Not Dead Yet

chance he would recognize her in the falling darkness, wearing large sunglasses, a baseball cap pulled low over her forehead, and with her hair dyed black. But even so, she tilted her face down. A thousand thoughts were going through her mind. Was the woman carrying a boy or a girl? How happy was he with her? How long had they been seeing each other? Did they argue all the time?
    What do I do next?
    She waited some moments then took a cautious peep. Just in time to see him tapping the entry panel keypad. Then he pushed the wrought-iron gate open and entered. Moments later it swung shut behind him, with a clang.
    Swung shut on her.
    Locking her out of his new life.
    She kept looking until he had walked out of sight.
    Then she twisted the key in the ignition, so hard that for a moment she thought she had snapped it. The engine fired. She checked her mirrors, then accelerated up the road, squealing the tyres, sending Coke spurting over her protesting son.

74
    ‘Goddamn lucky it ain’t raining,’ Drayton Wheeler said. He turned, as if for confirmation, to the awkward-looking woman standing behind him in the long line of people stretched back from the main entrance to Brighton Racecourse; the building had been commandeered by the film production as the assembly point for the extras.
    She looked up from the copy of the Argus she was reading, staring for some moments at the rather odd man in front of her in the queue to register as film extras. ‘Very lucky.’
    ‘You’re fucking telling me.’
    He was definitely a weirdo, she thought. Tall and gangly, with a grey pageboy fringe poking out beneath a wash-faded baseball cap. He was all twitchy, his face screwing up in frown lines, as if filled with pent-up anger, and had a sickly, sallow complexion. There were fifty people in front of them, all shapes and sizes, waiting to sign on and be fitted for costumes. They had been standing for over an hour, in the blustery wind high up on Race Hill. White rail posts marked the oval race track, and there were fine views across the city and south, over the Marina and the English Channel.
    Suddenly, from the front of the queue, a cheery woman’s voice called out, ‘Are family Hazeldine here? Paul Hazeldine, Charlotte Hazeldine, Isobel Hazeldine and Jessica Hazeldine? With their dog, Benson? If you are here, could you make yourselves known to us please! Come forward to the front of the queue!’
    Wheeler looked at his watch. ‘Gonna be another hour at least.’ He looked at the woman, who was about his age. She had an angular face, with blonde hair styled like Gaia’s from a photograph that was in a large spread about the shooting of the movie in today’s edition of the local paper.
    His movie.
    His script they had stolen.
    He could do with sex. She wasn’t attractive, but she looked likeshe was single and she wasn’t a paper bag job. No wedding band. Great legs. He was a legs man. Maybe she was up for sex? Maybe, if he played it right, he could get her back to his room for a screw afterwards? He could focus on her legs, and not her face. His apparatus still functioned – one of the side-effects of the happy pills he was on to help him forget that he was dying. She looked lonely. He was lonely.
    ‘Done this before?’ he asked, trying to break the ice.
    ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘that’s none of your business.’ She lifted her newspaper, to block him out of sight, and continued reading the spread on Gaia and on the filming which was starting on Monday.
    Bitch . She was thinking. Oh you bitch, Gaia. I’m going to think about giving you one more chance. Understand? One more chance. And that’s only because we love each other.
    She could tell, from the contrite expression Gaia had, that she was trying to send her a signal. An apology.
    It’s almost too late. But I might give you one more chance. I haven’t decided.
    She lowered the paper. ‘Actually I’m only doing this because I’m a personal friend of Gaia.’
    ‘No shit?’ he said.
    She smiled back proudly. ‘She’s wonderful, isn’t she?’
    ‘You think so?’
    ‘She can do no wrong!’
    ‘You think so? Jesus!’
    ‘Well, from what I’ve read about this film, the script is crap, but she will make it something special.’
    ‘Crap? Lady, did you say the script is crap?’
    ‘Whoever wrote it has no idea at all about the truth between George and Maria. But that’s Hollywood, right?’
    ‘I don’t like your tone.’
    ‘Fuck you.’
    ‘Fuck you,