Page 47 of Just Like in the Movies

‘I did know him. I loved your brother a great deal,’ Ruby found herself saying as the familiar tears leaked out of her eyes. ‘Matty was my best friend for a long time. And he always will be.’

‘I know that feeling, my dear,’ Helena said, her voice rough with sympathy and understanding. ‘He was my best friend, too … once. And I’ve missed him more than you can imagine over the last thirty-one years. What fools we both were not to bury that hatchet a long time ago. And now I will never have that chance. I feel devastated about that. I’m so glad that, while I was foolishly holding on to my pride, he had someone like you to look after him.’

‘I didn’t look after him,’ Ruby said, her voice broke as the tears she thought she’d finally gotten a handle on over the last few weeks started to strangle her again. ‘He looked after me.’

The strange Twilight Zone conversation continued, but the ball of grief that had made Ruby feel wretched for so long, didn’t feel quite so wretched as Helena spoke to her about her brother. Ruby could hear the raw edge of grief in the actress’s rich resonant voice – a voice that had entertained kings and presidents and seduced a movie icon – and Ruby realised for the first time she was speaking to someone who understood the full extent of how hard her life was going to be without Matty.

Every morning when she woke up, for a split-second, she would believe Matty was still alive, but then the truth would slam into her again, and shove her into the deep bottomless pit which she would have to drag herself out of to function.

And no one else truly understood how deep and black and all-consuming that pit was. Because no one else had ever depended on Matty or loved him, or enjoyed his cheesy taste in movies or his daft exploits or his ridiculous sense of humour as much as she had.

But as Helena spoke, Ruby realised even if Helena hadn’t talked to her brother in over thirty years, Helena understood about that bottomless pit, how cold and black and ugly and unforgiving it was, because she had been in it a great deal longer.

Ruby sniffed and chuckled weakly, turning her back on Jacie and Gerry who now both looked appalled, while clinging to Helena’s voice and the distinctive rasp of emotion in it she recognized from One Summer in Sorrento. The tears flowed freely down her cheeks, as she listened to a wonderful anecdote about Matty from forty years ago.

Helena Devlin knew. Helena Devlin understood.

And for the first time in months, Ruby felt less alone.

***

Luke pressed the last of the plaster into the damaged moulding with his fingertips while The Strokes banged out ‘Last Night’ on his ear buds. The raw angry lyrics fit his mood as he wiped his fingers on his overalls and reached round to pluck the moist piece of cloth from his tool belt. Plastering of this sort was hard sweaty precision work, but The Royale deserved the care he was giving it. He’d never seen such intricate moulding in a building of this sort. And concentrating on the plasterwork and The Strokes’ date night disaster song was keeping his mind off Ruby and their boiler date that wasn’t from a couple of hours ago.

But as he stretched to wipe the last of the residue, a tug on his overalls startled him so much he almost toppled off the ladder. He whipped out an ear bud to find Jacie the theatre’s assistant manager standing below him. The troubled look in her usually lively brown eyes had him swallowing down the swear word about to bounce off his tongue.

/> ‘What’s up?’ he asked, because something was clearly up. From the few interactions he’d had with Jacie he knew she liked checking out his butt and didn’t make any secret of it, that she was nosey and more than willing to hold a grudge against him for not stepping in to fund the theatre. But he also knew she was Ruby’s fiercest defender.

‘It’s Ruby,’ she said without any preamble. ‘I think she’s having a breakdown talking to your mother.’

‘Huh?’ The tension in his gut he always got when his mother was mentioned had him tightening his grip on the ladder.

‘Helena Devlin, your mother,’ Jacie said, as if she were talking to a dumb toddler. ‘She’s on the phone to Ruby right now and Ruby’s in floods of tears. I’ve never seen her so weepy. Not even at the hospital when they told us Matty was gone.’

‘Fuck!’ Luke jumped off the ladder, ignoring the wobble in his knees and marched across the auditorium towards the woman he’d been trying to ignore for the last two hours. Jacie scrambled after him.

Ruby stood with her back to them both, her shoulders hunched and trembling. Gerry sat next to her on a bar stool looking even more troubled than Jacie.

Ruby had changed into a pair of skinny jeans and a Pride in London T-shirt, Luke noted. The heat pulsed in his abdomen, as it did every time he got within a few feet of her, but he ignored that, too.

So not the damn time.

What was his mom playing at? What the hell was she saying to Ruby to make her cry? And how the heck had she gotten this number? The only two people he’d told his true whereabouts to were Gwen and his kid sister Becca, who he’d given the information to in case of a family emergency. And Gwen was a rock.

Becca? You didn’t? You’re a dead woman.

He tried to dial down on his fury with his kid sister. He of all people knew how hard his mom’s probing was to resist when she went the full Spanish Inquisition on your ass. But as he touched Ruby’s shoulder, she glanced round, and the fury lanced through him again.

Nope, Becca was definitely going to have to die.

The freckles on Ruby’s cheeks were raw, her eyes dazed with sadness.

‘Hey, what’s up, are you okay?’ he said, even though the question seemed kind of redundant, because she was clearly not okay.

Despite all the damning evidence to the contrary, she bobbed her head, still clinging to the handset. ‘I’m … yes … I’m talking to Helena.’ A wobbly smile lifted her lips that only made him madder. ‘I mean, I’m talking to your mother about Matty.’

It was all the evidence he needed. Resting his hand on her shoulder, in a vain attempt to relieve her trembling, he lifted the phone out of her fingers. ‘Can I speak to her?’

‘Yes, of course.’ Ruby handed over the phone, the flash of colour backlighting the moisture on her cheeks.

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