Rory tipped his head and swirled the dregs round in his empty glass. ‘Well, lucky her, that’s all I can say.’ He got his phone out again and refreshed his emails. ‘Come on, we’ve really got to go,’ he said, standing up, slinging his suit jacket over his arm.
Ava checked her phone. It was piling up with more messages: new dates suggested for the I’m alive!! dinner. The sweetness of friendship that she hadn’t factored on. It made her waver on the decision building inside her to defy Rory and come out to Spain anyway.
The man playing the guitar came round, proffering a hat for change. The waiter swept past, clearing their glasses from the table like magic, the teenagers blew smoke rings up at the sky, the arguing couple stood silently fuming. Ava put a euro in the hat. Rory didn’t.
‘Do you ever think that there’s still time?’ Ava asked, hand clutching her phone as they started to walk in the direction of the main road.
‘Sorry, what was that?’ Rory said, distractedly searching for a taxi, pushing his hair back from his face. ‘God, it’s so hot here.’
‘I said do you ever think there’s still time?’ she repeated, looking straight at him.
‘Still time for what?’
‘To ace your life.’
‘Me?’ he said, looking confused, ‘I am aceing it.’
Ava stared after him, amazed at his unwavering certainty as he strode away to flag down a cab. Then she looked down at the emails on her phone, everyone raring to go for the new date – I’m alive!! – and she knew that returning here on her own would disrupt the steady predictability of her life. Would answer back to all the faults in her life that had been disconcertingly exposed since the bus crash. She imagined her mother would have done it simply for the adventure. It was the very definition of I’m alive!!
And she knew she couldn’t let her brother be the reason she didn’t do it. Nor for that matter the safety of her friends. She opened a new email.
Thanks guys, for trying to rearrange, but I’m not going to make it. I’m going to be in Spain for the summer!
It was pouring with rain. Ceaseless, monotonous, Armageddon-type rain. The sky was like concrete, the horizon a mesh of cranes, half-built tower blocks and jagged scaffolding. Rory was standing in the middle of an industrial estate in East London, on the set of his current documentary project, filming the life of a mute swan and a Canada goose who had set up home in an abandoned Tesco trolley next to a small, dank excuse for a pond. The birds found fame when one of the office workers set up an Instagram and Twitter account for them – #SwanLovesGoose – and across the globe people fell for the hopelessly devoted mismatched duo.
Almost overnight the birds became a symbol of love, peace and acceptance. National treasures, they were mentioned on X Factor and the fun bit at the end of the BBC news. The horrible pond became a conservation area. And Rory snapped up all the rights immediately. As well as the documentary, there was a book written from the point of view of the female swan scheduled for release at Christmas.
‘God, why can’t they just mate? Why can’t they do something?’ Rory was dressed in his blue waterproof, the rain dripping from the peak of the hood on to his nose and into his cold Styrofoam coffee cup.
He could see the money racking up every time he glanced from his camera crew to the two overfed birds sitting on the depressingly grey water doing absolutely nothing. The old shopping trolley sat empty.
Rory used to have a lot of patience when it came to nature. He’d built his living on his ability to wait it out. After critical acclaim for his degree show film about the Michelin-starred beach café next to his grandmother’s house in Spain, he’d followed up with a documentary about the Fête de l’Escargot in France and the traditions around snail-hunting season, which shot him to prominence as one of the youngest BAFTA documentary nominees. He hadn’t won, but his name had been on people’s lips and he’d dined at No. 10, chortling with the PM over canapés. At just twenty-one his star was on the rise, but that same year his son Max had been born. Plagued by reflux, the baby hadn’t slept, the cries echoing round the flat twenty-four-seven. His wife Claire struggling and Rory exhausted, at his worst when he hadn’t had any sleep, his brain frazzled as he tried to work, money painfully tight. It was a ten-month black hole in his life. And when things started to get back to normal the wave of success seemed to have rolled on without him. No longer riding out front, he was paddling to keep up at the back, always a step out of sync. He spent ten months driving across America in search of the quintessential diner, only to find a bigger budget version of the same idea scheduled for release two months before his quiet little film. He worked harder and harder. Obsessively. And yet never bettered the French snail success. More recently, in the relentless quest for the BAFTA, he had taken on more commercial projects which he hated. He’d spent last spring on tour with a controversial young indie rock band, filming a supposed warts-and-all behind-the-scenes exposé that, while highly praised, had been a frustrating six months watching lazy teenagers sleeping, playing videogames and refusing to rehearse. To make matters worse, the BAFTA that year was nabbed by a quirky little film by a virtually unknown director who’d sprung to fame via YouTube, setting off to record the 300 different types of snow that the Eskimos were reputed to have words for.
All Rory’s hopes were now pinned on this swan and goose, which he counted on having just the right amount of commercial whimsy to bag the gong. But not only were the birds doing absolutely nothing, Rory was stressed and tired. The plane home from Spain had been delayed for hours on the runway and he still didn’t feel like he’d caught up on sleep.
He huffed back to his Portakabin, past the catering van. Larry, the chef, nodded towards the fat birds and said, ‘Not much going on, is there?’
‘No,’ Rory replied. ‘Absolutely bugger all.’
‘I’ll go home and get my rifle if you want, shoot one of them!’ Larry laughed. ‘That’d boost the ratings.’
Rory paused. That wasn’t actually a bad idea. He didn’t want to shoot one, of course, but maybe they could do something to chivvy it up a bit. He called to his assistant, ‘Petra, meeting in my office, five minutes. Get the team.’
The Portakabin was cold but dry, except for the trail of muddy footprints and the dripping of six wet jackets on the backs of a hastily assembled group of chairs. Two of the team were perched on the side of Rory’s desk. A packet of custard creams was doing the rounds.
‘Do you think this is what it’s going to be like the whole summer?’ Petra stared out the window at the rain.
George, the assistant producer, shook his head. ‘We don’t have summer in Britain any more. Global warming. We’re just going to be grey and bland forever.’
Petra made a face.
‘OK, listen,’ Rory clapped his hands together then rubbed them to warm up. ‘We need these birds to do something, pronto. And they aren’t doing it themselves. I don’t want to put them in danger, as such, I just want to spice things up. Ideas?’
The only noise was the crinkle of the custard cream packet.
‘Come on, you lot!’ Rory sat back in his swivel chair, hands behind his head. ‘This is what I pay you for. Think. What can we do with them?’
George shrugged, mouth full of biscuit. ‘We could kidnap one. Goose could handle it, I reckon.’
Petra made a sad face. ‘That would be really mean, though.’
‘Petra,’ Rory glared at her, ‘it’s not real. If we kidnap him he’ll be in this bloody Portakabin, probably eating all my biscuits,