"What were you doing in the freezer? You know I only use it to store the chandelier."

"The what?"

"It must have fallen out and hit you on the head. It's very valuable, you know. Edwardian."

Meredith noticed the dangling topaz crystals, now scattered over the floor. She opened her mouth to say something, but before she could do so, a longing moved through her. All the familiar sensations were there: the gaping belly yawn, the arterial fizz, the hardening of her nipples...

"Mummy."

"Yes."

"Can you help me with something?"

"What's that?"

"I want to have a baby of my own."

Irma pressed a damp, dirty washcloth over the b.u.mp on Meredith's forehead. "Is that all?" She laughed and patted her daughter on the cheek. "Easy-peasy."

That night Meredith's eyes snapped open in the dark. She raised herself from the bed and removed the plastic bite-plate she wore to bed each night in an effort to "deprogram" her from grinding her teeth. There would be no more sleep for now.

Fumbling around in the dim chaos of her mother's flat, she managed to open her binder-size laptop and dial up a modem connection. Cross-legged on the floor, Meredith logged on to the server and opened her account. There were eighty-six new messages, the bulk of them regarding p.e.n.i.s enlargement, mail-order college degrees, discount v.i.a.g.r.a and urgent salutations from African despots in need of a temporary overseas loan. Meredith scrolled through her in-box, deleting whole screens at a time, until suddenly she came upon a message that froze her thumb in mid-click.

To: Meredith Moore From: Dr. Joe Veil Subject: Your disappearance Dear Meredith, I hope you don't mind that I have taken the liberty to contact you via the e-mail address provided in your file, but after your exit yesterday I found myself at a loss for what to think. I hope my advice was not overly blunt. If that was what made you leave my office so abruptly, I apologize. As your doctor I felt it important to take the time to check in and make sure you are not in any kind of distress.

I hope you are well and taking good care.

Yours sincerely, Dr. Joe Veil Meredith read the note twice before even attempting to compose a reply. What to make of it? Professional obligation? Fatherly concern? Flirtation? No, Meredith did not detect a hint of that in his tone. Though, how strange that a busy gynecologist should go so far out of his way to contact a skittish patient. For all he knew she was simply a nut. What to make of this sudden interest in her behavior? She clicked on REPLY and began to type.

To: Dr. Joe Veil From: Meredith Moore Subject: Re: Your disappearance Dear Doctor, Thank you for the kind note, but I can't accept your apology. I did not leave your examination room because of any offensiveness on your part-quite the opposite. You were professional and direct, and I thank you for your concern. I am currently away on business but will make an appointment with one of your colleagues upon my return.

Sorry if I alarmed you by leaving so abruptly. It wasn't like me to run away. I guess I haven't been myself lately. Perhaps it's the biological twitch twitching. You'd probably know better than me. You're the doctor.

Sorry again, Meredith

6.

Meredith didn't mind being called the continuity girl. Over the past year or so, however, she had begun to wonder whether she ought to be slightly embarra.s.sed by the t.i.tle. Like so many otherwise driven women, her greatest fear was not having a lack of authority but having a surplus of it. Too much power (she had to admit it) made her feel less...feminine. She waited anxiously for the terrible day some third-a.s.sistant-director film school grad would turn around and unthinkingly call her "the script lady." That would be the day she'd quit.

In recent years, the industry had been called to task for its use of outdated terminology, particularly when describing jobs traditionally occupied by women or gay men (this being show business, there were lots of both). Since Meredith had started working on set, producers had been forced, in official contexts at least, to hire makeup artists instead of "pretties," actors instead of "talent," and background artists instead of "extras." It wasn't that anyone on set actually talked any differently than they used to, just that everybody now had two job t.i.tles instead of one. Meredith's twin t.i.tle was script supervisor, but thankfully no one called her that. She was still performing what the trade considered a young woman's job, and she wanted to keep it that way.

Of course, in a way, she had quit. Walked off Felsted's set with the bleary intention of getting out of show business altogether. (There had been the occasional intention of enrolling in cooking school, until she remembered nearly fainting the time she had to "dress" the turkey giblets at Elle's house one Christmas, and the thought pa.s.sed.) But here she was in London, back on set and in the thick of it all. Toughing it out with a bunch of men who in all likelihood resented her presence more than they appreciated it.

But that was where the similarities to any previous job ended. Richard Gla.s.s was an altogether different sort of director from those she had worked with in Toronto. For one thing, he was slender and almost girlish looking. And he wore suits-unhemmed pants and monogrammed shirts so worn you could see his flat penny-size nipples through the fabric.

While most directors tended to be brusque and proud of their macho to-the-pointness, Richard seemed to have all the time in the world for silly small talk and pranks. Like others in his position, he spent a lot of time flirting with the actresses (whispering in their ears, placing a supportive hand on the small of their backs), but unlike most, he flirted with everyone else on set as well. He slipped and slithered about the set all day, offering every individual the unexpected treat of his undivided, if momentary, attention. In this way he managed to charm every member of the crew into carrying out his orders without ever raising his voice.

Meredith had been on the set for eight days of the forty-day shoot and was coping well enough so far. The film was a Victorian period murder mystery/romantic comedy starring Kathleen Swain, an American starlet coming to the end of her bankable period. In it, she played a spinster pathologist who falls in love with a brooding detective while performing autopsies on the bodies of the prost.i.tute victims of a Jack-the-Ripper-like murderer. The film was financed on the slope of Swain's cheekbones.

The project's backer was the mysterious and never-present Osmond Crouch, who, it was widely rumoured, was a former lover of Swain's. In his place, Mr. Crouch (as everyone called him on set) had sent a line producer to oversee the shoot. Dan b.u.t.ton, an overgrown Scottish goth boy, minced about in a black trench coat and skull boots, looking terrified to talk to anyone. He couldn't be more than thirty, Meredith thought, and yet Crouch had for some reason sent him here to oversee the production of a twenty-million-dollar movie. Twenty million! That's what this pimply monkey of a boy, this wannabe vampire, was in charge of. It boggled the mind. While most of the hands-on crew generally ignored b.u.t.ton, the director would occasionally slip off with him for a little chat. b.u.t.ton would invariably emerge from Richard's trailer flushed with pleasure, and for the rest of the day would skulk more happily around the set, occasionally tap-tap-tapping his walking staff to the tune of some dark, internal symphony.

The crew was setting up in a large empty warehouse s.p.a.ce on the third floor of a nearly condemned East End building when Meredith arrived for her call time of seven thirty a.m. She grabbed a juice from the "tea cart" (funny Brits) and unfolded her tiny portable camp stool in a quiet corner, then began her day's logging. Hauling a binder out of her bag and wiping the crumbs from its surface (a packet of airplane pretzels had somehow escaped its packaging), she examined the day's pages for the third time that morning. The script had been changed so many times by Gla.s.s and the writer that it was now an unruly rainbow of candy-colored revision pages. Every revised page in the script was dated and printed on a different-colored page from the one before. The rotation, according to protocol, began with white and was followed by blue, pink, yellow, green and goldenrod (Meredith had never understood why they didn't just call it orange). The scene they were shooting today (which involved a fight, a kiss and a bad guy being set on fire and thrown out of a fifth-story window) was printed out on white paper-double white-which meant it had been rewritten exactly six times so far. Meredith would not be the least bit surprised if handwritten blue revisions-double blues-appeared and had to be stapled into her binder. Usually, by the time shooting began, Meredith knew the script so well, had read it and made so many detailed notes on it, divided it into eighths (for scheduling purposes, all scripts were organized this way-Meredith's job was to keep track of the shooting times of each eighth of a page) and numbered all the scenes and shots, that she felt she could recite the thing by heart. Nevertheless, she now studied the scene once more.

Act 1, Scene 6 Int. Empty Victorian garment factory-the scene of the crime.

The voices of Celia and David can be heard off camera as they make their way up the stairs.

CELIA (OFFSCREEN).

Once again, Inspector, I'm not sure what you think you're going to find here that the police already haven't.

Int. stairwell.

David is helping Celia up the rickety steps.

She struggles a bit and tears her petticoat on a nail.

CELIA.

Good heavens.

DAVID.

Are you all right, miss?

CELIA (IRRITATED).

Yes, yes, fine. To be perfectly honest, Inspector, I'd be a great deal better if I was back at the morgue doing some useful work.

DAVID.

My dear Miss Hornby, thank you again for your skepticism, but surely as a doctor you must agree that no hair can be left unturned, particularly when lives are at stake.

Just this snippet, Meredith knew, would take most of the morning to get on film. First a camera setup for the interior of the factory, then another for the stairwell. They would shoot the interior scenes of the factory first, and likely get to the stairwell segment later. Meredith made a mental note to ensure the wardrobe people had provided a visibly ripped petticoat for Celia in the interior garment factory scenes.

The truth was, for all her copious work and attention to detail, few directors or editors even looked at the continuity notes anymore. Schedules could be generated by computer. The log was kept more out of tradition and protocol than genuine need. The bulk of Meredith's job was to record the difference between what was on the page and what was shot. If dialogue was added or cut, Meredith made note. If an actor strayed into an unscripted moment of genius or folly, she noted that too. If anything changed from the original plan, she was on it. Her first loyalty, as continuity girl, was to the script.

She removed a ruler from her case and darkened the dividing lines of eighths using her sharpest pencil. Then she flipped forward in her binder to the Daily Continuity Log sheet, on which she would take careful note of the setup, scene and slate (the clappy board) number, as well as shot time, pages shot and, most important, which take of which shots the director wanted the lab to print and send out to the editor. With her Polaroid camera, digital stopwatch, binder and sharpened pencil, Meredith would record and keep track of even the most seemingly unimportant detail on the set, from the exact time (down to a quarter of a second) the crew broke for lunch, to the precise measurement of the rip on the hem of the actress's petticoat. She would keep notes for the a.s.sistant editor in a daily log, recording the scene, slate, time and print numbers for him to note when he looked over the rushes in the following days.

Meredith was the editor's eye on set. They were in it together, she and he (in this case, a grumpy little Glaswegian named Rowan, who lived and worked in a dark suite deep in the Hammersmith riverbed). As the rest of the crew busily manufactured random narrative fragments out of time and out of context, Meredith kept the order in her daily logbooks so that the editor could put the story back together again.

The grips were setting up a camera across the room, wheeling around dollies, taping down wires and trading lame jokes. No sign of Richard. Meredith took the moment of calm to take stock of her kit-opened her black nylon pack and accounted for its contents by touch.

Script in script binder-check. Book light for night scenes-check. Wite-Out-check. Victorian slang dictionary-check. Polaroid camera and extra film-check. Pencils and sharpener-check. Hat, mitts, scarf for outdoor shooting-check. Envelopes: legal size-check. Eraser-check. Organic yogurt and Fuji apple for lunch-check. Waterproof felt pens-check. Reinforced three-hole paper-check. One-hole punch-check. Paper clips-check. Ruler-check. Self-stick three-hole-paper reinforcements...self-stick three-hole-paper reinforcements...no! Where were the freaking self-stick three-hole-paper reinforcements?

Meredith took in air and closed her eyes. Yes, she was sure she had noted them the first time she completed the checklist that day, just before leaving the flat at dawn. The self-stick three-hole-paper reinforcements were a small but essential tool for her job. Without them, she would have to punch holes in her blank paper, clip them into the binder and simply trust that they would stay secure. If a careless technician b.u.mped against her while she was working, or if her binder slid off her knees onto the floor (as it often did if she was absorbed in watching the monitor or talking to the director and forgot to steady it with her elbow), then carefully compiled pages of log sheets would be in danger of detaching at their weakest, unprotected spots. Columns of painstakingly listed shot details could be damaged or, worse yet, lost completely. What if she wasn't looking when a page ripped off and got stuck on the second AD's boot as he walked by, barking call times into his walkie-talkie? By the time Meredith noticed the missing log sheet it could be six hours and two setups later. The page could have been swept up by the cleaners, dumped into the dustbin, bagged and ready for the afternoon pickup. It would be too late to get the page back, impossible to remember all the relevant details, a disservice to the editor and the director-and she would be fired. For the second time in her life. And all because her brand-new packet of self-stick paper reinforcements had probably slipped beneath her dusty little bed.

Meredith felt her guts constrict. There was a pounding in her ears. It was not impossible she would die. People died all the time. Cells exploded in their brains or their throats just swelled shut. She reached deep into her pack and found the inner pocket containing a small bottle that held a dozen or so dissolvable half-doses of Ativan from a prescription she had filled four years before after a particularly bad breakup. She wrapped her hand around the bottle and the imminent-death feeling gradually faded.

She'd spent enough time in therapy to know her anxiety was likely brought on by the sudden close proximity to her mother. But Irma was trying her best. She had somehow arranged this job, hadn't she? And she was supportive of the donor quest-devoting herself to the task of setting up Meredith with a suitable specimen using every connection available to her.

And Irma's connections were considerable. In spite (or perhaps because of) her immutable eccentricity, she had compiled a network of friends and ex-lovers who ranged across London society. She belonged to half the clubs in the city and was well known in the others. There were dinners and book launches and pub quizzes to attend several times a week. Irma sat on a number of boards and governing committees of art galleries, a library and a major literary prize. While she never contributed anything in the way of actual work in these postings, she amused her fellow artocrats by telling animated stories of the old days of Notting Hill-hanging out with the arty crowd, dropping liquid acid and sipping Campari on the rooftops. She was, and always had been, a hit wherever she went. And now, for the first time ever, Irma finally had something to offer her daughter: a rich and varied social life.

On Wednesday, Meredith was to attend a dinner at the Chelsea Arts Club with her mother. Perhaps the father of her child would be there.

Meredith pushed these thoughts from her mind and forced herself to concentrate on the job at hand. Richard was striding across the set, right hand pitchforked deep into his bale of brown hair. He obviously needed something big from her, and Meredith resolved to make herself useful.

"Meredith. Heavenly to see you. Turns out you're just the person I was looking for." Richard covered his heart with ten long white fingers and bowed like a courtier. There was a slightly sarcastic inflection to everything he said or did, as if his entire life were one elaborate adolescent boarding-school prank. Meredith felt very slow and cement-witted whenever he was around. She stood up.

"Sir?"

"Listen." He lowered his voice to a clamp-toothed whisper. "We have a rather serious crisis on our hands-one that I think you could help to diffuse by employing your..." He searched. "Womanly charms."

"I'm sorry?"

"I'm afraid it's Miss Swain." He winced and looked around to make sure none of the crew members were in earshot. "She's-how to put this delicately?-having a bit of a hissy fit at the moment. A sort of a does-my-a.s.s-look-fat-in-this-dress tantrum. In her trailer. Won't come out. It's all quite ridiculous, but she's utterly inconsolable-by me at any rate. She's already scared the wardrobe stylist off set, and if she doesn't calm down shortly I'm afraid Dan could be next in line." He glanced across the warehouse to where Dan b.u.t.ton sat dejectedly polishing the carved ivory k.n.o.b on his walking stick with a shammy.

"That's awful," said Meredith, feeling confused. Swain's diva antics were hardly surprising, but Richard's confidence in her was. Continuity supervisors had little contact with the actors, apart from annoying them by taking Polaroids of their costumes or reminding them to back-match their lines to their actions. Meredith preferred it this way. Actors were unpredictable, self-obsessed and invariably unstable. No good could come of befriending them. She worked around them like a stable hand sweeping out a thoroughbred's stall.

"You see, Meredith, what I was wondering was-and no pressure, by the way, although to be perfectly honest, at this point the entire balance of the show does depend upon it-if you wouldn't mind talking to her, American woman to American woman."

"But I'm Canadian."

Richard corrected his stoop and looked over Meredith's shoulder toward a team of grips a.s.sembling weights on the back of a crane. "Ms. Swain's trailer is the third on the left. The first setup should be complete in half an hour." The conversation was over.

As she made her way to the line of trailers (affectionately referred to as "the circus") Meredith marveled at how archaic the average film set was. In an era when computers could be chess champions and compose original symphonies, cinema was clunky up close. The makeup artist applied blue lipstick to the mouth of the girl playing the corpse; and fake blood-a mixture of gelatin, water and purple food coloring-was splattered at the scene by a propsmaster wielding a child's plastic squirt gun. Cameras were still laboriously rigged on the outside of cars, fastened to the top of cranes or mounted Snugli-style on the chest of the Steadicam operator.

Meredith felt more of an affinity with the camera than with any of her breathing colleagues on set. She and the lens had certain things in common. They were both dispa.s.sionate observers valued for their ability to meticulously record details without judgment or embellishment. Immovable in their pedantry, both were utterly indispensable to the process.

The door of Kathleen Swain's trailer was slightly ajar. Meredith tapped twice and stood frozen on the floating stainless steel stoop, listening for signs of life. After a half minute or so, she knocked again.

"Oh, what now?" That unmistakable sandpaper drawl.

The words sounded scripted to Meredith. What now, is right, she thought. Her hands were trembling. Maybe she should have taken that Ativan.

Meredith spoke-but did not look-into the crack in the aluminum door frame. "Ms. Swain, my name is Meredith Moore. I supervise continuity on the set and I was just wondering if I could maybe help you with anything."

A stocking-clad toe appeared around the edge of the door and tugged it open. Inside, the trailer smelled mysteriously of baby powder and Chardonnay (or was it cat pee?). In a far corner a makeup girl was crumpled on a stool, sniffling into the industrial-size cosmetic kit on her lap. Swain lay on the daybed beside the door, wrapped like a California roll in what appeared to be a velvet curtain, complete with rod. Her face was covered with what Meredith thought were bandages, but on closer inspection turned out to be a pair of white cotton gloves.

"Continuity, huh?" she said, peering out from between her fingers. "Courtney, you're free to go."

The makeup girl clamped her kit shut and shuffled out, giving Meredith a miserable glance as she pa.s.sed.

Only when the door was shut tight did the actress take her hands away from her face. Meredith saw what she had already known: that in spite of age, stress, a slightly overzealous collagen injection artist and a layer of troweled-on camera makeup, Swain was still very beautiful.

"You're not English," Swain said. "But you're not American either. That makes you Canadian."

"How'd you know?"

"I've been to Toronto a bunch of times." She stretched her arms above her head and yawned like a bored housecat. "In 1982 for The Taste of Honey, then in '87 for The Sorceress, then '91 for Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jones. I got a Golden Globe nom for that one, you know. A complete surprise. And then I was there in 1998 for the opening of Blue Orchid. Oh G.o.d, Valentino sent me this dress the night before and it didn't fit so I had to get it pinned. Terrible picture. Anyway, Toronto's not such a bad town. Do you ever go to Bistro 990?"

"Sometimes," Meredith lied.

"Well, good. You're practically American, then. I just get sick of all these English people all the time. They're so...shifty. You can never tell if they're joking. And the men all smell funny. Sort of sad and sweet-"

"It's the detergent."

"What?" Swain had removed one cotton glove and was peeling a coating of pink paraffin wax from her previously concealed hand.

"It's the cheap laundry detergent they use. I forget the brand name. It smells like a dead marriage."

"Yes, exactly! It's awful. Oh G.o.d, I'm so glad you noticed it too. I honestly thought I was going crazy." Swain laughed long and hard, and after a little while Meredith joined in.

"Have a seat." Swain motioned to the kitchenette table across the room, a whole two feet away. "Welcome to my movie star trailer," she said, p.r.o.nouncing the term "moovee schtaa" in her best mid-Atlantic lockjaw.

Meredith wasn't sure if she was joking.

"You see, Meredith, the thing about acting, the truly rotten, vicious thing about it, is not the scrutiny, the superficiality, the endless rounds of boring interviews. Most of my colleagues have got it all wrong. They're complaining about the good things. The really rotten thing is the people. The people are awful. I mean, most people are. But show people? The worst. And the higher up the food chain you go, the worse it gets. Me? I am a Hollywood movie star. In other words, a monster. As bad as it gets. You know what they say?"

Meredith shook her head.

"People in drama like drama."

"I've heard that."