Film Star (7 page)

“Ruby,” Art said, making me jump a little in my chair, which made Natasha hiss through her teeth.

“Hello, Mr Dubrovnik, Art, I mean,” I said, opening one eye and looking sideways at him.” Natasha clamped a hand on my head and repositioned it with a huff. Natasha was quite scary.

“Don't move,” she told me. “We're at a crucial moment.” There was no way I was going to disobey her; I would actually slip into a coma if I had to sit here for another hour.

“So you know your lines for today?” Art asked me.

“Yes,” I said, without nodding. “There aren't that many, are there?” Art laughed.

“It's not about how many there are—it's about how you deliver them, how you feel the lines and the scene. In this
scene, in the ledge scene, you have to think about all the things that are going on in Polly's head. First of all, she's very scared. She's on a tiny ledge with a drop beneath so big that she can't see the bottom.” I swallowed.

“Will there be a mattress or something if I fall off?” I asked him hopefully. “Or a stunt girl?”

“A stunt girl?” Art asked me absently as he concentrated on his notes. “No, Ruby, you only get one of those for the
really
dangerous scenes, explosions and stuff or—if like Imogene—it would cost too much money to replace you.”

“OK,” I said, trying to hide the anxiety in my voice. I wasn't going to have to act scared. Hanging off a high ledge, even a movie-set ledge, wouldn't require me to act at all.

“Also,” Art continued, “Polly still hasn't really understood what's happening to her. This morning she was a prim little English schoolgirl with a clever daddy who loved her and who she loved very much. This afternoon not only has she found out that he's a deranged murderer, but that he never loved her, she is not his daughter and that she is at the very top of the list of people he wants to knock off. She's in shock, she's hurt and confused. She still loves him, even though she's frightened of him. And as for Flame and Gareth trying to
persuade her to jump off the ledge and out into nothing so that they can try and catch her hand before she falls? Well, she's only just met them, and ever since they came into her life things have gone terribly wrong. She doesn't trust them and she almost hates Flame. She hates her for telling her the truth. Do you get that?”

“I get it,” I said. And I thought I did. I thought about the night Mum and Dad told me they were splitting up and the shock and hurt I felt, not to mention the anger. I was angry because I hadn't wanted to know the truth. I think that was how Polly would be feeling. Almost that she would rather have been led unknowingly to her death on the altar of the evil sorcerer Mordred than find out her daddy didn't love her.

“So,” Art said, “when you make that decision to jump, are you doing it because you suddenly realise that Flame is your sister and you trust her?” I shook my head, and Natasha narrowed her eyes at me.

“No,” I said. “I'm doing it because the alternative is death. The mummified zombie-witch Morgaine is creeping down towards the ledge and when she gets there she'll take me to be killed anyway. Jumping is the only chance I have. And I'm a survivor. I'm only just beginning to realise how tough I really am after all those years of being brought up as an English rose.”

Art nodded.

“Good,” he said, patting me heavily on the shoulder. “Good girl.”

“Art?” I asked him. “Will there be wires when I jump off the ledge? Like safety wires?”

“Wires?” Art looked at me, puzzled. “You won't need wires, Ruby.”

“‘kay,” I said. And my mouth suddenly went dry.

“Ruby?” Art peered at my face and saw underneath all the make-up and dirt and spray-on sweat that I had gone white as a sheet. “Ruby?” Art asked me. “You do realise, don't you, that the ledge will only be about ten centimetres off the floor?”

“Um, yes?” I said, making it obvious that I didn't.

“Ruby!” Art said gently. “I'm sorry. I forgot this is your first time on any kind of film set, let alone an action film. I'm so sorry. Everything else in this scene is green screen. You know about green screen, right?” he asked me.

I decided that bluffing would only make me look even more stupid than I already did.

“Not really,” I said.

The sound stage was nothing like I had imagined. There were all the lights hanging high above me, glistening and sparkling like giant Christmas-tree decorations, and all the camera and sound equipment that I was half-familiar with. That much I had got right. But I had pictured the set for the Caverns of Mordred as being built to scale right here, just as they had built an entire square and mews for
Kensington Heights.
I thought it would be like that but even grander—one huge big set that I could walk on to and act just as if I was in a real secret underground cavern.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. There were only two pieces of set. My ledge, which was, as Art said, about ten centimetres high with a bit of rocky cliff face sheering up behind it. And then about ten metres away and a little higher up there was the other ledge—the ledge Imogene and Harry would be on. The “ravine” in between the cavern's walls and all around weren't there. In those spaces all there was were sheets of bright green material.

“Green screen,” Art told me as he led me on to the set a few minutes early. “What I need for you to do, Ruby, is to
imagine
the drop beneath you.
Imagine
the zombie witch crawling towards you and
see
her. It's just the same as imagining how Polly is feeling inside. But
you've also got to imagine what she sees around her and how she is reacting to it. And after the film is shot, the computer-generated effects—like the witch, the fire in the depths and all that—will be layered over the top, and then that together with the live action will in turn be dropped against a background painting of the caverns.”

“Pete?” Art looked up and called a man with blond hair over. “This is Pete. He's brought you the storyboard for today's scene so you can visualise it.”

I looked at the drawings, which were almost like a comic strip. Each part or frame of the scene had been drawn out and planned, including the parts I had to imagine—the ravine, the witch and the fire.

“This helps us position you right for when the effects are added,” Art told me. “It's a very precise process. So you know when Polly jumps and Flame doesn't manage to catch her and she falls?” I nodded. “Well, we'll cut as you jump and then morph you into a computer-generated version of you. That will be the you that falls into the pit of fire, thought lost for ever. Are you comfortable with all this, Ruby?”

I looked around me at the huge studio and the blazing lights and the crew all there for me—me, two film stars and a tiny, tiny set.

“I think I can do it,” I told Art.

“I
know
you can,” Art said.

“Ms Grant and Mr McLean on set!” somebody shouted from behind the cameras.

“All right then,” Art said, looking me in the eyes. “This is where the fun begins.”

INT. TIME OF DAY—INDISCERNIBLE, THE SECRET CAVERNS OF MORDRED

POLLY is perched on the edge of a ledge that hangs over a narrow but deep ravine. The bottom is lost in darkness. On the other side of the ravine FLAME and GARETH are waiting for her. POLLY is very distressed and confused.

POLLY

Who are you? Why are you doing this to me? It was just a normal day until you came and told all these lies and now…(POLLY LOOKS OVER HER SHOULDER INTO THE DARKNESS WHERE SHE CAN HEAR STRANGE NOISES GETTING CLOSER.) I hate you! I hate you!

FLAME edges along the ledge and tries to reach across to POLLY who cowers away from her. The gap is just too great and FLAME slips and almost falls; she is caught just in time by
GARETH. Rubble falls and long moments pass before we hear it hit the ground.

FLAME

Please, please believe me. All I want to do is to help, to save you. Ember—you have to trust me!

POLLY

My name is not Ember! I'm Polly Harris. I have been all my life, and I…(POLLY becomes very upset.) I don't understand any of this. Why is this happening to me? I'm just a normal girl.

Suddenly the hissing growl that they have been hearing in the background is very loud. Out of the shadows creeps THE ZOMBIE WITCH MORGAINE. She inches closer to POLLY.

MORGAINE

(Her voice is dry and crypt-like.)

Come, come my lady Guinivere. Let me take you to meet your master at last. Ha, ha, ha!

POLLY cowers back from MORGAINE as she approaches her. She is frozen with fear.

FLAME

Ember! Polly, I mean! Just jump, stretch out your arms and jump. I swear I'll catch you. It's your only chance!

POLLY looks from MORGAINE to FLAME. She jumps.

‘…And it was just
amazing,
” I told Danny, Nydia and Anne-Marie as we sat in the café. It was my first Saturday off, the first time we had all been together since I had started on the film a week earlier.

“We know,” Anne-Marie said, rolling her eyes. I looked at her quizzically.

“How could you know?” I asked her.

“Because according to you,” Danny said, leaning towards me and smiling his heart-flipping smile, “every single thing you do there is ‘amazing'. You've said ‘amazing' about two hundred times so far this morning, don't you reckon, Nydia?”

Nydia glanced up from her cup of tea which she had been stirring for at least a minute and smiled a half-smile.

“At least,” she said, before going back to stirring her tea. I looked at her. She was quiet, not like Nydia at all. Not like Nydia used to be. Since the auditions for
The
Lost Treasure of King Arthur
she seemed to have made herself smaller. I missed her loud laughs and her endless questions and mad ideas. She was here but not here all at once.

“Not like you to have tea, Nydia,” I said, licking the whipped cream that topped my hot chocolate off the teaspoon. “Sure you don't want a choccy marshmallow special? I'll buy you one.” Nydia shook her head.

“I want tea,” she said firmly. I glanced questioningly at Anne-Marie who pulled down the corners of her mouth and gave a little shrug. I thought of the talk Nydia and I had had in the corridor just before I left to start on the film. About how unhappy she felt. She had told me that everything was fine just before I went, but I knew that it wasn't. It wasn't, and for some reason she didn't want to admit it or talk to me about it. I took a sip of my hot chocolate and felt the warm sweetness on the back of my tongue. Hot chocolates in the café were a tradition for me and Nydia, long before we made friends with Anne-Marie and I somehow got Danny as my boyfriend—back when it sometimes seemed that it was me and Nydia against the world. About a million years before I got the part of Polly Harris, a part Nydia wanted and probably deserved much more than I did because she didn't mess up her first audition. She was brilliant in her first audition.

But it looked as if our hot-chocolate tradition was over, and I worried that those years and years of friendship were changing for ever too. I didn't want that to happen. I had to stop it and find some way of getting Nydia back again. After all, not so long ago we had been so close we had practically been twins.

I listened as Anne-Marie chatted on about some scandal at school with Menakshi Shah and Michael Henderson (“As if
he'd
ever go out with
her
when he's still in love with
me
…”) and glanced out the window where two girls of around ten had been hovering for the last five minutes or so, as if wondering whether or not to come in. I smiled to myself; they reminded me of Nydia and I a few years ago, wanting to come into the café by ourselves and be grown up, but looking carefully at the menu to see what we could afford. These two were doing exactly the same thing, only they were taking a lot longer about it and giggling like crazy every few minutes.

“What about school work?” Anne-Marie asked me, sipping the cappuccino which she didn't really like but had ordered to be cool. “What's it like working with a tutor? Nightmare of the total variety, right?” I thought for a moment.

“Well,” I said, “it's all right. My tutor is called Fran Francisco and I have to call her Fran, and it's her full-
time job to keep kids on film sets up with their school work, no matter where they're from or what they study. So she sort of knows a bit about everything. And when Sean Rivers comes she'll be doing the same for him, only American high-school stuff, I suppose. I don't know if it's very different but…” Anne-Marie pretended to faint, and half-slid down the back of her chair.

“Do you mean that you are going to be in the same class as Sean Rivers?” she asked, clutching her hand over her heart. “Oh my gosh, imagine that, sitting next to Sean Rivers! You both reach for a biro at the same time…your hands accidentally touch…a thrill of electricity runs between you…you look up at each other…your eyes lock and…”

I looked at Danny whose sweet smile was rapidly disappearing under a stormy cloud.

“Probably won't be,” I said. “Shouldn't think I'll see him at all when I'm not on set.”

“But you see ‘Imogene' and ‘Jeremy' all the time off set,” Anne Marie said, doing an annoyingly good impression of me as she mentioned the actors' names. “You haven't stopped banging on about them since you got back.”

It was true that I had spent a lot more time with the stars that I had ever imagined. Imogene was the biggest
surprise; she was so friendly and always ready to talk if we had waiting time between takes or scenes. At first I had been in awe of her, and then as we talked about how she had started out or worked through scenes together, I would sort of forget who she was until I'd look up suddenly, or catch her reflection in a mirror, and she would be Imogene Grant, international movie star again. Then my mouth would go dry and I had to pinch myself hard to make myself realise how amazing it was to be acting with her. Amazing—I
had
started to use that word a lot.

But it
was
amazing because Imogene always had time for me. She invited me to her Winnebago for tea, let me look at her photos and told me stories about all the people she'd worked with. Or sometimes we just talked about films we liked or books we had read. We both loved
Anne of Green Gables
—we talked about that for hours.

Until I met Imogene I had sort of thought that all incredibly famous people would be divas—a bit like Brett Summers used to be before she was fired from
Kensington Heights
for throwing tantrums and acting like the centre of the universe—but a hundred times worse. Always going everywhere with hundreds of helpers, bossing people around and demanding a dressing room
full of white flowers and French bottled water served at precisely one degree below room temperature, and instantly firing anyone who got it wrong.

I had thought Imogene might be like that, but the only help she had was her PA Clarice, who she treated like a best friend, and her dog Muttley, a black Labrador cross who went everywhere with her. Sometimes her mobile phone would ring when I was with her and she'd look at the number and say, “Ruby, do you mind if I take this?” And of course I'd go away so she could talk to whoever it was in private. And once I glanced back and saw her talking and laughing and twiddling her hair and fluttering her lashes and I thought that whoever was calling her must be someone she was in love with.

I didn't ask her who because she is famous for keeping her private life private and would never sell photos of her wedding to magazines for millions of pounds like
some
people I could mention, which, let's face it, is just not classy.

And I
did
see a lot of Jeremy—because we had a lot of scenes together and he was a perfectionist. So we rehearsed and rehearsed them between takes. And even when Art thought we had a scene in the can, Jeremy would sometimes ask to do it again because he thought he could do it even better. And I didn't mind working like
that. I didn't mind because just by watching and listening to Jeremy I felt I was learning from him. Acting with him was like nothing else I had ever done. All the other actors I had worked with were either kids from school, who were all great but still beginners like me, or soap actors. And sometimes soap actors are amazing and sometimes they are on a sort of autopilot and just going through the motions in front of a camera.

But Jeremy was always switched on, always in the moment. And I believe in him so much that when we shot the scene where Professor Darkly is stalking towards me about to cut out my heart with the Sacred Knife of Avalon, my heart really was pounding in terror, my mouth really was dry, and when I looked around me all I could see was a dark chamber with no way out, and not the green screens at all. When Art shouted cut there were tears streaming down my face and I hadn't even known I was crying. We didn't need to do any more takes for that scene. Afterwards, Jeremy, back to himself again in an instant, came up to me and gave me a fatherly hug.

“Oh, Ruby,” he said. “You're going to be brilliant one day.”

If anyone else had said that to me I might have been offended by it, but when he said it I felt—well—
amazing.

And the other nice thing about Jeremy was that he put up with my mum hanging around without showing that he minded at all. In fact, when I had a scene and he didn't, he even let Mum go for lunch with him, twice. Mum couldn't stop talking about him and about what a gentleman he was and how funny and polite, and she got quite silly and her voice went high, and I know that she really wants to get back with Dad and hasn't got time to waste on a silly crush at her age, so I told her about Jeremy's supermodel girlfriend Carenza Slavchenkov who is much younger (and thinner) than her, and she calmed down a lot after that. She might have even been a bit sad, but if anyone knows about having crushes on people who will never like them back it's me. Before Danny, I was a world expert. I used to have a terrible one on Justin de Souza, and I don't want Mum to get hurt again, not so soon after Dad going. It's my job to look after her now, and telling her about Carenza Slavchenkov was me doing that.

Of course, when I meet Sean Rivers I might have a little wobble myself, but if I do I shall think about Mum and Danny and treat him with professional courtesy only.

I glanced over Danny's shoulder where there were now four girls outside the window dithering about whether or not to come in and finding the whole thing
hilarious. Danny on the other hand looked like someone had just told him the worst joke in the world.

“Well, I have spent quite a lot of time with Imogene and Jeremy,” I said slowly, “but that's because I have a lot of scenes with them. I have hardly any with Sean,” I said, wondering if that was exactly true as I had about one hundred and eight—not that I had counted them or anything. “I mean, for most of time I'm in the film,” I went on, “he's getting crushed to death in the Ancient Stone Chamber of Doom, where the walls close in on the prisoner—triggered whenever someone tries to take the Holy Grail from its secret resting place. And anyway,” I said, tapping the palms of my hands down on the table top, “even
I'm
bored of me now. Lets talk about you lot. What have you been up to?

“Oh, I know, Nydia—what about your audition for
Holby?
Did you get it?” Nydia looked at each of us.

“I did,” she said.

“Hooray!” I yelled, leaping out of my chair and flinging my arms around her. I suppose I was so keen to be happy for her that I maybe overreacted a bit, especially considering that Nydia didn't seem as excited as I did.

“Nydia!” Anne-Marie said. “I didn't even know you'd been for an audition. I can't believe you didn't tell me…Brilliant!”

“It's a proper speaking part and everything,” I said.

“Oh, great.” Anne-Marie pretended to be miserable. “That's it, I am now officially the only one of us without a part in anything!”

“That's great, Nydia,” Danny said. “What's your disease—is it going to make us cry or feel sick?” Nydia shrugged her shoulders a little and I released her from my hug.

“Early onset diabetes caused by morbid obesity,” she said. “There's a complication and I die.”

“Oh,” Anne-Marie said, and then, “wow…”

“You're going to be great, Nyds,” Danny said, ignoring the atmosphere that seemed to form around the table. “The actors on that show are really great and so will you be.” I sat back down in my chair feeling quite foolish.

“I bet your mum's pleased,” I said. Nydia nodded.

“Actually,” she said slowly, “she's having a sort of party for me next Friday. She said to invite all of you. You will come, won't you? Because otherwise it will just be aunties and uncles and cousins and…I didn't even want a party, but you know Mum. She makes a big deal out of everything.”

“Well, it is a big deal,” I said.

“Oh, yes!” Anne-Marie said excitedly. “We'll be there, won't we, Danny? And I can get Menakshi, Jade
and that lot to come and if they come then so will the boys and…Hey!” Anne-Marie clicked her fingers. “Ruby can bring Sean Rivers!” she said, bouncing in her seat. “If word gets round that Sean Rivers is going to be at your party, Nydia, then everyone will come.” Anne-Marie giggled. “I'll spread the word.”

“No!” Nydia looked upset. “No, I don't want a big party! I just want you three there.
You
will be there, won't you, Ruby? That's all I want. I don't want loads of people from school knowing about the part. I'll just get so much aggro for it and it won't air for weeks so I might as well put it off until then. Please, just promise me that you will be there.”

“I'll be there,” Danny and Anne-Marie said all at once. I bit my lip and looked out of the window where the group of girls had increased to ten or eleven; they must be some kind of Brownie group or something, about to go on a trip out. I looked at Nydia. Strictly speaking I didn't know if I would be working next Friday or not but I also knew I couldn't let her down. Whatever my hours were next week I had to make her party and show that she was still important to me.

“Of course I'll be there,” I said.

“Really?” she asked me. I was worried by how surprised she sounded.

“Of course,” I said. “It's my best friend's party—I'm not going to miss that for the world.” Nydia smiled at me and it was the first real expression I had seen on her face all morning.

“Good,” she said, lowering her voice just for me, “because I really need—”