Page 9 of Just for December

‘Right.’ Duke nods again. ‘Sure. Okay. Well, not a morning person, I see.’

He doesn’t move. He’s gone from wanting to establish some kind of rapport to feeling likewhat the hell?In less than thirty seconds. Is she really not going to even feign niceness? She doesn’t even know him; how can shenot like him?She must be like this with everyone. He feels like he’s been conned, somehow. This frostiness is not a character trait that comes across in her work.

‘Look,’ Evie says, finally casting her eyes back over him. ‘I’m sorry, okay? I’m dealing with a ton of stuff here, and I haven’t had coffee yet, and I just need to, like, make it to midday and then maybe I can give you the old razzle-dazzle or whatever it is you need from me to stop you from looking like I just stepped on your puppy. I apologise for being …’

‘Rude,’ Duke supplies, when it seems like she can’t settle on the word. He doesn’t mean to be combative. It’s just, well … It’s the only word that fits.

‘Er,’ Evie muses. ‘I haven’t beenrude.’

‘Somebody tries to come talk to you and you tell them to get stuffed? Seems pretty rude to me.’

‘Says the man who thinks he’soweda woman’s attention?’

‘I don’t think I’m owed anything,’ Duke counters. ‘I came to try and right our little …interaction …from last night, because we’re working together, and it seems like the right thing to do. But I can tell that has somehow rubbed you up the wrong way, and so you’re right, you don’t owe me your attention. I will back away slowly, now …’

He holds up his hands in surrender, shaking his head and heading back towards the bus. Jeez. Some people are just obviously better on the page than they are in person. That’s fine. He’s misjudged her.

‘No,’ she says, pulling a face. ‘You don’t get to make this—’ she gestures between them as she speaks ‘—myfault.I’mnot difficult.Youare too … too …fake.’

This is ludicrous. Are they really arguing right now? Duke is aware of people starting to look in their direction.

‘People are staring,’ Duke says, contorting his face into a smile and speaking through somewhat gritted teeth. ‘Can we not?’

Evie looks around and seems to take note of the glances in their direction, looking back at Duke and mirroring his pasted-on ‘smile’.

Through equally gritted teeth Evie says, ‘Let’s just call this quits, shall we? Leave each other alone? Like I said last night, we don’t have to be besties.’

Duke shrugs, realises it looks hostile to the last of the lingering eyes on him, and so opens out his arms so that his body language seems more congenial. Evie looks at him, horrified, and then inserts herself, putting her arms under his in an awkward collision of their angry bodies. They are hugging, now. They are grimacing and hugging and talking in hushed, snatched whispers.

‘Weird,’ Evie quietly says, after she’s pulled away and folks have started to file into the bus, ready to go to set. She doesn’t look at him, but at the ground.

‘Super weird,’ Duke echoes, letting her walk in front of him as he tries to figure out what the hell just happened. They went from snapping to hugging? In the blink of an eye? Bizarre. She’s mercurial, this author. Duke finds himself breathing shallower, unnerved.

Putting as much distance between himself and Evie as hecan, Duke lets a few others onto the coach ahead of him, and then clambers up the steps himself. The thing is packed, a sea of tired faces staring blearily into their phones, so he looks down to his immediate left at the seat behind the driver, the only seat free on the bus. In the neighbouring seat, Evie looks up at him, stony-faced, and then back down at her phone. He sighs and sits beside her. They do not talk. Duke half leans into the aisle to avoid accidentally brushing up against her. He holds himself as rigidly as he can as the bus takes bend after bend through the Bavarian streets.

When they finally pull up at their destination and the doors open, Duke flings himself down the steps to the safety of the land, confused as to how a silence between two people can feel so wordlessly aggressive. He decides, then, to leave her well alone. What a mistake trying to befriend her has been. He’s practically got frostbite from her cold-hearted attitude.

7

Evie

The sky turns pink at about six thirty. Houses and shops have orangey glows in upstairs windows, lights turning on one by one, as people begin to wake up and start their days. The river running through the town reflects all of it, a mirror to a thousand lives happening all around them. It is quiet, punctured only with occasional birdsong from little robin redbreasts perching on icy gates kissed by Jack Frost in the night. Evie blows into her gloved hands, her breath visible like a dragon’s, and then rubs them together. She’sfreezing.

‘Take two,’ the director, Brad, says, as somebody with a clapper board snaps it open, closed, then steps away from the camera. Duke and Daphne are in character as George and Hermione. Her heroine is in layered cream knitwear, a lavender scarf and bobble hat with matching mittens – accents of gold jewellery twinkling in the soft light. Her long hair islightly curled in a way that could be accidental, but Evie saw her call time and knows for a fact she had two hours in hair and make-up.

Looking through one of the monitors it’s incredible to Evie how it all works. She’d sworn to herself that she wouldn’t let herself be overly impressed, but she has to admit thisiscool. George and Hermione started out as thoughts in her head, when she was sat at her kitchen table in her pyjamas. And now here they are, walking and talking in exactly the ways she had decided they would walk and talk, a hundred people around them making sure it all goes to plan. She wishes her mom could see this. Evie snaps a photo, but deep down she knows her mom won’t fully understand what she’s saying when she tries to explain. Not unless it’s an especially rare lucid day. There’s a Christmas miracle Evie wouldn’t mind. She won’t hold out for it though. She knows better.

‘I don’t know,’ Duke says in character as George, the collar of his navy peacoat turned up against the back of his neck, a new golden sheen to his forehead that must be make-up but comes off as sun-kissed on camera. Evie doesn’t hate him when he’s in character. George isn’t Duke, and so it’s easier to watch in awe. ‘It’s what I promised my mother and every time I think I’m ready to break that promise I see her face. I can’t do that to her, Hermione. I just can’t.’

They walk slowly along the wide street that’s been cordoned off until 8 a.m. for filming, a camerawoman capturing it all as a man in a puffer jacket walks slowly backwards, pulling her along a train track that means she can keep them smoothly in frame as they move. Everyone is under strict instructions to work fast and use as few takes as possible,because there just isn’t the time. Three weeks is a tight shoot, she’s been told, and they’ve got a mountain of restrictions around filming times and locations because of the time of year. Southern Germany wants the movie made here, but not at the cost of annoying their tourists.

The actors pause in front of a small shop window.

‘You see that ring there?’ ‘George’ asks ‘Hermione’, and Evie holds her breath as he does.She wrote these words. It’s crazy. ‘She had one just like it. I wish you could have known her, Herm. I really do. My dad gave it to her after he came back. These little things that remind us – they’re everywhere, aren’t they?’

It’s Daphne’s turn to speak. ‘George,’ she says, and her voice is different than it is in real life. Evie doesn’t know why that surprises her, but it does. ‘Your capacity to romanticise the past astounds me. It’s what makes me love you like I do. But can’t you look forward, too? Because the past is over with, and I’m stood right here asking you to think of a future.’

Evie winces at the sentimentality. Those words haunt her, because she spoke them herself, once; the last nail in the coffin of a thing called hope. Back in her twenties her ex, Bobby, had truly broken her heart, but he was one in a long line of heartbreaks, starting with the moment that as a fifteen-year-old teenager she watched her dad pull out of the drive with two suitcases and his raging temper. Having him in the house had been hell, in many ways, because he seemed to resent that although he wasDonald Gilbert, famous screenwriter and director,out there in the world, in the house he was just dad. It was like Evie and her mom weren’t enough for him, like he needed to not only be loved but revered. Sohe left, ran into the arms of one of his actresses, then left her for another one.

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