Hannah Begbie - Blurred Lines

A girl with corkscrew hair sways and gyrates like no one is watching, or something like that. Becky feels both embarrassed and jealous, watching her dance like she is at a warehouse rave, weaving her arms in between strips of blue and green light.

Mary is talking to Brendan who is standing over her – his arm positioned in a way that makes it look like he is bolstering the wall, as if he is as essential as a ceiling joist. Mary is waving her hands, clearly telling a story that means absolutely everything to her, and she is delighted, in her element, because Brendan is looking at her and laughing and no doubt appreciating her pretty Irish eyes.

As if she hadn’t already known it, this confirms everything for Becky. Soon it is extremely unlikely that she will see Mary for the rest of the night. Despite all their promises it isn’t practical for them to do everything together. They are not Siamese twins. Mary is fun, which is why she is laughing with a boy she really likes. Becky is more introverted, harder to like, she thinks. It occurs to Becky that after tonight Mary may not in fact need her around any more. Having played her role as wingman she will be made redundant, a needless adjunct once Brendan is at the heart of Mary’s life. And then where will Becky belong?

It is no good for Becky to have these thoughts – not at this party, in this house where she doesn’t know anyone. But what can she do? She can’t afford a cab home on her own. Should she find a corner and try to sleep?

She lights another cigarette as Mary walks out of the room holding Brendan’s hand.

How embarrassing to feel so sad about something so small, a friend going off with a boy. Instead of what?

She wonders about the night bus. She can afford that. What’s the route? And can she bear it, drunk and alone and, yes, quite close to crying now?

She feels a hand at her back and a pathetic sense of gratitude rises in her that someone wants to talk.

‘Hey,’ Scott says.

He is tall, blond, good-looking. A friend of Brendan’s. Not quite in his group but not out of it either. One of those people who move around and seem to know how to get along with everyone.

‘There’s a game of Spin the Bottle going on upstairs. Mary and Brendan sent me to get you. We’ve got all the “stuff” up there.’

‘Spin the Bottle?’

‘Yeah, it’s retro. No obligations. You could just do a pill.’

‘What if the bottle says I have to do heroin?’

He doesn’t get her joke fast enough to laugh at it. She wishes she could take it back.

‘So do you want to come?’

Suddenly she knows that, more than anything, she is fed up with standing here with her thoughts. She wants to climb out of her head and have some fun.

This will fill some hours.

To think that she could have chosen the arduous night bus journey. The chances are she’d have made it home uncomfortable and tired, but safe and sound and awake enough the next day to enjoy her mum’s Sunday roast. But then again, she could also have fallen asleep on the top deck and found herself at the depot miles from anywhere, lost and vulnerable.

Followed home.

Or worse.

As it is, she stays at the party. She drains her beer bottle to its last tasteless drop, looks at Scott and tells him, ‘I’m game.’

The sky is blue in Soho this morning, and the sun casts a clear clean light across a street lined with fabric shops, one after the other, their fronts thrown open and piled high with rolls of cotton and acrylic, satin and lace. The food stalls are still skeletons, too early to be stacked with vats, rolls and wraps for the lunchtime crowd. Soho’s entertainment village is populated by film execs whose heads are full of the edit, TV producers whose minds are bending with budget cuts and the interns in Converse and skinny jeans feeling so hashtag-blessed.

Becky kicks through a messy pile of plane tree bark and fuzz balls on the pavement outside the office, a red-brick townhouse on a square just south of tourist-choked Oxford Street. Her tired eyes itch with pollen and pollution, her nerves still jangling after Maisie’s disgruntled departure for the school bus.

Over the years she has worked for Matthew, she has perfected the art of placating him, knowing whether his grumps are down to hunger or thirst or aggravation with a bullish agent who is fighting for more money and more rights. She takes satisfaction in the feeling that she is somehow unique, being both soother and gatekeeper for a man as special as he. But being the cause of Matthew’s problems? That’s new to her.

How will he raise it with her? ‘Last night, as I was shagging a young woman on my rug …?’ Will he take her aside and say they like rough sex? What is the etiquette here?

Siobhan is standing at the bottom of the staircase ready to greet her, clasping a telephone in each hand. ‘Am I glad to see you? Yes, I am,’ she says. ‘He’s been on my back and now he’s locked himself in his office again and I’ve got about forty things that need his attention. I’m going to make him an extra-milky coffee and slip a beta blocker in there.’

Becky likes to think that Siobhan is still mostly pleased for her about Medea going on the slate, because they went to the pub a few days after it happened and drank too many pints and Siobhan proposed a toast of congratulation before going on to say how much she needed to change her life so she didn’t feel such a failure. She came in with white-blonde hair the next day and that seemed to settle it.

One floor up, their office is painted white, with a little exposed brickwork to lend texture, and a nice long-leafed palm all tangled in fairy lights at the entrance to the fireplace, done for Christmas one year and then left because Matthew liked it. Only three of them are full-time but many more desks stand ready for production requirements. One such desk serves as a surface for stacked scripts and another as a place to lay out headshots of potential cast: long necks, long hair, high cheekbones, big eyes, soulful looks.

Matthew’s own office at the end of the floor is screened with glass walls and blinds. Becky looks at it anxiously. Matthew is inside it.

Siobhan grabs the phone on her desk before the door to the stairs has even swung shut. ‘David, I’m sorry, I did tell him you’d called. Yes, yes, I know … hold on.’ She presses her hand to the receiver. ‘It’s David Barraclough from Total Agents. Matthew’s been avoiding this call all morning. David is like, fever pitch angry.’

‘Really? But he’s so nice.’

DB, they call him: the linen-suited, salt-and-pepper-haired agent to a scrolling list of A-list actors whose careers he has launched and whose offspring he later calls godchildren. Becky recently took him for lunch at a tapas restaurant on Dean Street to discuss Medea casting ideas over half a carafe of red, chorizo and squid which she only occasionally sipped and picked at while he did most of the talking. He told lots of stories, some about the days he and Matthew were junior agents together, and she had encouraged it all by laughing along. Their lunch finished without any real business done but with DB feeling the warm fuzz of having been listened to, and that was everything that lunch needed to achieve. A success, by all accounts.

Siobhan throws up a hand as the voice on the end of the line rants on.