-•✦--✦--✦•-
The pit followed me into my sleep. Not as I had heard it spoken of in my lessons, nor as the men from the eastern coalfields sounded, but as something stranger and also familiar. The miners in my dreams were blackened entirely by coal dust, their faces and hands indistinguishable from the seams of their rough clothes, and their voices carried a muddle of Welsh words I felt more than understood. I carried a pickaxe among them and striked a wall. Each strike made my figure darken until I too was as black as the coals. Not much in the dream made any sense, yet dreams were never concerned with such things.
I lay awake for a long while afterwards, letting the unease settle rather than fighting it. I might not have been born in Durham, and I certainly didn't yet speak with anything approaching the correct dialect, but the more I thought about it, the more Billy made sense to me. In the dream I was down there with them, not labouring so much as moving — dancing, even — swinging a pickaxe rhythmically against the coal face. Grandad had told me often enough how the real pits worked, but dreams had their own logic, and this one demanded me to toil with the men.
Grandad's stories had lodged themselves deep inside me. Clive Price's brothers were there in the pits with me, blurry and dark faces that smiled and swaggered around. Even in sleep, I was haunted by the family history and insistence to do right by them.
"Morning, morning, wakey — oh, you're already up," Nain said, peering in.
"Morning yerself, darling." I replied, slipping into the northern dialect.
"Get yourself cleaned up. Breakfast in half an hour."
"Right," I said, more to myself than her.
Sounding northern was never the difficulty. I'd grown up parodying those accents well enough to reproduce them without effort. Hell, I was a northerner in truth. What I struggled with was shifting east. Sally's new unit was helping there. It had a structure to it, methodical in a way I imagined proper professors might be, or at least drama tutors at the more serious schools.
I unfolded the newspaper that had been faxed through by an entirely unexpected hand.
—✦—
Excerpt from the Northumberland Gazette, 5 May 1999
PRODUCTION IN SEARCH OF A YOUNG STAR
The production company behind Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill are seeking a boy to star in their newest feature, set during the miners' strike of 1984 in the North East.
Dancer tells the story of Billy, a boy with a rare talent for dance. Working Title Films and Tiger Aspect Productions will be extending auditions to the wider public.
Local boys aged 10–14 are invited to audition. Applicants should be confident performing on camera and either experienced in dance or willing to learn. Formal training is not required, but aptitude and commitment are essential.
Experience in tap, breakdancing, gymnastics, or skateboarding is desirable.
Open auditions will be held this weekend at the Customs House, South Shields.
Directed by Stephen Daldry, Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre, in his feature debut.
Note: children who have auditioned with casting advisor Pippa Hall need not attend.
—✦—
I had already arranged for a local actor from Durham to pose as my mother for the audition. She ran her own small drama school and was more than happy to earn some easy money. Nain had called me mad. Mum had stared at me for a long, unreadable moment and then ignored me for the rest of the day. I didn't need much emotional intelligence to know she was hurt by the idea of being replaced even in jest — though by now she was well accustomed to my schemes.
The news was both encouraging and alarming. Three extra weeks of auditions was a gift, no question about it. But it also meant more boys. More variables. Whatever it was that allowed me glimpses of the future — time travel, revelation, something else entirely — only ever showed me a fixed possibility, frozen as I once knew it. A single version of events. Wilfred Price might never have existed in the future I knew. The butterfly effect wasn't theoretical to me; it was a practical concern.
If there were more children like Dorothea in the world, Jamie Bell and I might not stand a chance.
The thought made me smile. Competition sharpened things. It always had.
I picked up a pen and wrote across the margin of the article. Ink on ink, my will rewriting the future.
I will play Billy.
With open casting, Tiger Aspect had moved beyond school noticeboards and theatre foyers and into buying slots in papers. Yet there was still no script circulating. No sides. Dancer, as it was still called, would be auditioned cold — pages handed over on the day. I'd done that already in Croydon, in that draughty old church, but unlike everyone else, I didn't have a Durham or Geordie accent in my bones.
Unlike everyone else, I had an advantage.
I took a clean sheet of paper and began writing out the film from memory — the confrontations, the rows, the father's anger, the brother's swearing. Sally had said it plainly the night before: accents were manageable if you had the script. And I did. Not just lines, but intention, rhythm, emotional weight. The whole thing lived in my head.
Her new class was blending theory with practice. The theory was simple enough. An accent was merely a system — rules governing how words were shaped and stressed. If I understood those rules, I could read from the page and sound convincing as a Durham boy. If Sally corrected me line by line, we could refine it until it passed without question.
I reread the requirements. Age ten to fourteen — nearly there. Dance skills — yes. Acting skills — yes. And then the line that mattered most, the one that no one else except a single reader would notice.
Local boys.
This wasn't the The Daily Mail nor The Sun which were based in London, nor was this paper meant to reach the most people in England. It was the Northumberland Gazette. The production had no intention of teaching an accent on top of everything else, so they'd went local even when they moved to open casting. I couldn't fault them. How many children could act, dance, and convincingly acquire a regional dialect?
Every job I'd had so far required accent work. Some I'd cheated on — generic Los Angeles, Spanish — lifted straight from my revelations, used without worry and with full authenticity. Others, like my working-class Kentish accent, had taken real effort. Franco had paid Sally well for that, even if he'd not known.
Which meant, absurdly, that I was precisely what Tiger Aspect didn't believe existed. The golden snitch that they dared not hope for actually existed.
Except I lacked that marker of being a local.
I would then have to act until they saw that I was the right person for the job. It wasn't enough to simply sound right. To pass as local, I would have to become Wilfred Price from another timeline — the one born in County Durham, raised among voices of the pit. I would have to blend among children for whom the accent was instinctive and not be exposed as the bald fraud I was.
The fear and excitement sat together in my chest. Auditions were terrifying on their own, bigger projects even more so. This one mattered — to my family's history as much as my own future. Roles like Billy Elliot came once, if at all. But this went beyond performance. I would be acting as someone already acting — a character beneath a character.
In a short span, I'd gone from barely competent actor to reliable under pressure, capable of hitting difficult emotional scenes in single takes. My approach to acting had become something of a hybrid. Classical technique gave structure; method gave depth to the character. I took from each as needed.
I flipped a coin onto the table and tried to make it land on its edge.
That image stayed with me as I wrote. The character profiles I'd started developing were skins I could step into — researched, understood, lived. Stanislavsky spoke of living the role. I took that literally as his very first students did. I wore the skin, acted out the scene then removed it the moment it was over. I refused to injure my mind for the sake of authenticity. But I also refused to not take risks. Acting would reach it's peak when you danced on the edge of a knife, I was sure of it.
Dialects worked the same way. Speech came from environment — family, class, labour, aspiration. Change any one of those and the person changed with it. A drunk father was not the same as an absent one. Nor was the son.
When I did it properly, I stopped playing at being someone. I thought as them. Lines became suggestions. Improvisation came naturally. Behaviour remained consistent.
I had added safeguards to it, made it a consistent feature. I could step out whenever I wanted. That mattered. The danger of method acting was losing sight of who you were beneath it all. I would not allow that.
There were other tools now as well — the drop, freeze, snapshot — no longer shackles, but instruments of my design. Techniques that I'd named for ease of bringing forth.
I needed a name for my entire method. I'd waited long enough.
Ten minutes passed as I worked mechanically through the dialogue. When I finished the second page, the answer was on the tip of my tongue.
Perhaps Germany lingered in my mind, or maybe it was just an apt to recall someone just as multi-linguistic as I was. Schrödinger's famous thought experiment was close to the coin analogy. A cat in a box, dead and alive at the same time. Only when the box was opened, would the cat settle on one state. Observer in my method would be the scenes as it came along, moment to moment I would use a state that fit better.
Schrödinger's Method — No, it sounded too on the nose and I didn't want to share a method so personal to me and attribute it to someone else's name. I thought more and more on his experiment. Schrödinger's cat — too literal. Superposition — nah, too technical, too fantastical. Wave function collapse? Bah, so pretentious.
Collapse.
The coin balanced on its edge was possibility. Observation forced choice. When the scene demanded it, I would collapse into classical or method without hesitation. And the name would remind me of the cost of failure — of what happened when you forgot who you were beneath the skin. Risk and reward both spelled out.
Yes. That would do.
The next step was obvious. I would practise being someone already pretending — motive hidden beneath motive. A lie wrapped inside a truth.
"Tails, even though I'm really heads," I muttered, the smile on my face stretching far enough to begin aching at the corners.
A voice cut in.
"You look proper marde with that creepy smile," Aurélie said, eyeing me from the doorway.
I wiped my expression away at once. "It's pronounced mad. You're making it sound like merde."
She considered that, then shrugged. "Oui. You look mad, Wilf. You also look like shit. Come on — breakfast."
The table was louder than usual. Sally had abandoned the careful, clipped poshness she'd used earlier and slipped back into a soft Scouse, batting jokes back and forth with Nain. They seemed to have decided they liked each other very much. They were of age with each other and was equally obsessed with the stars.
"Erin rang," Nain said, stirring her tea. "Your visa's being expedited. Interview's been scheduled with the embassy."
"I don't want to go," I said at once. "I'm busy."
"And that would matter if they needed you," she replied, chuckling.
I frowned.
"You're under fourteen. You're not required. Only your mum will go, probably Ollie too."
"Thank God."
"The church might appreciate the gratitude too," Grandad said mildly. "You heading up to Newcastle, then?"
"Yes. Best not leave it, even with the extra dates."
He grunted, the sound of a man quietly letting go of the hope that I might one day become devout. Using Sundays for auditions were becoming the norm.
"Adrian rang as well," Nain continued. "Franco wants some recordings. Before the end of the month so he can plan out the shots."
I'd barely finished waking up and my day was already being parcelled out to other people. Whenever I crossed something from my schedule, another seemed to take its place.
"I'll do him one better," I said. "Let's film it in a church."
Grandad brightened at the word church, then visibly deflated when he realised it was work-related. That earned him an explanation, which he endured with stoic disappointment. Sally, meanwhile, looked unconvinced of my methods.
"You'll never capture the audio properly."
"The mic, probably not," I admitted. "But I can do a clean vocal as well. It's a good song. Sad, but otherworldly too. I won't get another chance once my voice breaks. Feels right to get it immortalised on God's turf."
Grandad shook his head slowly, as though filing me under a heathen.
"You've got a few hours before set," Sally said. "Want to practise your Durham?"
There was, as ever, no rest for the wicked.
—✦—
"Have you got the script for me?"
I slipped into the version of myself I'd been constructing — the one I'd use whenever I was acting as myself. Being a good actor surely meant being a convincing liar, and if I was going to play Wilfred Price from County Durham, I might as well build him from the inside out.
As casually as I could manage, I placed the sheet of paper between us.
"Select sides from Dancer. It's all confidential — they don't want anything faxed — but I spoke with my agent and wrote it down for us."
"Uh… okay," Sally said, picking up the paper and giving it a once-over.
I was already cursing myself. Too much detail. I'd answered questions she hadn't even asked — why is this handwritten, why couldn't they fax it. A good liar never offered explanations in advance. Honest people never needed to.
Offering up excuses in advance. That, at least, was useful to remember — if I ever played someone duplicitous on screen.
Then there was the agent. Dragging other people into a lie without warning them was amateurish. Engineers improved things by making things simpler, didn't they? More moving parts meant more ways for everything to fall apart. I felt the drop settle in my stomach, though nothing came of it. It was too minor a lie and had not been noticed.
"You need to work on your handwriting. This is dreadful," Sally said absentmindedly.
I rolled my eyes as a revelation flickered through my mind — the gaps between each one was getting longer as the days passed.
Would I stop receiving them entirely one day?
"There's a study that says boys develop fine motor skills for writing later than girls. I've still got a few years to catch up." I said, using the new information on the spot.
"Flimsy excuse. You're a good dancer — or so Aurélie tells me," Sally said over the rim of her glasses. "You just don't care about writing, so you don't improve on it. Your grandmother also tells me you've not picked up Welsh, despite her asking."
"I thought you were here to teach me — not needle me," I said, sulking.
"This is teaching, love. Teaching you to be a better person," she replied, laughing.
"You're finally back then?" I smiled. "I almost thought I'd lost you."
"Well, I can follow a curriculum without draining all the fun," she said. "I was boring myself stiff teaching it like yesterday…" The last part came out under her breath.
She scanned the page again. "Right. This is all workable. But where are the action beats?"
Damn it. I'd missed that too. Seeing the scenes so clearly in my head meant I never felt the need to spell out movement or emotion on the page. I was meant to copy the screenplay and ended up simply writing sentences.
"I think they've left them out on purpose," I said as casually as I cold, "They want a genuine interpretation. Maybe."
"That sounds like production nonsense," Sally muttered. "They'd get far better auditions if they gave everyone the same footing. You're working too hard for this debut director."
I was dreadful at this. Every lie needed another to prop it up, until you were left with a castle built entirely out of sand, ready to collapse at the slightest push.
"I've done my homework," Sally said briskly. "Brought some recordings. Here's the first — genuine Durham lad. Tell me what you think after."
She slid a cassette into the player.
—✦—
Excerpt fromThe Tube— 1984. Trevor Horn, as interviewed by Muriel Gray.
M: Trevor, you must be the most successful producer in the country now.
T: I'm not really. There are other people more successful than me — there's a bloke called Mutt Lange and another called Quincy Jones.
M: Most people know you as the man behind Frankie Goes to Hollywood. What do you make of how that's going?
T: I'd rather be the man behind Frank than the one in front of him.
—✦—
I laughed out loud, and Sally did too but she gave me a glare. I wasn't supposed to understand adult jokes and honestly, I didn't get entirely but there were some low hanging fruits. The rest of the interview drew me in more than it should have but I appreciated the dry English humour and related a lot to Trevor Horn's inability to take compliments from others. By the time I realised, the tape had run out and static hissed from the player.
"Did you catch his dialect?" Sally asked.
"Dialect?" I repeated blankly.
"Exactly. I pulled this from the library before I even listened to it. The only accent that really jumped out at you was the Scottish one, wasn't it?"
"Yeah…"
"Do you know who he is?"
"Yeah. He's produced loads of big songs for others. Kiss from a Rose is my favourite."
She nodded, slipping neatly back into lecture mode.
"Trevor Horn's from Durham. Grew up there. But he moved to London and most of the accent's gone. Still, listen closely — especially in the latter half — it's faint, but it's there. This is what happens when someone calibrates themselves to the industry. Every actor who comes to London learns the RP eventually. If your Durham slips, this is a perfectly believable fallback."
She gave me a knowing waggle of her eyebrows.
"Good cover for your lies."
I swallowed. Did she know — or was that coincidence? This was another lesson to not lie. The guilt would eat up at me and I would see enemies in the shadows.
"Let's listen again," she said. "We'll break it down properly."
I focused this time, picking out details, but she didn't even let me show my work to appear the good student.
"Listen to the vowels. He still pushes 'a' towards an 'eh'. The northern markers are there, but softened. Pay attention to the 'oh' sound."
"Isn't it closer to an 'ugh'?" I said.
"Exactly. The fact it's blurred tells you how far it's faded. We'll keep this in mind, then move on to something purer."
She swapped the cassette.
"Paddy McAloon — Prefab Sprout. Had to dig for this one," she said, pleased with herself.
♪ Hot dog, jumping frog, Albuquerque ♪
I sang happily. The song was as old as I was and equally as ridiculous.
"I've got their album," I said brightly. "They're brilliant — one of the biggest pop bands of the eighties."
"You're impossible," Sally said, though she smiled. "Listen properly. This is the cleanest Durham accent I could find — no softening for the southerners he usually does for the telly. It's from a Durham radio station. Much closer to how a child born in '89 would actually sound."
She fixed me with a look.
"Right. Focus now. No more messing about."
We had a listen to the proper Durham accent which is in use currently without any of the pit yakker present in the old men of the pits.
"Make note of the vowels, go on. Try them. Say, 'don't', say 'now', say 'here'."
"Don't, now, here." I repeated.
"Make sure to say it more like 'hee-yar', really give it an emphasis."
"Here!" I said a bit loudly to match up her volume.
"That's right. Now, we'll do some of these dialogues of yours."
We went back and forth again, line after line. My musical training turned out to be endlessly useful. Perfect pitch helped me catch the smallest shifts, while years of transcribing melodies from memory made it easier to lock the sounds in place — tone, stress, rhythm — all of it filed away like notes on a stave.
"They're only meant for lasses — I wear my shorts."
Sally stopped me with a raised finger. "Careful. It's always me, not my. Me shorts that I wear. Never 'my shorts'."
"Right. Me shorts," I repeated, committing it to memory.
"When you try to convince others that you're telling the truth or serious about something, insert honest at the end of sentences. It's quite standard in the North." Sally went on.
The lesson flowed after that, though we both tripped over certain words and collapsed into laughter at others. There was something inherently comical about it. The North Eastern accent crept higher and louder the more emphasis I added, until I felt like a caricature of myself. Everything sounded confrontational, as though I were spoiling for a row while saying perfectly polite stuff.
For someone born there, it would've sounded natural enough. For an actor — someone who relied on how inflections carried emotion — it was a complication. The accent imposed a mood of its own, regardless of intention. Something I'd have to work on.
A challenge was always welcome.
It reminded me of speaking Italian. Whether it was the culture or the language itself, I always felt calmer in Italian, unhurried, as if there were time enough for everything. Spanish had the opposite effect, quick and restless. The North East — Toonside and the surrounding towns — belonged firmly in that latter category.
The voice demanded urgency. It refused to sit still.
Sally nodded along with each of my attempts, then shook her head decisively at the end.
"No. It's not right."
"I'm doing it exactly how you did it. Perfect pitch, remember?" I said, a little too pleased with myself.
She sighed and jabbed a finger towards the cassette player. "It's not that simple for me. I'm not doing it perfectly either — and neither is he."
"He can't be wrong, can he?" I said, slipping into my best Durham accent. "He's from Durrum, for God's sake."
"That's exactly the point," Sally said. "People speak casually all the time. Paddy's comfortable on the radio — he's letting things slide, probably had a few bevvies. That's fine when you're chatting to your mates. But you can't always talk like the lad down the pub, can you?"
"Alright," I said, giving up my argument.
She fixed me with a look.
"Areet," I corrected. It came out closer to aal-reet, which was the proper English up in the east.
"There you go. Progress," she said dryly. "Right, we'll have to do some exercises to sort this out. New curriculum, but you've done it before. Go on — assume the oral position."
I blinked. "You want me to get on my knees?"
The words escaped before I could stop them. Laughter bubbled dangerously close to the surface.
Sally froze. Her eyes widened in genuine alarm. "My God," she said, pointing at me, "how do you even know jokes like that?"
I ducked and weaved as she jabbed at me with her sharp fingertips, laughing outright now. She eventually caught me with a slow, theatrical slap to the arm — impossible to avoid without standing up. For all the mock fury, the corners of her eyes were creased with laughter. Honest.
And now the accent had crept into my own head. Brilliant, that.
"If you've quite finished," she said, straightening, "interlock your fingers and hold your hands about chest height."
I did as told.
"Now open your mouth."
I gave her an unamused look. "You're really not helping yourself here."
"Wilf," she warned sharply, "don't make me call your Nain in. You'll regret it." She ploughed on regardless. "You're getting it wrong because your larynx is closed. You need to loosen your jaw — Wilf!"
Too late. The moment she said loosen your jaw, something inside me gave way. I tried to hold it in, but the laughter escaped in a wheezing burst, my stomach burning with it.
"That's it," Sally said, marching towards the door. "I'm calling Gladys."
"No — no, don't," I gasped, half-laughing, half-pleading.
I slid off the chair and ended up on the floor, utterly helpless. My eyes saw white from my face being stretched so wide and stuck on like a statue.
Tears streamed down my face as the laughing fit took hold, and through it all I couldn't help but blame Larry. He was a bad influence.
Honest!
—✦—
In the late afternoon I arrived on set early, determined to make amends for my earlier transgressions. The hair and makeup trailer was eerily quiet, chairs empty, mirrors dark.
Today was for B-rolls, inserts, fillers — that was what the callsheet said. Usually those bits were folded into the days when the main scenes were shot, but because child labour laws had forced us to spend an extra day at Thorsby Hall, Julian had decided to use it fully, giving post-production more options to work with.
"Oi. Ready for your kissy-kissy scene?" Larry said, tapping my shoulder.
"Good day," I replied, lapsing deliberately into my neat Kentish accent.
"Oh come on," he said with mock disappointment. "I thought you'd be more embarrassed than that."
"Estella is not Zooey Deschanel," I said flatly.
"Who?"
I launched into a grand proclamation about an actress who would one day be famous. The drop didn't bother me in the slightest. Half the world was always predicting the next great star to walk among us. The difference was that I knew this one would have her time in the spotlight — not an enduring star but one who would be remembered through many classics.
"Here she comes," Larry muttered, elbowing me.
"Eyes forward. Don't move," Nicole hissed.
I tried to glare at Larry in the mirror, but he'd already slipped away. Once hair and makeup had you, you were trapped — no movement, no expressions. It was only Larry's third day on set and he'd already learned the most dangerous trick there was: distracting another actor mid-prep, mid-makeup. Offending the makeup department was career suicide. Absolute gossip-mongers, the lot of them.
"Larry. Wilf," Estella said in greeting, cool and measured.
She took the chair beside mine. I watched her in the wide mirror.
I was starting to work on a new technique, the one that allowed me to act in layers — characters nested atop another. Durham Wilfred wearing Chester Wilfred's skin, wave-function collapse, one but both at the same time.
Estella worked differently. She wore the skin of a character so tightly that I had no idea who Dorothea Offermann was underneath it all. It made every conversation feel like stepping onto thin ice.
"So," Larry said cheerfully, "ready for your kissy-kissy scene with Wilf?"
I longed to bury my face in my hands, but I was a hostage to this torture.
"It is merely a kindness I grant to a poor boy," Estella said with a dismissive scoff.
"I'm only doing it for the pay myself," I replied.
"If it's guineas you're after," she shot back, "you'd be better off wenching at the taverns."
"Steady your horses, children." Nicola said, laughing.
"Game of barbs were never your strength. Boy." Estella said with venom.
She was pretending nothing had happened the day before, retreating fully into her method. I couldn't blame her. After breaking down in front of everyone, it must have taken effort just to show up on set.
One day, I would wear a skin as an armour too.
"Your eyes are all puffed up, love," Fran said, fussing. "What's happened?"
"So," I blurted, for reasons unclear even to me, "you weren't at tutoring earlier. Where were you?"
Estella ignored me completely. Larry, ever the saviour, filled the silence as though I'd been talking to him all along.
"I'm off the production," he said with a wave, "Just hanging about. No point going back to school for just Friday."
"Right," I said. "It'll be lonely without you."
Nicola tapped my cheek sharply, warning me not to move my face too much. I sat there and endured the consequences of my choices.
We both tried to draw Estella into conversation, but she remained sealed inside the nineteenth century girl that she was playing. Speaking to someone permanently in character was exhausting, though I supposed it helped me, in some minor way, get in character.
We shot walking shots through Satis House, long hallways, then the courtyard. To anyone else they might've looked dull to perform, but I found them a useful exercise — slipping between moods, letting the camera read my internal mood just by my gait and body language. A wide shot, a slow dolly, my face closing in on itself against the vastness of Thorsby Hall. I would've paid to keep some of that footage for a future reel.
Estella's filler shots rarely featured her alone. Julian wanted my back in frame — me watching her from doorways, through windows, from a distance. He explained that it showed Pip beginning to want Estella, to see her as something to be obtained. Hearing that made me think of Miss Havisham's jewellery box, how desire and possession echoed through the story.
How no one would get what they wanted in the end.
Filmmakers had an uncanny ability to see the finished shape long before anyone else. Julian was cluing in the audience with mirrored shots with the object swapped out for a subject.
Nain and Maria watched as the long-awaited scene was called.
"Action."
I walked towards the gate as the dolly slowly rolled towards me. Estella stood there in her grape-coloured dress, holding it open. She looked like a doll dressed for mourning.
The opening was narrow, half-blocked by her. She didn't move aside, it wasn't her nature to vacate a space for another. I had to squeeze past. My face stayed blank. There was little to express. I was leaving for the last time, hope barred behind the iron of the gate. I could only retreat with my tail tucked, whimpering.
"You may kiss me, if you like," Estella said behind me.
Something lit up inside my chest. My face warmed, though I kept my mouth set, trying to hide my emotions.
Turning back too quickly betrayed it all in an instant.
She turned her head, offering her cheek. Still a bit chubby from the baby fat there, but her eyes were bored, unimpressed. My excitement dimmed — but only a little.
I rose onto my toes and pecked her cheek, making the soft, theatrical sound you used when kissing a lady's hand. I dared not do it carelessly, roses had thorns.
When I stepped away, her eyes flicked back to me. Unimpressed as ever. She'd shown no disgust, no warmth either — it had been only a chore to her.
"Goodbye," she said in a bored tone.
I walked off, head hung low, studying the mud beneath my boots. I was nothing more than dirt on her shoe. This was the trail I would trudge on, no paved roads for the likes of me.
"Cut. We'll try again."
"More kissy-kissy for Wilfy-Wilfy!" Larry shouted, setting the crew off laughing.
"Ignore them," Julian said lightly, though his attention stayed on Estella. "That was nearly perfect. But when Pip walks off, you need a smile — cheeky one. Like you did want the kiss, even if you pretend otherwise. Remember, you long for love that you never felt with Miss Havisham as a mother."
Estella nodded. We started over again.
"Cut. Second half was great, but you weren't bored enough at the start. One more."
"Cut. Missed your mark, Estella — we can't see your eyes in the gate. Red tape is your spot. Stand there."
"Cut. Nearly there. Step left — yellow mark first, green when Pip passes."
"Cut. Check the gate," Julian said at last, satisfied.
That was the most amount of takes Estella needed in all of her time filming on the Great Expectations set. Dorothea for all her cool attitude, must've been rattled from breaking her character the day before.
Cheers broke out all around us. Cast and crew — or what remained of them — gathered beneath the stripboard where purple strips marked the end of an actor's duty. On our set, that colour had become a signal on the callsheets. For the actor, it meant their last scene. For everyone else, it was a summons: come over, clap them out, see them off properly.
Every tradition invented more rituals, a speech was demanded.
Larry had gone first the day before. Four words, swallowed around a nervous gulp. That was wicked… wicked!
Now it was Estella's turn.
She stood in the centre of a loose semicircle, looking much as Larry had — cheeks flushed hot rod red, shoulders drawn slightly inward, eyebrows lifted like a deer in the headlights.
"Speech."
"Speech!"
"SPEECH!"
The chant rose and fell until, mercifully, it burned itself out to hear the girl. Estella clasped her hands together so tightly her knuckles blanched white. She swallowed, once, twice, and when she spoke her voice caught me entirely off guard.
The accent was still there — that careful, old-fashioned English that hadn't changed much since the nineteenth century — posh was still posh. But the tone was all wrong. Softer. Lilting. Almost tentative.
"Erm… thank you," she began, "for making my time on this set—"
And that was when a revelation all my own arrived at the forefront of my mind.
This wasn't Estella.
There was no edge, no hauteur, no deliberate cruelty in the lilting voice. This was Dorothea. Her usual voice without the shouting or the crying that I'd heard the day before. A night had passed and the difference between the two was as stark as the daylight inbetween.
"…my last project before I move abroad," she continued, "and I'm grateful to everyone for making it something I'll never forget. Truly. Thank you."
She dipped into a small, instinctive curtsy at the end. The crowd melted audibly. A collective sigh, the way people reacted to seeing a cute kitten struggle.
Maria stepped forward and wrapped her daughter in a hug, which the rest of the set immediately took as permission to close in. Dorothea vanished into a flurry of arms, smiles, kisses on the cheek. Larry had been hugged on his ceremony, certainly — but this was something else entirely. She'd collected affection from everyone quietly, almost without anyone noticing, and now it was being returned with interest.
"Go on, then," Nain murmured, nudging me forward.
I shook her off. "I'll wait. No point throwing myself into the stampede."
She rolled her eyes. Entirely my fault — I'd taught her that.
"Thank you, everyone," Maria called out, raising her voice. "Most of you know her as Estella, but my daughter's name is Dorothea. She's had it in her head to try method acting and committed to it fully. For those of you who supported her through that — we're very grateful."
A few people gasped, genuinely surprised. I counted them, quietly content with not being the last person to find out. I was blind but not so as blind as these people.
"Sadly," Maria went on, "we won't be staying for the underwater scenes. My husband's here to collect us."
The words landed like an anchor at sea.
I turned to Nain, accusatory, but she looked just as taken aback. My mind began scrambling, assembling half-formed plans — delays, excuses, reasons for staying. I'd only just begun to believe there was time. Days, at least. Maybe a week if Julian was right about the complexity of the shoot.
The crowd closed in again, Dorothea smiling wanly, asking people to call her Thea, her eyes glassy from the affection. When things thinned out, Julian approached, apologetic.
"I'm sorry — no wrap gift ready," he said. "I thought you'd be with us longer. But we do have something."
He gestured, and a runner appeared with garment bags. "The dresses made for one Estella Havisham. All of them. Including the one you're wearing."
Dorothea thanked him earnestly. Maria, meanwhile, was already cooing over the lace and seams. She would play dress up with her doll.
Larry said his goodbyes. My grandparents followed. I stayed rooted to the spot, still convinced that if I thought hard enough I could undo the situation entirely.
For all my knowledge from the revelations, I did not know a way of making husband and wife divorce at my will.
I caught Dorothea's eye more than once — her questioning, mine evasive.
Eventually she disappeared with her mother to change out of her dress. I lingered, planning. Foolishly.
"Not going to say goodbye?" Nain asked again.
"I suppose it's quieter now," I said at last. "Let's find her."
The costume trailer was empty. Then hair and makeup — also empty. A knot tightened in my chest.
"Where could she—"
"There," Nain said softly.
At the edge of base camp, a single SUV was pulling away, tyres crunching against gravel. Too far to see faces. Too distinctive to mistake. No one else on the production drove anything like that. No one left early when we had equipment to pack for the company move.
She was gone.
I'd stood still, believing myself clever enough to fix everything, and in doing so I'd lost even the chance to say goodbye. Not to a friend, not quite — but to a rival that came once in a lifetime.
"I didn't even get to say goodbye," I said, the words tumbling out sharp and wrong. "I thought I could make her stay. I wanted to see her face at a premiere for one of my films, one day."
"Oh, hush," Nain said gently. "You'll see her again."
"I won't go to Germany just to see her," I scoffed.
"You won't have to," she said, far too calmly.
I turned to her. She was smiling — the sort that meant trouble.
"I made a wager with Maria. They live in Chelsea, you know. Not for long, I suppose."
She let the pause stretch. I held my breath.
"Do you know the secret to winning any wager?"
Gladys Price, my grandmother, let out a deep, knowing chuckle.
"You bet on an outcome that's already decided," Nain said. "I suggested a wager on location. Winner hosts. Loser travels. My real aim was already in the terms."
She squeezed my hand.
"You'll have a playdate with Thea. Dance, sing, fight for real — if you like. You push each other to excellence. That's rare. You drew in your little duel, so I suppose it'll be one visit at each house."
This wasn't goodbye.
Just an intermission.