What Red Was

by Rosie Price

  “Like Rupert needs support, you mean? Even though he keeps saying he’d rather be dead?”

  Max’s voice cracked a little as he spoke, and Zara waited for a moment, giving him time to compose himself. He was angry: angry that the world was not as comfortable as he’d always been led to believe, angry that things didn’t just work themselves out, angry that he might, once in a while, have to do something to help things to the right conclusion.

  “None of this is a consequence of what you’ve done, or haven’t done,” said Zara. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t be there when the time is right.”

  Max was silent for a moment.

  “He hasn’t actually said he wants to be dead for a while,” Max said. A note of hope had entered his voice.

  “Exactly,” Zara said, as if this had been the point she was trying to make all along.

  “Yeah,” said Max, and when Zara imagined his expression she saw him as a toddler: lips pouting, big eyes wet, reaching again for the sweet treat he’d just been denied.

  “If you give me her email address, Max,” she said now, “I’ll write to her. I’ll send her some numbers she can call.”

  “OK,” Max said. She could hear him steadying his breath. It was possible, Zara realized, that he had been on the brink of tears. “I suppose she’ll appreciate it. Thanks.”

  After hanging up the phone, Zara wondered about calling Nicole. What Nicole had been through had been very different: the stress of the high-pressure all-girls school William had insisted on sending her to, which in turn had engendered absurdly high expectations of herself and the people around her. It had been Zara who had insisted on therapy then, too. But although it had been she who had driven Nicole to the sessions and had waited outside while they took place, whenever she’d tried to ask her daughter on the way home whether there was anything she wanted to talk about, whether there was anything that Zara could be doing differently, to make things easier for her, Nicole had turned up the radio and slumped down in her seat. It had worked, though: the therapy, the school transfer, the exercise, and the yoga. And you’d never know, looking at Nicole now—with the law degree, the flat, all those friends—what a difficult adolescent she had been. Nicole so rarely needed help nowadays, and it might even be gratifying for her to help somebody else. But something, perhaps the memory of those silent post-therapy car journeys, stopped Zara from calling.

  Instead, that afternoon, she composed and sent several emails: one to a former therapist of Nicole’s for a list of recommendations for trauma treatment; one each to the four or five directors to whom she was closest asking if they had any jobs for a young friend of hers who was looking to get work in the industry; and, when she received replies from the therapist and two of the directors, one to Kate with the contact details. She told Kate that she could call at any time, night or day, and that all she asked was that she call one of the therapists and schedule a meeting, as well as go to the doctor for medication. She knew Kate didn’t have the money, but she wasn’t to worry because Zara was going to pay, and if Kate wrote to either of the directors whose details she had passed on, she would be able to earn the money to pay her rent. This would not end her. Zara would not allow it to end her.

  We’ll find a way through, she wrote at the end of her email. With love, Z.

  23

  When they’d left Bisley House on their way back up to London, Max had driven Kate to her mother’s house. While Kate went up to her old bedroom to pack, Max waited downstairs with Alison, who was sitting at the kitchen table. Colored tinsel had been wound around the banister in the hallway, and there were rows of Christmas cards strung low across the ceiling here and above the doorway to the living room. Max could see why Kate had found it difficult being at home: it was disconcerting, the way the fluffy carpets and linoleum floors stifled his footsteps, and he found the density of the decorations claustrophobic. He did feel sorry for Alison, but he was relieved that she hadn’t asked him why Kate had chosen to spend the end of the holidays with his family instead of here.

  “You’re driving all that way?” Alison said now.

  “It’s a nice drive,” said Max.

  Alison nodded, but she was looking toward the door, listening out for Kate. “Better, is she?”

  “I think it was a twenty-four-hour thing,” said Max, “such bad luck.” Only after he had spoken did Max realize that Alison was referring to Kate’s mood, and the panic that had led her to flee the house on Christmas Day, rather than the sickness that had followed. But he didn’t say any more, and neither did Alison: she got up and opened the cupboard next to the fridge, her back to Max. Her woolen cardigan was wrapped around her waist, and she was wearing sheepskin slippers with her tights.

  “I haven’t offered you anything to drink. Would you like some tea? We’ve got some Earl Grey somewhere.”

  Max glanced at his phone for the time. “We should hit the road, actually, but thanks.”

  They kept the radio on all the way back to London. On the motorway, Max turned down the volume.

  “I can see how it’s hard to talk about,” he said, “and I don’t think you should rush it.” He was thinking of Alison, her skittish energy, and of how much more vulnerable than Max’s own mother she had seemed. “Family, particularly. They always mean well. But sometimes they’re too close to see what’s best for you.”

  Kate shook her head. “I can’t think about it right now,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  After they’d been back a week or so, Kate came into Max’s room, dressed in sweats, bashfully holding a bottle of wine and her phone. She told Max that she needed his help: she still hadn’t called any of the numbers Zara had given her, and she had responded to Zara’s email only to say that she would think about her offer to pay for therapy. She needed to try and do this by herself, but she didn’t know where to start.

  “I’ve been staring at my phone all morning,” she said limply. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

  “I got it,” Max said. He opened the wine and poured them both a glass, then he took Kate’s phone and called the first helpline on the list.

  “This is Kate Quaile’s assistant speaking,” he said with authority. “I’d like to speak to the person in charge of panic attacks, please.”

  Despite herself, Kate snorted.

  “I’m afraid she’s otherwise engaged,” Max said. “She’s asked me to speak to you on her behalf. OK, I see, let me put that to her. Please hold.”

  Max rolled his eyes and put his hand over the mouthpiece.

  “She wants to talk to you,” he said to Kate. Kate nodded and took the phone, only a little warily. She leaned back on Max’s bed with the wineglass resting on her stomach and the phone on speaker, her earlier anxiety beginning to subside now that she was with Max. The woman on the other end of the phone asked her to describe, loosely and briefly, the main symptoms she was experiencing, in response to which Kate found herself under-exaggerating the anxiety, the low moods, the strength of the panic attacks.

  “And do you feel low one hundred percent of the time on seventy-five percent of the days?”

  “I guess it’s more, seventy-five to seventy-five?”

  “You feel low one hundred percent of the time on seventy-five percent of the days?” the woman said.

  “No, well, not one hundred percent of the time because I’m asleep some of the time, you know, so maybe, I don’t know. Is this assuming I sleep eight hours per day? Because if it is, then I’d say thirty-five, but if it’s the time I’m actually awake well, then, it’s probably more like fifty, but then I don’t sleep too well so maybe forty-five.”

  “Thirty-five or forty-five?” said the woman.

  Kate shrugged, pulled a face at Max.

  “Go for forty,” Max whispered, “good round number.”

  “Forty,” Kate said. She hear
d the sound of several keystrokes.

  “And do you have thoughts of suicide or self-harm?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said. Again, she looked at Max, but he was now looking at something on his phone, deliberately not making eye contact with her. “No, not really,” she said.

  More keystrokes. “Good,” said the woman. She told Kate she would receive a phone call from a psychologist in the next fifteen days, and checked that she had Kate’s number correct before hanging up.

  “You know when your mum emailed me,” Kate said to Max, “she offered to pay for therapy.”

  “Oh, really?” Because Max did not look surprised, Kate assumed that Zara had spoken to him. “What did you say?”

  “I haven’t decided,” Kate said. “Do you think I should say yes?”

  Max shrugged. “Up to you.”

  “You don’t sound sure.”

  “You know best. If you think it will help you, you should do it.”

  “It would be less of a wait, going private,” Kate said tentatively. She had wanted his encouragement, not his permission. “If that phone call was anything to go by.”

  “OK, then. Say yes.”

  * * *

  —

  Later that day Kate called to thank Zara and to tell her that she had called one of the helplines and was going to be in touch with the therapists as well as the directors on the list. The conversation felt to Kate less like a crisis talk than she had been expecting, and she could hear Zara running a bath as she spoke, the radio on in the background.

  “You really must get in touch with Georgina,” Zara said. “She’s a dream to work for. And she’s got the most fantastic imagination. You’ll learn a lot, even if you are only running for her.”

  “I will,” Kate said.

  “And Frieda, too. Brilliant woman. Do send her my love when you talk to her.”

  “I don’t think I’ve seen any of her films.”

  “No, darling, Frieda is one of the therapists. You know she saved Issa’s life after her mother died.”

  “Issa as in Issa Moore?” said Kate, incredulous.

  “She was in a terrible state. Wouldn’t I make an awful therapist, Kate? I’m so indiscreet.”

  As well as Frieda, Kate contacted both directors whose names Zara had given her. Neither of them had any work until spring, but one gave her the details of a production company she knew was looking for runners, and Kate managed to get work on the set of a film they were making in south London. On her first day, the set manager gave Kate an industrial-strength Hoover and a pair of padded gloves, and told her that her priority was not to step on any nails when clearing the remnants of the car crash they were shooting. They were in an empty warehouse, filming the final few shots of a climactic chase scene through an indoor meat market.

  “Trash,” Zara said gleefully when Kate told her what her job entailed. “Pure trash. Exquisite. I dread to think what the budget is for those vans. What’s the film called?”

  “Gristle,” Kate said.

  “Exquisite,” Zara said again. “It will be tough work, though, Kate. Exhausting, and repetitive.”

  But this kind of work was exactly what Kate wanted. It took them hours to set up the crash scene: each market stall aligned at the correct angle for the seven waiting cameras; huge hunks of plastic fake meat hooked in the back rows of each stall, bloodied steaks, boards and knives on the work surfaces; then real lamb shoulders, strong with the smell of blood, hanging at the front.

  “These have to be real,” the set manager said to Kate, “because we want them to really splatter the side of the van.” For emphasis, he smacked the back of one hand against the palm of the other, then began adjusting the angle of the carcass closest to him ever so slightly. He stepped back to admire his work. “I’m actually a vegan,” he said ruefully.

  The two white vans would take less than fifteen seconds to come hurtling through the market, plowing into the stalls lined up along the middle of the warehouse. Because she wasn’t involved in the shooting of the scene, only the setup and dismantling, Kate stood with the other runners, leaning on the railing of the temporary platform erected behind the camera crew, watching as the first van skidded in an arc through the front of the warehouse, tearing down the fronts of the stalls as it went. For Kate, the choreographed destruction was a welcome break from the scenes of the nonsequential, detached aggression that had been assailing her consciousness in the last weeks. On set, action led to consequence led to action led to consequence. There was a structural integrity to the crash that her own experience of violence was entirely lacking.

  During those two weeks, the harder they worked—dragging heavy stalls and stacks of wood, realigning the hanging carcasses and clear-plastic curtains, clearing debris from that morning’s work—the better Kate slept, too tired in her body to entertain her mind. Of the work she was doing, she actually preferred the cleanup. It was a comfort to know that nothing she did here had permanence. The more she built, the more she destroyed, the more she understood that there was nothing that would not pass.

  * * *

  —

  On the last day of her first week, Kate stayed on set through lunch, working on one of her stalls. She was squatting on the toes of her heavy-soled trainers, using a screwdriver and her scant carpentry skills to try to prise out a nail that had been flattened in the back panel. Both hands were on the screwdriver, whose tip she was jamming into a knot in the woodwork. She could feel that the waistband of her jeans was riding a little low, that her lower back and hips were exposed, but was too focused on her task to pull them up until she became aware of somebody standing over her, just a little too close. They were men’s shoes: Timberland, too clean to have been put to much use.

  Kate took out an earphone and looked up. The man was about the same height as Max, perhaps in his late twenties, though he had a rough black beard that made him look older than he probably was. He was wearing a thick hoodie that showed some bulk around his belly and hips, and he was looking at Kate as though he was waiting for something.

  “What?” Kate said bluntly. She stood up, hitching her jeans up around her hips, and deciding that if this man tried to say anything about the fact that her ass had just been on show then she would skewer him.

  “Oh,” the man said absently, as if he and not Kate had just been in the middle of something. “That’s my screwdriver. I was gonna get it back when you were done.”

  “I thought they were communal.”

  “Nah. That one’s actually specifically for the rig.” He indicated behind him to where the cameras were set up. Kate saw now that one of the cameramen was straining to hold a detached piece of rigging in place. The man didn’t seem to be in a hurry, though. In fact, he looked as though he was trying not to laugh at her.

  Kate glanced down at the screwdriver. Its tip was scratched where she had been scraping it. “Sorry,” she said. She wiped it on her jeans and held it out to him.

  “No worries. Try that instead,” he said, pointing to the hammer that had been left on the floor by another of the stalls.

  * * *

  —

  Discreetly, Kate found out from Ben the Vegan Set Manager that the guy’s name was Andrew, that he was with the camera crew, and that he’d been working as an assistant to the same cinematographer for the last couple of years. Andrew had left an impression on Kate. Over the next few days, she caught herself looking at him during the takes, watching him instead of the crash scene. That half laugh he’d had for her had a warmth that she liked, and his brown skin was soft-looking. From the platform where she stood she saw that his frame was substantial but not muscular.

  At first Kate had told herself that her constant awareness of this man was because she considered him to be a threat, or had briefly considered him to be a threat the first time she’d been aware of him standing over her. He
r instinct was to categorize him as either not safe or safe. But that was wrong. Absurdly, impossibly, she was attracted to him.

  “Why is it absurd?” Max said when Kate told him about Andrew. She’d been agonizing all evening over whether to say anything, feeling that this new desire was some terrible sin. She’d found herself unable to resist bringing him up, though, and Max’s response took her by surprise.

  “Just feels a bit soon,” Kate said, squirming.

  “I don’t think there are rules,” said Max kindly. “I think it’s great news. I think you should have sex with him as soon as possible.”

  Kate put her head in her hands. “Oh God,” she said. “Don’t. I can’t. With any luck I’ll never have to speak to him again.”

  Of course she did want to speak to him again; it would be mortifying, naturally, but it would be good for her to try to have a conversation with a man who was neither friend nor, necessarily, threat. Ignoring the thrill that rose in her stomach, she reasoned that it would be an experiment—a means of measuring progress—for which it was obviously important to look her best. The next morning, she got out of bed just a little more eagerly than usual, scrubbed her face so that her skin felt clean and fresh, and took out the eyeliner pen she hadn’t used since the summer, drawing careful black flicks at the corners of her lashes.

  But when it got to the time that Andrew usually arrived and started setting up with the camera crew—he wasn’t there. Nor was he there by the coffee van after lunch, around the time she’d seen him there the days before; there were only a few days left of filming, and every day she became less hopeful that she would see him. She was on such high alert that she even forgot to think about Lewis, right up until they got to the end of Friday, and wrapped the final shoot without Andrew having returned.