Read Online This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell - Free Book Online
Authors: Maggie O'Farrell
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people on, you knew that, so you needed either to cut and run or stay and see how things progressed. You dithered as you swished ice cubes round your glass.
Timou was still talking about his film, about how you should be in it. This irritated you at such a basic level that it was putting you off the whole idea of him. It was so shallow a chat-up line, so obvious, so well-worn, that you felt insulted to think he might view it as effective. How dare he think that nonsense would work on you? Did he think you were a child?
You shoved your straw back in your glass as he told you he’d been watching you all week. You had, he said, a particularly mobile face, a way of frowning that he liked, a bone structure that took natural light well. That’s it, you decided. You wouldn’t sleep with him. You’d wrap things up, then head home.
‘You’d be great in the role,’ he was saying, in a low voice. ‘Absolutely perfect.’
You groped under the table for your bag. ‘But I’m not an actress,’ you said, lifting your bag onto your lap.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is precisely why you are so perfect. I don’t want actors in my film, people who have been trained, like circus animals, to display themselves to a camera in a certain way. It makes everything so formulaic, so conscious. I’m going to use people who have never been near a film-set before. It will make things fresh and unpredictable. I want to rip up the rulebook of film-making and this is one way to take things a stage further. No professional actors. Real people only.’
You stared at him. He stared back at you. It was like playing that game where you’re waiting for one of you to blink first.
‘I’m not making a pass at you,’ he said and, you couldn’t help it, you blinked. ‘I swear. I don’t mix work and romance. I have a girlfriend back in Gothenburg,’ he said, then added: ‘We went to art school together.’
‘But I have a job,’ you said. ‘And I don’t want to be an actress.’
He reached out for a strand of your hair. It was long but not as long as it will be later. He lifted it to the light then tugged it, as if it were something he required and it was inexplicably stuck.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘how about making an exception, just this once?’
Down at the Bottom of the Page
Niall, San Francisco, 1999
N iall Sullivan waits, standing on the school steps – his father is, of course, late. He holds his arms slightly away from his body so that the early fall air may pass around him, between his limbs and his torso, between his fingers where webs might have been in another life. His skin, the outermost layer of him, prickles and seethes like lava. If he stands still enough, his clothes won’t rasp against it. This is one of the ways Niall has developed to deal with his eczema. Coping strategies, the doctor calls them.
At the sound of his father’s car coming around the corner, Niall steps sideways, twice, then back, a move that reminds him of the knight on a chessboard, and conceals himself behind a pillar.
He opens his schoolbag, pulls out his binoculars, loops their strap over his head and leans around the pillar just enough for a clear, close-up view of his father, sitting behind the wheel of his car.
Daniel , he thinks to himself, arrives nine minutes late. Facial expression tense, gloomy – worse than this morning .
Niall was recently allowed to withdraw his first ever book from the adult section of the library. It had been about asteroids, and the layout of the page had been different from anything he had ever seen before. The text had been scattered with small numbers, and right down at the bottom of the page, in very small type you had to squint to read, there were extra facts. ‘Footnotes’, his father had told him they were called, when Niall had asked, and shown him how the numbers linked and guided you to the right information. Niall had been enthralled by this system, struck by its beauty, the way there could be one
Timou was still talking about his film, about how you should be in it. This irritated you at such a basic level that it was putting you off the whole idea of him. It was so shallow a chat-up line, so obvious, so well-worn, that you felt insulted to think he might view it as effective. How dare he think that nonsense would work on you? Did he think you were a child?
You shoved your straw back in your glass as he told you he’d been watching you all week. You had, he said, a particularly mobile face, a way of frowning that he liked, a bone structure that took natural light well. That’s it, you decided. You wouldn’t sleep with him. You’d wrap things up, then head home.
‘You’d be great in the role,’ he was saying, in a low voice. ‘Absolutely perfect.’
You groped under the table for your bag. ‘But I’m not an actress,’ you said, lifting your bag onto your lap.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is precisely why you are so perfect. I don’t want actors in my film, people who have been trained, like circus animals, to display themselves to a camera in a certain way. It makes everything so formulaic, so conscious. I’m going to use people who have never been near a film-set before. It will make things fresh and unpredictable. I want to rip up the rulebook of film-making and this is one way to take things a stage further. No professional actors. Real people only.’
You stared at him. He stared back at you. It was like playing that game where you’re waiting for one of you to blink first.
‘I’m not making a pass at you,’ he said and, you couldn’t help it, you blinked. ‘I swear. I don’t mix work and romance. I have a girlfriend back in Gothenburg,’ he said, then added: ‘We went to art school together.’
‘But I have a job,’ you said. ‘And I don’t want to be an actress.’
He reached out for a strand of your hair. It was long but not as long as it will be later. He lifted it to the light then tugged it, as if it were something he required and it was inexplicably stuck.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘how about making an exception, just this once?’
Down at the Bottom of the Page
Niall, San Francisco, 1999
N iall Sullivan waits, standing on the school steps – his father is, of course, late. He holds his arms slightly away from his body so that the early fall air may pass around him, between his limbs and his torso, between his fingers where webs might have been in another life. His skin, the outermost layer of him, prickles and seethes like lava. If he stands still enough, his clothes won’t rasp against it. This is one of the ways Niall has developed to deal with his eczema. Coping strategies, the doctor calls them.
At the sound of his father’s car coming around the corner, Niall steps sideways, twice, then back, a move that reminds him of the knight on a chessboard, and conceals himself behind a pillar.
He opens his schoolbag, pulls out his binoculars, loops their strap over his head and leans around the pillar just enough for a clear, close-up view of his father, sitting behind the wheel of his car.
Daniel , he thinks to himself, arrives nine minutes late. Facial expression tense, gloomy – worse than this morning .
Niall was recently allowed to withdraw his first ever book from the adult section of the library. It had been about asteroids, and the layout of the page had been different from anything he had ever seen before. The text had been scattered with small numbers, and right down at the bottom of the page, in very small type you had to squint to read, there were extra facts. ‘Footnotes’, his father had told him they were called, when Niall had asked, and shown him how the numbers linked and guided you to the right information. Niall had been enthralled by this system, struck by its beauty, the way there could be one
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