Ms

CHAPTER ONE

I’m running from the flat. High heels. Thick snow.

My tears make it hard to see where I’m going, lights blinding me further, noise roaring towards me. As my feet slip, I hit the ground and freeze.

“Cut!”

After bringing the bike to a halt the stuntman steps aside and Sam (who plays Liam, the handsome rogue the viewers love to hate) takes his place for the close-up. He’s never liked me, as one of the original members of the series he regards all newcomers with a thinly veiled air of suspicion. There's an unspoken rule in this industry; one in, one out. The show follows the lives of thirty regular characters plus a few occasional guest stars. Anymore would be too many to care about, any less and there’s not enough scope for intrigue.

The search for original storylines is relentless with the networks all competing for the most watched episode, especially over Christmas; hence, my ‘Death by Deliveroo’ after the shock of seeing my boyfriend snogging my brother.

The sacrificial lamb on the altar of viewing figures.

I’m trying not to be bitter. I’ve been here for three years but if I’d been sensible, there would be money in the bank to tide me over until my next project and I wouldn’t have to jump at the first thing offered. I haven’t been sensible. I’ve been rash. A bloody idiot, as my dad would say.

Sam’s perched astride the bike playing to the gallery of makeup and costume assistants who stand patiently on set, a captive audience. They laugh, but I sense they have the measure of him. We wait in position as the crew line up the shots. The stunt man gets to do all the actual driving, although I’m sure Sam would relish the opportunity to mow me down. He doesn’t chat with me, but then why would he? I’m as good as dead already. I haven’t left willingly, haven’t asked to be released to satisfy my creative yearnings elsewhere. Been written out, let go, sacked. When I joined the show, I was desperate for his approval even though I heard the way he badmouthed the other cast members. Now I’ve no chance of gaining his acceptance and I’m glad I never did. Still, when he deigns to speak to me, I’m all smiles.

“Any plans lined up after the show Flora?”

It’s not because he cares, he just wants to relay the news that I’m jobless.

“Oh, you know, Mike Leigh’s been on the phone.”

He doesn’t answer.

“I’m kidding.”

“No shit Sherlock.”

Now that I’m leaving, I don’t care what he thinks of me, yet he still has the power to make me feel small. I need to regain some ground.

“Well, I’ve been approached to be the face of a nutrition thing, you know one of those Instagram advertising campaigns.”

“Right. Good luck with that.”

He couldn’t sound less sincere if he tried.

“It’s better than nothing.”

And I couldn’t sound more pathetic, still trying desperately to impress. When you imagine your dreams coming true you don’t realise that you’ll still feel like you. I thought success would be like glue, thought that it would stick all my broken bits together.

“Right, moving on to the next shot. Let’s get Flora into position please.”

Lying on the pretend cobbles in this make-believe world I wait as fake snow is sprinkled over me. Only the sky here is real. Charmaine from make-up applies a trickle of blood to my nose, the camera starts to whirr and it’s over.

There’s only one more scene for me to do but it’s the last one on the schedule, which means hanging around at the studios for the rest of the day. There’s no time to sneak back home in case they rearrange the filming order and suddenly need me. We film four episodes simultaneously but not in consecutive order so if you’re featured heavily in them all, you run from one scene to the next at breakneck speed, reciting lines manically as you change costumes, desperately trying to remember what has or hasn’t happened yet. The scene we’ve just shot, my final one, is out of sequence as I’m contracted to keep filming for another four weeks, meaning I’ll have to endure the next month in a toxic soup of sympathy and suspicion.

I can’t face eating anything but the need for a cup of sweet tea, my solution for any kind of emotional upset, outweighs the need to seek solitude in my dressing room. It’s a peculiar sensation, this dislocation from my surroundings, it’s been my virtual home for nearly three years but being written out has marked me as faulty goods. My colleagues’ avoidance of me says more about their own professional insecurities than an attack on my person, I reason, but reason doesn’t help ease the prickling of anxiety in my ribcage or soothe the knot in my stomach.

Dean keeps reminding me that fear stands for ‘false evidence appearing real’ which is another piece of his New Age nonsense. I’m not imagining the looks being thrown my way as I force myself through the lunchtime chatter. If it could happen to me, it could happen to them. Morag, my character has a loyal fan base, I’ve been on breakfast TV to discuss my storylines. There was even talk of ‘Strictly’ (the holy grail) in the pipeline.

The canteen is inoffensively painted the same shade of grey as every other functional space, surely destined to become tomorrow's magnolia. Sandra behind the counter, doles out food and drink with a uniform air of contempt, her consistency oddly comforting. I take my tea and go. A huddle of extras (or supporting artists as we’re now meant to call them) whisper conspiratorially as I pass.

There’s a brutal demarcation of status between extras and actors. We don’t mix. Even though there’s no reason for one camp to be wary of the other, there’s a palpable distance. The ‘supporting artists’ don’t want to appear too friendly in case they look ‘star’ struck, whilst actors seem to need to keep themselves distinct, a separate species entirely as a matter of survival. We actors are only one step away from having no lines and so their very existence terrifies us. We are nothing after all, without our stories.

“We feel we have gone as far as we can with Morag.” Yvonne the series producer had said to me last week when I had my being ‘let go’ chat.

“You look lovely in lemon by the way.”

“Oh, um thanks.”

“It really brings out your eyes.”

She’d also talked about the weather for too long, so I had an inkling that bad news was in the post, but I still had to catch my breath when she said it. Of course, I said I understood, tried to stay upbeat, the way you do after a dodgy haircut when all you really want to do is get home and have a good cry. The shock of it was soon overtaken by a sickly feeling of shame at being rejected so publicly.

At least she had the decency to tell me before they issued the next batch of scripts. There are tales of actors reading unsuspectingly only to discover themselves being killed off. The other small mercy is that I have an actual on-screen death as sometimes characters are simply ghosted; no one mentions their name anymore. A dramatic ending is the way to go, apparently as it raises your profile, however fleetingly.

“It’s a high-profile death Flora, it’s going to get the ratings. Morag is a much-loved character.” Yvonne had told me as I left the room.

“In terms of a death this is a chef’s kiss.” Dean had said. “You should be pleased.”

I snake my way through the busy lunchtime corridor, trying my best to feel grateful. Dean is big on gratitude; he reminds me daily to count my blessings. To be honest it's brutal going out with someone so relentlessly upbeat, especially when the shit hits the fan. Only this morning he said I should think of the programme as a plant, that sometimes even the healthy shoots need to be trimmed back.

“Remember, it’s not personal” he told me.

“Easy for you to say, you’re the resident heartthrob, they’re not pruning you.”

My head is firmly kept down in case anyone feels obliged to commiserate with me on my fictional passing, but no one tries to catch my eye, they are all as wary of me as I am of them. No one wants to be associated with me now. My humiliation is more contagious than any virus.

In the safety of my dressing room, I contemplate my future. It doesn’t look good if I’m not moving on to another project, failure is lapping at my heels. Serena, my agent, is pushing me to take the advertising contract. My gut feeling is to say no but as usual with my gut feelings, it’s just a tiny whisper and other voices drown it out too easily.

“Darling, it’s a fantastic opportunity you’d be a fool to turn it down”.

Apparently, I can use it to build my ‘brand’ whatever that is. It’s not under any circumstances to be called a diet, the focus is on scientifically backed nutrition, but the premise is the same old story, drink some shakes instead of real food for a few weeks and watch the fat melt away. No one has bothered to ask me if I want to lose any weight. I like my curves, thank you very much but it seems I fit the bill; perfect casting as a body to be whittled down to an aspirational ideal. The assumption being that we’ll be rejected for being anything other than a size eight. It’s not that anxiety that propels me to make the call but another fear entirely: that without any kind of job or function I will disappear like a puff of smoke or a contestant on Love Island. There’s an overwhelming need to stay visible, although whom I need to be seen by, I don’t know.

I’ve lost my appetite since my pretend death, so maybe this is as good a time as any to be paid to starve myself. It’s a lie but lying is the thing I do best. Lying comes easy when you do it for a living, pretending to feel things you don’t and be someone you’re not.

I will miss being Morag. Poor, clueless Morag with her blood spilled all over the cobbles outside the pub. I liked being somebody else. This new contract requires me to be myself, showing up daily to give updates on my progress, on my disappearing flesh. I’m not sure if I can do this but it’s not the starvation that scares me. It’s the scrutiny- the hateful comments that will undoubtedly appear underneath each post. I’m entering the world of the influencer, a shadowy realm where nothing is as it appears. The brighter the image the bigger the shadow.

Despite these reservations I dial the number on the card. Cassie Flint, it says. She sounds like a Disney character, an evil queen presiding over the kingdom of her emaciated subjects.

“Flora” she says, “How wonderful. We’ve been waiting for your call.”

CHAPTER TWO

One, two, one, two, one, two, one, two…everything hurts.

One, two, one, two, one, two…everything really hurts.

One, two, one, two…I think I’m going to be sick.

One, two… oh why am I even doing this crazy madness?

Namely, running around my local park in the rain wearing next to nothing, being harassed by an angry man. I’m feeling decidedly odd. My vision swims. The grass is green beneath my feet, the greenness starts to fizz up until I realise, I’m falling, landing face first with an almighty squish.

“Up, up!” is being yelled in my ear and slowly, reluctantly, I peel my aching bones out of the earth and propel myself onwards. My brand new, stupidly expensive running top is now glazed in mud. I’m entertaining thoughts of a boil wash when I feel the nausea rising. It feels like it is coming all the way up from my bowels.

“I’m not feeling too good Frank.” I gasp but he is having none of it.

“Just run through it,” he barks at me, “Move through the pain.”

Frank is an ex-army trainer; he takes no prisoners. Sadly, bodily functions are not under his steely influence, nor mine for that matter.

“No, no, I mean it, I’m… I think I’m going to be...”

“Come on Flora, push it, power through, dig deep.”

I’m wondering how many more stock phrases he’s got up his sleeve before I vomit. Well, it’s bile to be precise, which is what happens when there’s no food left in your stomach to bring up. For a moment I think he is going to yell at me again to keep moving, to keep pounding the streets covered in mud and green puke.

“You’re in bad shape,” he tells me. “Much worse than I thought.”

We walk back home in silence, via a leafy London suburb popular with the rich and famous. One of the streets is an Instagram paradise due to its brightly painted buildings and we weave past people posing in doorways or standing in the middle of oncoming traffic to get the shot. The perfect Instagram post is the new souvenir for tourists. Most people don’t leave their homes here looking any less than immaculate for fear of running into lurking photographers. When I started the training, they published a picture of me in an unforgiving crop top and neon pink shorts. To add insult to injury, they took an already unflattering image and photo-shopped cellulite onto my stomach and thighs.

“Don’t worry darling,” Cassie had said. “When they see the new improved you, no one will even remember the ‘before’ ones.”

Which was a lie of course. I was set up, after all, the worse I look now, the bigger the transformation and the better the product will sell.

We moved here on Dean’s insistence because he liked the kudos of proximity to such a swanky address. Initially, I didn’t think I’d care how I looked while popping out for a pint of milk, but when the people in the queue at your corner shop are supermodels or presenters (who look like they might as well be supermodels) you start to wonder if there’s any harm in a touch of Touché éclat.

“Are you angry with me?” I ask eventually, more to break the silence than anything else.

Frank is so uncommunicative that in all the weeks I’ve been working with him it’s been impossible to build any kind of rapport. He’s like a personal training robot. It’s what makes him so popular, with a waiting list longer than one of his perfectly toned, sinewy arms. Apparently, I was extremely fortunate to get him. And he, judging by the look on his face, was extremely unfortunate to get me.

“No, not angry,” he replies eventually, “just disappointed.”

Which reminds me of something my dad would say to my teen-aged self, designed to induce terrible guilt. All I feel now is a knee jerk rebellion, an urge to run away shouting, ‘I didn’t ask for this.’ Which, I did. Ask for it, I mean. My agent may have pushed me into this, but I’d signed my name on the dotted line and have no one to blame but myself.

Frank is still talking, going on about the power of visualising and how critical it is to expect success. I nod occasionally, hoping to create the illusion of interest even though it’s the most he has said to me in weeks.

“In fact,” he’s saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone more negative.”

He’s decidedly animated now, his frustration with me clearly has been bubbling away all along and now that he’s started, he doesn’t know how to stop. Finally, we reach my door.

“Right, well, thanks Frank I’ll take that on board. See you tomorrow.”

“Don’t let me down Flora, this reflects on me too. Failure is not an option.”

Staggering inside; all I can visualise is food, or better still the Jaffa cakes at the bottom of the bin, flung there in a cleaning out all forbidden food frenzy. The dietician hired by the company had been very clear that all temptation had to be removed as I wasn’t making the kind of progress they’d hoped for; only a few pounds after nearly six weeks of gruelling abstinence. They didn’t directly accuse me of cheating but when two assistants came to do a sweep of the house it wasn’t hard to read between the lines. It was harder not to laugh at the seriousness with which the search took place. I was half expecting armed police and sniffer dogs to burst in. Even Dean’s honey roasted cashews had to be confiscated. Which isn't fair considering he lives here too but he’s being very understanding. He’s even started eating his evening meal out, which is sweet of him because if I’m going to fulfil the terms of my contract, three stone exactly must be shed by Christmas, in time for the January stampede, when my nutritional shakes should fly off the shelves. They don’t care if I keep it off for good, just long enough to showcase my ‘hot’ new body for a few not so glossy magazines.

There’s a niggling fear that Dean’s keenness to get out the house has less to do with consideration and more fear of being associated with me since my sacking. Even though his job is safe due to his heartthrob status, he has a fan base who stalk his every move on social media. Dean is all about appearance and my fall from grace will be affecting him on some level.