Make or Break

My coat was barely off and I’d only said the word ‘Have’ (which was the beginning of the sentence: ‘Have I got some fucked up shit to tell you’) when Lana threw me into a meeting in her place.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, I know you want to tell me all about your holiday,’ she said as she chucked me a fresh notebook and quick-stepped me past the coffee machine and Steve-o the Australian office barista who ‘G’day’-ed me a welcome back, towards our glass-walled meeting room. ‘And I do want to hear it,’ she threw a quick glance in the direction of my ring finger, ‘but I’ve woken Roger up in LA and he’s on hold and he’s not happy.’ She ducked behind a pillar with an exposed metal pipe running down the side of it. ‘And I canNOT handle that guy this morning.’

I looked in the meeting room at who she was referring to: a hectic young ‘genius’ (self-described) man/boy director we’d worked with a handful of times and who thought he was reinventing the three-minute music video, pontificating to some gathered peoples. He was tall, thin, achingly cool and had bought his entire outfit from ‘Indie Directors R Us’.

Lana shuddered, grabbed a pen from a nearby desk and handed it to me. ‘OK, take notes, shut down anything ostentatious and keep the meeting moving. We’ve got a big day today. And thank you!’ She grinned, flashing naturally white teeth, then raced back to her office.

‘I want no narrative. No imagery.’ Directors R Us paced the room, the waxed floorboards creaking with each pointy-loafered stride, shouting out random shots. ‘A horse standing in spaghetti. A girl with her feet in a tub. Toothpaste on a tree. A doll on fire. No. A . . .’ he continued his blah blah blah-ing and I began wondering why the hell I was sitting in a meeting when there were many other, much more logical options I could have chosen instead of coming into the office the day after finding out that my family was the opposite of the happy nuclear family I’d always believed us to be. I could have stayed at home and watched Life is Beautiful, eating jam on toast and cultivating a nice wee depression. I could have flown to Barbados and pretended none of it was happening. I could have booked in to have my spleen removed; anything would have been preferable to being at work listening to a dick director talk about dick shots.

‘Sure,’ I said to one of the dick shots without really hearing what it was.

‘Absolutely NOT!’ Steph, our three-dog-owning, keeps-their-photos-on-her-desk, PETA-belonging production manager said, throwing me a look of disgust. ‘You can’t set a frog on fire!’

What?!

‘No, no, of course not!’ I shook my head vigorously and turned to the director. ‘Sorry, no, we can’t do that.’

‘Well, get me one that’s already slated for animal testing,’ he said which made me immediately think of my mother and the time she’d purged our house of any product or company that tested on animals. Annabelle had had an epic, cyclone-like rampage upon finding her make-up in the bin, Mum had tried to wrestle the rubbish bag away from her and in the melee Dad had quietly popped out. He’d come home with a small pile of books, a bunch of strange ingredients and then spent the entire weekend helping Annabelle make natural blush, eye shadow and lip stains at the kitchen table.

‘I think we should move on.’ Steph’s harried voice pierced through the memory that was playing like an old movie in my mind. She turned and gave me a hard glare, making me sit up a little straighter.

‘Yes,’ I said, trying to feign officiousness and ‘with-it-ness’.

The director made ‘why did you hire me, do you want creative distinction or not?!’ kinds of noises then carried on listing his demands, his eager-to-please assistant scribbling furiously next to him. I looked around the table; to my left was Steph, her brow creased, tapping irately at her iPad; to my right was the annoyingly enthusiastic assistant, and across from me sat a couple of reps for the alt-rock band from Newcastle we were making the video for, one making notes, the other nodding blithely and swiping right on his phone. Was he Tindering? Did Elsie, the other PA sitting at her desk outside the meeting room in her customary short skirt and heels, just get swipe approval? I looked through the glass; she too was on her phone. Was there Tinder flirting going on?

‘Jess?’

I turned. Steph was looking at me expectantly. I looked around the table. Everyone was looking at me expectantly.

‘Ummm, sure,’ I said, venturing an answer and hoping it was the right one.

Steph glowered.

‘No?’

The director glowered.

Shit.

‘Let’s come back to that one,’ I said. I gave Steph a brief ‘sorry, I’m here, I am SO here’ kind of nod then smoothed out a blank page in my notebook. ‘What else?’

‘I want someone licking a candle,’ director dude said after looking at me like I was a very irritating bug.

I scribbled candle.

‘I want a shot of clouds. Then one of water.’ He stopped pacing. ‘No. That’s narrative opposites. Clouds then tiramisu.’

Tiramisu, I scribbled.

He recommenced his wide-stride march. ‘Gimme someone putting on deodorant.’

Deodorant.

‘Give me a road.’

‘An ominous road?’ the assistant offered.

‘Don’t say ominous – not ominous.’ He rolled his eyes.

‘So, a road to somewhere better? A happy road?’ The assistant asked and I thought, hell yeah, I want a road to somewhere better. A road right out of Shit Town, thanks. And if that road could lead to Ian and Diego and Jimmy, that would be nice.

‘A nothing road. No narrative.’ The director scratched at his non-existent stubble.

My phone screen lit up with a text from Jimmy. I glanced at the others all either occupied with their note-taking or staring adoringly at the director, then slid my phone from the table, held it in my lap and opened the text.

Hi Jess, I know you’re probably going through hell right now but I just wanted to let you know I’m thinking of you. You don’t have to reply but I’m here if you need to talk or whatever. I miss you. Xxx

‘OK, scrap the road,’ I heard the director say while I worried about Jimmy worrying about me and longed to be back in his bedroom getting those three kisses for real. ‘Give me a French fry.’

Absent-mindedly I pushed a plate of untouched biscuits towards the director, who looked at them and then at me, as one might look upon crackers spread with water vole innards.

I glanced around the room. Everyone was staring at me again. ‘Do you want me to order in?’

Half an hour later, with pages of half-formed notes and doodles of deodorant and tiramisu in Lana’s previously very neat notebook, I entered Lana’s office and sat in the velvet tub chair. She looked up from tinkering on her laptop.

‘So, what are we shooting?’ she said, glancing at her watch. I knew from her diary that she was about to race across town to bid for a three-video deal with an up-and-coming pop princess from the dodgy end of Ladbroke Grove.

‘Um . . . anything,’ I said, flipping through the (unusually for me) sparse pages of notes. ‘Literally anything. As long as there’s no narrative or symbolism, or theatre, or story, or imagery, or opposites, or similarities, or connections, or emotion, or—’

‘So, what then?’ Lana said, impatient.

‘Well . . .’ I said, flicking faster, trying to find anything useful. ‘Ahh . . . he wants to set a frog on fire . . .?’

Lana sighed heavily. ‘What’s the song about?’

‘Love.’

She rolled her ice-blue eyes then looked at her Rolex. ‘So, tell me about your holiday. And be quick. I have nine minutes.’

I speedily regaled her with the whole scenario, only hitting on the main points: wedding, mountain, Pete and the cheating, Jimmy and the shagging, Dad and the vaginas, Mum and the lie, Pete still in Cape Town but moving out when he got back, Dad not coming home till Saturday morning to explain himself and the fact that I was now a Sagittarius and needed to re-evaluate my whole sense of self accordingly.

Lana shook her head, her Scandi blonde hair swishing. ‘Holy shit. No wonder you never take your holidays if this is what happens. Are you OK?’

I nodded, emotionally checking myself. ‘I’m not sure . . . So far, yes. I think so.’

‘Why don’t you go home,’ she glanced at her watch again. ‘I’m sure Elsie can continue to cover your workload.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m here now. The distraction is probably just what I need.’

She gave a sympathetic nod and looked at her watch again. ‘Can I do anything?

‘Just keep me really busy.’

‘Not a problem.’

And she offloaded a bunch of production notes and I hid behind my computer giving an air of ‘too-busy-catching-up-on-work-to-tell-you-about-my-holiday’, booking crew, catering and studio time and ignoring emails from my friends asking how the holiday went.

As I left work that afternoon I called Annabelle to check she was OK if I went straight home and picked up my suitcase from her place another time. Annabelle said Mum was there teaching Katie to sign the words ‘digestive juices’ and trying to convince the internet that Mono-Meal Monday was the new Meat Free Monday, and that my suitcase was just fine as long as I didn’t mind that the cat was sleeping in it.

My flat was cold and smelt like Burger King. I threw my bag on the sofa just as Dave was coming out of his bedroom dressed for work. Even with a supplied uniform he managed to look homeless. His hair was messy and his skin pale and waxy.

‘Welcome home,’ he said, picking up a couple of empty cartons of chips and burger wrappers. ‘How was it?’

While Dave got ready for work (sniffed socks from the floor to see if they could last another wearing) I filled him in, starting with the Pete situation in Cape Town.

‘So Pete is moving out?’ Dave said after listening to my tale while collecting his belongings from various places around the flat.

‘Yeah.’

He stopped in the door to the kitchen. ‘So . . . I don’t want to be a dick about it, but . . . what about rent?’

I hadn’t thought about that. Despite Pete and I sharing a room and Dave having his own, we’d split the rent equally three ways, making it affordable for all of us. Paying half might make things a bit tight. ‘You could always get a girlfriend?’ I suggested.

Dave looked at me like I’d suggested he get Legionnaires’ Disease.

‘And what about my twelfth birthday, when Dad couldn’t make it because of work?’ I said five minutes later after I’d told him about my parents.

We stood at the open fridge taking turns to eat random ingredients. Dave and I considered this a perfectly viable way of eating dinner.

‘Or the time he missed seeing me in the school nativity play? Or my interschool relay finals?’ I said, waggling a pickle. ‘Or any of the things he couldn’t come to? I don’t know if my dad missed me winning the English award because of a lie or because he really was working. Did he choose to miss certain things and then really was working on others? I feel like I want to get an inventory of my whole life events and tick them off with him – ‘legitimate miss’ or ‘missed by choice’.

‘What will that do?’ Dave said, leaving the fridge with a wedge of cheese and heading into the living room with me at his heels.

‘I don’t know. It will help me make sense of everything, maybe? Mum and Dad were a lie, Pete and I broke up and Annabelle seems to have been fine without me. I feel a bit . . . I feel . . . like an unboxed jack-in-the-box, you know?’

‘Yeah . . .’ Dave nodded, then frowned. ‘No, not really.’

‘Pointless. And floppy.’ I flopped onto the sofa to emphasise my point.

Dave, never one for talking much about feelings, collected his aged rucksack from the floor and left for work among mutters of, ‘you’ll be all right’, ‘I don’t suppose anyone meant any harm’, ‘chin up’ kind of platitudes and I stayed on the sofa contemplating whose job it was to get the jacks in their boxes. I thought it would start off being the best job ever, but then the enjoyment would wear off and you’d end up hating those springy, cheerful bastards. You’d look at a jack-in-the-box and where everyone else sees joy and hilarity you’d see pain and frustration and a wasted life.

Tuesday passed much like Monday but with less sleep and more staring off into the distance. I kept thinking about the logistics of having two families, and trying to figure out how my vague father had managed it for so long. I wondered if he’d ever gone from one family to the next, woken up and not remembered which house he was in. Which bedroom he was in. Which wife he was in. Ew. And then my head had filled with very unwanted thoughts about the logistics of Dad’s sex life. Did his SA wife ever want ‘goodbye-I’m-not-going-to-see-you-for-a-while’ sex before he jumped on a plane to Mum, who immediately wanted ‘hello-I’ve-not-seen-you-in-a-while’ sex? And what did that do to his emotions? Was there guilt during either of the sex times? And how unfair was it that I was thinking about my father’s sex times?!

To get the thoughts out of my head I’d needed something shocking so I’d gone onto Giselle’s Instagram and looked at Pete through her lens. Then ended up with some wrath that had Lana telling me to go outside and ‘walk it off’. Dave wasn’t home that night so I’d stayed up till 2 a.m. watching Stranger Things without absorbing any of it. Was it about aliens? Was it a comedy? Did it have hobbits? I didn’t know.

On the Wednesday I was sitting at my desk with a pile of call sheets that I was supposed to be entering into the computer, but instead was doodling and mentally running through my past to see if there were any signs of the double life we had been living that I might have dismissed as Dad just being vague. Like, did he ever call Mum his wife’s name? Did he ever ask me how a school project was going that was not mine but perhaps one his South African daughter was working on?

Lana passed my desk and I was partially aware of her saying something, then suddenly she was in front of me.

‘Jess?’

‘Yeah?’ I said, clicking out of my reverie and focusing on her. She was looking at my doodle pad. I’d scratched an angry scar in the paper.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes, thanks.’ I pushed the ruined doodle pad to the side and picked up a call sheet. ‘You?’ I asked through a yawn.

Lana watched me for a moment. ‘Can I get you a coffee?’

‘Ah . . .’ I said, looking between the call sheet and my computer screen. It seemed I’d already entered that one. ‘Ahhh . . .yes, a coffee . . . Yes please.’

‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

I looked up at her. Wow, it was hard to focus. ‘Yes, I’m all good,’ I said with a smile as my mobile rang.

I smiled wider at Lana to show her that everything was just fine and she headed towards Steve-o with a nod.

‘Hey,’ I said into my phone.

‘Turn on the radio,’ Annabelle said.

She didn’t need to say which station. If we said that, it meant Mum’s radio show. I clicked on a tab that was always open on my desktop, put an earphone in my free ear and immediately heard my mother sobbing.

‘Oh, the innocence!’ Mum wailed. ‘So easily betrayed. So easily hoodwinked! Their little faces . . .’

‘Oh dear,’ another voice came down the radio waves. ‘Are . . . are you OK?’

‘What’s going on?’ I hissed down the phone.

‘A caller asked about natural stress relief and Mum said the usual.’ By this Annabelle meant the list of stress-reducing things we’d heard many times over: take St John’s wort and passionflower extract, stop caffeine, put your bare feet on grass, tell a house plant you love it, etc., etc. ‘Then Mum said she’d been suffering from stress herself and had found that listening to children’s choirs on YouTube was helping.’

‘Right . . .’

‘And then she started crying and saying adults must be careful not to “corrupt a child’s innate innocence” and something about the “worlds we weave”, and “we’re all guilty” and then I called you.’

‘Christ.’

‘I’m going to call Patrick.’

‘OK,’ I said and hung up while listening to Mum blubber down the radio waves about a child being born an ‘empty vessel of possibility’ and how they are so easily and accidentally ‘filled with the sticky tar of untruths’, with the caller trying awkwardly to comfort her. I hung my head in my hands.

‘And the singing!’ Mum wailed. ‘Oh, dieser engelsgesang!’

My desk phone rang and while keeping my head in one hand I lifted the receiver and banged it down again with the other.

‘Jess?’

I looked up to see Lana with my coffee. She was frowning at the now silent phone. In the earphone Mum’s wailing suddenly stopped and Patrick came on air. ‘I do apologise, we seem to be having some technical difficulties but now we have someone on the line who managed to solve her gum disease with urine therapy.’

I pulled my earphone out while looking up at Lana. ‘Sorry,’ I said, and the look of concern on her face nearly had me in tears.

‘How are you coping?’ Lana said from behind her desk five minutes later.

‘I’m OK,’ I said from the tub chair.

‘I disagree.’

I bit my lip.

Lana studied me for a while, her hands clasped under her chin. ‘You used to run, right?’

I nodded, confused.

Lana then told me that to help her get through her messy divorce she’d started running. It had calmed her mind and ordered her thoughts. And it was while on a run down Abbey Road that she’d come up with the idea for her all-female music video production company. She scheduled a run into every day now – it was as important as a business meeting. She suggested it might be a good way to help me deal with my ‘situation’ and the growing seed of wrath I was developing because of it.

So at lunchtime I entered a bra shop and a woman who could have been twenty-four or sixty-four approached me with a face so taut she looked as if someone had grabbed a fistful of the skin at the back of her head and was running in the other direction.

‘I’m taking up jogging again but the last time I ran I didn’t have these,’ I said, opening my jacket to reveal my bust. ‘I need these jiggly panna cottas to be rigid and immobile. Like toffee apples. Or bollards.’

The woman appraised my bust with heavily drawn-on eyebrows and walked towards some hanging bras that looked like they were made of bad-weather sailcloth.

‘They feel like I’d get rather sweaty,’ I said a few minutes later when I’d tried on the three options they had for my bust size.

They’d been so hard to get on that the lady has thrust aside the curtain, grabbed the back straps and hoisted and pulled so forcefully she may as well have pinned me to the floor, dug a knee in my back and forced the edges together. I’d suggested a bigger size and, with a mild sweat across her upper lip, she’d agreed. I looked wistfully at the small-bust sports bras in multi-coloured fabric designed to be shown off. Mine were in nude or black and intended to be hidden shamefully.

‘Yes. Sveat is a problem for breaztez like yourz. You use panty linerz,’ the lady said, walking behind the counter with my two reluctantly chosen bras.

‘Excuse me?’

‘In ze cups. Mozt effective for sveat. Other productz don’t work so much.’ She waved to a host of ‘sweat wicking’ powders lined along the counter. She reached to a shelf behind her and handed me a little pink bottle. ‘Chafing problem too. You need ziz.’

I paid and left feeling a little grim. The last time I ran I did it in nice bright little crop tops. Now it was a shiny black material so thick a pair of hedge clippers would have a tough time getting through, panty liners in the cups and a product called ‘lady slide’ that promised ‘silken-like sliding’ in the cleavage area.

On Thursday morning, some scented liners up against the underside of my breasts, I programmed my run-mapping app and took off. I assumed I’d need some kind of Rocky Balboa montage-worthy struggle to get my pace back but actually, after a brief two minutes of empathy for asthmatics, I hit my stride and my familiar breathing rhythm took over.

I can do this, I thought, as I wove in and around tourists taking photos of swans on the Serpentine. I can feel my wrath subsiding already. Wow, some people really need to pick a walking line and stick to it. Christ, lady, watch your kid! Who the hell walks five abreast on a London footpath? Single file, people – I’ve got places to go! Stop weaving from side to side, you indecisive fuck. WHY DOESN’T EVERYONE GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY?!