The Reunion

stage left, and up the stairs. Lilah, half held up by Andrew, sobbed with her entire body. She struggled to put on her boots, fell, pushed Andrew away from her when he tried to help her up, got to her feet and walked out of the room and into the snow. After that, no one moved: there was silence, and the silence stretched out.
    Had Dan been directing, he thought he might have wanted some music here, something stirring, orchestral, or possibly ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. He might have had the camera pan around the room, beginning with Jen’s face, pale to the point of ghostly, going around the table, 360 degrees, coming to rest once again on Jen, Jen gripping Andrew’s hand so hard her knuckles had turned white. After that, an exterior shot, the lonely house and the mountains behind, and finally, in the garden, Lilah – the beautiful, broken blonde, standing alone in the snow, looking out over the valley as the blizzard hits.
    But Lilah wasn’t standing in the garden looking across the valley, she had marched off down the driveway towards the road. She was no longer even visible. Dan waited for Zac to run after her, but he didn’t. The big lug just stood at the window, watching her go. Andrew got to his feet and grabbed his coat from the stand by the door.
    ‘Come on, Zac, I’ll come with you,’ he said.
    Zac shook his head.
    ‘What, you’re just going to let her go? You’re going to let her walk out in this? For Christ’s sake, she could slip and hurt herself, she could fall down the mountain, get lost – Jesus, she’s drunk, alone in a blizzard. Anything could happen.’
    Zac puffed out his cheeks and exhaled loudly. ‘No. You know what she’s like. Or maybe you don’t any longer, but I do. She’ll get a couple of hundred yards down that hill and realise that she’s freezing, and that she has no coat and no money and that she’s being silly. She’ll be back in ten minutes, fifteen tops. If she’s not back in twenty, then I’ll go and get her.’
    Andrew threw his hands in the air, a gesture of exasperation. Jen got to her feet.
    ‘I’ll come with you, Andrew,’ she said. ‘We can take my car. I’ve got snow tyres.’
    ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ Dan said, getting abruptly to his feet and knocking a wine bottle over in the process.
    ‘I’m the only sober one,’ Jen said, quietly. ‘Plus I know the road better than you do.’
    ‘You’re also the only pregnant one,’ Dan said. ‘There is no way you’re going out in this.’
    ‘No one should be going out in this,’ Zac objected.
    Dan was seized with a sudden, irrepressible rage. What on earth was this huge hunk of beef still doing here? Lilah was his responsibility. If anyone was going to risk life and limb to fetch her, it should be him.
    ‘For God’s sake, what is wrong with you? If you’d just run after her straight away, like any sensible man would, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. She’s your girlfriend, for God’s sake, she’s drunk, she’s upset, and you’ve just let her run off into a blizzard. Who does that?’
    ‘I
know
Lilah…’
    ‘We all know Lilah. We care about Lilah…’
    ‘Oh, hang on a minute, aren’t you the guy who completely humiliated her in glorious technicolour?’
    ‘What the fuck has that got to do with anything?’ Dan yelled, flinging his arms into the air. ‘You’re saying because I made a film – a work of fiction – more than a decade ago, that I don’t care about her? You’re an idiot, you know that?’
    The front door slammed. Dan turned and watched as Andrew strode out to Jen’s car. Jen made a move to go after him, but Zac caught her arm and stopped her.
    ‘Dan’s right,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t go.’ Instead they stood motionless as Andrew opened the car door, jumped inside and began reversing slowly down the drive. The three of them watched the yellow halogen lights fade out and finally disappear as he swung the car into the road.

 
     
    14 September 1999
    Email, from Andrew to Dan
    Hi Dan,
    Thanks for your message. I am sorry that things turned out the way they did. I know it was a big night for you, I hope it wasn’t ruined.
    You must understand, however, that was not easy for us to watch. Yes, it’s fiction. Yes, you weren’t responsible for the final cut. But you were responsible for most of it, Dan, and I think we can both agree that it was only very thinly fictionalised, wasn’t it? And you could at least have warned