Happy Endings Read Online Free PDF Page B

always playing dress-up and acting out scenes from television. I was quite a precocious child, probably very annoying, but I always knew what I wanted. I wanted to act, to perform, to have hundreds, thousands and, maybe one day, millions of pairs of eyes just on me.
    As a child I just needed my mother, but as I got older and began acting in school plays, I craved it more and more. I studied drama at university in Bristol and when I left I thought it was only a matter of time before I got my big break. That’s the thing about dreams, you think because you’ve wanted it for such a long time that it will just happen. It has to. You forget, of course, that a million other people are thinking exactly the same thing. I got a couple of jobs here and there, but eight years later I was still scratching around the dregs of the acting world.
    When I was offered the lead role in The Hen Weekend , it was like every moment of my life, every second of doubt, regret and uncertainty, was justified. It all meant something. My biggest fear had always been that I was so focused on acting that if I didn’t make it my whole life would have been a waste. However, getting that role vindicated every single thing I’d ever done.
    So why when I was so deliriously happy about it was Jack so miserable? Was it something I did? Said? Didn’t say? Could he be jealous that I’d finally achieved my dream and he hadn’t? We met as struggling artists, both intent on making it in our chosen fields and somehow one of us achieving it broke the balance and sank the ship. Our joint failure had been the glue that kept us together, but maybe now it was tearing us apart.
     
    ‘A whole week?’
    ‘I do it for all my projects. It’s fun. We stay at this incredibly old mansion in Berkshire. We get to bond as a group and start working on the connections between the characters. It’s a good chance to have a few beers and relax before the hard slog really begins,’ said Matt.
    ‘I understand. It’s just, Jack, I . . .’
    ‘We need you there, Emma. We can’t do it without you.’
    ‘Of course I’ll be there.’
    ‘Great, fantastic. I’ll email you the details and travel arrangements. We’ll send a car to pick you up on the day. It’s going to be wonderful. Trust me, yeah.’
    ‘I do,’ I said, and then we hung up.
    A week away from Jack was going to be tough. Since we’d started dating five years ago, and moved in together a year later, we’d barely been apart. I was excited though. A week with the cast at a mansion in the Berkshire countryside, it was the stuff of dreams. A week to bond, drink, talk about acting and finally, after all the years of struggle, be an actress. A tear suddenly leaked out and down my face. It felt like my life was just starting and the first person I wanted to tell was also the person I was most afraid to. Jack would be fine though. He knew what it meant to me and what it could mean for us. He would come around. He had to.

Kate
    I always thought I’d go travelling much earlier. In my head I was about twenty-one, fresh out of university, the world at my feet, carefree, confident and unaffected by the rigours and strains of adulthood. Backpacking was meant to be the last bastion of my childhood before the reality of life outside of education began. I hadn’t ever considered I’d be teetering on the edge of my twenties, timidly tip-toeing into the big beyond with a whole life behind me and more baggage than I could carry.
     
    On the plane and once I’d stopped crying, watched my second film and tried my best to sleep, the realisation that I was totally on my own began to hit me. The enormity of what I was doing started to hammer away at me and it was then I really wished I was a happy-go-lucky twenty-one-year-old instead of a tightly wound, scared-shitless almost-thirty-year-old. I wished Ed was there too because despite his many faults one of his biggest strengths had always been to make me feel safe and