have taken the microphone off.
Meredith realized her eyes had been closed, and when she opened them Irma was standing there, her mouth, astonishingly, still opening and shutting. Meredith kept the headphones on until Irma stopped speaking.
After Irma moved off, Meredith stayed behind, going over the day’s shot descriptions. A few minutes later her phone rang. It was Mish.
“Her Impossibleness is having a meltdown.”
“Tell me about it.”
“She ripped apart her entire trailer before I could stop her, and now I’m fucking stuck here trying to get organic fucking blueberry juice stains off an original Victorian undergarment.”
“Oh God.”
“Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. How’s your mum? I helped her pick out her costume. Adorable.”
“That’s...one way of putting it.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I feel like my head is about to pop off.”
“Come see me. I’m in her trailer. She’s gone off for some appointment with one of her team of travelling specialists. Probably getting a new chin or something. She won’t be back for hours.”
“Are you sure?”
“Totally. I’m mixing martinis.”
“Mish!”
“Golly gee, Meredith, don’t be such a prude. It’s the Old World. Everybody here drinks at lunch.”
“I’ll come but I can’t drink.”
“Great. I’m making yours extra dirty.”
The door of Kathleen Swain’s trailer was open. The reassuring sound of Mish’s Top 40 radio emanated from inside. Anywhere in the world one could hear the same rotation of musical lollipops interspersed with traffic reports and jokes about the weather. Meredith stepped in and paused. The trailer was in even worse condition than the first day she’d seen it. Piles of clothes everywhere. Stray bottles of hair goop, moisturizer and random cosmetics products on the floor. The flip-up folding table, half torn from its hinges, hanging on the wall like a loose tooth about to give.
An enormous cloud of lace and crinolines gushed through the bathroom door, and in the center of it was Mish.
“There you are. I was just soaking all this shit in soda water.” She held up a purple-splotched garment. “It’s completely useless. Hope Herr Direktor doesn’t want to show her knickers in the sex scene or I’m screwed. Oh!” She dropped the clothes in a heap, remembering something. “Liquid lunch. Almost forgot.”
“Mish—” Meredith began to object, but it was too late. Mish had already opened the traveling velvet-lined bar kit and poured several ounces of vodka into a stainless steel shaker, and was popping heart-shaped ice cubes out of a tray from the mini-freezer.
“Don’t you love my bar set? I got it in one of those junk stores on Portobello. It’s so James Bond. All I need now is poison lipstick.”
Her phone rang and she flipped it open with one hand, shaking the cocktails with the other.
“Yeah? Oh. Uh-huh.” She lowered the shaker. “Mmm. No problem. Sure. I’ll be right there. No, I obviously won’t forget.” She closed the phone. “That was Andrea-the-Lackey. Turns out Her Highness is now too stressed for her appointment and has decided to spend the afternoon getting body makeup done for the love scene instead. I have to go and glue a patch over her pussy.”
Meredith laughed. “Have fun.”
“Man.” Mish began gathering her things together. “And I was just about to get you in trouble too. Hang out here and have a drink if you want.” She gave Meredith a smooch on the ear and ran out without shutting the door behind her.
Meredith was about to follow when she thought—why bother? The star’s trailer was by far the most comfortable place on set, not to mention the safest hiding place from her mother. She reached into her bag and pulled out her book—a ragged copy of The Portrait of a Lady she’d borrowed from the bookshelf at Coleville Terrace—and flopped down on a pile of costumes.
She was only a few paragraphs in when she heard a tentative knock at the door. A Bryan Adams song played on the radio. She briefly considered pretending not to be there.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hi,” said a man’s voice from behind the threshold. “I was looking for— Ow!” He’d stepped in and banged his head, and was now wincing and rubbing his skull. She didn’t see his face. Meredith looked down and pretended to be absorbed by her book.
“Low ceilings in these things...Meredith?”
She glanced up. “Oh my God. Dr....?”
“Veil. What on earth? I mean. How incredible. Really. What a...what a pleasant surprise.”
She dropped her book on her lap without marking the page. An eerie composure overtook her.
“Seriously. What are you doing here?”
“I’m working. This is what I do.”
“You’re an actor?” he asked.
“God, no. I’m a script supervisor. I do continuity. In films. What about you? Have you become an on-set medic?”
Joe laughed—a low huff—and fell silent.
Meredith leaned back, arching her back, and stretched her arms in the air. Thoughts passed through her mind like sticks whooshing down a river. Why was he here? What could it possibly mean? Did it have anything to do with her? Did any of these questions really matter? She was filled with a strange elation. He looked at the cocktail set and raised an eyebrow.
“You’re having drinks at his hour?” he said.
“You want one?” Meredith was certain he’d decline.
“Why not?” He set down his bag. “I’m jet-lagged anyway.”
One sip of lunch-hour vodka had infused the moment with an illicit thrill. The trailer seemed to cup them in an aluminum cradle, and after a few minutes of chat their coincidental meeting seemed the most natural thing in the world.
“Seriously. Why are you here?”
Joe hesitated, remembering the assistant’s not-so-veiled threats. He prided himself on his discretion, but the vodka and jet lag were disarming.
“Can I tell you something in confidence?”
Meredith threw up her arms and lowered an invisible dome over their heads. “Cone of Silence,” she said.
“I’m here to examine Kathleen Swain.”
“Shut up.” Meredith found herself leaning over and gently slapping his shoulder. “That is too weird.”
“Tell me about it.”
“She flew you over from Toronto just for an appointment?”
Joe nodded.
“You must be a big deal. Are you ready for another martini? There’s some left in the shaker.”
He hesitated. Looked at his watch. Shrugged. “Why not?”
“So how did she hear about you anyway?”
“I wrote a book. I was on Oprah.”
Meredith asked Joe about his book. He answered her questions politely but didn’t seem overly keen to talk about himself, so she returned to the subject of Swain.
“And now she wants you to knock her up.”
“In a roundabout way, yes. I’m here to run some tests. How do you know that?”
“She told me. That she wants a baby, I mean. Seems like the underlying theme of the making of this movie.”
“What’s the movie about anyway?”
Meredith shrugged. “It’s a murder mystery.”
“Who did it?”
“Either the lord of the manor or the parlourmaid. Depends what the test audience decides. We’re shooting two different endings. Is your drink cold enough?”
Joe nodded. “Do you have a trailer?”
“I wish!” Meredith laughed a little too loudly. She opened the mini-fridge door and stuck a hand inside, searching for ice. “Didn’t you notice the big gold star on the door?”
“I did.”
“Trailers are for important people,” she said.
“Are you calling yourself unimportant?”
Meredith stuck out her lower lip and nodded. “Pretty much.”
“You seem more confident tha
n that.” Joe smiled.
“Not really,” she said. “The next thing you’re going to say is that I seem ‘pulled together,’” she said, referring to their exchange in Toronto.
He laughed. “I know, you’re actually a mess, right?”
“Exactly. Like an egg. Smooth on the outside, runny and goopy on the inside.”
“And delicious fried in butter.”
“Just like everything else.”
They laughed, delighted with this shared bit of nonsense. Eggs, Meredith thought, shut up about eggs.
She waited a moment then asked him, “So why did you call me that time, anyway?”
“You mean after you ran out in the middle of your appointment?”
“Was there any other time?”
He shot her a knowing look. “I was worried about you,” he said. “I was following up.”
“Oh.” Meredith deflated. Whatever she’d been fishing for, she hadn’t found it.
“I also kept thinking about that thing you said,” he added.
“What thing?”
“About me not seeming like the sort of person who would take a leap of faith.”
“Oh,” Meredith said, waving a hand, “you shouldn’t have listened to that. I was just freaking out about other things. I don’t even know you. It was presumptuous.”
“Yes,” he said, “it was.”
She held up the shaker and tipped it toward his glass. There was a bit of rust near the spout.
“Will that give us tetanus?” she asked, draining the rest of the vodka into his glass, sloshing a bit on the sleeve of his sweater. Cashmere, she noticed.
“Only if you suck on it for ten thousand years,” he said. “But you should probably clean it off to be on the safe side.”
Meredith looked at the rust mark. “I wonder if they have CLR here,” she said, more to herself than out loud.
“I love that stuff,” Joe said, taking the shaker and rubbing at the spout with his thumb. “It’s amazing. It would definitely get this off.”
“I know!” said Meredith. “I use it on everything—faucets, tiles, countertops.”
“Have you tried soaking used flower vases in it?” he asked. “Like magic.”
“Seriously? I hate those stains at the bottom. The ones you can’t even reach with a scrub brush? They drive me nuts.”
He nodded. “All you do is pour in some water and a little CLR and let it sit overnight. In the morning—gone.”
“What does the name stand for again?”
“Something Lime Rust,” he said.
“Clean Lime Rust?”
He shook his head. “No, it’s something else.”
They were silent for a moment, sipping their drinks.
“Calcium!” Meredith jumped to her feet. “Calcium Lime Rust!”
“That’s it!” Joe offered her the high five, and she did a little victory dance. Then he coughed, remembering himself.
He looked at his martini glass and back at her.
“Are you sure we should be doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Drinking. In the middle of the day. In a movie star’s trailer. On a film set. Where you are employed.”
Meredith made a fake snoring sound. All of a sudden she was sick to death of being the responsible one. After several moments of shameless enjoyment, she stood up and sauntered over to the trailer door, pulled it shut with a cowgirl wink. She thought of what Mish would say in this situation.
“Don’t sweat it. Kathleen won’t be back here for ages. She’s getting her body makeup done.”
“Body makeup?”
“For the nude scene.”
“Riiight.”
“So I guess she bailed on your appointment.”
Joe shrugged and nodded at the same time. “Looks that way. Fine with me really. Just means I get to spend another day in London.”
“How long are you here for?”
“Just a couple of days. I have to get back. My daughter.”
“Right. Of course.”
For a moment they sat in silence. They sipped their drinks and tried not to stare at each other. It was hard. He was handsome. But in a slightly outdated, unfashionable way, as though he should be wearing a soldier’s uniform and kissing a girl with braids in a Norman Rockwell painting. It really was too bad about the ring. She checked his left hand. Still there.
“How old are you?” she asked, suddenly curious.
“Forty-six.”
“When did you get married?”
“A while ago. But my wife—”
“Never mind about your wife,” Meredith said. The last thing she wanted to hear listed were the virtues of the underage gazelle she’d seen him with in the drugstore. She wished she hadn’t brought the marriage thing up. “I want to hear about you. Where did you go to medical school?”
“University of Toronto. But I studied literature first and switched to medicine later. Listen, Meredith, I’ve been wanting to ask you ever since we spoke on the phone that day...”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you ever end up seeing another doctor?”
“Well no, not exactly. I came over here and started working and things have been pretty crazy since then.”
“Crazy how? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“I don’t mind you asking but I’m surprised that you’d be interested.”
“Of course I’m interested.” He leaned forward slightly. “I’ve thought about you.”
“What did you think?”
“I wondered how you were.”
“Were you worried? I mean, about my ovaries shrivelling up inside me?”
“Not like that, no.”
“Well, I’ve been dating. I guess you could call it that. I’ve been looking for, you know, the One. But not in the romantic sense. More in the biological sense.”
“Can you separate the two?”
“My mother did.”
Joe smiled. “You’d know more about that than I would.”
She felt a hot stab of resentment. The smugness of married people! He probably drives a BMW sedan with leather interior. His wife was a former hospital candy striper—some innocent society flower who grew up in the suburbs surrounded by plush carpets and protective parents and now spends her days doing Pilates and taking Tuscan cooking courses. Probably has season tickets to the symphony and a time-share in Arizona. Probably they call each other some silly equal-opportunity pet name like Snooger Booger. What can people like this know about life?
Meredith felt indignant. How could he have any idea what it was like to be single for years and years and worry about growing middle-aged alone in a condo with exposed ductwork and no walls? What it was like to long for the company of a cat but resist getting one for fear of becoming a single woman with a cat? She drained her martini in a gulp.
Discovering a candle nub on a plate with a packet of matches, she lit the wick and set it on the floor between them. After a jittering start it flamed high. The smell of lilac and sulphur filled the trailer.
“Tell me, Doc, what’s in your bag?”
Joe looked down at his battered antique doctor’s bag, a gift from his late father-in-law, a retired obstetrician.
“Oh, you know. The usual tools of the trade—potions and lotions and a lot of frightening stainless steel devices.”
“Because I was thinking...”
Joe raised an eyebrow. “You want to reschedule your appointment?”
“I want”—Meredith lowered her head, covered her face and spoke into the warm fleshy mask of her hands—“I have no idea what I want.”
Meredith uncovered her face and, dropping her arms clumsily, managed to send Mish’s traveling minibar clattering to the linoleum.
“Oh shit.” She crouched down and began clutching at half-melted ice cubes that skittered out of her fingers like beetles.
“Meredith.” Joe managed to sound calm and deeply alarmed at the same time.
“Relax, it’s nothing�
��” But before she could finish, Meredith understood. Her skirt had managed to skim the top of the candle and catch fire. She began to jump up and down like a mad pogo stick while Joe swatted her bottom with a rolled-up newspaper.
“Water!” she screamed. “Stop, drop and roll!”
“No,” said Joe. “Get it off.” And with a single yank he ripped off her skirt, leaving her naked except for her underwear.
The fire died as soon as it hit the soaking linoleum and the charred skirt lay smoldering on the floor between them.
Before they could say a word everything in the room changed: a whine of hinge, a shift of light and a gust of damp outside air.
Richard Glass was in the trailer.
“Excuse me, sir,” Joe said as indignantly as he could manage. “Can’t you see we’re occupied here?”
“Of course,” Richard said with a chilling politeness. “I’ll give you two a moment to straighten up.” He turned around and stepped out of the trailer, shutting the door firmly behind him.
“Oh God,” Meredith groaned.
Joe handed her a petticoat to put on. “Not again,” she whispered.
“You’ve done this before?” Joe seemed slightly amused.
“No,” she snapped. “I’ve been fired before.”
Joe laughed. “No one would fire you for this.”
“Don’t count on it.” Meredith struggled miserably with her shoelace. “That was my boss.” Her hands were shaking. Joe noticed and put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s a long story.”
After a minute Richard stepped back into the trailer. He didn’t knock, but simply came in and began inspecting the place. He lifted a martini glass to his nose, sniffed it once and set it down again. He picked up Meredith’s novel, opened it to a random page and read a line or two, and then set it down again.
“Well, Miss Moore,” he said. “It’s been quite a day.”
“Look, Richard. I’m sorry. I know this looks terrible, but let me explain.” Try as she might, Meredith could not staunch the gush of useless clichés pouring from her mouth. “It just sort of happened. It was an accident really. We were talking and then the bar fell over and I tried to clean it up but my skirt lit on fire so Joe here pulled it off and that’s when...” She paused to inhale. “I know it’s a mess. Just give me another chance.”