Well Groomed (31 page)

‘Sound?’

A sound engineer crouching beside a lap-top computer which was attached to various space-age master boards fiddled with his headphones and glanced across at a man holding a furry mike on a boom. ‘Rolling,’ he muttered.

‘Mark it!’

With a breathless spiel of the slate and scene number from the nervous-looking youth, the clapper came down and he loped gratefully out of shot.

‘And – action! Go in three, Jim!’ Nigel squawked into his walkie-talkie, gazing fixedly at his monitor.

Moments later, Niall and his posse were thundering down the hill, sending up great divots of earth in their wake. The camera swept around on its crane, following their progress in a smooth downward sweep.

Tash stifled a laugh as she saw that one of the kilts, his face pinched with fear, looked dangerously close to falling off, or not stopping at all. Thankfully his mount was far more experienced than he was and, without any apparent guidance from its rider, slithered to an obedient halt behind Niall’s huge, sweating chestnut as the camera dropped to head-height and filmed Niall jumping off.

Then it slid easily along its well-oiled tracks as it followed his short run to the delighted Minty who fell into his arms, her exquisite tulip-bud lips rising towards his.

Tash winced as the kiss seemed to go on forever. Craning her head to try and see whether they were using tongues, she fought a desperate urge to shout ‘Cut!’

When Nigel finally yelled the blissful word, Tash had come to the conclusion that not only were they using tongues, but they were indulging in mutual mouth-washing and teeth flossing with them.

After a quick consultation with his camera-man and the sound engineer, Nigel squinted at the sky and shrugged. ‘Print it?’ He turned back to his DoP.

‘Print it.’ The swarthy DoP nodded and backed off to talk to the camera crew once more while Nigel addressed the group at large.

‘That was fucking fantastic, guys – more fantastic than the fucking, in fact,’ he yelled at the actors. ‘The light’s going. We’re out of here, folks. Thank you, everyone. Grab your call sheets from Angie if you haven’t already. See most of you tomorrow.’

Tash heaved a sigh of relief and watched as Niall slowly disentangled himself from Minty and tried to make his way over to her, big grin still firmly in place. But he was waylaid en route by Nigel who had suddenly shed his dictator role for oily, conciliatory father-figure.

‘Terrific work, Niall – great passion. I think we should work on . . . ’

Hoping he was going to say ‘the scene where Minty loses all her teeth’, Tash tried to listen in but Nigel turned his back to her so that his words were muffled.

As Mel sloped off to help with the wrap, dropping piles of paper in her wake, Tash huddled in the worsening drizzle feeling left out. Minty had joined Nigel’s tight little congregation now and was preening delightedly under his increasingly unctuous praise. Tash loathed the way she touched Niall when she spoke, as familiar as a lover. She knew that this was typical of actresses, but it didn’t stop a squat little green harpy of jealousy from crouching on her shoulder and whispering ‘They’re bonking’ into her ear.

‘Tash!’ Niall waved her over. ‘Come and meet Nigel. Nigel, this is Tash.’

Nigel, who close up was a weasely-nosed little man with darting eyes and an over-wet mouth, didn’t look at her at all.

‘Hi,’ he muttered, walking off to chat to his location manager.

Niall laughed cheerfully. ‘Bastard. Let’s rip this plaid off, get my stuff together and go back to the hotel – you must be bored stiff. I said we’d give Minty a lift, okay? Her driver hasn’t turned up yet.’

Tash gave Minty as big a smile as she could muster. ‘Fine.’

At least the back seat of the design classic was tiny and covered with dog hair and sweet wrappers, she realised with some satisfaction.

Tash had hoped for a quiet meal together that evening. She badly needed to talk to Niall, to try to draw him out about his erratic behaviour, his drunken, near-comatose unhappiness of the night before, his relationship with Minty. It occurred to her in a moment of panic on the way back to the hotel that he had only kissed her in his trailer because he had spotted Minty approaching through one of the steamy windows and wanted to make her react. Worst of all, Tash was beginning to worry that his odd behaviour stemmed from the most disturbing of all reasons – his feet were getting colder than a Himalayan hill-walker’s about the wedding.

But she had no chance to talk to him. The moment they were in their room alone, he peeled off his clothes and headed into the shower. As soon as he was out, he was dressing, eager to get to the bar, MacGinnen’s smile still dancing on his lips.

‘Can we go for a walk or something first?’ Tash asked hopefully.

‘In this weather?’ Niall laughed, looking towards the vast window where the loch was almost in darkness and being lashed by another downpour. ‘Tash, you’re so gloriously hare-brained sometimes. Are you going to change, or shall we go now? I’m parched, so I am.’

‘Can’t we stay here and talk for a bit?’ She snuggled against him imploringly.

He pulled a face, still boundlessly cheerful. ‘We can talk in bed later, so we can. I want you to get to know everyone better, angel. They’re a terrific bunch, you said so yourself.’ He pulled gently away from her and walked over to the desk to glance at his character notes.

‘Niall,’ she bit her lip, following him, ‘have you told them we’re getting married this summer?’

‘’Course I have,’ he gathered her into a hug and dropped his mouth to hers. The move seemed alarmingly perfunctory, as though it, too, was scripted.

Tash badly wanted the reassurance of the kiss, but the image of him using precisely the same moves on Minty over and over again in front of a crowd earlier made her feel jumpy and distanced. And when his mouth did close over hers it was greedy and boisterous, not at all gentle. She kissed him back, but nothing kicked inside her except for a great churning swell of panic.

‘You,’ he announced as he pulled away and headed for the mirror to check his hair, ‘are going to cheer up tonight, if it kills me. You’re so morose, angel, it’s depressing me. I know you find film sets intimidating, but it’ll get easier, I promise. The guys think you’re a knock-out, and Minty adores you already.’

‘Minty?’ Tash croaked, gaping at him.

‘Sure.’ He grinned at her over the shoulder of his mirrored reflection. ‘She told me earlier that she thinks you’re priceless. I’ve invited her to the wedding.’

When he urged her to hurry up, Tash trailed into the shower and indulged in a long, thoughtful, lonely blast of hot water, listening to Niall chattering away in the other room or singing Rolling Stones hits very loudly. She wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or on the phone, the shower made it impossible to hear a word. After five minutes he went quiet.

Wondering if he was okay, Tash wandered back into the main room, a toothbrush poking from her mouth as she tried to neutralise her breath from so much coffee on set.

He had gone already, leaving a selection of clothes on the bed which he was clearly eager for her to wear.

Tash sighed unhappily. Dear Niall had such romantic ideas, but his taste in women’s clothing was appalling. He had laid out her nylon under-slip, thinking it some sexy little black number, plus her black riding jacket which she had been wearing at the trials the day before and had brought along by mistake. It reeked of horse and, on close inspection, had a line of scurf along the front from leaning into Snob’s neck as they jumped. Added to this, he had put out her hold-up stockings which always fell down in minutes and her long boots from the christening.

She longed to pull on some jeans and one of his jumpers, but was too uncertain of him at the moment to risk it, guessing that it would be best to pander to him while she rode out his current mood.

When she looked in the mirror, she perked up slightly. The outfit was ridiculously tarty, but she had to admit it was absurdly sexy as well. The stockings made her legs look gloriously long, and the strappy slip clung to exactly the right curves of her body. Matched with her bruised, tired eyes and damp, dishevelled air, she felt both sleazy and sophisticated – a been-there, bored-by-that rock chick in the Marianne Faithfull mould.

Having made up her face and dusted off the worst of the jacket’s scurf, she headed to the bar with a rebellious swing of her hips, her nerves firmly held at bay.

The first person she caught sight of was Minty, lounging on a tartan sofa wearing threadbare jeans and a shrunken Fair Isle sweater which clung to every curve of her capacious bosom and minute waist. Her beautiful face free of make-up and her hair as wild as it had been on set, she made Tash feel like an over-primped tart trawling the hotel lounge for trade. Her fragile confidence started to ebb away.

‘Tash darling!’ Minty gave her a friendly wave. ‘You look gorgeous. Doesn’t she look gorgeous, everyone?’

She was draped partly over the sofa arm and partly over Niall who, scruffier than ever in his ancient jeans and Aran, was knocking back scotch and chatting to several other sprawling men. Tash assumed they were the kilts, now unrecognisable without their muddied faces and draped blankets. As Niall made no effort to move sideways and accommodate her, she dragged over a spare chair and plonked it beside one of the lounging men.

‘Were you in the battle scene earlier today?’ she asked, trying to imagine his face covered with mud.

‘Hardly.’ He looked put out. ‘I’m the lighting camera-man.’ Turning his back on her, he joined in an animated conversation about whether or not Nigel was shagging the young clapper loader.

Niall was still completely ignoring her as he laughed uproariously with Minty, MacGinnen’s big grin tugging at his cheeks, gaze merrily soaking up that clean, scrubbed pink face with its ripe plum cheeks, kitten eyes and cocoa dusting of freckles.

Tash felt a tide of bile and panic surge at her throat. More than anything, she felt jealousy eating at her stomach. Their confidence and companionship left her hopelessly alienated. The entire group was chattering about the film and future scenes, a topic of which she knew precious little. Most of them, it seemed, were heading on to Edinburgh the next week to continue shooting there.

Gratefully recognising the man who had given her a cigarette in the tent earlier and told her that Minty was a bitch, she caught his eye and grinned.

‘Edinburgh’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said, unable to think up anything less banal in the brief second that she had his attention.

‘So are you,’ he growled wolfishly, and slithered his eyes along the entire length of her legs. Tash gulped uncomfortably and glanced at Niall, who was now playing with Minty’s hair while he talked to her. When she looked back at her cigarette friend, he was once again embroiled in a loud conversation about Nigel’s apparently rampant sex life.

She spent the ensuing two hours perched on the edge of a chair, draining her drinks far faster than everyone else. Her small talk needed a microscope to be spotted and went largely undetected.

When they all finally piled into the baronial dining hall to eat, she found herself sitting between two of the former kilts who had both forgotten her name and proceeded to talk across her as though she was a mildly irritating stone column. She had wanted to sit beside Niall, but he’d cheerfully insisted that she should get to know his friends better.

‘You’ll love these two guys,’ he’d laughed as he posted her between them and kissed her on the top of the head, ‘they’ll keep you in stitches all night. You can charm them, angel, and make me wildly jealous.’

She tried gallantly not to let him down, cracking the odd joke and interjecting comments and questions when the conversation went anywhere near something she felt was common ground, but it was like talking to the television – they just chattered on regardless. The only thing they seemed to want to keep stitched was her mouth.

Tash tried to feign an interest in her soup, gazing at it as though it was doused in the cyanide of her own jealousy.

The only comment levelled at her by one of the name-forgetting kilts was, ‘At least we know you won’t do a Minty and chuck that all up later – you haven’t eaten enough of it to get a purchase on any vomit.’ Laughing with his friend, he proceeded to chatter about the crew on the last film he had done, none of whom Tash knew.

She looked at She Who Vomits – placed neatly between Niall and the best-looking of the kilts. Minty looked ravishing and regularly ravished. She kept leaning across to whisper into Niall’s ear, that pretty, coquettish smile playing on her lips. Every time she spoke, he burst into gales of laughter.

I can’t believe he’s doing this, Tash thought murderously. He must know how much he’s hurting me.

The flirtatious cigarette-donor, who was sitting directly opposite, was back on her case again.

‘Devastating, isn’t she?’ he murmured, locking eyes with Tash.

She managed a wobbly smile. ‘She’s very beautiful.’

‘And knows it.’ He let out an indulgent, almost carnal sigh. ‘I can’t tell you how good that feels.’

Tash wondered what he meant. Perhaps someone was playing footsie with him under the table and he thought it was her? She scraped back her chair slightly and sat prudishly upright.

‘What feels?’ she asked.

‘That,’ he sighed, eyes sliding sideways and watching Minty pop one of Niall’s breaded mushrooms into her lush little mouth. ‘I was on the receiving end of that last week. You don’t have anything to worry about.’ He turned to Tash again with a sad smile. ‘They’re not shagging.’

‘What d’you mean?’ She looked at him in horror.

‘I mean,’ he dropped his voice and leaned forward intently, ‘that she only flirts like that when she hasn’t got someone into bed. The moment you do the business, she doesn’t want to know. She’s famous for it. She only had a go at me last week because Niall made it so patently obvious there was nothing doing.’