Page 16 of The Cut

‘My earliest memory is sitting in the neighbours’ garden, strapped in a pushchair.

I must have been three years old. Mum was busy chatting in the kitchen and I had somehow shuffled the buggy forward.

I wanted to look at the goldfish swimming in the pond.

’ Nate swallowed, his complexion white as a sheet.

His face was projected through the darkness on to the cinema screen that covered the entire wall. A pair of unusually clear, light-brown eyes shone like windows into a young, uncertain soul.

‘The wheels caught on the edge of the paving stones and the buggy tipped over.’ He closed his eyes tight.

‘I was suspended underwater, trapped. I couldn’t breathe.

’ Tears streamed down his face now. ‘I nearly drowned. Mum wheeled me home, dripping in green algae.’ He wiped his face and smiled.

‘It became something they all laughed about … the green slime bit anyway, especially Lily.’

Nate paused for a second, gathering himself as he tried to swallow the sadness.

‘Ever since then, I’ve been terrified of water. Can’t swim, even now.’

The film was paused once again on the face full of pain, and this time something else lingered behind the boy’s eyes.

Fear and guilt. The hands controlling the film reached for a laptop on a side table.

The overwhelming urge to reach out to this boy, to heal and nurture him, took hold.

But that would be overstepping the line.

Nimble fingers tickled the keyboard and a web page flashed up on to the screen.

The RetroFX blog site. Logging on, the cursor found the last thread of the conversation they’d been having.

Nate’s light was amber, which meant he wasn’t online.

In the empty box at the bottom of the thread, a new message was typed.

How did the audition go? Did you nail it?

A fingers-crossed emoji.

As he pressed send, the freckled face of the girl with glasses and bouncing pigtails waved on to the screen, carrying her message to Nathan Knot’s computer.

Then Freckles, the lonely little girl, the emoji with the red hair who was just like Nate, stood up from her lonely chair, moved across her lonely office and stepped out of the darkness.

She crossed to a drinks’ cabinet, threw a handful of ice into a highball 87 and poured herself a gin.

The man in his forties behind the friendly emoji passed a hand over a well-groomed beard.

In the darkened room, a heaviness hung in the air.

The digital footage was uploaded on to the hard drive and a retro filter was processed over the iPhone video of the audition.

It still wasn’t good enough to use in any large format, but all he needed to know was if this boy could convey the truth.

That’s what he was hunting for: truth. Not some stage school kid who had been coached, but someone real and touching.

There was something about Nathan Knot, something you just couldn’t take your eyes off.

Maybe there was an imprint there, an endowment of an essence he wanted to see, a memory of the past. Max Crow had found his muse.

He squeezed his eyes closed, trying to shut out the cacophony of thoughts cluttering his mind.

He needed a break, needed to think. He leant back in his chair and stretched his arms as the door behind him was nudged open.

A dog padded across the room, hopped up on to the leather couch and nuzzled under an outstretched arm.

‘Good boy, is that dinner or garden?’ The tail wagged as the good boy cleaned the hand with his warm tongue. ‘All right, all right.’

Max stood and stretched. That was enough for today.

He opened the shutters, letting the bright sunlight stream into the room, before pulling open the door to the terrace where warm evening air perfumed the stifling atmosphere with bougainvillea.

As he turned back to the paused screen, the face in the darkness stared back at him.

Max tried to imagine him in the role. Was he up to it?

Could this kid take what was about to happen to him, physically and emotionally?

The Cut was deep. It wasn’t his intention to make it bleed. After all this time, old wounds were supposed to have healed. But 88 if he would insist on picking at the scab, forcing the skin to tear, enjoying that moment of stinging pain and the relief of blood flow, then what did he expect?

Max hesitated for a second. Was he really going to do this? He slowly pulled his phone from his back pocket and opened his contacts. He scrolled down to her number then dialled. It went straight to voicemail.

‘Hey, it’s me, it’s a green light. Offer him the role.’ He hung up.

There were many pieces to this puzzle that would need to be found, but the first, most crucial piece was Nathan Knot.

He was the muse. He was also the target.