LITMIR.BIZ

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I was supposed to do. All I knew was that a line had been crossed. My face was throbbing and the back of my head hurt from where it had landed against the stone wall.

      I was on my knees before him and he was throwing plants on me, kicking me and screaming at me. I had apparently rejected perfectly good saplings and at the same time retained puny ones that should have been destroyed. There was no rhyme or reason. All I could do was hope it would be over soon, but he continued to spew insult and bile and his body at me while the crash of the storm covered the sound.

      Suddenly there were spikes in my eye and I realised he had kicked me into a pile of saplings, and then I felt the dull thud of his boot against my tailbone and my mouth was full of them too. I wanted to stay there, facedown, curled into a foetal position, and let him finish me off. But the overpowering survival instinct took over, and before he could strike again I turned round and fell to my knees before him, sobbing and beseeching.

      “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t know! You didn’t tell me!”

      I felt pathetic but it stopped him in his tracks.

      “I didn’t do it on purpose. I wanted to get it right, but you didn’t tell me. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. I’m so sorry. Please!”

      I was done. Nobody was coming to save me, and nobody cared.

      My body began to shudder and heave with such black grief that it surprised even me.

      The sound of the shed door banging shut opened my eyes. He was gone. After a while I stopped crying. There were little trees stuck to my hair and in my mouth. My face was throbbing from his blows and my bum hurt from his boot.

      In the eaves of the attic room of the shed was a wooden hutch my father had built to house a pair of doves we had once been given years before. For some reason I wanted to go up there. I climbed the stairs and dropped to my knees, staring plaintively into the dark recesses of the empty coop. Time passed. The storm finally subsided. The numbness in my cheek ebbed into a swelling. Darkness fell. Still I sat in a heap in front of the empty birdcage, tears flowing.

      I had thought earlier I might die. Now, once again, I wanted to.

      FRIDAY 21^ST MAY 2010, 5 P.M.

      In no time at all I was in my London flat, having a laugh with friends.

      I was to be based there for the first week of shooting of Who Do You Think You Are? aside from the mystery trips I would be taking elsewhere. My old friends Sue and Dom were there to greet me and I looked forward to catching up and having a laugh about the insanity of the night before in Cannes, each anecdote more sweet in its telling because it was now just that, an anecdote, and not real life.

      I could relate the palpable drama after the auctioneer told Jennifer Lopez her dress made her look like an ostrich, but not have to see it, or feel it. There would be no anxiety that the name of the celebrity I was about to announce would not be the same as the one who walked onstage. There would be no celebrities at all, in fact. Just me and my besties.

      Sue and I had met many years ago at the Donmar Warehouse theatre in London. I was there playing Hamlet, immediately followed by my turn as the Emcee in Cabaret that later transferred to Broadway, and we had been best friends ever since. When people ask how we met, Sue likes to tell them she washed my undies, and indeed she did, for then she was a member of that most noble of professions, the theatre dresser. She was also, and is, totally gorgeous. Quite literally, actually. Her surname had originally been Gore, but she changed it legally to Gorgeous, after years of it being her unofficial monicker. The actual document she had to sign to complete the name-changing process was hilarious, asking her to solemnly swear to renounce the name Gore and to be, from that day forth, forever Gorgeous. And she has been. When she married Dom, I and our other bestie, Andrew, were male bridesmaids, stifling our giggles as Sue walked down the aisle to Elvis singing “It’s Now Or Never”.

      As the wine flowed and the laughter rose, I felt the feeling I most enjoyed—home. Then, Sue’s phone rang.

      “Hi Tom,” she said. “Oh, he’s here. He arrived about an hour ago.” I wondered why my big brother would call Sue and not me to find out my whereabouts. Sue passed me her phone, and immediately I knew something was wrong.

      “How are you doing?” Tom asked, a little shaky. Obviously he hadn’t intended to speak to me.

      “I’m good. How are you?” I replied, cautiously.

      “When am I going to see you then?”

      “Tomorrow night, remember? We’re all having dinner,” I said, referring to the plan for him, his wife, Sonja, a bunch of my London friends, and me to meet up in my favourite Chinese restaurant the next evening.

      “I really need to talk to you, Alan.”

      There was silence for a moment. I tried to process what this meant.

      “Well, why don’t you come up a bit early tomorrow and have a drink with me at the flat before dinner?” I said eventually.

      “No, I need to talk to you sooner than that.” Tom was trying to hold it together, but the cracks were beginning to show.

      “Tom, what’s wrong?”

      “I can’t tell you on the phone, Alan.”

      “Is it your health?” My mind immediately raced to the worst possible scenarios. My brother is a rock. If he acted like this, it meant there was really something badly wrong. “Has something happened between you and Sonja?”

      “No, no.”

      I could hear Tom, even in the midst of whatever painful thing he was dealing with, trying to reassure me. It was what he always had done for me.

      “Is something wrong with Mum?” But I’d spoken to Mary Darling several times that week and had listened to a message from her just that day. There was no way she could have hidden anything bad from me.

      Suddenly, I remembered what Mary Darling had said about the reporter. “Is it something to do with that Sunday Mail guy looking for Dad?”

      “It’s all come to a head, Alan,” was Tom’s response. “I need to talk to you tonight.”

      It took Tom three hours to get to me. He lives in Southampton and had to catch a train, and what with travel to and from the stations, I had to endure three whole hours of my mind racing and my heart thumping. Sue and Dom tried to distract me, but I could never wander far from the worry. What could possibly be making my brother so upset that he couldn’t even utter it to me on the phone? I was a mess. My mind went to very dark places. The press being involved was a particularly disturbing element.

      If I had had the ability at that moment to be rational, I would have realised that there was nothing particularly scandalous about my life that had not been revealed or touched on before now, and I might have taken solace from this added boon of having become an open book. But I was finding it hard to see solace anywhere. I started to get wheezy. I have asthma and one of the times it comes on is during moments of great stress. Sue is luckily a self-confessed hypochondriac and an expert on all homeopathic remedies, so before too long I had a mouthful of pills to distract me. But still the nagging anxiety persisted, and still Tom hadn’t arrived. He kept texting: I’m on the train . . . I’m nearly at Waterloo . . . I’m getting in a taxi.

      I kept replaying our phone conversation. Had my father died? Was it something to do with my husband, Grant? He was heading home to NYC now, could something have happened to him? But still at the root of it all was the reporter from the Sunday Mail and the fact that, as Tom had said, it had all come to a head. But what did that mean?

      By the time he arrived I felt I had aged ten years. He entered the flat looking remarkably normal. No tears, no visible signs of torment. If anything he looked a little sheepish, as if he were embarrassed by all the fuss he must have known he’d caused by losing it on the phone. For a moment my heart leapt and I thought that maybe this revelation, whatever it might be, was not going to be as portentous and damaging

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