The Playdate (14 page)
“Aargh!” shrieked Debs. “What was that? Allen, what was it?”
“Goodness. How strange,” said Allen. “Must have been a fox.”
“No,” Debs protested, with haunted eyes. “Allen, that was not a fox. It couldn’t have been. It was huge.”
She looked around her, shaken, as if it were about to jump back over the fence and attack her.
Allen cleared his throat. She turned and saw him rubbing his brow, his eyes fixed firmly away from her as if he were seeking an escape route.
Oh no. Quickly, she reached out a hand and touched his sleeve, pausing a second as her fingers absorbed the forgotten fleshy softness of his arm under the cotton.
“No. No. You’re probably right, love.” She nodded, dropping her fingers so that she wouldn’t have to suffer the pain of him pulling away politely. “I’m seeing things. It must have been a fox.”
That was no fox, though, she thought, forcing herself to smile. The creature had been evil-looking. Strange. Like a devil’s hound.
Bloody Tube.
I’m late. On my second day at work.
Now it really is a signal failure, this time at King’s Cross. I jump off the fast Victoria Line train and run to the Piccadilly Line. I glance at my watch. This is a disaster. I’ll have five stops on the Piccadilly Line, not three, and will have to get off at Piccadilly Circus, which is five minutes’ walk farther from the studio in Soho. To make it worse, everyone else at King’s Cross has the same idea and I have to push onto a crowded train, where the only space is beside the open window of the door that connects two carriages. As soon as the train sets off, a blast of wind blows through, pushing all my hair forward, so that I look like an Afghan hound, much to the amusement of two boys standing opposite me.
I shut my eyes to stop my hair from going in them and think about Rae.
She is the reason I am late.
“I’m not going to after-school club,” she said, sticking her chin out defiantly, the minute I woke her up at 7:30
A.M.
I stared at her. Where’s this come from?
“Well,” I stuttered. “Rae, you have to. I’m at work today.”
“It’s not fair,” she cried suddenly. “I hate you. And I am not getting out of bed.”
I was so shocked I had to go to the kitchen and made sandwiches for work. When I finally tempted her out of bed with the offer of pancakes, she announced that the school shirt I’ve just bought her was suddenly “too tight.” Then she refused to eat the pancakes, deciding she wanted porridge instead. Her pièce de résistance, however, was kept for last. When I finally persuaded her into the bathroom to do her teeth, she “accidentally” dropped her soft doll with the plastic head and arms down the toilet and flushed it before I could stop her.
“What are you doing, Rae?” I shouted as the water in the toilet bowl rose up and refused to drain away. The doll had disappeared apart from one pink finger sticking out, fittingly, out of my reach.
She just shrugged. I was so confused, I marched her to school without talking, and handed her to her teacher, Ms. Aldon, trying not to feel upset when Rae refused to kiss me good-bye.
So now I am late for work, worried about Rae. I forgot to talk to Ms. Aldon about Rae being upset about after-school club, and I have no idea how I am going to find a plumber to fix our toilet.
I jump off at Piccadilly Circus and cut away from the tourists on Regent Street through the back alleyways of Soho, past the sex shops and market stalls, hoping I can remember the way to Wardour Street.
“Come on, Cal!” Guy shouts at me from his glass-fronted
office when I run in the door of Rocket, my hair buffeted from the Tube and now also frizzed in the morning rain. “He’s been here ten minutes.” Guy’s warm brown eyes have darkened dangerously. I might have been away from work for five years but I still know the score. In Soho sound design, the client is king. And turning up ten minutes late for a meeting with the king is simply not showing the appropriate amount of respect.
“Sorry, sorry,” I whisper, running into Guy’s office, looking for somewhere to put my coat.
“Here,” Megan says, coming in and taking it off me. “Coffee?”
I nod gratefully.
“Right, let’s go,” Guy snaps.
He takes me into the client room, which boasts luxury cinema seats and a giant plasma TV that is currently screening some of the studio’s latest prestigious commissions: in this case, a Japanese car advert.
Parker stands up when I come in and, to my relief, offers me a beaming smile. I recognize him from a BBC art program I watched. He is tall and slim, with coffee-colored skin, startling deep blue eyes, and Afro hair woven in tiny plaits, wearing a stylish pin-striped suit and an open-necked white shirt.
“Nice to meet you, Callie,” he says with a mild Scandinavian accent. “Heard a lot of good things about you.”
I almost laugh out loud. The idea that Loll Parker has heard of me is funny. He is clearly just being kind.
Guy shoots a look at me. “Lucky for you he’s a nice guy,” it says.
Suitably admonished, I sit down. “Right,” he says. “Loll? Will we run through?”
Parker nods and Guy turns down the lights. A film starts to
play on the plasma screen, with no sound apart from a rough of the actors’ voices.
Parker’s ten-minute short film opens on a remote Swedish lake that is surrounded by pine forests. On the empty shoreline sits a lone cabin. The narrative starts. The cabin belongs to an overweight, retired lawyer from Stockholm, who arrives every weekend, makes himself a luxurious breakfast of herrings and cheese, sits on his balcony overlooking the tranquil lake in his straw boater with his newspaper, and gives a self-satisfied sigh.
Except this weekend, he wakes to a banging sound. He looks out to see a giant thug of a man laying the foundations for a cabin right in front of his.
“Who are you?” the lawyer booms off his balcony.
“Your little brother,” the thug booms back.
He is in fact the man’s long-lost brother who has been in jail abroad for thirty years for murder, and has been left equal rights to the land around the lake. “Our father favored you!” the thug shouts at the lawyer. “It’s his fault I turned to drugs and crime.”
“But you’re stealing my view,” whimpers the older brother, sensing the menace of his brother.
“I haven’t had a view for thirty years. It’s my turn now,” the thug growls.
The film follows him as he continues to saw and hammer and build his cabin, stealing his brother’s tranquility hour by hour, till the film ends with the lawyer suddenly finding his bravado again, and fixing a chair to his roof. It finishes with the thug erecting one even higher on his.
Guy and I clap at the end, and Parker beams. “I’m exploring ideas of global population migration,” he tells us, with his slight Scandinavian lilt. “You know, two hundred million people
right across the world no longer live in their country of origin. At the same time, more of us than ever before are choosing to live in cities, cramming in together, searching for cultural identity and space.”
I watch him, fascinated. Parker can’t be any older than me.
Yet while I’ve been sitting at home for five years, he’s been doing this. Developing ideas, learning, taking on the world.
The possibilities hit me. The doctors keep telling me that Rae is fine now; that she will live a normal life, bar a few extra risks. If we have really reached that point, we can both start finally to live a little. If I can really allow myself to believe that—well, the things I could achieve . . .
It’s an art film, and visually stunning. Parker says he wants two things from the sound. He wants me to capture the stillness of the lake and forest, so that the intrusion of the sounds of the building contrast as violently as they can.
The challenge, I can see, is immense. Frightening. To create the perfect background of “nothing.” Already my ears are mixing sounds: sparrow wings flapping on the current, breeze through reeds, insects creeping through undergrowth. I’m excited for the first time I can remember in years. But as Parker smiles that big smile at me expectantly, I also feel like a fraud. He expects something from me that I’m not even sure I can do anymore.
* * *
Parker heads off to see his agent and leaves me to it, and I work on a few ideas, forcing myself to concentrate every time my stomach turns with nerves, and I have to fight the urge to bolt out the door and down Wardour Street. It is only when I go to the bathroom that I remember the broken toilet at home, and manage to ring my landlord to get a number for his plumber,
and arrange a visit through the plumber’s wife for sometime Thursday, all whispered from inside a toilet stall. I have the feeling that Guy will not appreciate domestic dramas interfering in our day today. I turn off my mobile as I walk out of the bathroom, in case the plumber himself tries to ring me to confirm the time, and head back to my office.
“Ready for us?” Guy asks, popping his head round the door just before lunchtime.
“Er,” I say, my heart thumping. “I think so.”
He and Parker walk in and sit on the cinema chairs. I work around them calmly, making sure I don’t do anything stupid, running through the sequence in my head. I am just about to press “play” when Megan comes into the client room holding a handset.
“Callie, there’s someone called Suzy on the phone?”
Guy looks at me. “Need to take that?”
“Um . . .”
What do I do?
“Do you mind? It might be urgent.”
“Go on, then,” he says, his expression giving nothing away.
“Sorry.”
How did Suzy get this number? I’m sure I didn’t give it to her, for precisely this reason.
“Suze—everything all right?” I say, turning my head away from them as much as possible.
“Hi, hon,” she says. “Yeah. I was just phoning for a chat. Your mobile is going straight to message.”
A chat? I look up at Guy. He is sharing a joke with Turner Prize nominee Loll Parker, drumming his fingers on the table.
“Um. Suze . . .”
“Sorry I was a little weird last night—I was just worried about Jez and Henry. I wanted to check how Rae was this morning?”
I stare at the carpet. “That’s nice of you, but actually I am in a meeting . . .”
“You can’t talk?”
“Quite an important meeting.”
“Oh, OK. I’ll leave you to it. Hey, hon? I must tell you before I go. This morning? You know Rae and Henry are doing this history assembly? It was the funniest thing. Henry told me he had to dress as a pheasant.” She laughs.
I say nothing, just smile inanely and nod as Guy looks over. What is she doing?
“He meant a peasant!” she says.
“I know,” I say. “That’s a good one. Listen, I really have to go—sorry. I’ll call you later—bye.”
“OK, hon, bye . . .” she trails off as I firmly press the “off” button.
Avoiding Guy’s eye, I go back to starting my rough sound track again.
“Everything OK?” Guy asks.
No, it’s not.
“Yeah, sorry. Anyway, what I was thinking . . .”
* * *
Loll Parker likes my ideas for the “stillness.” Guy catches my eye and winks.
“Good. Right—lunch. We better go,” he says, checking the clock on the wall. “Table’s at one-thirty.”
I let out a silent sigh of relief, and busy myself at the desk as they stand up and walk to the door. I could do with half an hour just to sit quietly and recover my nerves.
Guy stops at the door.
“Cal? Ready?” he says, waiting.
Parker holds the door open expectantly.
“For . . .” I try faintly.
“Lunch?”
“Oh. I’m coming, am I?” I stammer. Guy shoots me a subtle but admonishing look. We’re on show—pull yourself together, it says.
“We’ll meet you in reception,” Guy barks, motioning Parker to go ahead of him.
Shit.
I find a lipstick in my bag and quickly apply it in my reflection in the computer screen, rubbing my lips together to squash it into some sort of even tone. Pushing my Afghan-hound hair back, I dash after them into the reception area. Guy is already opening the front door and ushering Parker out into Wardour Street.
“Do you know where we’re going?” I whisper to Megan, rummaging desperately to see if I have enough money in my bag for a sandwich.
“That restaurant that chef off the telly has just opened on Wardour Street, I think,” she says, reapplying her own lipstick in a pretty little compact. A compact. Of course, Megan would have a compact.
“Really . . . ?” I turn pale, looking hopelessly at my maxed-out debit card.
“Callie—Guy’s paying,” she says. “It’s a client lunch.”
“Is it?” I say more loudly than I mean to. Of course it is.
Megan lets out a giggle like a tinkling bell. “You do make me laugh,” she says. “You’ve got to come out one night.”
“Oh,” I say, taken aback. “That would be nice.”
“There’s a launch party at Universal on Thursday—my flatmate works there. A few of us are going. Come.”
“Really?” My mind spins. What would I do with Rae? I’d have to ask Suzy . . .
“Cal?” Guy barks, his head appearing back in the door.
“Go on—you know what he’s like,” Megan teases, as I rush toward the door.
She’s right. I do know what Guy’s like. I’m remembering fast. Demanding, challenging, forces you to think quick and live on your nerves. Encourages you to do things you didn’t think you could do.
Exhilarating.
Guy and Parker are already twenty feet ahead, deep in conversation. I trot behind them on my new sandals. I can hear Guy’s voice booming even from this distance, as he moves confidently through the bicycle couriers and pavement tables, past film and music and advertising companies. I watch him. He walks these Soho streets where deals are done like he owns them. Like he belongs.
The restaurant is only two minutes from Rocket. As Guy and Parker stop at the door to wait for me, I notice two women in their sixties pass the cool glass and wood exterior that says “Asian fusion” and glance up. I can tell from the women’s pastel suits, carefully accessorized scarves, and coiffed hair that they are on a day trip to London to visit an exhibition, do some shopping, and take in a musical, just like Mum and Aunty Jean used to do once a year.