Alice in La La Land

by Sophie Lee

  'Never mind, get on with it, girl,' she told herself, gritting her teeth and committing the first line to memory.

  'Wait up, Billy, there's a hole in my shirtwaister.' Alice guffawed, inadvertently spraying the page of dialogue with fizzy green drink. What the hell was a shirtwaister?

  Alice focused on the task and once she was satisfied she had memorised the lines of all three scenes, she moved onto the next script. Apparently, this one was an 'action comedy'. Alice took a slug of Triple G and chewed her fingernails. 'Right, okay, action comedy,' she said, willing herself to be reasonable. 'Fair enough, the two can be effectively combined.'

  She paused to chug down the rest of the can of Triple G and wondered how this script had been greenlit. Its premise was that a mad billionaire pledges a million dollars to whichever team of desperate gamblers can finish first in a wild obstacle course across America. Alice's character was a young, gorgeous helicopter pilot who took part in the humiliating competition.

  The audition scene involved Alice performing wild manoeuvres in an imaginary helicopter while talking about her unlucky love life. She wasn't looking forward to the audition. It was embarrassing enough just thinking about miming the helicopter controls. At least it was only one scene.

  The third and final audition for the day involved about ten pages of dialogue. This was a flat-out comedy about a beauty pageant. It fell into the category Alice could best describe as 'comedies that are not funny'. It began to dawn on Alice how special the Rough Beast Slouching script was. She quickly looked over the pages of the beauty pageant audition and realised that her character was highly skilled at baton-twirling and was also in her early twenties. In desperation, she returned to the helicopter pilot pages and began reading them out loud to get a feel for how she would do it.

  'Uh, Alice,' said Shauna knocking on her bedroom door, 'it's ten minutes after you said to meet.'

  'Coming,' sighed Alice, cutting short her rehearsal with the helicopter's invisible control panels. She had really only half-learned the scenes for the first audition and it was already ten past ten. She opened her door and stepped out into the hallway.

  'You want to go first?' she offered.

  'Oh, thanks, Alice,' said Shauna, absurdly grateful for the help.

  They returned to the office and Alice sat down on the only chair. 'What's your audition for?' The chair was retractable and she spun round in it half-heartedly, trying to inject some levity into the proceedings.

  Shauna handed her the pages. They were crinkled from excessive handling. 'It's called Dorothy Navigator.'

  'Dorothy Navigator. That's catchy,' said Alice looking down at the first scene. 'What is it like, Dora the Explorer?'

  'You're funny. Uh, no, it's more like Lara Croft Tomb Raider, but she's on rollerblades. Sort of like sci-fi slash adventure with a hot chick on wheels,' Shauna explained, sawing at the air with her palm.

  'Okay, Dorothy, let's see what you got.'

  'Uh, Alice,' said Shauna looking at her directly, her feet spread apart and legs stiff; she resembled a buxom foal. 'I haven't done acting classes in over a year so please just give me some hints, okay?' Her tone was very earnest and Alice smiled at her. Shauna flicked her hair from one side of her face to the other.

  'Sure, that's fine,' Alice said reassuringly.

  'So, let's go from there,' prompted Shauna, stabbing at a spot on the top page. She took a deep breath and began in a much quieter tone than normal.

  'So, how'd he get it, Chops, he copped a taser in the back of the head. And you expect me to hang around and help?' she began.

  'Hang on, Shauna,' interrupted Alice. 'What is Dorothy, a . . . transatlantic navigator?'

  'Uh, no,' said Shauna, '. . . that's my English accent.'

  'Oh, okay. Cool, let's start again.'

  'So how'd he get it, Chops . . .' Shauna began again. Alice strained to hear the dialogue. Her accent was like nothing Alice had ever heard. It was Valley girl with crisp consonants but all the same vowel sounds. In no way did it sound English. Never mind, thought Alice, she was so gorgeous, perhaps it wouldn't matter.

  'Uh, Alice,' said Shauna looking up when they had reached the bottom of the first page. 'Are you okay?'

  'Fine, why?' She noticed her breathing was more rapid than usual but she'd attributed it to the quality of the dialogue.

  'You have some red spots on your neck,' Shauna indicated, pointing down at her from her standing position.

  'Oh my God!' Alice blurted, peering at the angry welts appearing on her chest. She could see them flowering before her very eyes. She began rapidly scratching at her face and could feel more bumps spring up under her fingertips.

  'Let's just press on, shall we?' urged Alice, shaking her head and choosing to ignore the tingling sensations. 'There's no time for this right now, so let's just ignore it,' she reasoned, pulling at her shirt to conceal the discolourations. 'From the same line again, please Shauna.' Alice was aware that they needed to get through this and onto her scenes before midnight.

  'Okay, if you're sure,' mumbled Shauna. Despite screwing up her face in concern, she still managed to look pretty.

  'So how'd he get it, Chops, he copped a taser in the back of the head,' she began again, this time with a little more energy. 'And you expect me to hang around and help?'

  'Damn right, and that's nothing on what I'm gonna do to you.' Alice leapt up in a threatening manner, as per the suggestions in the script, and brandished an arm. The physical action made her feel hot all over.

  'Have you forgotten the Gem?' said Shauna as Dorothy.

  'You don't have it, Dorothy, so don't even pretend,' Alice replied, squinting at the script.

  'Then what's this, Chops, a mirage or something?' Shauna dropped the arm that held the imaginary jewel. 'Alice, the spots are getting worse. Can you at least look in a mirror?' she pleaded, returning to her normal speaking voice and sounding extremely worried.

  Alice's heart-rate felt even faster and a little worm was wiggling back and forth in her aorta. She stood up, huffing ragged breaths, and headed for the bathroom.

  'Oh my God,' she muttered.

  'I told you it was bad,' Shauna chided.

  'No, there's puke in here. Green puke. I haven't even looked in the . . .'

  Alice stopped talking when she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Spittle had caught in the corners of her mouth and her pupils were dilated. They were a couple of marbles staring out from a mass of red splotches on her papery flesh. She looked a bit like the victim of a serial killer who hadn't quite finished the job yet. She cautiously opened her shirt to assess the situation. Not good, she concluded, appraising the crisscross of welts that seemed to spread from her throat to her middle. Her impulse was to scratch wildly like a dog.

  'Stop!' yelled Shauna, appearing behind her in the mirror. 'You'll only make it worse.'

  'Triple G,' Alice whispered. 'Can you be allergic to an energy drink?'

  'Uh, I don't know, but I'd feel better if we went to a hospital.'

  'Are you kidding? I can't afford that! I didn't get medical insurance.' Alice was wheezing now, and a goblin had taken up residence on her chest.

  'Oh crap,' Shauna said, reaching for her handbag. 'I'll have to call Dr Dink.'

  'Shauna, I'm going to lie down for a minute,' Alice mumbled, sliding onto the bathroom floor, taking care to avoid the cat vomit.

  Shauna pulled out her phone and started dialling. 'Hey,' she sang, 'how are you sweetie? Nuh-uh, not on a school night! You are so naughty, Dinky!' she giggled. As she looked over at Alice, her smile dropped completely. She rolled her eyes. Alice thought that she'd make a good actress after all. She turned her back and Alice could hear her crank up her party-girl persona again. 'Uh-huh, sure, I'll definitely be up for that Saturday . . . Uh, quick favour. My roomie is not well right now. Can an energy drink make you real sick?'

  Alice suddenly noticed the welts on her legs. She was really starting to panic. What would happen when they reached her fe
et, the only part of her body that remained unblemished? Shauna walked back to her room and came out again with her unopened can of Triple G. She held the can close to her face and tried to pronounce the ingredients.

  'Additive 136, flavour enhancers, guarana, glucose, ginkgo balboa, gooseberry extract, pseudoeffedrine and . . . huh?' She paused. 'Really?' she said. 'Okay . . . anti-what, sweetie?' she said nodding into the phone, 'Oh right . . . sure, I'm writing it down, and a tepid what, you dirty dog? No, Alice and I do not share a room we share an apartment . . . so just over the counter should fix it? Uh-huh . . . miss you too, see you Saturday,' she cooed, hanging up. 'What a douche bag.' She ran to pick up her car keys from the kitchen bench. Alice heard a thump.

  'You all right, Shauna?'

  'Uh, you really should've wiped up that drink off the floor, soldier,' she sighed, re-emerging and rubbing her bottom. 'I'm going out real quick to the drugstore. There's a Rite-Aid real close. I'll be right back with some antihistamines. I just need to put some tepid water into the bath for you. Do we have tepid water?'

  'That's just water that isn't very hot,' Alice explained from her position on the floor. The tiles were cool under her back.

  'Oh, okay. I thought maybe it was, like, mineral water or something. Start getting undressed there, commander,' she instructed, stepping over Alice and turning on the bath taps.

  'I'm going to grab my lines so I can learn while I'm in there,' Alice grunted, sitting up. She was not sufficiently ill to give up on the evening's task.

  'You Aussies are tough,' Shauna said admiringly. The bath was shallow and she turned off the taps. 'Apparently you'll feel better if you get into the bath for a bit.' Shauna watched Alice stand up and begin to undress. 'I'll be real quick,' she assured her, closing the back door. Alice could hear how swiftly she ran down the back steps and wondered how she managed it in her high heels.

  5

  . . . if you drink from a bottle marked 'poison', it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.

  Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

  Alice sat in the shallow bath trying not to panic. She could tell her heart-rate was elevated and could hear it drumming away in her right ear. Panicking seemed to aggravate her rash and she willed herself to breathe slowly through her nostrils. In the dim fluorescent light of the bathroom, her skin looked as though it belonged to a prehistoric animal. At least the light did not fully reveal the filth in the bath. Alice suspected that neither Neville nor Shauna had ever used the tub, and the spores of mould supported this intuition. Alice inspected the green scum around the rim and wished she had a little toothbrush so she could scrub at it. Her bottom lip throbbed uncomfortably and her desire to clean the bathroom was overcome by panic. The tingling in her face was becoming more pronounced and her breathing sounded shallow and raspy. She looked at her watch. Shauna had been gone just over half an hour. Alice closed her eyes.

  For some reason, she found herself thinking about the way Conrad's fringe caught in his eyes when he blinked and wondered if he'd managed to give up smoking. Apart from sending him an email about the funds owing, she'd left him alone. If he didn't have the money, what was the use of chasing him? Clearly he wasn't missing her. This thought cut through Alice's core.

  She remembered taking her position in the darkness of the prompt side of the stage on opening night of Citrus Days of the Marzipan Pig, her adrenalin coursing like petrol in her veins. Flick, her closest friend from drama school, liked to remind her that the amount of adrenalin an actor produces on an opening night was equal to that of someone in a car accident. She stood in the narrow passageway beside the stage, inhaling the scent of sawdust while she waited for her cue. There were only seconds until blackout. The theatre was intimate, one hundred and fifty seats, and in her position Alice could make out the pre-show chatter. She tried to put faces with the words.

  '. . . brave of him to attempt it . . .' Theatre critic and Conrad supporter.

  'Is my mobile switched off?' Conrad's mum. When did she get a mobile phone?

  'Malteser?' Theatre patron with the munchies. Possibly Flick, although she hadn't RSVP'd.

  'Who's she? I've seen her in something . . . such a big round face . . .' Some bitch who should have known better than to make personal remarks just before the play commenced.

  Alice had done some deep breathing. Nothing she heard could break her concentration. She was in the zone. She rubbed her fingertips together in the dark. The crowd had gone silent and her tiny green cue light began to blink. Although completely blind, she managed to glide to her starting position on the stage in the blackout. The set was an airline cabin, and Alice was seated and fastening her seatbelt as the lights came up.

  'Nuts?' asked a flight attendant.

  Small snickers from the audience. Good, thought Alice, they're on-side.

  'Excuse me, I didn't get a headset.' Her knee stopped trembling. Now that her first line was out, the adrenalin rush was becoming more manageable and she anticipated it would be almost fun to ride.

  'Here, have mine,' offered the actor playing her copassenger, 'I've got a book.'

  'Thank you. What are you reading?'

  'Psychedelic Jihad,' he replied.

  The onstage cast made sure that they adhered to Conrad's direction throughout and went for the 'energised ennui' he had spoken about so rigorously in rehearsal. So far it was going well. She felt it was their best run of Act One to date. Sometimes things could go haywire on opening night, but in light of an abysmal dress rehearsal the previous evening, everyone had banded together to focus with grim determination.

  At the conclusion of Act One, head down in the brace position with an oxygen mask clamped over her mouth, Alice's character realises her fellow passenger is a terrorist. Alice could hear the sharp intake of breath from the audience as the lights went to black. Act One was a winner!

  Alice shifted in the bath and checked under her buttock to see if the swelling had gone down. She could still feel the welts but told herself they were a tiny bit smaller. Her breath felt as though it were being delivered to her via a rubber tube. She licked her lips but didn't manage to moisten them at all. Closing her eyes again, she focused on submerging her body parts. She tried to imagine her breathing slowing and the rash disappearing. Her fingertips tingled and she put them under the water.

  Alice had felt they were losing the audience about ten minutes into the second act. The goodwill they had extracted with the pithy dialogue and clever plot twists in Act One had evaporated by the middle section of Act Two.

  In this act, Alice played a completely different character called Shoshanna. She was a limb-impaired sex worker. Alice had a lengthy monologue and had hoped for at least a few laughs. She was greeted with audience indifference, especially in the pole-dancing segment. At the end of that portion of the performance, when a crooked cop was forced to eat falafel by a Lebanese drug-dealer, there was a palpable shift . . . toward the exit.

  The tough third act was entirely in verse and set in a dystopian landscape. Even the ironic dance to the Spice Girls in the curtain call couldn't revive any of the initial warmth. The final applause sounded wildly uneven, like friends and family clapping overly enthusiastically to mask an icier response from industry guests. There hadn't been a single encore, unheard of on an opening night.

  After the show, the cast huddled backstage, trembling and tearful, for a postmortem.

  'Did they hate it? They hated it!'

  'Did you see them get up and leave? How many of them left?'

  'They didn't laugh at any of the gags in Act Three . . .'

  'Rubbish, they laughed at your monologue! Oh wait, that wasn't meant to be funny.'

  Conrad had appeared. His face was grave but he was full of admiration for the cast. 'You guys were wonderful. That was the best you've been and I'm really proud! Let's party!' He caught Alice in a big hug. 'Who wants Sambucca?'

  Once the postmortem was complete, Alice took a deep breath and marched
out through the stage door and into the opening night party. Her mother was the first person she encountered and her pasted-on smile may as well have been a soliloquy on how awful the play was.

  'Well done, dear,' she said stiffly, and gave Alice a peck on the cheek. 'Thank you for your work.'

  Alice had instructed her mother years ago on foyer etiquette for opening night audience members. She told her that even if you had loathed every moment of the opening night performance and could not find a single positive thing to say, you could still thank an actor for their efforts. Her mother seemed to have forgotten that it was Alice who gave the advice.

  'Thanks, Mum, thanks for coming all the way to see it,' she replied, giving her a clumsy hug. The static-charged fringe of her dress clung momentarily to her mother's cardigan.

  'Well, Dad and I are investors after all,' her mother countered, clutching her trendy bottle of Italian blood-orange soda.

  'Mum, just excuse me one sec,' Alice sputtered, suddenly feeling sick. She needed a drink.

  'I'll just have . . . a glass of white wine, thanks,' Alice asked the barman. He had a sympathetic face, and Alice recognised him as another theatre actor.

  'Sure. How'd it go?' he said, pouring from an already open bottle. It was the better wine they sold at the theatre.

  'Yeah, good. Really solid, I thought. Be great to settle into the run.' She handed over a five-dollar note.

  'You're not buying your own drink on opening night, are you?' roared a woman with short hair and bright pink lipstick. It was Bunny, her Australian agent.

  'Oh, hi Bunny.' Alice willed her face to smile. Bunny Gange was still smarting over the Starmap 3000 fiasco. Alice's role had gone to an actress represented by another agency.

  'Give me a champagne as well,' Bunny said to the barman. She paid for the round and they took their drinks to a far corner of the bar.