Alice Feeney - I Know Who You Are

I frown and his features readjust themselves, to reflect the caution and concern most people would display in these circumstances. He lowers his voice. ‘Does he know about us?’

I stare at his face, so serious all of a sudden. Then the creases fold and fan around the corners of his mischievous eyes, and he laughs at me. ‘There’s a journalist waiting in your dressing room, too, by the way.’

‘What?’ He may as well have said assassin.

‘Apparently your agent arranged the interview, and they only want to speak to you, not me. Not that I’m jealous … ’

‘I don’t know anything about—’

‘Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry, my bruised ego will regenerate itself, always does. She’s been in there for twenty minutes. I don’t want her writing something shit about the film because you can’t set an alarm, so you might want to be a little more tout suite about it.’ He often adds a random French word to his sentences, I’ve never understood why. He isn’t French.

Jack walks off down the corridor without another word, in either language, and I question what it is about him that I find so attractive. Sometimes I wonder if I only ever want things I think I can’t have.

I don’t know anything about any interview, and I would never have agreed to do one today if I had. I hate interviews. I hate journalists; they’re all the same – trying to uncover secrets that aren’t theirs to share. Including my husband. Ben works behind the scenes as a news producer at TBN. I know he spent time in warzones before we met; his name was mentioned in online articles by some of the correspondents he worked with. I’ve no idea what he is working on now, he never seems to want to talk about it.

I found him romantic and charming at first. His Irish accent reminded me of my childhood, and bred a familiarity I wanted to climb inside and hide in. Whenever I think it might be the end, I remember the beginning. We married too fast and loved too slowly, but we were happy for a while, and I thought we wanted the same thing. Sometimes I wonder whether the horrors of the world he saw because of his job changed him; Ben is nothing like the other journalists I meet for work.

I know a lot of the showbiz and entertainment reporters now; the same familiar faces turn up at junkets, premieres and parties. I wonder if it might be one of the ones I like, someone who has been kind about my work before, someone I’ve met. That might be okay. If it’s someone I haven’t met before, my hands will shake, I’ll start to sweat, my knees will wobble and then, when my unknown adversary picks up on my absolute terror, I’ll lose the ability to form coherent sentences. If my agent had any understanding of what these situations do to me, he wouldn’t keep landing me in them. It’s like a parent dropping a child who is scared of water into the deep end, presuming that the child will swim, not sink. One of these days I know I’m going to drown.

I text my agent, it’s unlike Tony to set something up and not tell me. Other actresses might throw their toys out of their prams when things don’t go according to plan – I’ve seen them do it – but I’m not like that, and hope I won’t ever be; I know how lucky I am. At least a thousand other people wish they could walk in my shoes, and they are more deserving than I am to wear them. I’m still fairly new to this level of this game, and I’ve got too much to lose. I can’t go back to the start, not now. I worked too hard and it took so long to get here.

I check my phone. There’s no response from Tony, but I can’t keep the journalist waiting any longer. I paint on the smile I have perfected for others, before opening the door with my name on, and finding someone else sitting in my chair, as though she belongs there.

She doesn’t.

‘I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting, great to see you,’ I lie, holding out my hand, trying to keep it steady.

Jennifer Jones smiles up at me as though we are old friends. We are not. She’s a journalist I despise, who has been horribly unkind about me in the past, for reasons I’ll never understand. She’s the bitch who called me ‘plump but pretty’ when my first film came out last year. I call her Beak Face in return, but only in the privacy of my own thoughts. Everything about her is too small, especially her mind. She leaps up from the chair, flutters around me like a sparrow on speed, then grips my fingers in her tiny, cold, claw-like hand, giving my own an over-enthusiastic shake. Last time we met, I’m not convinced she had seen one frame of the film I was there to talk about. She’s one of those journalists who thinks that because she interviews celebrities, she is one too. She isn’t.

Beak Face is middle-aged and dresses like her daughter would, had she been willing to pause her career long enough to have one. Her neat brown hair is cut into a style that was almost fashionable a decade ago, her cheeks are too pink and her teeth are unnaturally white. She’s a person whose story has already been written, and she’ll never change her own ending, no matter how hard she tries. From what I’ve read about her online, she wanted to be an actress herself when she was younger. Perhaps that’s why she hates me so much. I watch her tiny mouth twitch and spit as she squawks fake praise in my direction, my mind already racing ahead, trying to anticipate the verbal grenades she plans to throw at me.

‘My agent didn’t mention anything about an interview … ’

‘Oh, right. Well, if you’d rather not? It’s just for the TBN website, no cameras, just little old me. So you don’t need to worry about your hair or how you look at the moment … ’

Bitch.

She winks and her face looks as if it has suffered a temporary stroke.

‘I can come back another time if … ’

I force another smile in reply and sit down opposite her, my hands knotted together in my lap to stop them from shaking. My agent wouldn’t have agreed to this unless he thought it was a good idea. ‘Fire away,’ I say. Feeling like I really am about to get shot.

She takes an old-fashioned notebook from what looks like a school satchel she probably stole from a child on the street. I’m surprised, most journalists I meet nowadays record their interviews on their phones. I guess her methods, like her hair, are stuck in the past.

‘Your acting career started when you got a scholarship to RADA when you were eighteen, is that correct?’

No, I started acting long before that, when I was much, much younger.

‘Yes, that’s right.’ I remind myself to smile. Sometimes I forget.

‘Your parents must have been very proud.’

I don’t answer personal questions about my family, so I just nod.

‘Did you always want to act?’

This one is easy, I get asked this all the time and the answer always seems to go down well. ‘I think so, but I was extremely shy when I was a child … ’

I still am.

‘There were auditions for my school’s production of The Wizard of Oz when I was fifteen, but I was too scared to go along. The drama teacher put a list of who got what part on a notice board afterwards; I didn’t even read it. Someone else told me that I got the part of Dorothy and I thought they were joking, but when I checked, my name really was there, right at the top of the list – Dorothy: Aimee Sinclair . I thought it was a mistake, but the drama teacher said it wasn’t. He said he believed in me because he knew I couldn’t. Nobody had ever believed in me before. I learned my lines and I practised the songs and I did my very best for him, not for me, because I didn’t want to let him down. I was surprised when people thought I was good, and I loved being on that stage. From that moment on, acting was all I ever wanted to do.’