Time is a healer

*Trigger warning: Mentions of mental health and cancer*

Leila grabbed her thermos of coffee and slipped out of the door of her trailer, her breath transforming into a vortex of fog as the cold shocked her into a gasp. Pulling her trailer door shut, she grasped the collar of her massive black puffer coat and jumped down onto the tarmac below her.

‘Good morning Ms Knight!’ a chirpy voice erupted from Leila’s left.

‘Hello,’ Leila replied politely, a little startled.’I don’t want to sound rude, but who are you, hun?’

‘Tilly, I’m your intern assistant for this shoot. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here Ms Knight.’

‘Oh call me Leila. Don’t worry, I’m not one of those terrible actors who must be treated like god’s gift. Normality rules in my house.’ Tilly's shoulders dropped at least two inches, and her smile relaxed.

‘Thank god for that. The last celeb I interned for, and I won’t name names, was awful. He insisted on no first names, and I always stayed at least a metre away from him. Something to do with the smell of polyester in my clothes.’

‘That sounds uncannily familiar,’ Leila laughed. There was a great deal many celebrities she could recall with similar aversions to non-luxury fabrics. ‘I’m sorry you went through that.’

‘No, don’t worry. I know what I signed up for. I grew up with two big brothers, I’ve been training for this my whole life.’

The two laughed and then commenced walking together. Leila took a sip of tea from her thermos, and her eye became drawn to the clipboard grasped tightly by Tilly’s reddening fingers. She found herself struck by the shortness of the list.

‘I thought we were doing a whole day of stunt training today. This schedule finishes at 1 pm. Has it been updated?’ the actress queried, gesturing a gloved finger at the paper that was left blank just over halfway down, at least six lines shorter than the schedule she had received only the day before.

‘Something to do with the trainer. She can only do a few hours at a time. Didn’t say why. The producers don’t seem too concerned about missing the deadline, she’s one of the best in the business right now. Plus I believe she wanted the chance to get to know you better, and spend the afternoon with you.’

‘Oh, okay,’ was all Leila said.

The two continued getting to know one another on the 10-minute walk to the gym hall where the stunt training would take place at the studios. Tilly had grown up in London and was hoping to become a director in her own right some day. Leila admired that ambition. Unlike her own dreams of becoming an actress, Tilly was willing to work from the ground up to achieve her success, a fear that she may never even achieve in the next decade let alone her lifetime. Leila’s own achievements had been purely up to chance. She had been part of a small acting group in Bournville, where she had grown up, and they were given the chance to perform one of their plays for charity one night at the Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham. It was Romeo and Juliet, and she was the leading lady, but only because she was the understudy and Sarah Lewis was off sick with pneumonia. There was a scout, looking for a young actress for a small film role in a blockbuster film, and she had impressed them. Enough for them to seek her out that very evening and offer her an audition, and free flights to Los Angeles in order to do so. Everything after that had been built off of that one lucky success, one charity performance. It had often been a topic of discussion with Leila’s therapist, her denial that any of her achievements were her own doing and not the result of chance that Sarah had caught such a bad chest infection after a camping trip the week before. It could easily have been her walking toward that gymnasium that day with Tilly, and not Leila. That’s how she felt, anyway.

They reached the gym and Leila pulled open the door, letting Tilly in and out of the cold first, then following herself. Tilly led her to a private changing room, where Leila left her coat, her matching Gymshark set ready underneath. She took the flask with her, knowing that a morning of punching, kicking and careful sparring would be no good without a few sips of chai to keep her energies up. She rejoined Tilly outside, who led her to the massive gym hall, ready with all the soft mats and equipment they might be using for the practices of the morning.

This wasn’t the first round of stunt training that Leila had ever gone through. Her second film was a post-apocalyptic dystopian blockbuster when she was 18, and that had been fairly brutal. As a new actress, she thought it only appropriate that she learn the stunts herself rather than have a stunt double do it for her. She had feared that if she didn’t learn to do it herself, they would find another more talented actress to replace her. She’d also done a police drama for a couple of years which required a great deal of arms training, alongside close combat, so she had an idea of what she was in for. 

Tilly sat to the side with the other interns and assistants, while Leila met with the other actors and attempted some small talk while stretching. It wasn’t the first time she’d met them, though she hadn’t worked with any of them before. They had all met a few weeks earlier, for screen tests followed by a full read-through of the script. They still seemed quite nervous around her, the actress with the most screen titles to her name, but she wasn’t the star of this particular project. A young man named Marcus Peters, a boy only as old as she had been when she started starring in movies. Most of the cast was younger than her, and the movie was about a group of teenagers on a coming-of-age adventure, and Leila was playing Marcus’ character’s mother. The teenagers would face a ‘great evil’ and Leila the doting mother had to fight all manner of monsters to help them. A bit of a fun project for her, as her most recent was a dark thriller for Netflix that had taken her down some morbid paths in order to relate to the character being played. 

A loud clapping brought the actors all to attention, and Leila herded the others over to the central mat as a woman in a cap approached, probably Sam, the stunt professional who would be training them for the morning. It quickly became apparent why she was only able to train for the morning, as she walked on a prosthetic on her left leg that came up to her knee. But the greatest shock came when she lifted her head, her face no longer concealed by the black baseball cap that sat low on her head. 

‘Sammie?’ Leila asked, a smile reaching her lips, and the woman smiled in return.

‘I wondered if you would remember,’ she grinned back, as Leila took a step forward to hug Sammie with one hand, the other woman reciprocating with both of her own.

‘How long has it been? It must be 17 years since I last saw you!’ Leila exclaimed as she released her old friend, taking in her features. She had barely aged a day, still, that youthfulness in her dimples, though her eyes were wiser.

‘About that, yeah,’ Sam replied. ‘I couldn’t miss the opportunity to work with you. To see if you remembered.’ Leila turned to face her confused colleagues.

‘Sammie and I went to school together. We were best friends,’ Leila reassured them, and a flurry of Oh’s bounced around the room.

‘That’s so cool,’ Marcus piped up, stepping forward to offer Sammie his hand, which she accepted. ‘As if, after all these years. Very spooky. Did you know she was in the industry, Leila?’

‘I had no idea, I’ve been a terrible friend. I went to LA and didn’t manage to keep in touch. Social media wasn’t what it is now back then. Sammie, I thought you dreamed of being an athlete, I never thought to look into you in this industry.’

‘We’ll have plenty of time to catch up after training. Don’t want them to sack me for chatting on my first day here,’ she laughed. ‘I’ve saved us some time this afternoon to hang out if you don’t mind? I can’t train all day, so I thought we could make something of this afternoon.’

‘Of course, yes, sorry. Well seeing as you’re the one who cleared my schedule, I’ll use it wisely. Tilly honey, could you make sure my afternoon is down as unavailable?’ she called over, and Tilly's head bopped up from its slouched position, and nodded vigorously, her hands lifting to make some notes on her phone.

After one last fond smile, Samme stepped back, and the training commenced.

After several hours of difficult sparring, Leila left her changing room, hair freshly dried after a quick shower. Black coat reapplied, she walked out to the entrance to find the rest of the actors already there, two of them vaping so the smell of sickly sweet candyfloss. Sammie was stood a few steps away, clicking away at her phone. Leila said her goodbyes to her colleagues and Tilly, and walked over to Sammie, greeting her again.

‘Want to go get some lunch? Tilly ordered some to be sent to my trailer, so it should be there by the time we get back?’ Leila offered.

‘Sounds great, lead the way.’ 

They walked in silence for a minute, before Sammie piped up again.

‘So how have you been? I obviously know pretty much everything about your career at this point, not many people don’t, but I paid a particular interest, obviously.’

‘Not too bad, it’s hard to complain,’ Leila sighed. ‘It’s not been the best year, but things are starting to look up.’

‘Yeah, I heard about your divorce. Sounded messy. I hated what the tabloids said about you here, they’re right shits. I don’t know how you cope without going mad.’

‘I have a very expensive therapist,’ Leila joked, and Sammie smiled. ‘My daughter got me through it, and thank god for her honestly. She’s three, and the only good thing to come out of that marriage.’ 

‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out. You seemed like such a good couple when you got married.’

‘This is so bizarre, you know almost everything about my life, and I know nothing that’s happened to you,’ Leila deflected, having talked about her personal life one too many times. ‘If you don’t mind me asking… what happened to your leg?’

‘I don’t mind you asking, don’t worry,’ Sammie laughed, looking down at her concealed prosthetic. ‘Well, you know I wanted to be an athlete? I was training to do Judo at the Olympics?’

‘Yeah, I remember. You were in one of the local teams.’

‘Well I was training, and fell. Bruised my leg straight away. But it didn’t heal properly. My trainer suggested I get it checked, and it turned out to be leukaemia. We caught it fairly early, but the treatment took a long time. By the time I was all clear, I was way behind where I would need to be. A couple of months later the bruising started again and it turned out the cancer was back. They couldn’t save my leg that time.’

‘Sammie, I’m so sorry. That’s awful. I wish I’d known, I would have come back to visit.’

‘No, you’ve been far too busy, and you were there in a way. Watching you’re films and tv shows while I was going through treatment was a brilliant distraction. The cancer was tough, but it wasn’t the hardest part. Realising I couldn’t do what I’d dreamed of for so long, and even then I was too old to train for the Paralympics. I had to start from the beginning again.’

‘I’m guessing that’s where the stunt work came in?’

‘Yeah, eventually. I found a trainer who would take me on as an intern. Wasn’t the nicest guy, but needed to fill the diversity quota and I ticked every box going. Gay, Indian and disabled, he didn’t need to hire anyone else out of his perfect little box. But he was one of the best, and I was able to start my own company a couple of years ago.’

‘I can’t believe it, Sammie that’s wonderful. You should be so proud of what you’ve achieved.’

‘Me so proud? Bloody hell, look at you! You’re an all-star, what you always dreamed of. I can’t believe how far you’ve come.’

‘I got lucky. You got what you achieved purely through hard work. I might as well have been handed all this on a silver platter.’

‘I don’t believe that for a second,’ Sammie scoffed, looking at me. ‘A black woman from Birmingham making it in Hollywood? Unheard of. You had to have something special to make it out there, and you did. And I never doubted you.’

That statement caught Leila by surprise. She was normally numbed to praise, talk show hosts doling it out like chocolate, but hearing it this way from someone who had known her before caused a pang in her chest and a stinging behind her eyes.

‘Thanks,’ she said thickly, taking the final sip of her tea. She caught Sammie’s eye, who was grinning. ‘What?’

‘Chai tea? You haven’t changed at all,’ Sammie chuckled warmly, bumping her arm with her elbow.

‘Oh,’ Leila laughed back. ‘Yeah, it’s essential on my rider. Nowhere near as special as the stuff your mum made us when we were kids. How are your parents?’

‘My dad passed away a couple of years ago. My mum is fine though, still lives in the same house. I visit her once a week, even though I live in London now. Take the kids sometimes.’

‘You have kids?’ Leila exclaimed, gripping Sammie’s forearm with her free hand.

‘They’re not technically mine, I can’t after all the chemo. They’re my fiancees. She had them with her ex-husband, but now that we’re getting married I’m in the process of adopting them. They still see their dad a lot, and we’re actually good friends too. It’s all very modern and amicable.’

‘That’s amazing though, you always wanted kids. I bet your mum spoils them bloody rotten.’

‘She does, they love her.’

They arrived at Leila’s trailer, opening the door to the smell of the one thing that Leila could possibly have ordered for the two of them after all this time.

‘You did not order McDonald's to a film set Leila Knight,’ Sammie squealed, jumping up into the trailer and checking the bags. ‘A fillet of fish you fucking diamond.’

Leila giggled, shutting the door behind them.

They continued chatting as they ate, reminiscing over everything they had missed over the years. They quickly realised it was like no time had passed at all. They bounced off one another like magnets.

‘Are you happy with how things turned out?’ Sammie queried. ’I’ve always wondered. It can’t be easy, becoming an overnight star.’

‘It’s not easy. There have been so many times I nearly packed it in to become a sheep herder in Iceland or something. I dreamed of it my whole childhood, there was no way it could ever have met my expectations. I don’t think I’d change any of it, but it’s funny how appealing that life seems until you live it.’ Sammie nodded in agreement, eating another salty fry. ‘What about you? Do you wish it had turned out differently?’

‘I’ll always wonder what could have happened. Without cancer. But if I hadn’t had it, I would never have met Maxine or the kids. I don’t know what I would be without them. Plus, I really do love the stunt work. I get to meet so many people, some of them shittier than others, but I doubt I would have found you again any other way.’

‘You’re right,’ Leila said, reaching out to hold her friend’s hand. ‘Promise me we’ll stay in touch this time? Obviously, we’re working together now, but I don’t want it to be another 17-year gap before we catch up again. I want to meet Maxine and the kids!’

‘No, we won’t leave it like that again. Social media is a godsend, and I want to meet your little one.’

‘You could meet her this week, she’s with her dad until Friday but then she’s coming down to London with me.’

‘Amazing! We’ll make a day of it.’

‘Definitely.’

They swapped numbers, and Leila added Sammie to her personal and private Instagram accounts. As the winter evening drew in, Sammie headed home and Leila pulled out her script pages, ready for work the next day, the constant smile she had worn all day still a whisper on her face.