Bron-2

Continued from Chapter 1: Bron-1 | ABCtales

Chapter 2

Bron had been one of Chris’s finds. He’d seen her in a coffee shop on Queensway in Bayswater. She was frequently to be found there, to escape the sitting room in Phoebe’s tiny flat, where she’d been temporarily sofa-surfing for the past six weeks, which was small, cramped and not particularly fragrant. The shop’s Lebanese manager let her stay and consume endless cups of coffee all day for free. A pretty face was good for business and anyway he himself liked ogling her.

Chris had slapped his business card on the table in front of her, saying that if she fancied doing a bit of movie-acting she should get in touch. It was corny, he knew; nine times out of ten – no, more like 97 times out of a hundred – he heard nothing from the young women he approached in this way, but Bron had been one of the exceptions. She’d come round to the studio – just a rented garage in a Bayswater mews - the very next day.

Bron wasn’t paid anything; West Two Productions didn’t have the funds. Chris, Mike and Geoff could barely afford the rent on the garage. Pretty much everything else was begged or borrowed, with the exception of some of Bron’s gear, purchased from a firm that sold replica military stuff. Her flight suit was a set of mechanics’ overalls, her boots from a charity shop.

While Bron wasn’t being paid as such, part of the deal was that she got to live in the spare bedroom of Chris’s flat near Marble Arch for free, which had solved her housing problem, at least until such time as she landed a steady job.

So her occasional threats to walk off the job didn’t really ring true. It would mean a one-way ticket to Holyhead, which she couldn’t afford anyway, back to the family smallholding near Bodedern, and she certainly wasn’t ready for that.

Chris’s wife Linda hadn’t been too happy at first with the arrangement for Bron to take up residence in the tiny flat, especially as he hadn’t consulted her in advance.

At home, Chris affected a studied indifference to her; Bron spent most of her time in her room anyway, when she wasn’t in the coffee shop.

Unlike at least three of the other crew members, Chris hadn’t put pictures of Bron on his computer. If he had, and Linda had discovered them, it would have been Goodnight Vienna as far as the marriage was concerned.

Mike, though, had been experimenting with software that could strip away Bron’s clothing and replace it with naked flesh. But the results so far had not been very encouraging, like something out of a medical textbook printed in a Third World country.

Chris had problems enough, without adding marital ones. He was, effectively, doing two jobs, the day one at the media company, then fitting the film production around that. It was the same for the rest of the team.

And there was the problem of Bron herself.

She wasn’t exactly demonstrative. Or, at least, she was undemonstrative until she erupted into one of her bilingual swear-storms.

Before engaging her, Chris had no idea if Bron could act. In fact, until she pitched up at the garage he hadn’t even heard her speak. In the café she hadn’t uttered a word as she’d picked up the card and slipped it into her handbag.

“I’ve come about the part in the film,” Bron had said. All the other aspiring actresses they’d dealt were eager, effusive, bubbly, excited; Bron could have been asking about a cleaning job.

“Where are you from?” Geoff asked.

“Llanfairyngmochnant. It’s a really small village. You won’t have heard of it; it’s near Bodedern.”

“Bo-dead-end?” Chris ventured.

“Near Holyhead,” Bron clarified, again.

“Ah, you are from Wales. I thought you might be.”

“Yes, I am. Definitely.”

“Do you speak Welsh?”

“Yeah, with my Nan mostly. But not in Bayswater.”

“Say something in Welsh,” Geoff broke in.

“Eich ffrind chi gan wyneb fel bol bwch.”

“Meaning?”

“Oh, nothing really. Just a saying…”

Her accent would need a lot of work. It wasn’t that her North Wales tones were unpleasant on the ear, though her words came carefully, she didn’t waste them. It was just that it was impossible to imagine a mode of speaking more removed from Lieutenant Lizzie Hind’s deep Kentucky drawl.

Still, having a pretty girl – SUCH a pretty girl - would do their chances no harm at all with male film industry execs and having her on set would brighten everyone’s day.

Continued in Chapter 2: Bron-3 | ABCtales