Waiting for Callback

by Perdita Cargill

  Moss’s phone buzzed. She looked at the screen.

  ‘Was that Torr?’ It was always Torr.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Tell me that he hasn’t seen it.’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘He’s seen it. What did he say?’ And I grabbed her phone.

  Hahaha Classic Elektra

  Great. It wasn’t just funny that I’d completely humiliated myself, it was typical that I’d humiliated myself. And this from a guy I’d met all of three times (and it’s fair to say I hadn’t been the focus of his attention). Also Moss had nearly laughed when she’d read it. I took another tissue and watched the likes mount up – 80, 85, 92 . . . Well, it was lunchtime; people had nothing better to do. In less than twenty-five minutes, it had approximately fifty more likes than any other status I was tagged in, but it was the Comments (mostly directed at Archie) that destroyed me. Here’s a sample:

  Good result, bro (Archie was predictably tagged), two girls at war. Respect (19 likes)

  Take this down (Posted by Moss. 6 likes so far – and nearly all of them from girls in our form which was courageous.)

  This is hilarious (27 likes)

  Tough choices, dude (3 likes)

  Who’s the flat-chested one? (1 like – This one didn’t bother me as much as you might think because it was posted by Ben Gardener who is this guy who basically has internet Tourette’s. He just goes around spraying abuse pretty much at random. Also I was flat-chested. Also only Flissy had liked it – so far.)

  You pulled Talia Spearman?!!!!! Nice one, mate (43 likes)

  Who hasn’t? (12 likes – all from girls. Like I said, Talia was gorgeous.)

  And there were others that I just can’t repeat.

  ‘How fantastic that when I was making all my mistakes people weren’t really noticing.’

  Jessica Chastain

  ‘Hi, Elektra.’ Nelly smiled at me. She ran the office at ACT and hassled us when we missed more than two classes in a row. ‘What have you lost this time?’

  ‘Nothing – I’m a reformed character.’ She looked doubtful. ‘It’s just that Daisy wasn’t in class today,’ I said. It was the first ACT class of the summer term. Nobody ever missed first class back because a) there was cake and b) there was gossip. In the wake of Open Outcry, maybe I should have missed it.

  ‘She wasn’t?’

  ‘No and she missed the last class last term.’ Nobody ever missed the last class of term because of, well, cake. Daisy hadn’t been at a class since Fortuneswell and I wanted to check she was all right. ‘Do you know if anything’s the matter?’

  ‘I’m sure Daisy’s fine,’ said Nelly in a voice that meant that even if she knew anything she wasn’t going to tell me.

  ‘I’ve lost her mobile number and I just want to check she’s OK.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to give out students’ phone numbers.’

  ‘But it’s me, Nelly. It’s not like I’m some dodgy stranger.’

  ‘I’m really not allowed, Lecky. Message her.’

  ‘She’s not on Facebook.’

  ‘Respect. Well, I could give her your number if you want?’

  I wrote down my mobile number on the edge of her pad. I too had a new mobile number because it was a new phone. A shiny new iPhone, my Open Outcry pressie from Eulalie, inscribed on the back, ‘Mieux vaut faire, et se repentir/Que se repentir, et rien faire.’ Basically, this translates as YOLO and was the only good thing to have come out of that whole painful episode. Now we could skype on the go. I wasn’t sure where my actual phone was at that precise moment (slight but familiar panic), but I knew the number off by heart. ‘You won’t forget to give it to her, will you?’ There was something messy and fun about Nelly that made it hard to trust her powers of organization.

  ‘I promise. Any message you want me to give her?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not really. Just tell her to call me.’

  ‘OK.’ Nelly didn’t ask me to explain. Unlike most adults, she was good like that.

  ‘Good class today?’ she asked. She always wanted to know what we were doing. I think she longed to be downstairs on the stage with all of us and not up here on her own behind a wobbling tower of paperwork.

  ‘Good. We improvised a Game of Thrones/Gossip Girl mash-up.’ I didn’t mention that I’d spent most of the class trying to avoid eye contact with Archie.

  ‘Sounds interesting.’

  ‘It came to life when Chuck Bass was taken down by the Sons of the Harpy.’

  ‘Who was playing Chuck? I love Chuck.’

  ‘Me too.’

  We took a silent moment to dwell on his awesomeness. ‘Christian.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ she said.

  ‘His casting provided strong motivation for the Harpies.’ I stole an enormous toffee from the bag on her desk. I was still chewing it when I went out.

  ‘Elektra.’

  I jumped. The last person I’d expected to see hanging around so late after class finished was Archie. I blushed (obviously).

  ‘Here.’ He handed me my coat. ‘You left it in class.’

  I swallowed the toffee so I could speak (which was quite painful). ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I think you left your phone in the pocket. Well, the pocket keeps barking anyway.’

  ‘Yeah, that would probably be my phone then.’

  He laughed. ‘Probably.’ He sort of nodded at me and I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It wasn’t much of a conversation, definitely a backward step from the Open Outcry banter, but it made me happy. Given that the last time we’d been together I’d sobbed all over him, the fact that Archie was still talking to me at all was a result. Also I was eternally grateful that he still hadn’t ‘liked’ the slap video, far less commented on it, and I was even more grateful (pathetically grateful?) that he hadn’t said anything to me about it in class. I wasn’t even going to go down the road of worrying if he was just sorry for me. I’d decided to be nice to myself for a bit.

  ‘You were a great Harpy today,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks. Sort of,’ I said. Good to know I’d impressed as a rapacious monster.

  ‘You OK about the Open Outcry thing?’

  ‘Sort of,’ I said. I wanted to say, ‘Sure!’, but I didn’t think I could pull that off, not after all the sobbing on his shoulder stuff.

  ‘I wouldn’t be cool about it either; it sucked.’

  I really liked him for saying that.

  ‘Do you want some?’ He held out a seriously large bar of chocolate.

  ‘Just one square.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said and broke me off four.

  ‘God, I love chocolate.’ I think I said it with real feeling because Archie looked at me like I was a bit strange. ‘No, I really, really do.’

  ‘Milk or dark?’

  ‘Don’t care; it’s not really about the taste.’

  ‘Then what’s it about?’

  How could he not know? ‘It’s always been there for me,’ I said simply.

  ‘Whatever gets you through?’

  I nodded. I’d been eating a lot of chocolate recently. I’d probably got to the stage where on any analysis chocolate would register as one of the major elements of my body composition, right up there with carbon and calcium.

  ‘So . . . I guess I’ll see you next week.’

  I thought that he might hug me, I mean in a friends way (we both did drama and there was a lot of hugging), but he just kind of smiled and shrugged and crossed the street and stood at his bus stop. I stood at the bus stop too – but my bus was going the other way. It was kind of funny, the two of us standing on opposite sides of the street, trying not to look at each other. It was like a romcom moment.

  Romcom moments were outside my usual experience (but nice).

  I texted Mossy. Archie . . . still hot. Just saying.

  My phone barked. Yay! She was picking up for once. Did u talk to him again?!!!!!! (PS I know he’s hot, we’ve stalked him often enough

  So
rt of . . .

  OMG, it’s love!!!!!!!

  Hahaha!

  There is very little excuse for text exchanges like this so I won’t try to make any. Don’t judge.

  Mum was stressing when I got home. ‘You’re really late. Why didn’t you call? I was worried. I almost called the police.’

  That was typical her. She doesn’t think like anyone else would: ‘Elektra must be having a nice time at ACT; she’s probably talking to all her friends after class.’ Or: ‘Oh, the traffic must be slow, which will be a little irritating for dear Elektra.’ No, no, no, my mum thinks: ‘Elektra is thirty-five minutes late; she must have been attacked by a child molester or a headless phantom.’ (Or something equally statistically unlikely in our part of London at 7 p.m. when it’s not even dark.) Then she goes pacing around and wringing her hands. When she said she’d almost called the police, that wasn’t just parental hyperbole, it was fact. She’d phoned them before. I probably had a file. She was outside normal.

  ‘Sorry.’ Maybe best not to point out her irrationality while she was still in the meltdown zone. ‘Sorry.’ I’d just keep repeating it.

  ‘And you didn’t answer your phone,’ she said (as she so often did). ‘I called a hundred times.’

  This was, like, her number-one complaint; it bugs her even more than me saying ‘like’. It probably wasn’t a good idea to explain that I’d temporarily misplaced it. I had noticed the three missed calls when I was texting Moss, but I sort of forgot to ring Mum in the excitement of the whole Archie encounter.

  Priorities.

  She was going on and on and on – a sort of white noise of ‘disappointed’.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said again, butting in before she started on some horrible statistic about how many hours it takes before missing children are chopped into small pieces by their abductors or something equally traumatizing. ‘What’s for supper? I’m starving. I haven’t eaten all day.’

  Ha, the siren call to my mother. Excellent distraction. No need to mention the chocolate.

  I didn’t hear from Daisy till after the weekend.

  She sent me a text Had a bug, back at class soon. xx

  I texted my reply under the desk. My lesson was a particularly trying one on ionic and covalent bonding, so I was grateful for the distraction. Get better soon. We all want you back. And then I added, Big Brian wants you . . . badly because she would appreciate the irony.

  I want him too. We are in a deep and meaningful relationship.

  Hahaha

  I heard about Open Outcry. That’s grim. I’m sorry.

  I didn’t mind sympathy from Daisy because I knew that she’d get it. Like Archie. It’s only when you’ve failed to land a heap of auditions yourself that you can really get acting stuff going wrong. I wasn’t surprised that Daisy knew about Open Outcry. Everyone did. Even people who weren’t on Facebook.

  And I didn’t hear about callbacks for Fortuneswell yet, did you?

  No

  Big Brian got a part playing a delinquent in some BBC thing

  Not a stretch for him

  Archie got a voice-over for a new biscuit

  Seriously? (trying not to mind that Daisy knew and I didn’t and failing) That voice

  Why did it seem like this was easier for guys? With too few exceptions, the ones I know didn’t grow up on a diet of Fame, Glee and Ballet Shoes or fantasize about what to wear to the Oscars. Most of them didn’t nag to go to drama classes; they got sent to football and, if they weren’t any good at it, either they didn’t care and did it anyway (which is just not a girl attitude) or they just went inside and bitterly played FIFA on the computer. And there are way more (better) parts for boys than girls. You don’t get a whole mob of boys turning up to castings – casting directors have to go out and look for them. They stalk them.

  Casting directors are basically like teenage girls – they’re all on the lookout for the next hot boy.

  Whatever Daisy had must have been quite a bug because she wasn’t in class the Thursday after that either. We had a stand-in teacher (or ‘drama mentor’ as he grandly styled himself ) who was almost as ugly as Lens was hot. He spent thirty minutes lecturing us on Stanislavsky and his Method and the next thirty making us remember sad and/or distressing things that had happened to us. It wasn’t a huge success as all the boys got embarrassed (so obviously the distressing things were all to do with sex) and all the girls started sobbing (so obviously the distressing things were all to do with love or maybe small animals).

  Not me. I couldn’t get into it. I just kept thinking about things that were sort of sad, but that I found bizarrely funny. I knew that wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing. I knew that I was meant to be connecting with something that had really upset me and I knew that the teacher, sorry mentor, wanted me to use that. Despite the fact that he was so irritating and talked entirely in textbook pretentious phrases (‘playing with risk in a safe environment’ I found particularly ironic as I was standing next to Big Brian at the time), I could see what he was trying to do and on another day I would just have got over myself and done it. But the horrors of Open Outcry and now Flissygate were just too fresh in my mind.

  From: Charlotte at the Haden Agency

  Date: 27 April 18:02

  To: Julia James

  Cc: Stella at the Haden Agency

  Subject: Elektra

  Dear Julia,

  I’m afraid that Mayday Productions have decided to go in a different direction on the White Noise project (mute, traumatized child role). They did ask us though to pass on their thanks to Elektra who was apparently very convincing in this role at the audition! I’m sure they’ll bear her in mind for other projects.

  Thank you for the messages asking for an update on the Straker (working title) project. As far as we know, no decisions on casting have yet been taken. It may be that they have decided to cast the net wider and see more girls or it may be that the delay has nothing to do with the casting process at all. Sorry not to have more exciting news for you and Elektra this time!

  Kind regards,

  Charlotte

  WAITING

  • Time (awake) spent at school: 63.1 per cent; time at school spent thinking about acting: 37.5 per cent (which has reduced, but I’ve been distracted by life drama).

  • Number of auditions since Open Outcry: 4 (Stella’s on a mission to get me over it); strike rate: 0 (but I am now an EXPERT on auditions).

  Top Audition Rules

  (as listed on google and annotated by me)

  1.

  Be yourself.

  LOL don’t be youself; be the character. This is obviously a stupid rule.

  2.

  Wear all black so the clothes provide a neutral base for your characterization.

  Unless ypi happen to have a stunningly vibrant purple schooluniform and you disposal. If you do whip it out.

  3.

  Be off book.

  This is true, learn you lines even if they say you don’t have to then you can feel smug. Also your acting will be better.

  4.

  Be nice to the casting director.

  Good plan. Playing hard to get really isn’t going to work when there are seventeen girls who look EXACTLY the same as you sitting in the waitng room.

  5.

  Walk in with good vibes

  What does this even mean?

  6.

  Don’t request feedback.

  I think I must be looking at an American list. I don’t know a single British actor who wouldn’t be way too awkward to do this.

  7.

  Always celebrate/console yourself with cake.

  I added this one in. You’re welcome.

  ‘Each time my mum would ask me: “Are you sure you want to do this? ” and I’d be, like, “Sure!”’

  Dakota Fanning

  ‘Elektra, do you want me to run these lines with you?’ my mum called upstairs.

  ‘It’s for a dead child. I don’t have any words,’ I yelled back. />
  ‘No, not that one. The Casualty casting with seven lines before the operation,’ she bellowed.

  Obviously, I would learn my lines, but I was in the middle of a mildly satisfying Sunday evening gossip session with Maia so I ignored Mum. I needed to know if Jenny had beaten Bella in the battle to the death (well, this week’s battle to the death) for Max’s affections. I checked my phone. Excellent, she had (I liked Bella but I liked Jenny more).

  What do you think of Torr? asked Maia, moving on.

  He’s nice

  Bit up himself, right?

  Bit

  He was in my Tube carriage today. She attached a pic of him, enormous headphones squashing down his hair. You could tell he was nodding along to the beat.

  Some indie band that he’s ‘early adopting’, right? That was my guess.

  He probs knows the drummer

  Hahaha Did you talk to him?

  No. He was pretending he didn’t know me.

  To be fair, as far as I knew, Torr did hardly know Maia.

  My phone barked again. Too cool?

  So cool

  Bit weird?

  LOL maybe

  And Moss is so boring when she’s with him

  I know, right? And then I felt guilty so I texted, But they’re really sweet together.

  No reply.

  ‘Elektra?’ my mum called again (of course she did).

  ‘Are you word perfect?’ The words bounced off the walls.

  ‘Yesssss.’ No. Nooooo.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  How did she always know?

  ‘Come down and we’ll just run them a couple of times.’

  I knew she’d come up if I didn’t go down and then she’d go on at me about the state of my room as well as how unprepared I was. Tidying it was on my list – but a long way down from learning my lines.

  ‘I can practise them by myself,’ I said, helping myself to a slice of sponge cake when I came into the kitchen. ‘Hi, Dad.’ He was practically hidden behind a perfectly constructed wall of files and just grunted a reply.