After Beth left, Al got up, closed the door, and leaned her back against it, rolling her bottom lip between her teeth as she ran through the meeting in her head. Beth had reminded her of herself when she’d just started in the film industry: not in her naivety – Al felt like she’d been born precocious and a little jaded – but in her excitement about starting out in something new, a new life. And at the same time Beth’s blundering revelation about Al’s scary reputation showed how much she’d changed since then. It was no news, really, just a confirmation of something she knew already, but it was like inadvertently catching sight of oneself in a mirror in a public place and realising how everyone else saw you. Not very flattering. And then, somehow, instead of relishing watching Beth squirm with embarrassment Al had ended up brushing it off and was now even thinking of offering her a job. She must be losing her edge. It must be the baby. The baby. Just thinking about Joe made Al’s breasts tingle with the milk let-down. She checked that the blind on the internal window looking onto the landing was properly closed. Then she flicked the latch on the door, checked that it was locked, ensured that the blob of Prestik still covered the keyhole (a dim PA had once let slip that everyone just looked through Al’s keyhole to check whether she was there) and got her breast pump out of the cupboard. Al had resolved to keep expressing for Joe right up to the start of the car job when she’d have to be away for at least a week, and she had no intention of breaking that resolution. And if she banked extra bottles in the freezer she could even ensure that he still got his daily dose of breast milk when she was hundreds of kilometres away. She’d prove that it was doable if you just managed it right. She’d already kept him off formula until he was seven months old, even though she’d been back at work full-time for the last four of those months. Al did some calculations in her head. Joe would be almost eight months old when she got back from the shoot. God, that meant Stella would be turning five. She’d short-changed Stella on the breastfeeding front, stopping at two months when she took on a big location shoot to prove that having a baby wasn’t going to get in her way. She’d spent a week away from Stella with hot, painful, leaking breasts which she periodically pumped out into the loo, setting her jaw as she watched her precious breast milk swirl down the toilet bowl. This time around, Al felt no need to prove herself in the workplace. She’d made her own rules and she’d stick to them. She switched the pump on, lodged it against her left boob, shut her eyes and tried to relax. Just as the milk began to trickle painfully slowly into the bottle there was an irritatingly tentative knock at the door.
‘Go away,’ Al bellowed, trying to remain relaxed and focused on the expressing. She tried to muster up a mental image of a gentle waterfall complete with sound effects while mentally bracing herself for another knock.
‘Al?’ came an annoying little voice from outside the door. It was Courtney, Andreas’s current PA, who had a neat, tiny little bum and a matching brain. She’d been around for well over a year, which was an accomplishment in itself, but Al felt sure they’d be looking for a new girl soon. When the allure of the mini-bum had worn off, Andreas would no doubt realise Courtney was completely inappropriate as an executive producer’s PA and come with that hangdog look to Al, hoping she would make it all better as she always did. Al knew it wasn’t her job, but Andreas was better at looking Adonis-like and speaking Italian as he swept back his long blond locks than he was at the mundane practicalities of finding suitable assistants, and Al invariably found it was less hassle if she just sorted things out herself.
‘What do you want?’ Al shouted at the closed door. ‘I’m busy.’
‘Erm, Andreas needs you. He’s having a crisis with the soup client.’
‘Fuckitall,’ she muttered under her breath. If people could only deal with their own shit and leave her alone for more than about five minutes at a stretch she’d be coping fine. More than fine. When Al had gone back to her brutally demanding work leaving her three-month-old son at home, the critics had had a field day. She’d had disapproving tuts from the nurses at the baby clinic, envy and genuine concern from her best friend Evie, pointed comments from her mother Yvonne who reminded her of how terrible it’d been when Stella was born, and perplexed mutterings from Ant’s mother Meredith, Al’s mother-out-law, who didn’t understand why Al pushed herself like this in the first place and was a firm believer in macrobiotic diets, mountain walks, and decent rest. To all these clamouring voices were added those of several annoyed producers who’d hoped her job would be theirs now that she’d gone and bred again (and were now eagerly anticipating her failure), and a slightly menacing concern from the powers that be at Kinetix, who feared she might have gone all soft and not be up to the rigorous demands of the job. But Al had only dug her heels in even harder, protesting that it was quiet during the pre-season months and she needed to set things up for the summer when the shooting season came and things really hit the fan. That had been four months ago. There had been several small jobs over the season, even one brief away shoot where she’d had to spend a night up the West Coast for an insurance advert pretending to take place in the Caribbean. But the car advert in a few weeks’ time would mean a whole week away, and reaching the location meant several hours’ flying and driving. Just thinking about it made her stomach knot. She examined the almost-empty bottle attached to the breast pump. It was pointless. She’d have to try again later. She took the pump off with a sigh of exasperation and adjusted her bra and top.
