Playing with Bethany

Bethany, the character and actress, is beginning to interest me. This week she has made me cringe while also making my heart ache. She’s a school girl, but is way too cool for school. She is trying to enter an adult world in which she fears she isn’t cool enough.

Dog and Gun regular

She’s sneaking off to play with the big kids – Callum, Gemma and the clientele of the Dog and Gun. She has to navigate her own way through the unknown territory of drinking without being scolded, and delivering substances in small packets to sketchy looking guys. She’s learning how to collect information and use it to her own advantage, as in getting money for a school trip to Paris out of Callum. But she hasn’t learned that he might be collecting blackmail material on her at the same time, which he is.

While she is illegally drinking in the Dog and Gun, and is carrying a small baggie for delivery, the police with a sniffer dog raid the pub. Callum manages to get the envelope from her and pass it to Gemma. Gemma is caught with it. But Bethany gets nothing but a bit of advice from a cop – “you shouldn’t be here.”

Out of her league

She’s a girl who does know there are things she should not do, like make deliveries of anything to run-down houses, on grounds of both morality and safety. She’s scared out of her mind during the police raid. She knows she’s way out of her league with Callum, emotionally and in blackmailing skills.

But she’s falling for Callum. He’s an older man and a “bad boy” who treats her as an adult and as an attractive woman. An added bonus is that he’s her mother’s boyfriend, a fun way to hit back at her mother for whatever.

Just kids on the street

On the street, she’s treated as a kid. At the café, Anna suggests that she and Faye “could get together for, I don’t know, a play.” You can see the loathing come off both girls at the very thought of being anywhere near the other’s orbit.

This was a truly excruciating scene. Neither one of them said more than a couple words. Meanwhile Anna and Sarah just kept digging themselves in deeper with each of their many words.