Page 22 of Just for December

She turns around, then, for no discernible reason than she feels compelled to. And there he is: Duke, looking after her, watching her walk away.

Evie throws her arms up, asking him wordlessly:What?!

Duke shakes his head, jaw slackened, expression wounded, which is a bit rich considering he’s the buffoon. Evie decides to stare him out; she will not cower from him, will not pander to his moods. She didn’t even want to be here, remember? And now she’s a central player in this farcical few weeks andhehas got the nerve to have attitude!

She wins. Duke turns away. And Evie hates herself for noticing the curve of his ass and the confidence to his walk as he does so, the curl of his fingers at his sides, his width, everything.

So he’s hot,she scolds herself.So what? What’s hot when it’s all window dressing?

But she still doesn’t look away. She keeps one eye on that window dressing until he’s out of sight, and even then the thought of him lingers in her mind.

14

Evie

Evie can’t help herself. All day she has been trying to write, to get her book ever closer to being finished, and yet somehow all her love interests are suddenly being written as though they’ve got Duke’s blue eyes or wide shoulders. In the café where she went to work this morning, on set this afternoon, and now in the hotel bar, still a thousand words short of her target, she keeps thinking about her fake date with Duke last night.

Frustratingly, considering she hates all of it on principle, it went so much better than the coffee shop – until his mood changed, anyway. Before that point she’d been perilously close to enjoying it. When Duke relaxes and forgets to be ‘on’, he’s okay company. Not that he does that often, of course. It’s odd. She woke up thinking about the closeness of his arm when they were walking, the flex of his forearm muscles when he grabbed the pole of the merry-go-round. It mustbe tiredness, or ongoing jet lag, but it’s on a loop in her head, annoyingly, and she can’t stop playing it. So she googles him, just to distract herself, and before long is reading feature after feature on him, including in one of the Saturday arts sections inTheTimes.

She reads:

Duke Carlisle isn’t your average Hollywood rising star. After a decade and a half in pursuit of his dream, he tells Sally McVitie what he’s learnt about love, laughter, and the importance of honesty onscreen … and off.

Duke Carlisle sits across from me in a central London hotel lobby; arms resting on his knees, baseball cap pulled low on his forehead. ‘It’s not like I’m Bieber or anything,’ he tells me with a sardonic smile. ‘People do recognise me, but it’s all about context. When I’m suited and booted it’s obvious I’m on the clock and it’s okay to approach, but when I’m like this I mostly get left alone. It’s the paps, really, who don’t have any boundaries.’

I tell him that must be hard – I don’t even like it when I get tagged in a mate’s Instagram photo without prior permission.

‘Thanks for saying that,’ he tells me, those famous blue eyes sparkling with mischief. ‘I know it’s a bit like complaining my diamond shoes are too tight – I’m aware of that. But equally, when did we collectively decide that making movies means I’m allowed to be followed down a dark alleyway at night, or photographed putting the bins out with a hangover?’

With his distinct clipped vowels and wry, disarmingly straightforward demeanour, he’s not what you expect from a man tipped as award season’s front runner for his guest appearance inThe Marvellous Mrs Maisel, the face of Chanel’s new men’s fragrance and seller of tabloids simply by dint of being alive. Today, he sips his green tea as we chat, pausing to consider each question before launching into an eloquent, discerning and refreshingly frank response.

‘I know it’s possible to be in the public eye without the constant scrutiny. This is going to sound like a major name-drop, but I’m mates with Stormzy and it’s incredible to me how he gets left alone. He gets to make his music, have his life, and then pop up out of nowhere to release an album and perform Glastonbury, and then it all gets pretty chill for him. When I got photographed on that paddleboard a few summers ago, he thought it was awful, but we laugh about it now. He’s put me in his phone as Anaconda, apparently.’

Ah yes. I’m glad Carlisle is the one to raise this (so to speak). The paddleboard photographs he refers to broke the internet in summer 2020, when unbeknownst to him he was snapped cavorting on a lakeside beach with a mystery blonde – stark naked. Twitter had a meltdown over the size of his manhood, with everyone fromThe Late, Late Show with James Cordento Boris Johnson passing comment. He seemingly took it in good humour at the time, but months later went viral once more with a blogpost he wrote about the invasion of his privacy.

‘I just had to say something,’ he explains, in a suddenbout of seriousness. ‘Like fair play, I had my knob out in public. We were in France, and I was in love and feeling happy and free. And then the media, and social media, made one of the happiest, most romantic days of my life into a sort of joke, and it took me ages to work up the courage to say it made me uncomfortable. I just kept thinking, if it happened to a woman, would people have been sharing it like that? Or would it have been unfeminist?’ And that’s exactly what his post explored. ‘Like, okay, we know what the male gaze is and how it makes women feel, but surely the definition of equality is not that we then adapt a sort of female gaze that reduces men to the size of their … whatever. Equality is saying hey, let’s not make anyone feel this way. Let the man paddleboard in peace! And maybe buy him some new swimwear!’

He breaks out into a charming chuckle at that, doing what he’s become so well known for in his movies: pushing his audience to an emotional edge, and pulling the rug from under them with his humour and delight.

‘Because you just can’t make it up, can you, how weird life is. And I know that me and my friends, we don’t sit around crying too much. I don’t mean that in a blokey way, like I’m too much of a man for that. Maybe it’s being Northern: you choose to laugh rather than cry. I guess that’s often what I try and bring to my work. To me, that’s humanness. Walking that line.’

I can’t help but wonder how he came to be this way. Little is known about his childhood, except that he was raised by a single mother in Sunderland and didn’t show an aptitude for theatre until relatively late.

‘Yeah,’ he tells me, stroking his chin thoughtfully. ‘I had a really great teacher, Mrs Steinenberg, who told me about an audition happening. I’ve never asked her why she pushed for me to go – it was right as we were leaving school and then the audition became my first gig, moving to London, and, bam, here we are all these years later.’ He shakes his head fondly. ‘Do you ever get freaked out by how fast life can move? Like, wasn’t I just a kid? It’s mad.’

Life must feel fast when you pack in as much time on set as Carlisle does. Last year alone he featured in four major movies and his guest spot on Mrs Maisel. ‘Ah, yes,’ he says, in typical self-depreciating style. ‘But that was only three episodes of the show, and two of the movies were supporting roles. But when Olivia Wilde asks you to play back-up to the great women-led stuff she’s been making, you make the time, you know? Same with Greta. When she called, my head exploded. I can’t tell you what an honour that felt like.’

The Greta he’s referring to is Oscar nominee Greta Gerwig, and his role in her newest movie is why we’re meeting today …

Evie pulls herself away from the article.Focus,she reminds herself.Just get this first draft done!She has had to turn her phone off because she’s suddenly become Ms Popular, with people reaching out left, right and centre, from college friends of friends to her old high school English teacher and her editor to her cover designer. Photos of their fairground date have been published, with morerubbish about their ‘growing love’ for one another, with yet more fake sources from set. It’s too much. She just needs it to all blow over. This is exactly what she has spent her career trying to avoid! You can’t create good work when you’re distracted by noise! She hates it. Hates, hates, hates it. She opens a new browser and idly types inDuke Carlisle paddleboard.

‘Crafting your next masterpiece?’ Duke asks, casting a shadow across her screen. She looks up, horrified, snapping her computer shut faster than a teenage boy with a sock in his hand. Duke is fresh from the shower, his wavy hair damp against his face and neck, looking casual in grey jogging bottoms and a T-shirt that on mere mortals no doubt hangs loose, but on Duke Carlisle clings to rock-hard biceps and solid abs.

‘You,’ Evie says, darkly.

‘I know,’ he replies, smiling with only one side of his face to convey his contrition. ‘I’ve ruined your life. I’m fairly confident it will all be tomorrow’s fish paper before you know it, but still …’

‘Fish paper?’ Evie asks.

---