‘Oh,’ he said, surveying the coins. ‘I need a bit more than that. I’ve got to pay for my website hosting tomorrow or else it will all come crashing down.’
‘Is anything actually on your site yet?’
‘Well, no, but I have to pay rent on it still, otherwise I’ll lose the domain name, or something. Sorry. My Solo card is up to its limit, and mum said she can’t give me any more money this month. Can you lend me, like, fifty, that should cover it? Sorry, I hate to ask…’
As if on cue, the opening beats to The Littlest Hobo bleated out like a cacophony into her left ear. And the snooze fest was over with a thud. Holly punched the ‘stop’ button on her phone, and resolved to change the once-nostalgic-now-infuriating alarm tone at the next available opportunity. She sat upright, shook her hair, and rubbed the sleep dust from her eyes. Keep calm, she told herself. Yes, he’s the only person she knew that still took money from his parents. Yes, it was the third time she’d lent him money in as many weeks. But these were all things she should think and not say, in order to prevent an outbreak of world war three.
‘Um, how to put this without sounding like a naggy old hag. Did you not hear me the other day when I said my job is currently hanging in the balance? This is radical but – have you ever thought about getting a part-time job, or something? Just for a bit, so you can catch up on your finances a little?’
‘Oh here we go. By the way Holly, it’s really NOT sexy how much you sound like my dad sometimes. “I don’t know why you don’t go in for bar work, or take a Saturday job as a labourer,”’ he said, mocking his dad’s West Country accent. Holly couldn’t help giggling at his performance, even if it was designed to wind her up. Bollocks, why did he have to be funny, even when he was being a knob?
‘Folly,’ he said, back to his normal accent, ‘we’ve been through this before. I need all the time in the day to work on my films. On my reel. On keeping in shape. So I don’t have time – that’s reason number one. Reason number two: If I have a part-time job – for example – an usher at a crap musical, I’ll just feel shit about myself, and I’ll be too tired and deflated to work on my directing stuff. Then before I know it, I’ll actually BECOME an usher. That will be my life. People will look at me while I shine a light to their seats at We Will Rock You and they’ll say, “Oh there goes that nice usher man again. I wonder how many years of training he took to get there.”’
Holly rolled her eyes and tried to call to mind all the reasons she was with him. Funny. Intelligent. Caring (sometimes). Gorgeous. She checked them all off, and then began to dig around in her hard drive of happy memories. The day he’d taken her to the seaside as a surprise, and they’d ended up sleeping on the beach under the stars. The time she’d been to stay with his family in Cornwall and they’d all played guitar karaoke together out in their garden. And… and… But the images were beginning to fade; the more Lawrence wittered on, the more pixelated the halcyon days became…
‘Don’t you see, Holly? The money saved will be nullified by the psychological damage incurred – which will slowly become my undoing.’
…until they were gone entirely, and all she could see standing in front of her was an absolute tool.
‘Surely you can understand that, Hol?’ the tool was saying.
She sat up in bed and stared at him.
‘Lawrence. Just for a second, pretend that your parents aren’t around to help you out, and to pay your bills. You wouldn’t just give up on being a director, would you? You’d find a way?’
Lawrence appeared to have stopped listening. He was shoving clothes into a bag, no discernible logic to his approach. He calmly upturned the entire contents of his underwear drawer. In amongst the pants and old coins, there fell a bottle of lighter fluid, some cigarette filter tips and an old Pringles tube. He pocketed the change, and left the drawer and its offspring all over the floor.
Whenever Holly watched him packing for anything, or getting ready to go out, it was like watching small hand grenades being detonated one after the other. And yet none of this bothered Lawrence, who remained calm throughout as he moved on to dragging a massive holdall down from the top of the wardrobe. As he did, a thousand more things came cascading down all around, knocking other things flying.
‘You know, Lawry, maybe you’d even feel proud of yourself, for getting there on your own? Besides – when did you last actually do a proactive film anyway? I’d really love for us to work on Mind the Gap. If you could only help me write it. I know you had some doubts about it, but I can really imagine it having a powerful twist at the end!’
‘All right, maybe.’
Holly felt the good kind of butterflies kick off in her belly. ‘Yay! How about we try and make it in time to enter into the next Future Shorts?’
‘Okay. Sure. Just as soon as I’ve finished wading through corporate sludge for Barclays. And once I’ve built my website.’
‘You’ve been saying that for years.’
‘Have you ever tried to understand HTML? It’s, like, harder than Mandarin! Anyway, we both know this isn’t really about coding, is it? This is about that giant chip you’ve got on your shoulder, isn’t it? That, just because my parents have been supportive, it’s somehow my fault that yours aren’t?’
‘All I’m saying is, I’ve always had to do part-time jobs to get by, and it’s not done me any harm.’
‘But I don’t have time! No offence Folly, but editing’s nowhere near as competitive or hard to get into as directing, is it?’
‘I’m sorry? What did you just say?’
Lawrence inched away, a look of fear on his face.
‘Do you think I just filled out an application form? Did my job just fall into my lap from the sky? No – I did twelve months of unpaid internships while also working in an effing call centre!’
Holly climbed out of bed and began throwing things into a bag. She cast a look at herself in a nearby mirror. Catastrophic bags under the eyes, and a spot the size of Copenhagen brewing… but she could probably just manage the journey home looking like this. Provided she held her head down and avoided all eye contact. Anything but stay here a minute longer. She had just hit her Lawrence Limit. And in her experience, it was always better to walk away when this happened. She pulled on her jeans, and shoved her red hoody on over her head. ‘I’ll do a transfer when I get home,’ she said, her voice measured.
Lawrence looked humbled for a moment. ‘Thanks baby. Look I’m sorry; I didn’t mean it to sound like that. I’ll walk with you to the bus if you wait five minutes. Don’t you want a shower or something?’
‘No, I’ll have a bath when I get home.’
‘Holly,’ he said, taking her by the shoulders and looking her in the eye.
‘Womble.’
Holly broke away and picked up her bag.
He grabbed Georgia and started to pick out a familiar tune. ‘Feels like nothing matters… in our private universe…’ he sang.
Arses, thought Holly, trying to keep her armour in place. It was, to use so saccharine a phrase, ‘their song’. It was also so ludicrously moving that it could engender a tear in the most stony-hearted of folk. But not today. Right now, the dulcet early-nineties tones of Crowded House just weren’t up to the job.
‘Goodbye, Lawrence.’
‘You know, Holly, it’s actually not my fault that I have supportive parents,’ he began.
Oh, here it comes, she thought. Any moment now he’ll step on the hidden tripwire