Page 7 of Keep It

“Goodbye.”

What. The. Actual. Fuck. Did I just get a job on a Gwendoline Marcs feature film in a five-minute phone call? I check the time on my screen – scratch that three minutes and twelve seconds. My stomach soars and I laugh incredulously.

I sent a text to Rosie full of exclamation marks and ring my mum immediately.

“Salut,monpetitcabbage.” Mum chirps down the phone.

“Mum I got the job!” I screech.

“What job?” Mum exclaims, matching my energy even without any information.

“A job on a Gwendoline Marcs feature!”

“Gwendoline Marcs! Wow!”

I laugh, “You don’t know who that is do you?”

“Well no, but you do.” Mum says. “Go on, tell me everything.”

I stumble over my words telling the whole story from the demented smoke machine to Rosie’s text to the call with Devon. Mum interrupts with the appropriate exclamations.

“So when do you start?”

“I don’t know yet, I’ll get the contract in soon.”

“I’m so proud of you, cabbage.” Mum had been calling me cabbage ever since I was a child. She used to say the French term of endearment until I was old enough to know what it meant. I used to be so cross that my mum was calling me a root vegetable that Sabine Bonnet started to just call me Cabbage just to wind me up. And it stuck.

“Uh, there is one thing.” I play with the end of my hair.

“What?”

“I told them I have a base in Paris.”

Silence.

“Why did you say that?”

“I don’t know! I panicked.” I pull at my lip tentatively. “Do you think Aunt Claudette will let me stay at hers?”

I hear mum’s sigh down the phone.

“Please?” I ask. My mother and her sister do not have an easy relationship. I’ve never really known why they don’t get on but I always know to approach the subject gently.

“Mum,” I say quietly.

“I’ll text her,” she huffs. “But if she says no then you’re going to have to start searching.”

I pump my fist. “Thankyouthankyouthankyou.”

Later, after I’ve been to visit Steve and put in my notice, I’m opening a bottle of supermarket prosecco when a text comes through from mum.

Mum: Claudette is ‘summering’ in the Alps so her apartment is all yours.

The bottle pops and I feel like an Formula 1 driver, basking in my victory.

Chapter 4

ANYA

---