by Nikki Logan
Chapter Six
Kenzie’s features pleated into the most confused of frowns. ‘Are you having a lend, Dylan?’
‘No,’ he murmured. ‘Is it so crazy?’
She shuffled where she sat. ‘You want to audition. For the play?’
‘With your help.’
‘Even though you find speaking to strangers quite … difficult.’
An understatement, for sure. ‘Maybe because I do. Shouldn’t I challenge myself?’
‘I don’t know. Could it hurt you?’
This woman … She oozed kindness. No concerns over whether he had the goods; only worry that it might compromise his already fragile agreement with his voice.
‘I guess we’ll find out. Will you help me, Kenzie?’
‘I can be your prompt, I guess. The first monologue is—’
‘Actually, I was thinking of something with a bit more interaction in it. And maybe I could submit a video to stand in place of a live audition piece.’
The obvious question loomed large in the room. If you can’t even audition for Lexi how are you going to perform for a theatre full of strangers?
‘Video. Um, that’s unconventional.’
‘Let’s see if she thinks I’m worth shortlisting before I put myself through that.’
Kenzie would help him, he was sure. That’s the sort of person she was. But she was just as likely to pick his lie apart until it fell in loose shards around their feet. ‘I’m thinking we could just do a scene together? Something with impact. Maybe scene eleven?’ The scene with the most powerful female lines in it.
Kenzie paused as she was getting up on her feet. ‘Do you mean seven? I don’t think we’ve seen act two yet.’
Right. What was it she’d said …? Releasing it in acts.
‘Something with Ron and his sister in it. A bit of dialogue will probably be easier than delivering a monologue.’
Kenzie studied him, maybe a moment too long, before deciding. ‘Give me a second, I’ll get the pages I copied.’
Clearly eight years on the road had prepared him well for deception of all kinds. This new lie tumbled more easily off his tongue than most words ever did. He glanced at Phantom, who glared at him like he was the lowest human being ever to walk the earth. But what did a dog know about ends and means?
Kenzie deserved this chance.
Kenzie sighed softly as Dylan fumbled with his phone, setting it up for an arty through-the-mirror shot now that they’d rehearsed the scene to death. The angle he was filming was odd—from where she sat, it looked like only half of him would be in it. But this was his parade; she wasn’t about to rain on it. Let him get what enjoyment he could out of the process.
Any concerns she’d been harbouring about how Dylan would cope if Lexi gave him a speaking part in Larrikin had evaporated entirely as he’d begun to work his way through the scene’s lines.
Dylan was quite, quite terrible.
He’d learned the lines quickly enough—almost like he’d been the one to have the pages hidden away in a drawer—but as for performing them … No-one would be queuing up to give him a Helpmann Award any time soon. How crushing it would be for Dylan. This one time he was braving it, doing something radical, yet his name had zero chance of being on the callback list. Unless he was to be some lineless extra. Or a piece of set furniture.
Still, her job wasn’t to pre-empt Lexi’s choices, it was to support Dylan through this momentous process. Even if he was taking an eternity to strap his phone to the old hatstand from Rivervue’s production of Streetcar in order to record the audition.
As Dylan fiddled with the settings on his smartphone, Kenzie amused herself with chat.
‘I wasn’t expecting a war-era play to have many female parts but de Vue can’t have known many women at all if Dra—’ She barely caught herself before revealing Lexi’s secret. Fumbling her way out of the comment was complicated by the doof-doof of her heart hammering somewhere closer to her throat. God, she was bad at deception. ‘—if the playwright had to look to de Vue’s half-sister to be the lead female part in a play about the Larrikin’s life.’
Particularly since there happened to be a wife and daughter to choose from to provide some gender diversity, neither of whom made an appearance in the part of the play she’d seen. Just as neither of them copped a mention whenever anyone was remembering de Vue, either.
Dylan stopped tinkering with his phone, glanced up from under his thick lashes and then back down again. ‘He was a farmer and then a soldier, wasn’t he? Both male-dominated occupations at the start of the twentieth century.’
‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that someone’s finally talking about a different member of the de Vue family.’ Seriously. ‘But why Mary? What did she do, exactly, other than inherit the family farm and run it until she died? What made her so fascinating? And why focus on one sister and not the other one?’
His pressed lips looked like they were reconsidering the wisdom of ever starting to open in front of her and she realised how like a Gatling gun she must sound. Her issues with Ron de-bloody-Vue were not Dylan’s problem. She didn’t want to be the cause of all his words drying up again. Not when they were so hard won to begin with.
‘Sorry, I shouldn’t take it out on you.’ She sighed. ‘Not like you wrote it. I’m sure all will become apparent.’
Facing her now, he opened and closed his mouth twice, wordlessly, before he pulled his attention back onto the screen of his phone. He triple-checked the shot and then carefully stepped around the Streetcar hatstand and joined her in the light cast by a pair of glowing genie lamps they used for Aladdin. The light they threw was rather soft and pretty, and it did nice things to Dylan’s bone structure, which since his recent clean-up act she could appreciate more fully.
Now who knew that had been hiding under all the scruff?
It added a whole new dimension to the nervous thrumming of her heart.
Even running lines with someone else she felt like she was doing something wrong. Betraying … someone.
‘Ready to go?’
If she’d been picking his audition piece, she would have gone with something that gave him more opportunity to stretch creatively rather than a scene somewhat dominated by the Mary character, but sometimes less was more. And Dylan’s worryingly lacklustre performance was most definitely one of those times.
Yet she couldn’t help herself. Mary—for whatever reason—had some decent page time in this scene and it was well written. Sitting behind a locked door in front of a mirror was just too familiar, even if there was a handsome, semi-mute, semi-Frenchman in there with her. It was easy to fall back on her habit of years.
Performance might be a dirty word in her family, but she could indulge a little in the privacy of her own mirror. Besides, it was helping Dylan and that made it philanthropy. And surely that was something of a tradition in her family.
She turned her focus to the pages and gave Mary’s first line.
Dylan hovered in the upstairs lounge area outside Lexi’s office, just long enough to reassure himself no-one was coming, before slipping inside like a thief and closing the door quietly behind himself. He favoured the drama of leaving his latest work wrapped securely on some theatre doorstep like a relic from another time, but sometimes technology was more expedient and so he always had a couple of his trademark black USB drives floating around in his pack. For moments like this.
He grabbed a martini glass–shaped notepad from Lexi’s desk and scribbled two words on the top leaf: W A T C H M E. Then he slid the USB drive to the centre of her desk where she couldn’t possibly miss it and would be no more able to resist it than Alice with the potion.
A braver man might have stayed and explained himself. But Kenzie’s strong performance needed little interpretation. She was fantastic. Even more so when she had her game face fully on—even if it was for someone else’s audition.
The way he figured it, this could go one of two ways: either Lexi would cast Ke
nzie in the lead and she’d be excited enough to overlook his interference, or Lexi would cast someone else, and Kenzie would be spared any disappointment.
He was good with either of those.
Of course, there was always the possibility that Kenzie would get cast and still rip him another orifice for the presumption. But he’d seen her face. And the longing on it. Something told him he knew exactly which way this would plot out. Mary needed everything Kenzie had to offer. Raw appeal, personal resilience and the ability to win the audience’s hearts. This play would sink or swim on empathy. The audience didn’t need to agree with what they were seeing, they just needed to understand it.
The office door clicked shut behind him and he crossed swiftly to the big glass windows that overlooked the river and busied himself with staring out of it as if that was all he’d been doing the past ninety seconds. He’d read the plaque out front, knew that this land and the building on it were a bequest from Ron de Vue’s estate fifty years before. Most community theatres he’d visited in his time were in inner-city or industrial areas or set up in town halls and civic centres. Most towns would have built McMansions on this spot. It wasn’t every day that the best parcel of land in a town became a community arts facility. Local governments had a tendency to keep the best spots for the best people. It was only de Vue’s fifty-year bequest that had let Rivervue and its family be here as long as they had, and that safety net was about to expire. It was the reason he’d chosen Brachen—and de Vue—for his latest work in the first place.
Places like this needed protection from governance like that.
De Vue had loved Brachen enough to transform it from Butterville to Artsville, but he’d then spent the rest of his life away from it. Once gone, he’d never returned.
Leaving money was probably the best he could do.
‘Can I help you, mate?’
If Dylan’s condition hadn’t already robbed him of the words he needed to reply, the sheer size of the guy facing him would have. Half lumberjack, half offensive-tackle and a bonus half of Navy SEAL was enough to surprise verbiage right out of him.
Dylan shook his head and gave two thumbs up—for bonus credit. He saw the exact moment it dawned on the man-mountain who he was. The guy stepped closer and spoke louder as if either of those things would make any difference to a deaf man. Allegedly deaf.
‘Hey,’ the mountain said, thrusting a plate-size hand in his direction and taking care to articulate. ‘I’m Bruce. I’m part of the stage management crew here.’
Bruce. How Aussie. But the hand that shook his wasn’t careless and it didn’t crush his writer’s instrument even though it easily could have. Bruce’s own fingers were made for working hard, not penning words.
‘If you need anything,’ the redhead offered, his volume normal now, ‘come find me. I’m usually somewhere backstage. Or in here.’ He pointed at the next door down, the one marked Control Room. ‘Just follow the smell of sawdust. And if you get tired of painting props, I’ve always got plenty of set-building or lighting jobs on the go.’
And then he carried on his way and disappeared through the control-room door.
Despite his size, there was an easy likeability about Bruce-the-giant. The kind of guy he could imagine working alongside in companionable silence. Someone with whom he could happily discuss absolutely nothing. For hours.
He gave a firm nod and made a mental note to get Bruce onto the speech-approved list as fast as he could.
That was assuming any of them at all would want to talk to him once they knew who he was.
Chapter Seven
Auditions were always such an incredibly exciting time at Rivervue. The energy, the breathless anticipation, the pale-faced nerves, the exuberant vocal warm-ups, the agitated pacing and whispering of lines under breath just before contenders were shown in to CJ’s Youth Theatre workshop room, where Lexi typically held auditions.
It was a big couple of days ahead, exciting as always. Even if Kenzie wasn’t technically a part of it this year.
That unexpected first hurt way down deep where she didn’t usually let stuff get to her. But it had—even though the adult part of her knew it wasn’t reasonable; that it wasn’t her right to get to coordinate auditions just because she had for every production in the past six years. She didn’t get to hoard plum jobs at Rivervue the way she kept all her favourite props under close guard.
But it wasn’t the coordination she was mourning, it was the involvement. Helping out during auditions was the closest she was ever going to get to doing an audition, so, to be robbed of the opportunity, especially on what might be Rivervue’s last performance … Well, that just stunk.
Helping out meant she could hover in the green room where everyone prepped before being shown through to CJ’s workshop for their audition and suck up their energy like some kind of dramaturgical vampire.
But, this time, Lexi had Shelley Marks coordinating arrivals.
Hmph.
Shelley ran Brachen’s stationers, The Treasure Box, and so normally helped with producing flyers and copying them and running off script copies and other admin-type tasks. Looked like she’d earned a promotion. Might have been nice of Lexi to give her a heads-up, though. Especially since she was the one getting a demotion to accommodate Shelley’s rise.
It meant she’d had to come up with another defendable excuse to be hanging around in the green room on audition and so, here she was, cleaning out the green room’s kitchenette cupboards, cataloguing crockery and generally making busywork for herself to stay involved.
Sad, desperate individual that she was.
It meant she got to see who came and who went—although more of the former and less of the latter, since most people skipped straight out after their audition to burn off residual energy with a brisk river walk or a coffee or jumping jacks out on the grassy hill that Rivervue sat on.
Or maybe that was just her. In her mind, of course. It was what she sometimes imagined she’d do after auditioning. She could only go on what she’d observed in other people’s tryouts, though she’d desperately love to know what it felt like, firsthand.
But no … There were kinder ways to break her grandmother’s heart. Besides, the Russells were old-school Brachen—too straight to be into anything as frittery as theatre. Or dance. Or music. Or any of the things this town was already overflowing with.
Leave that to the artistes, her father liked to say. Arteeeests. Where the number of ‘e’s he put into the word was directly proportional to his disdain for the occupation.
That’s how he’d been raised and that’s how he’d raised Kenzie: convinced that Brachen needed pharmacists, builders and bank officers infinitely more than it needed yet another creative type.
Kenzie herself had grown up to be a vet nurse, her dad was a teacher, her nan had been a seamstress, and her nan’s mum got herself a job as the postmistress once she’d found herself husbandless, off the farm and in need of a town living.
Four generations of sensible, productive citizens of Brachen. Not a single pair of yoga pants between them.
But Kenzie had watched all the artsy kids at school doing artsy things in preparation for their artsy lives and she’d quietly longed to be one of them. She wanted to be the girl holed up in a corner learning lines, or with the boys working up their first barbershop trio, or one of the adorable band nerds with their disproportionately large brass instruments. Instead, she remained loyal to her family, stuck with sensible subjects in high school, and she’d got herself a sensible qualification right away, as she watched her classmates all pack up and go to city colleges to pursue their art. Brachen excepted, this valley was a farming district; with training in animal care she’d never go without work. She’d got a job before she’d even finished her qualification.
It was only when she’d moved under her own roof on her own dollar, that she’d mustered up the gumption to scrawl her name on a Rivervue sign-up sheet under the column headed CREW. Everything in her had wante
d to be signing up in the other column, but the Kenzie her family had raised wouldn’t think of it. A year had passed before she’d even admitted to spending any time at Rivervue, and only because they started to notice the large amounts of time she was spending dashing all over the district buying up old furniture and other props.
No, the PERFORMERS column was most definitely never for her.
Now, here she was in her sixth year at Rivervue, on her hands and knees scrubbing out cupboards rather than miss out on the hype and energy of tryouts.
Kenzie glanced at her watch and knew that Shelley would be popping out to collect the next auditionee any moment. That was her moment to sprint into CJ’s workshop, a brief window to fill her lungs deep with the smell of timber wax and adrenaline. Enough to sustain her. She scrabbled at the green room’s supplies and whipped up two instant coffees.
The double doors opened and Shelley appeared.
Kenzie snagged up the coffees and slid past Shelley faster than the woman could protest.
‘Lexi,’ she breathed as she skidded to a halt in the corner of CJ’s workshop space and thrust the fresh mocha towards her friend. ‘It’s not Dasha’s but it’s hot. And yours, Hamish.’ The short black went to the stage manager.
The two of them didn’t have that weary audition-glaze just yet. It was still early days. They were probably only on the third rendition of the same monologue for the day. Let’s see how they would be looking this time on Thursday when two full days of auditions were behind them.
Lexi smiled up at her and then just kept on staring. Like she’d never seen her before. Like Kenzie had bleach on her nose or something. It was impossible not to swipe at her face, just in case.
‘Thanks, Kenz,’ she said and winked. Winked. Lexi never winked. Though she was no doubt due a nervous tic having to sit with Hamish Waters all day long. No love lost between those two.