‘A present to congratulate me on my first film role?’
She didn’t say anything so I knew I was right.
I shook my head. ‘Maybe you should give it to the other Elektra.’ That was a bit unnecessary, but this was not my finest hour. ‘Sorry, I’m not in the mood.’
‘Not even for one of Eulalie’s over-the-top cadeaux?’
‘Nope.’
‘She sent it in a cab so that you’d get it today.’
I shook my head.
‘How about a piece of my cake then?’
‘Nope, not even your cake can help this situation.’
‘That bad?’ Her chocolate cake was epic.
‘That bad.’
‘It’ll all keep,’ she said and we lay there for a bit and although she was being nice I just wanted her to go away. I was weirdly sweaty and I just needed a bit of space. ‘Stella phoned,’ she said.
‘Is she upset with me?’ This was so embarrassing. Another wave of heat.
‘Of course she isn’t! She just feels bad for you. She says to tell you that everyone’s really sorry and that you’ll still be paid.’
I didn’t care about the money and I definitely didn’t want people to feel sorry for me.
‘That boy was cute.’
‘Which boy?’ Like I didn’t know who she meant. She knows too much. I don’t always understand how she knows as much as she does, but she just does.
‘You know which boy I mean; the one who gave you his handkerchief. I didn’t think boys carried hankies any more.’
‘It wasn’t a hanky, it was a napkin.’
I love you.
Go away.
Please.
Things I didn’t say.
‘It was still very nice of him,’ Mum said.
‘Yep.’ I didn’t really want to have this conversation.
‘So what’s his name?’
‘Oh, he’s just a guy from ACT. I don’t really know him.’ Well, that would certainly be true now I’d made such a colossal tit of myself in front of him.
‘There’ll be other parts,’ she said for about the fiftieth time.
‘I know,’ I replied for about the fiftieth time, although I still didn’t believe it. And there wouldn’t be other parts in a film with James Bond. And Archie Mortimer.
After a bit, I sort of pretended to have fallen sleep and Mum crept out in that exaggerated tiptoe way that people do when they’re trying not to wake up babies. Digby jumped back on to the bed, did that going round and round thing for a minute or two and then settled down fatly on my feet. At least one of us was happy.
I was still wide awake.
My phone barked: The other Elektra was rubbish. Archie x
From: Stella at the Haden Agency
Date: 17 April 10:01
To: Elektra James
Subject:
Dear Elektra,
Charlotte and I just wanted to say that we heard what happened at Open Outcry and it shouldn’t have happened and we’re sorry. Come and have coffee and cake soon and we’ll tell you some much worse stories about things going wrong on set (but you have to promise to keep them secret!). The people on set said you handled the situation like a pro, so well done you because this was one hundred per cent their fault.
Onwards now – there will be other opportunities.
Big hugs from both of us x
‘There’s always a part of you that wants to please your parents.’
Max Irons
‘She says she’s fine, Bertie, but you know what she’s like.’
‘Yes, I got the “it’s fine” line too. Plainly, it’s not fine, but how not fine it is I’m not sure.’
‘She’s done nothing but mooch about for the last two days.’
‘To be fair, she usually mooches about during the holidays. I don’t think we need to panic,’ said Dad.
‘I just wish she’d talk to us about it.’
‘There were always going to be some knocks along the way.’
I was sitting (very quietly) on the stairs, listening to my parents talking about me. I appreciate that this sounds quite furtive, but I was an only child.
‘This Shouting Out film is a very hard knock.’
Was that Eulalie? When did she arrive? They were literally having a conference about me.
‘She’s tired too,’ my mum went on.
I was tired, but it is really annoying to hear someone say that.
‘She looks dreadful.’
Brilliant. Thanks, Mum.
‘She’s had all the stress and none of the upside.’
True. I started to feel quite sorry for myself.
‘I’m worried it’ll start to affect her schoolwork. I’m pretty sure she’s behind on her coursework and she’s back to school again tomorrow.’
I was and sadly I was. I’d had better Easter holidays. The conversation was getting dangerous. Digby padded down from my room (he’d been having a lie-in on my bed) and came and leaned against me. It was comforting.
‘We need to keep an eye on it,’ said Dad.
I wasn’t sure if ‘it’ was my homework or my acting. Either way, this wasn’t good.
‘Maybe we just need to say “enough”,’ said Mum.
No way. I was not going out on a low.
Open Outcry was a massive low.
‘She enjoyed the Utterly Nutterly thing,’ said Dad. That seemed a long time ago. ‘Maybe she’ll get repeat nuts work or, I don’t know, get promoted to crisps or something and that’ll cheer her up.’
‘Cheer who up?’ I asked ‘innocently’, walking into the kitchen. Eulalie wasn’t there which was confusing.
‘You,’ said Mum in her concerned voice (I hated that voice).
‘I’m fine,’ I said and they both looked at each other. ‘I really am. You’re not worried about me, are you?’ I didn’t give them time to answer. ‘Because I’m fine.’ Maybe I needed to stop saying that.
‘But are you being really fine?’ said Eulalie’s voice from the laptop. I angled the screen and there she was, skyping in a negligee. ‘There will be other chances, chérie. This Shout Out film, he will certainly be a disaster.’
‘Open Outcry not Shout Out,’ I corrected. Eulalie struggled with names unless they belonged to handsome men.
‘Shout Out/Open Cryout, it is the same. Nobody will ever hear of him. He will sink without trace.’ It wasn’t just the accent: she struggled with English pronouns too. ‘You will be having a much better role soon. I know this for sure. Maybe one with words. Or a costume?’
Eulalie had disapproved of the clothing brief for Open Outcry. She was the only woman in the world who thought I’d look good in a corset.
‘What about the Streaker film?’
‘Straker. They just keep postponing everything. I don’t think it’ll ever happen.’
‘Maybe they make again Funny Face or Roman Holiday?’
Roman Holiday had been a high point of my Gregory Peck studies. Eulalie was also the only person in the world who thought that I looked like Audrey Hepburn. I looked nothing like Audrey Hepburn. She disappeared from the computer screen, but I knew she’d be back and she was in just a minute, waving a fresh glass of champagne at me. ‘I would offer you some if this stupid technology allowed it.’ Her head loomed perilously close to the camera so that she looked a bit like a very glamorous puppet.
‘Champagne at nine o’clock,’ muttered my mother as if Eulalie were doing hard drugs.
‘I wasn’t hearing you, Julia,’ said Eulalie, who obviously had.
I wasn’t expecting them to remake Funny Face or Roman Holiday – more to the point, if they did, I wasn’t expecting a call, but some good news would be welcome. Any good news. Another Utterly Nutterly commercial would be OK (I was pretty sure I could develop Squirrelina as a character – maybe get her out there meeting some civilian squirrels). A crisps role would indeed be even better. Whatever else this acting stuff was doing for me, it was turning me into a realist. I’d ‘refine
d’ my original list of roles I wouldn’t take:
(STILL) Out of the Question
1. Any role that involves total or partial nudity.
2. Any role that involves anything more than kissing. (Maybe I’d decide on a case-by-case basis, but I wasn’t brave/desperate/stupid enough to strike this one yet.)
3. Any role where the love interest is a man who is old enough to be my father.
4. Any role in a commercial advertising a ‘female sanitary’ product (especially if it has a sporty theme); incontinence products; head-lice treatments; wart treatments; zit cream; or anything medical to do with bottoms.
5. Any role in a horror movie.
6. Any role that involves real spiders, large or small, household or Amazonian, venomous or herbivorous.
7. Any role that involves bugs. (Including beetles – except lady birds – , any grubs or larvae and maggots and basically anything that wriggles.) (By now I was prepared to EAT the bugs.)
8. Any role that involves snakes, garden or venomous, etc.
9. Any role that involves heights, by which I obviously mean any height in excess of my own.
10. Any role that involves singing or dancing. (Well, if they were stupid enough to cast me.)
I wanted to act. Acting made me happy – well, the ‘doing it’ bits anyway and that was enough to make the horrid bits worth it. I was still in this. But now I was in it as a realist. I watched a spider scurry across the floor and I barely flinched (it was very small). What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger (maybe).
‘Have you got plans for today?’ asked my mum, switching off Eulalie (which sounds like a really bad thing to do to your stepmother). ‘Why don’t you go round and see Moss?’
‘I don’t think she’s around.’
‘She’s back from her course. I saw her mum in Sainsbury’s.’
And I bet they had a really good gossip about us both. I knew Moss was back. She’d phoned me when she got all my messages and she’d been lovely and said all the right things (i.e. not very much, but she’d made me laugh), but she was seeing Torr this morning (they’d been apart for three whole days) and although she’d asked me to come too I wasn’t in the mood for third wheeling. ‘I might see her later,’ I said vaguely, but I probably wouldn’t.
‘You can help me bake,’ Mum said a bit too brightly. ‘We could make cupcakes.’
Great. Retro holiday activities. No wonder I wasn’t rushing to give up the acting.
‘I’m glad I could do those films and I was glad to leave school. I couldn’t relate to kids my own age. They are mean and don’t give you any chance.’
Kristen Stewart
‘Babes, poor you.’ The ‘sympathy’ was pouring out of Flissy as she met me at the door of our form room at lunchtime. I was suspicious right away: even if it was the first day of a new term, Flissy did not meet me at the door of our form room; usually, she slammed the door in my face.
‘Sorry?’ I asked, but I had a bad feeling.
‘I heard what happened.’
I clung to the one per cent chance she wasn’t talking about Open Outcry. ‘Nothing happened,’ I said and I tried to push past her.
‘You’re being so brave. I would just have died of mortification.’
The one per cent followed the other ninety-nine into the pit of despair.
‘What happened in the holidays at your filming,’ she went on for the benefit of everyone who was listening (which unfortunately was most of the class). ‘Or what didn’t happen.’ She laughed and lounged across the whole doorway so that I couldn’t get past.
‘Who told you?’ I asked.
‘A friend.’
She had friends? Wow. ‘Who?’ I asked because I knew for sure that it hadn’t started with Moss. I tried again to get past Flissy and reach the safe zone next to Moss and Jenny and Maia who were watching with horror. I failed.
‘A girl I do dance classes with was in it as an extra – an extra just like you now I come to think about it. She knows we go to the same school so she thought I’d want to know.’
‘The rest of us weren’t that interested,’ said Moss (which was supportive, but not that cheering because Flissy had obviously told everyone).
Of course Flissy had found out. Over eight and a half million people live in London so statistically the percentage I know must be irrelevant and yet every single time I do something embarrassing it gets back to someone I know.
‘Oh, it wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t care. It was just a tiny part. I didn’t even have any lines—’
‘Really? When you were talking about it at the end of last term, you made it sound like such a big role. That’s . . . awkward. Anyway, you must still be so disappointed and embarrassed.’
Karma is a seriously mean girl. I should never have told anyone about Open Outcry. I’d worked out fast enough that talking about acting with anyone that didn’t do it was a bad idea. At best, people thought I was a weird drama geek (to be fair I was), at worst, that I was up myself and showing off. I hadn’t specifically told Flissy, but I hadn’t restricted the information to the circle of trust (Moss, Jenny and Maia) either. And even though Flissy and I don’t talk to each other somehow we always know what the other one is up to. Mum, who went through a phase of reading teen psychology books (but somehow never learned about the need for healthy detachment), keeps saying we’ll end up friends. She’s wrong. She also keeps saying that there must be more to Flissy than mean girl. She’s wrong about that too.
What I would have given right now to have been beneath Flissy’s notice.
‘Well, I got paid. And there’ll be other parts.’ I sounded like my mum (and she hadn’t had much luck with that line).
‘Of course there will,’ Flissy gushed. ‘Apparently, everyone was really sorry for you. Maybe you’ll get a pity casting.’
I hated her, I really did.
I should have left it at that. ‘What else did your “friend” tell you?’
‘That you cried.’ Long pause. ‘And that you sobbed all over Archie Mortimer and he had to be nice to you.’ She smirked, not even bothering with the fake sympathy expressions any more.
I felt the tips of my ears go hot and red. ‘You know Archie?’
‘Yeah.’ She shrugged as if to suggest that she knew every hot guy in North London (maybe she did).
‘How do you know him?’ (Why did I ask? Why?)
‘He got off with Talia at Fran’s Halloween party.’ At Halloween, I had voluntarily worn a spider costume, this time complete with weird legs made from tights, and gone trick or treating with Moss and Haruka. An image of Talia in some wrong sort of costume involving fishnets and little else crossed my mind and stayed there.
‘So . . . so Archie’s dating Talia?’ I tried to get past Flissy again, but she blocked me.
She shrugged. ‘It was just a get with at a party. It wasn’t like “true love”.’ She sniggered. ‘It’s what people do at parties. Do you go to many parties, Elektra?’ And she sniggered again. ‘Maybe you’ll get to go to all the A-list acting parties now – with, like, Daniel Craig and people. Oh, no, wait! That’s not going to happen, is it? Shame.’
Look, a saint would have snapped. A saint probably wouldn’t have slapped her though. But I’m not a saint so I slapped her.
Sort of.
In my head, it was a full-on, open-palmed, efficient single slap to her perfect, over-made-up face. In my head, it was a movie moment of exquisite revenge. There’d be shocked gasps of admiration, Flissy would step aside and I’d pass with my head held high and pride restored. Or something like that.
But no. I missed her by a mile.
I’d yet to master the high five so why I thought I could pull off the full-on bitch slap I have no idea. I should have gone to that combat class.
Also I think I had my eyes closed.
At least there was no teacher there to witness it (even my flouncy, failed, girly attempt would have got me into serious trouble) so I was going to get off scot free,
right? Well, no. Much worse. Some random girl had been filming on her iPhone.
There’s always some random girl filming on her phone. Always.
‘It’s not all bad,’ pointed out Moss as she handed me yet another tissue and we examined the footage it had taken someone seven minutes to upload to Facebook. ‘Flissy comes off way worse than you.’ Moss had rescued me out of the doorway and into the corridor. We sat with our backs against the too-hot radiators and everybody took one look at my face and left us alone.
‘At least Flissy just comes over like a horrible person. I look like a complete fail at life.’
‘Nah, everyone hates Flissy. People will be pleased that someone finally fought back.’
‘Tried to fight back.’
‘Your technique does need a bit of work. I’d have another go if I were you.’ No. That was not happening. ‘At least you surprised her – look at her mouth hanging open when it’s over.’ She froze the screen at a particularly unflattering-to-Flissy frame. ‘It’s even wider than normal so you can tell how stupid she is.’
I’m not sure Flissy is stupid. One minute she’ll be saying something spectacularly thick (‘Taiwan’s a factory in China where they make fake Vuitton bags’ being this week’s genuine example) and the next minute she’ll be coming out with some whip-fast verbal takedown. It’s confusing.
‘She’s not as pretty as Talia,’ I said pettily.
‘Nobody is as pretty as Talia.’
That’s true and I don’t know if it made her getting with Archie better or worse. It wasn’t hard to visualize them together; in fact, it was going to be hard to stop visualizing them together. Talia will probably get spotted by a model agency any day now and they’ll beg her to do the Burberry campaign or something because she’s got that rich, useless look. I couldn’t stop watching the video. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t had audio, but you could hear every word because the entire class was holding its breath. No sound and I could have lied about what happened and nobody would have cared. But basically the whole world could not only watch, but also listen to me being crushed over Open Outcry and melting down over Archie Mortimer.
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