I Wrote Their Love Story, So I Wrote Myself Out novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Last Bed in Leith

Isla rents him the loft above her cinema on four rules; on the stairs Wyatt's FaceTime demands the drive of raw footage.

It was raining sideways when the tram let me off in Leith.

I walked the last half mile with my backpack on my front, because the drive inside it could not get wet.

The Brodie Picture House sat between a chip shop and a shuttered bank.

One lamp over the door was lit and the glass case beside it held a single poster for a film from 1962.

A woman stood on a stepladder in front of the marquee, sliding black plastic letters into the board.

She had dark red hair pinned up with a pencil and a cardigan soaked through at the shoulders.

I read the board over her head.

It said CASABLANC SAT 8PM.

"You're missing an A," I said.

She looked down at me.

"I ran out of As. People guess. Can I help you?"

"I need a room for a while. I don't have a hotel."

"You've come to the wrong building. It's a cinema."

"I know," I said. "I think I'm here because of a letter."

I hadn't planned to say it.

She looked at me a moment longer, with rain running off the end of her pencil.

"Letters here are mostly from the council," she said.

She climbed down, wiped her hands on her cardigan and unlocked the door with a key off a ring of about twenty.

"I'm Isla."

"Jasper."

"There's a loft above the foyer," she said. "It was my grandmother's flat. It has a bed, a kettle and a heater that works if you hit it on the left."

"How much?"

"Cash on Fridays. Four weeks at the most, because after that I'll start to like you and have to charge you more."

"That's a rule?"

"It's the first one." She held up two fingers. "The second one is nobody goes in the projection booth without me. I have eleven thousand pounds of equipment in there that's older than both of us."

"What's the third?"

"I haven't thought of it yet. Come in out of the wet."

The foyer smelled like carpet and popcorn that had been cooked years ago.

There was a box office with a brass grille, a staircase with a velvet rope across the bottom and, past a pair of doors, the dark shape of a hundred and forty seats.

She unhooked the rope and went up ahead of me with a torch in her teeth.

The loft had a low sloped ceiling and a window that looked out over the chip shop's extractor fan.

On the bed there was a folded wool blanket with a tartan edge.

"Heater," she said, and hit it on the left.

It came on with a smell of burned dust, and she went back down to find me a towel.

I set my backpack on the floor and nodded my thanks, and my phone started ringing in my pocket.

I had turned it on in the tram.

I had sixty-three missed calls and I'd ignored every one.

This one was a video call from Wyatt.

I stood in the doorway and thought about letting it ring.

Then I answered, because I had picked up every call from Wyatt for eleven years.

His face filled the screen, bright and unshaven, with the white brick wall of the loft behind him.

"Jas! Dude! Where are you? Is that a bed? Are you in a hotel?"

"Hi, Wyatt."

"You can't just leave a party. The teleprompter's locked, the editing server won't take Dennis's login, and somebody put a stack of paper on the stand and Demi won't let anyone touch it."

"That's the script."

"I know it's the script. You didn't tell us there was a script."

"There's always a script."

He laughed, a big easy one that made the screen shake.

"Okay, okay. Look, whatever this is, come home, we'll go for a beer. Demi's been crying all night."

"Has she?"

"Well, she cried once. At the cake. Jas, come on."

Behind me, on the stairs, a step creaked.

Isla was coming back up with the towel.

She stopped halfway when Wyatt said my name.

She stood on the stairs with the towel folded over her arm and did not move.

Then she kept on up, handed me the towel without looking at the screen, and went back down.

On the phone, Wyatt had stopped smiling.

"Listen. Dennis is going to call you. Don't be weird with him. He says the whole archive belongs to the company, three years of footage, the master drive, all of it."

"It's my drive."

"It's company footage. You're a contractor, man. He showed me the paper."

He said it kindly, and he meant it kindly, which was worse.

"So he wants it by Monday," Wyatt said. "FedEx it, and he won't have to send lawyers."

I looked at my backpack on the floor, and the drive inside it, and I ended the call.

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