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Sometimes, in life, when it comes to important matters, you know before you know. As if there are minute tells in the ether your brain somehow picks up, but your eyes and ears fail to acknowledge.
The existence of such minute pieces of information, skirted over by my conscious mind, would have explained the twist in the pit of my stomach when I returned to the flat I now lived in. My home.
They also say it takes a year after moving house to truly make it feel like home, which meant another four months of not being able to put a name to that persistent discomfort. It kept changing in its exact nature. Sometimes disappointment, sometimes failure, sometimes plain old loneliness, it haunted me in all its guises, and had done in the eight months since I’d unpacked my clothes, arranged my new furniture and tried to find a convenient spot in which to hide the memories of what had driven me back here.
I loved Edinburgh, had been incredibly lucky to find this apartment in Morningside at a price I could afford, but hadn’t fantasised about returning to live permanently in the city of my birth under these circumstances.
Groaning, I chucked my handbag onto the massive L-shaped sofa and stood in the middle of the open-plan living and kitchen and dining and bingeing Netflix because you’re such a lonely failure, Afton Collier...wait where was I?
Yeah. Thirty-eight years old, with a pretty sweet apartment in the nation’s capital, paid for by my inability to do marriage right.
Though the apartment felt emotionally empty, it was in actuality the right size for someone living on their own, with one main room, a separate bedroom and a bathroom at the far end of the hall. However, having (half) bought the house, got my name on the title deeds and moved in, baggage and all, I had to give up fighting the plain and simple fact that–
“This is my life now,” I muttered out loud. Another heavy sigh. “This. Is my life now.”
After a moment of standing in the middle of the main room, turning on the spot, trying to convince myself of the words I spoke, I got sick of the self-pity and headed over to the kitchen. Even though I’d only just arrived ‘home’ from dinner with friends, I couldn’t resist raiding the fridge, just for something to do. Now-Afton hated Yesterday-Afton. That bitch had filled the shelves with fruit and veg and smoothies and Greek yoghurt. Low fat this, reduced sugar that. All kinds of healthy muck, instead of double chocolate sheet cake.
Though one of the kitchen cupboards stored alcohol, as did a small, two-tiered hostess trolley in the living area, I was reluctant to hit the bottle, especially without company, this excess of caution being a hangover, so to speak, from my misspent youth.
Although I couldn’t say I’d ever been physically addicted to booze per se, I’d been fond of the way being drunk made me feel. Easily-acquired liquid confidence, before growing into my own life and the realisation that chemical shortcuts, though fun, came with consequences.
Years ago, I’d quit binge-drinking with no permanent ill effects, no cravings for the demon drink. These days, I tended to err on the side of caution and stick to soft drinks when home alone, just in case oblivion got too tempting. There had to be something pretty damn sad about a woman in her thirties drinking alone and self-pity wasn’t something I needed any more of. Not now.
While out with friends, too, I exercised restraint, limiting my intake. I didn’t want to be recognised while puking into a gutter on the wrong side of town and end up on some Where Are They Now website. Knowing my luck, a certain person would get to hear about it and laugh up his sleeve at the state I’d got myself into.
So while self-preservation and a desire to cultivate good health was a major part of my clean living, there was also pride.
But I still really, really wanted double chocolate sheet cake.
And sometimes, just sometimes...I wanted to get wasted just for the sweet release of giving precisely zero fucks for a few hours. I just didn’t fancy waking up in a gutter or the gossip columns, scrabbling around for some aspirin and whining about the pounding inside my skull.
God, I was bored. That was it. Coming home to an empty flat and still not being used to living here, on my own, after eight months. I was just bloody bored.
Having learned years ago not to risk the integrity of my precious, though short, fingernails on a ring-pull, I used a teaspoon to work open the can of coke and returned to the living area. The L-shaped sofa had been one of my better ideas. Even if much of my Netfix bingeing was solo, it had to be done in comfort. So I stretched my legs out in front of me along the chaise, about to start scrolling through my Watch Later menu, and stopped. Damn it, I’d neglected to send a group text to let the others know I was back. There was the possibility their concern was less about the sisterhood and more about wondering exactly how delicate was my overall emotional state? How was I getting over things really? As if I were that delicate. Easily broken? Not I. Not Afton Collier.
No-one could deny I’d been through the mill, though, so I guessed the concern of friends was only natural. I ought to be grateful. Not everyone had a roof over their head or supportive friends.
With one hand, I tapped out a quick ‘That’s me home, you can stop panicking now’ message and left them to whatever they were up to. The dinner at an eyewateringly-expensive restaurant had been wonderful, more down to the company than anything else, but I’d skipped out when someone suggested moving on to a club. Luckily, I hadn’t needed to call on my acting skills too much to convince them I was too old and tired, though not the oldest of the group. All it had taken was the reminder I’d only been back in town for a few days after an extended period of work in Manchester. Night shoots, you know how it is, I’m still not recovered from having to be up at 4am for an entire week, sorry, you don’t mind if I skip out, do you? Someone had called a cab and half an hour later, here I was on the settee, scrolling through Twitter and Facebook on my phone. Did I really want to piss away an hour before bed on social media, when I could spend it on the next episode of Stranger Things?
I was on Netflix, too. A two-part drama from a couple of years back for ITV, Double Helix. I’d never watched it back in full, didn’t have the heart to. Couldn’t bear the thought of seeing myself on screen, like many actors I knew and had worked with. But it had been fun. In one of the first scenes of Episode One, I’d made a rather fetching corpse discovered on a beach, seaweed tangled in my hair, one shoe missing and a bullet hole clean through my neck. I’d become good friends with the makeup girls, in particular Sandra, who’d said it was the best bullet hole she’d ever constructed. She’d worked so hard to get me exactly the right shade of six-days-dead, murky grey-green.
And from then on, the mini-series had been told in flashback, leading up to the scene where yours truly, or rather, my character, had been found on the beach, shot by either her brother or her father.
One of the main reasons I’d never watched it was knowing, despite my character heading for an early grave, I’d been truly happy in real life while filming was going on. Poor, unfortunate soul that I’d been back then, not knowing what was coming. I much preferred to leave Then-Afton alone in her ignorance.
Might as well quickly check my emails before picking something to watch that would stop my mood sinking even further. The only qualifications were that it had to be something I wasn’t in, and nor could it star anyone I’d fucked.
Which ruled out Echoes, a time-travel drama, because one of the three leads, Declan Keating, was a dirty bastard who’d kept me occupied for a few nights after I’d guested in a couple of episodes of series three. And the amazing thing was, we’d stayed friends. Still kept in touch.
I really ought to give him a call sometime, I pondered. Find out if we’re in the same country soon.
That was the problem with this industry. As grateful as I was to find work when I needed it, the unpredictable nature of when such work would eventually come in made it difficult to maintain intimate relationships. Not impossible. Difficult. It took work, and it only would work if both people involved had their hearts in it.
In Declan’s case, it was more of a friends-with-benefits thing so no great shakes if we couldn’t see each other but when we managed to coordinate...yeah, it was fun.
“Still got it,” I muttered, laughing in spite of my restless boredom this evening. Maybe it was coming up for my time of the month; that might explain it. No anniversaries approached. It was probably just a case of me reluctantly settling into a new life after months of fighting the inevitable, and being forced to admit that yes, this was my life now. I had to give up any hope of the situation reversing.
In my heart of hearts, I’d known it wouldn’t. But there would always be a tiny part of me that blamed myself for the way things had turned out.
I had a number of email addresses; one connected to my social media accounts, another linked to my website where fans could contact me and Lord, how I hated that word. I knew I lived a privileged life, travelling for work and meeting famous people and getting my face on television, but the word ‘fans’ suggested hero-worship and made me extremely uncomfortable, as if I were claiming status to which I was not entitled. Viewers. I decided to call them viewers.
I wasn’t big enough to require a personal assistant for my online business, had just flung a few quid to a friend for setting up the website and giving me a quick rundown on how to add photos and blog entries; that seemed to do the trick.
The drop-down menu for awards seemed a little tacky, but I allowed myself the indulgence of showing off the Sexiest Actress trophy I’d won a few years previous. Hardly a commentary on my acting skills which had their own minor statuettes, but good for my self-esteem which...given the past couple of years, had taken a battering.
But the emails. Oh my god, the emails.
Double Helix appearing on Netflix prompted a few enquiries regarding what I was up to next and I resolved to deal with them in the morning; nothing urgent.
One name caught my eye but didn’t trip me up completely; I kept scrolling, then noticed a faint, nervous rippling in the pit of my stomach, as if I’d seen something deserving of my attention, but which hadn’t quite leapt off the screen at me yet. Like my brain still had to catch up. I’d had one or two drinks that evening but nothing too strong. Certainly not enough to render me inebriated.
G. Peterson.
As strange as it was to describe my reaction in this way, my brain hiccuped. A record scratch and a feeling of what the hell?
The last name on Earth I’d expected to see, but then again...it could have been anyone. A pretty common name. There were probably a million George Petersons out there, or Grahams or Grants or Gordons. And that only covered the male side of things. I could have a fan (viewer!) called Georgina or Gemma or Gayle.
And really, I had to learn to calm down. This jumping to conclusions could only be a result of my already-restless mood. There was no reason for me to decide here and now that the sender was the person I’d immediately assumed.
Quite what I could have absorbed from the atmosphere to make my thumping heart believe this was bad news, I couldn’t imagine, but the way my breathing quickened was no illusion.
I didn’t want to read the email, but I couldn’t not, if only to reassure myself the sender’s name was George or Gordon or Gemma or...hell, even Guinevere.
But, nope. It was Glenn. At least, such was the name he went by.
Dear Afton,
I’m assuming you check your own messages through your site, but just in case you have an online assistant, I’ll keep this brief and ask you to contact me personally later. (Just use this email address; only I have access to it.)
You wouldn’t have been expecting me to get in touch after all this time, I’m sure, but I’ll be in Edinburgh soon for the Fringe and didn’t want to alarm you with my sudden reappearance on your home turf. I know, it’s a huge city, so what are the chances? I don’t even know if you’ll be in town during August, but I will be, and knowing our luck, you’d see a random advert or flyer stuck on a lamppost.
Anyway, if you want to, please get in touch. It wouldn’t feel right to come back home after all this time and not at least say hi.
Yours,
Oosh.
Another five straight minutes elapsed before the pounding in my ears lessened. I’d forgotten up until that point how painful my own pulse could be. And I read the email countless times over within those five minutes.
Oosh, indeed. Definitely him. The reason for my previously unexplained apprehension upon my return home.
The old nickname was unmistakable; he only used his middle name Glenn because his parents had gifted him with the rather more Gaelic Uisdean, around which few English-speaking tongues could wrap themselves. OOSH-jun was probably as close as they could get, hence the nickname I’d used for him way back when, half a lifetime ago. As far as I’d known, only a couple of his closest friends were ever allowed to call him that.
It had made me feel special, for a time, but what the hell did it mean for him to sign off using that stupid fucking name, so many years later? He’d spent his entire adult life being Glenn to the world at large. Nearly two decades after we’d last spoken, he’d firmly established himself as Glenn Peterson to everyone who mattered. When he’d buggered off to the States to make his name, the name he had made was Glenn, not the Uisdean which preceded it on his birth certificate. And he’d even ridden out the tabloids dubbing him Glenn Morangie because of his overindulgence in just about every substance known to man, some of which he’d snorted off me.
I burst out laughing then, a short, sharp noise I soon smothered, looking around the room and feeling guilty. Was I allowed to laugh at the remembrance of something nearly two decades past?
But then the amusement – if that’s what it was – faded, to be replaced by anger. Irritation, at least, at him popping up out of the blue. Now he was going to be back on my home turf, technically his home turf as Edinburgh was also the city of his birth, despite his having long since forsaken it for pastures new and lucrative.
I mean, good luck to him. You went where the opportunities and the money were. One couldn’t blame him for that. We all had careers to build.
If only he’d bloody stayed there, and left me, and Edinburgh, and indeed the entirety of Scotland, out of it. His email had managed to disturb my tenuous equilibrium and maybe I wasn’t angry at Uisdean Glenn Peterson at all.
It was entirely possible I was angry at myself for giving a damn.