Love, Unscripted Read online

  Love, Unscripted is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Owen Nicholls

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in Great Britain in 2019 by Headline Review, an imprint of the Headline Publishing Group.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Columbia Pictures: Excerpt from Ghostbusters on this page courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

  Emma-Lee Moss: Excerpts from “Mia” from the album First Love by Emmy the Great on this page courtesy of Emma-Lee Moss.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Nicholls, Owen, author.

  Title: Love, unscripted : a novel / Owen Nicholls.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Ballantine Books, [2020] | Originally published in Great Britain in 2019 by Headline Review, an imprint of the Headline Publishing Group.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019038100 (print) | LCCN 2019038101 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984826879 (paperback) | ISBN 9781984826886 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PR6114.I274 L68 2020 (print) | LCC PR6114.I274 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019038100

  Ebook ISBN 9781984826886

  randomhousebooks.com

  Cover design and illustration: Sarah Horgan

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  First Intermission

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Second Intermission

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Third Intermission

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Fourth Intermission

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  When we were eleven, Leon Woodward told me about his plan to kiss Sally Carter.

  He would take her to the cinema to watch Disney’s Aladdin, a film he’d already watched three times in order to work out the exact moment a girl of Sally’s disposition would be most susceptible to a spontaneous lunge in which his lips pressed up against hers.

  He chose the moment the Princess first saw Aladdin for who he really was. It worked so well that the week after, he took Sally’s best friend, Hannah Jenkins, and did the same thing.

  Even at a young age, I thought this was a dick move. For two reasons.

  First, I liked Sally Carter. She was funny and kind and had nice hair and didn’t deserve to be the first guinea pig in Leon’s sexual blitzkrieg on every girl in school.

  Second, I really liked that part of the film. To me, it seemed wholly unfair to interrupt a pivotal scene where two characters’ true selves are unveiled for the first time with something that could easily wait until the end credits.

  But then Leon kissed a lot of girls in school.

  And I didn’t.

  I’m still thinking about Leon Woodward kissing Sally Carter when the fire starts. It isn’t a big fire, just the melting of an inch-long piece of plastic, but the smoke sets off the alarms. I pull the film from the projector and stamp out the flames as an extremely anxious and very sweaty Seb comes running into the booth.

  “Ah shit, what happened?” he asks, with an exasperated tone I assume has less to do with the problem at hand and more to do with the paperwork he’ll have to fill out later.

  “The gate got stuck, the lamp was on, A plus B equals man fire,” I explain.

  “Nick, you have to strike the lamp after you’ve got the loop running.”

  I scratch at the hair on my chin and cheeks. The two weeks’ growth of a boyfriend in a coma.

  “I did know that. Sorry.”

  It’s not like I have a particularly bad memory. I can recite the entirety of the Pacino/De Niro coffee-shop conversation from Heat and can remember the exact order in which the eleven jurors are turned by Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men—it’s Juror #9, Juror #5, Jurors #11, #2, and #6 at the same time, Juror #7, then Juror #12 and Juror #1. Juror #12 changes his mind but switches back with Juror #10 and Juror #4, leaving just Lee J. Cobb breaking down in the final reel as Juror #3. But I can never retain certain key information about the inner workings of the projectors. A small part of me thinks they might lose their magic if I know exactly how they work. If I ever mention this to Seb, he’ll probably fire me.

  “I’m sure Humphrey…it is Humphrey, right?” Seb asks.

  I nod. It was my idea to name the projectors after my celluloid heroes, and Booth 3 houses both Humphrey and Katharine, Screens 6 and 7.

  “I’m sure Humphrey will be fine.” Seb says. “And you?”

  I know what he’s getting at.

  “I’m fine.”

  He gives me the international face of “Really?”

  “I’m absolutely fine. It was just a little fight.”

  His eyebrows rise enough to add an exclamation mark to the “Really?” And a “Really?!” is harder to brush off.

  “Because Ellie said—”

  “You spoke to Ellie?”

  He shouldn’t have spoken to Ellie.

  “She rang me. She wanted to make sure you were okay.” He pauses, not for dramatic effect, although it has that result. “She told me she’d moved out.”

  It’s true. She moved out a week ago, but I convinced myself she’d move back in quickly enough that I wouldn’t need to tell anyone. I was approximately two days away from dressing up in her clothes and waving at people from the window in order to convince friends and neighbors that everything was still a-okay.

  “It wasn’t a little fight,” I confess.

  Seb’s “Really?!” face collapses into one of suc
h pity it’s all I can do not to well up. We both suggest a cigarette break at the same time.

  “I think the fire’s gone,” Seb assures me.

  “That’s what she said,” I reply.

  NOVEMBER 4, 2008—11:21 P.M. GMT

  OBAMA 0

  MCCAIN 0

  270 NEEDED TO WIN

  I first met Ellie at a 2008 election night party held by a mutual friend of ours who just happened to be a libertarian. Normally I would balk at being near anyone who would describe themselves as such, but Tom had a big house, good weed, and an encyclopedic knowledge of Asian cinema. That he was the only person in south London who wanted John McCain to win wasn’t quite enough to counter these excellent qualities, and the fact that he’d only invited thirty or so twentysomethings, who were all sane non-libertarians, was typical of him. He hated people agreeing with him, loved confrontation, and would almost exclusively start arguments with the phrase “I’m just saying.”

  He addressed a crowd of five.

  “I’m just saying, you lefties all fawn over Obama, but policy for policy he has more in common with Cameron than Brown.”

  A clueless twentysomething in a beanie hat took the bait.

  “So you want another four years of the same regressive Republican agenda that took the UK into two wars?”

  Ellie entered my life half watching David Dimbleby informing us the polls for Kentucky, Indiana, and Georgia would close in forty-nine minutes, and half watching Tom take on the hipster. A wry smile crossed her face; she knew full well what he was doing. It was that smile that got me. I’m a sucker for any kind of smile, but a wry one just floors me.

  Her smile was one of the first things I remember really liking about Ellie. The second was the way she tucked her hair behind her ears. There was a surety in the action. Maybe it was because as a teenager I was teased about my sticky-out ears. I even grew long hair to cover them. To see someone purposefully putting theirs on show made me want to yell out, “Good for you!”

  I didn’t. Obviously.

  That in a certain light she looked like Holly Hunter when Holly Hunter was in her mid- to late twenties—so Broadcast News–era Holly Hunter—certainly didn’t inhibit my attraction. They shared the same quizzical eyebrows and flawless skin. Plus, she had Kate Winslet’s neon-red hair from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and wore the most nondescript zipped-up gray hoodie and navy jeans, like she was paradoxically trying not to be noticed yet screaming, “Look at me!”

  It took me forever to make my move. I became paranoid I’d been staring at her and she’d noticed and was now wondering who this weirdo creep with massive ears and…Wait…were we wearing the exact same hoodie?

  It was a sign.

  I grabbed two beers from the kitchen and went for it, handing her one and observing, “You must have seen Tom do this before to smile like that.”

  She squinted slightly, viewing me with the requisite amount of skepticism with which you should view someone who comments on your smile, and took the drink.

  “He certainly has a need to be disliked,” she said, elongating the vowels in “need”—an Elliesque idiosyncrasy I have since found both adorable and infuriating in equal measure.

  We watched as Tom stepped his attack up a notch with a one-two of questions on the difference between the House and the Senate, and a much more aggressive than passive investigation into his opponent’s previous UK election-viewing habits, to which the hipster could only respond with a shake of the head.

  Tom was obliterating his foe with a smile in his eyes. I could see where this was heading and gave my insight to Ellie.

  “If that guy mentions hope or change, he’s done for.”

  And just like that…

  “So,” he said, a little too smugly, “you don’t believe in hope? You don’t believe in change?”

  Tom erupted.

  “Fuuuuuuck you!”

  The hipster was taken aback by this outburst and looked around for help, but none was forthcoming. On the contrary, if there’d been popcorn, it would have been opened and passed around for the crescendo.

  “I will happily have a debate with you about the rights and wrongs of universal healthcare, military spending, or the antiquated penal system of America. But I am fucked if I’m going to stand in my own home and try to form a cogent argument over two-bit slogans. Jesus Christ. Hope. Change. You moron. Those posters might as well have said ‘Kittens’ and ‘Puppies.’ Nobody is against hope. Or change. Everyone loves change as long as it’s vague enough. I had genuine respect for you when you were arguing the ins and outs of foreign policy. But this. This is beneath me.”

  The doorbell rang and Tom—without missing a beat—patted the victim on the arm and departed to answer it. But not before giving me and Ellie a wink on the way.

  “He’s good,” she said in a way that made me a little jealous, again bringing several extra vowels to the word.

  “He almost convinced me to join his anti-tax group when we were at university,” I said, stopping for a sip. “Before I remembered I like roads and hospitals and libraries and that I’m not an arsehole.”

  “Is that where you know him from? University?”

  “Yeah. You? You’re not part of his anti-tax group, are you, because if so, I didn’t mean the thing I said just then about them all being arseholes.”

  She let out a short, sharp laugh, her brown eyes twinkled, and my heart soared.

  She followed the laugh with “I’m tempted to say yes to see how quickly your principles fly out the window.”

  “As Groucho said, ‘These are my principles and…’ ”

  “ ‘…if you don’t like them I have others.’ ”

  When I went to clink beers, the move was not reciprocated. Perhaps she just didn’t see me do it, but the minuscule rejection brought a cold sweat to my neck.

  “I was friends with his sister when we were little. When I moved to Clapham, she passed me his details so I’d know someone locally. He has a point about why we’re so interested in another country’s election, though,” Ellie said, erasing my social anxiety over the missing clink. “Did you stay up for the last election in the UK?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “So why this one? Why are we all so besotted with this guy?”

  I hadn’t contemplated until that very moment why we were all (except Tom) so excited at the prospect of Barack Obama becoming the 44th president of a country the vast majority of us had no actual affiliation with.

  “First of all, it’s him,” I said. “He has an allure. An allure so strong that a straight male from the south of England can say ‘he has an allure’ without even pausing to wonder why he’s using such a romantic word.”

  At this Ellie flashed a grin that blew the wry smile clear out of the water.

  I continued, spurred on by the grin. “But I’ve always loved American politics. It’s what America pretends to be that’s appealing. Truth, freedom, liberty. All that jazz. In a country that’s still sort of young…”

  She looked deep into my soul and offered, “The possibilities are endless.”

  “We’ll always have Barack,” I say to Seb as I put out my second cigarette. But the line and its relevance are completely lost on him.

  “What’s that?”

  “Me and Ellie. We met at the 2008 election.”

  “Oh right. Is that three and a half years ago already?”

  Since he became a dad, Seb has become hyperaware of time passing, and can often be caught forlornly noting ten-year anniversaries of albums he remembers buying with a similar refrain. He’s recently been promoted to projection manager, which is fine by me. He’s my friend, he works hard, and even though I’ve been at the cinema three years longer than him, I don’t really want the extra work and stress the promotion would mean.

  “Two
thousand and eight? Wasn’t that your Before Sunrise night?” he asks.

  I’d actually described it as my In Search of a Midnight Kiss night, but Seb still hasn’t seen that film, and when I explained to him that In Search of a Midnight Kiss is a lo-fi American indie about two people who meet and talk all night and get to know each other and fall in love, he kept saying, “Like Before Sunrise,” and it was clear he’d married the two things in his mind.

  I don’t feel like correcting him, because he’s being incredibly supportive of my current relationship status. Considering he’s only just come back to work after the birth of his second child—and exists on three hours’ sleep a night—him giving even a solitary shit about me is superheroic friendship.

  When I first met Seb, if someone had told me he’d one day be responsible for the lives of two actual human beings, I would have found the quickest way to have him castrated. But seven years is a long time, and the twenty-three-year-old Seb with huge hair and a ginger Gandalf beard who used to leap across the tops of parked cars high on LSD has been replaced by a trimmer, tidier version who goes for weekly runs and takes his eldest to toddler yoga.

  “You know you can call me anytime, Nick. If you need a chat,” he offers. “I don’t sleep.”

  I silently nod my appreciation.

  “I better go do the handover with Lizzie. You staying down here?”

  I nod again, and Seb leaves me alone on the fire escape, smoking.

  It’s getting on for five, and that means shift handover. I’m on a mid shift, working from one until nine. Seb did the open shift, nine to five, and Lizzie is on the close, five until midnight. She’ll be print-checking the new Judge Dredd film tonight, Dredd (2012), making sure it’s put together properly and isn’t scratched to shit. The state of some of the films we get from other cinemas makes you want to weep.