by Jane Fallon
‘How’s the law?’ I ask him as we walk through Gordon Square towards a pub that he tells me does fantastic sandwiches but also, more importantly, usually has space outside.
He grimaces. ‘Loathsome.’
‘Really?’ I wasn’t expecting that. I assumed he’d found his calling.
He nods. ‘I hate it. Don’t tell them that.’ He jerks his head back in the direction of his office.
‘You’ve been doing something you hate for twenty years?’
‘Pretty much. Well, if you don’t count the extra year of college I had to do to convert. Seventeen years. And eight months.’
‘At the same place?’
‘Yep. And three and a half days.’
‘Ha! Not that you’re counting.’
‘It’s not that bad,’ he says, striding along. I’d forgotten how fast he always walked, long legs flying out in front of him.
‘Slow down,’ I say.
‘Oh, sorry.’ He does. The tiniest fraction. ‘It could be worse, of course it could, so I try not to moan on about it.’
He comes to an abrupt halt as we turn a corner and arrive at the pub. I almost bang straight into him, manage to stop myself just in time.
‘Here okay?’ he says.
‘Lovely.’
‘You can’t tell me you’ve hated it for the whole seventeen years and eight months?’
‘And three and a half days. No, of course not. I think I was quite excited for a week.’
‘So why not change and do something else?’
He shrugs. ‘Responsibilities. Once the kids came along, you know. And it’s okay, really. It’s just a bit dull. The job, not the kids. The kids are marvellous.’
The waiter comes along and we order a turkey-and-cranberry sandwich (Tom) and a blue-cheese ploughman’s (me), along with two fizzy waters.
‘Anyway,’ he says, once our order has been taken. ‘Enough about my boring career, let me live vicariously through you. Tell me everything.’
‘You don’t want to know,’ I say.
‘No, I really do, that’s the thing. Every job you’ve had since you left college.’
I laugh. ‘Every single one? Most of them only lasted a day, didn’t pay anything and no one ever saw them.’
‘I love it,’ he says. ‘Tell me about the really awful ones before we get on to Murder in Manhattan. Which, by the way, I’m completely hooked on. Is it Courtney? The murderer? It is, isn’t it?’
So I tell him a couple of funny stories about the more outlandish jobs I took in the early days (one playing an owl in a children’s community theatre, which just involved me hooting a lot and looking stern, and another about the time I appeared in a film student’s graduation film and he talked to me for two hours about my back story and motivation, then it turned out all my part required was for me to walk into a shop and ask for a packet of Nurofen). Tom lapped them up, laughing in all the right places.
‘I love it. Remember how pretentious we all were when we were at college? Sitting around discussing Pinter like it was the most important thing in the world?’
‘And Kieron would always bring up Brecht, because he was the only one who’d ever read any.’
‘He’s still the same,’ Tom laughed. ‘Honestly, I swear the last time I saw him he started on about the Theatre of Noh like I was meant to know what he was on about.’
‘So, he’s still directing. Alistair’s teaching … what does he teach?’
‘English. Seems quite happy.’
‘And Pia? I don’t suppose any of you kept in touch with her?’
He raises an eyebrow at me. ‘Hardly. I mean, I would have, obviously, but I guess she didn’t want anything to do with any of us. Last I heard, she’d gone to work in Spain. She had family there.’
I wait for the waiter to put down our drinks and fuss around with knives and forks.
‘I’ve always felt guilty. I should have known what Mel was capable of.’
‘Hardly your fault. Alistair was the one who betrayed Pia, not you. Not that it matters, not that I ever would have brought it up at the time, but you know Mel told him she’d seen Pia with someone else that night.’
‘It doesn’t surprise me. Mel, I mean –’
‘God, Mel was a nightmare. I wonder what ever happened to her.’
I put my head in my hands. ‘Oh God, Tom, you can’t even imagine –’
‘You’re not still in touch with her?’
So I tell him the whole story, and he sits there, open-mouthed, taking it all in.
‘Poor you,’ he says when I get to the end. ‘Shit.’
‘It’s all my own fault,’ I say. ‘I should never have let her back in my life.’
‘We should have stood by you more. I always felt bad about that. The way we all just dropped you.’
‘We were kids,’ I say. ‘I’ve missed you all, though.’
We settle up and I stroll back in the direction of his office with him. That is to say, I trot along beside him, trying to keep up.
‘We have to do this again,’ he says. ‘Or we could meet up one evening. You could bring Simon, and I could see if I could persuade Alistair out with Siggy. She’s scary. In a nice way. Impressive, I think I mean, really.’
‘Only if you promise to go a bit slower if there’s any walking involved.’
‘Shit. Sorry.’ He changes pace, slows right down so now we’re walking too slowly, but I don’t say anything.
As we reach the corner of Tottenham Court Road, my phone starts to ring. Sara.
‘I’d better take it. I’m going to head for the Tube anyway.’
We have a quick hug and he strides off, turning to say, ‘Next week, maybe?’ as I press to take the call.
‘Lovely!’ I shout back, feeling a warm glow that it’s gone so well, that Simon might be right and reconnecting with my old friends might be just what I need. ‘Hi, Sara.’
‘Can you make an audition tomorrow?’ she barks, leaving out the pleasantries. ‘One episode? Five lines?’
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Give me the details.’
‘New comedy drama for ITV called Sisters. About – well, you’ve guessed it – sisters. Made by Framework Productions – and yes, before you ask, they’re definitely legit. They’re in Percy Street. They could see you pretty much anytime between two and four.’
‘And what’s the part?’
I hear the usual shuffle as she finds her notes. ‘Woman with Dog. You pass the time of day with one of the sisters waiting in a queue for a coffee in the park.’
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Later is better, I can do a half-shift.’
She promises to call me back to let me know the time. Before I head down into the Tube station I ring the call centre, tell them I’ll only be in for the morning. I’m gratified to find that I still get a little jolt of excitement when I say the words, ‘I’ve got an audition.’
48
Mel
Amy has cut me off, vanished into thin air. I know this because I tried to look at her Facebook page but I was denied access, so then I tried Twitter and it told me I was blocked. I rang her phone out of curiosity – I knew she wouldn’t answer if she saw it was me, and I didn’t want to speak to her, in all honesty. But the number is dead.
Which is a shame, because I was hoping to hand it over to Georgie Rigby once I’d told her exactly what her husband was up to. What better way for Amy to find out Simon is married than the poor wronged wife calling up, looking for answers?
I could give her Amy’s address, obviously. I assume she’s still living there. Although, as she now knows the whole Blood Ties thing was fake, she must also realize that it was me her agent gave her address to so I could send her the non-existent scripts. Would she do something as drastic as move because of me? It only looked like a shitty little rented flat to me, so maybe she would. And I don’t really want to send Georgie Rigby all the way up there to try and catch her husband in the act, only for it to be a wild-goose chase.
Of course
, this is assuming Georgie will bite. Maybe she’s such a drip she’ll just accept whatever he’s doing. Refuse even to confront him in case he leaves her. Maybe she knows already. Maybe she’s actually got a man on the side herself and it’ll be a relief. I doubt it, somehow. She doesn’t look the type.
I’ve got a few days to think how best to handle things. My appointment to view Georgie Rigby’s ugly ceramics isn’t until Friday.
‘I can’t decide which one I want,’ I told her on the phone. ‘They’re all breathtakingly beautiful.’
She was so flattered she agreed that I could visit her at home and check out the whole collection. She didn’t usually deal with people in person, she told me, but I sounded nice and it was obvious how much I loved her work (self-effacing little laugh).
‘I do!’ I told her. (I almost choked at this point.) ‘It’s so … unique, so … personal.’
How could she refuse?
49
Amy
Woman with Dog, it turns out, has a lot in common with Woman in Pub and Woman in Park, in that she has absolutely no distinct personality. She’s just a woman saying lines to facilitate the plot. Only, this time, she has a dog. That’s her USP.
It’s the same old same old. I show up ten minutes early, having been home to change after my shift (only one sale; they would have sent me home at lunchtime, anyway). I wear jeans, a T-shirt and a gilet, which feels to me like something a woman walking a dog might wear. If she was a massive cliché. I nod hello to the other Woman with Dogs, chat briefly to the casting director’s assistant about the weather, and then I’m in. I answer politely when the casting director (who I’ve met before) and the director and producer (who I haven’t) ask me about Murder in Manhattan, and then I read my five lines with the producer reading the responses.
‘Great,’ Joy, the casting director, says when I’ve finished. ‘Thanks, Amy.’
I’m about to get up and leave when Nick, the director, mutters to the producer something about Catherine. With a question mark afterwards. I hesitate, unsure what to do.
‘Good idea,’ the producer, whose name I’ve already forgotten, says.
‘Oh … yes … why not?’ Joy says. She’s wearing the casting director’s uniform of a floaty, oversize top, baggy trousers and large clunky jewellery that rattles when you’re in the middle of your reading.
‘Are you okay to hang on a sec, Amy?’ She shuffles bits of script around and it’s like being trapped in a room with Evelyn Glennie. I wonder how the other two can sit in here with her all day without wearing earplugs. Finally, she locates what she’s looking for.
‘Here it is.’ She thrusts a piece of paper at me. ‘Nick was just saying maybe you should have a read of Catherine.’
Nick chips in. ‘It’s a bit of a bigger part. Single mum. Feisty. If you want to pop outside and have a read through, we’ll call you back in in a bit.’
‘Sure. Great. See you in a minute.’ I’m gratified that my Woman with Dog must have gone down well, not to mention delighted to be able to have a go at something a bit more meaty. I manage my excitement, though. This has happened to me before and has never yet amounted to anything. I wonder if, as soon as I leave the room, they’re all going to decide this is a big waste of everyone’s time and why did anyone suggest it?
Joy shows me out and tells her assistant to send me back in in about ten minutes, whenever there’s a gap. The three other women waiting look at me with expressions ranging from curiosity to out-and-out loathing.
I sit in the corner and look at the scene. It’s two sides of papers stapled together and it’s a two-hander between feisty Catherine and someone called Miranda, so there are a fair few lines to get my head around. Feisty Catherine doesn’t seem to be being at all feisty, in fact she’s crying by the end, which is a challenge in itself, as I don’t really know anything about her or what might have happened to make her so upset.
It’s always weird, being given a disembodied scene with no context. I don’t even know what relation these two women are to each other, let alone what they might have argued about, but this is obviously some kind of post-argument make-up. Catherine thinks the Miranda woman never takes her seriously seems to be the bottom line.
I read it through a few times in my head, trying out different ways of approaching it. And then I sit and think about sad things to get me in the mood for crying. I’m spoilt for choice when I consider my own life. The danger is that I’ll be bawling before they call me back in.
‘Have you had enough time?’ Joy’s voice snaps me back to reality. I hadn’t even noticed her appear. Which, given the jangly bracelets, is a miracle in itself.
‘Yes. Fine. Thanks.’
I follow her back in, say hi all over again, and then I’m reading, with Joy playing Miranda. The first read is a bit awkward, not helped by the fact Joy has all the acting ability and enthusiasm of a robot. She plonks out line after line in the same flat intonation, so we sound like two people playing different songs on one piano.
‘Okay, let’s go again,’ Nick, the director, says. ‘This time, think that Catherine has held this resentment for years but she’s never really verbalized it. When she cries, they’re tears of frustration, not sadness.’
I resist the urge to say, ‘You could have told me that before,’ and throw myself into it. I try to ignore Joy and imagine Miranda’s lines said in a way that would provoke me – the truth is, I imagine Joy is Mel, that I’m saying the lines to her – and, somehow, I manage to get lost in the moment and, at the end, produce a couple of real tears. So, all in all, I’m pleased I’ve done as well as I can.
‘Great,’ Nick says. He looks at Joy and she stands up.
‘Thanks, Amy. Good to see you again.’
And that’s my cue to leave.
I haven’t seen Simon since the weekend. He’s been up against it, finishing the St John’s Wood job, and he’s just, he says, been too knackered when he finally finishes late in the evenings. It was a relief to be able to tell him I’d been to see Jack when we talked on the phone yesterday. It felt as if I’d finally removed a barrier that had gone up when he’d found out I was still ‘officially’ engaged to someone else. It felt like a new start.
‘Oh, and I had lunch with Tom.’
‘Good for you. How was it?’
‘It was great,’ I said. ‘You were right, it felt almost cathartic.’
‘See? I should be a life coach.’
‘What? You’d give people old rugs and tell them to meet up with long-lost friends?’
‘Exactly. Can I come over tomorrow? I’ve missed you.’
‘Definitely.’
I had already decided I was going to get him a set of keys cut for my flat. I felt as if I wanted to make a gesture, something that told him how I was starting to feel without me having to actually say it.
Last night, Kat and Greg came over and we sat on the roof with gin and tonics, watching the sun go down.
‘God, you’d pay a fortune for this view if it was officially yours,’ Kat said at one point. They had arrived clutching a tray of little geraniums and a couple of bags of soil and we’d spent twenty minutes planting up a few of the nicer pots.
‘You could do a whole herb garden up here.’
‘I’d spend the rest of my life watering it all. I’d never be able to take another job again.’
‘Let’s toast the end of a very unpleasant era,’ Greg said, and we all clinked our glasses, them on the two recliners, me sitting on the wall. I felt as if I’d finally reconnected with the world.
‘Well, you obviously did something right because they want to see you again.’
‘For Woman with Dog?’ I’m half asleep. After Kat and Greg left, at about quarter to ten, I polished off the rest of the wine from the second bottle we’d opened and fell into a deep, contented sleep on the sofa, from which I woke at about three this morning, no idea where I was, hangover already kicking in. When I finally found the bed (via the best part of a pint of water), O
scar was sprawled right across the top, snoring away, so I sort of shuffled on, curled around him as best I could and consequently have a stiff neck to add to my headache.
Sara laughs. I hold the phone away from my ear. ‘No! For the other part you read for. Catherine. They want you to go in and read with the actress playing Miranda.’
‘Really?’ Suddenly, I’m wide awake. ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘Of course it is. Although it’s by no means a done deal.’
‘No. Of course. I know that.’
‘It’ll all depend on the chemistry. Miranda’s cast already – she’s one of the sisters – and Catherine is her life-long friend. It’s a decent part, I think. Not one of the leads, but second level. They’re bringing six people back, apparently.’
‘Who’s playing Miranda?’
Sara names an actress of the down-to-earth, woman-next-door variety who I have always admired.
‘She’s great. I could imagine being her friend.’
‘Well, that helps,’ Sara says. ‘They’re seeing people Monday, if that works?’
‘It does. It works. Any time.’
‘Okay. Well, I’ll let you know the details later.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, and then, before I can stop myself, I add, ‘And it definitely is real, isn’t it? Definitely?’
‘Definitely,’ she says and, to be fair to her, there’s no sense of irritation at being asked this again. ‘Don’t worry, Amy, I’m double checking everything from here on in.’
I know nothing is guaranteed. I’ve been down to the last two for a part before and the director has more or less told me I’m their favourite and they’re looking forward to working with me and then I’ve found out I haven’t got it. Anything can happen. One piece of the jigsaw moves and the rest has to shift to accommodate it. But it’s been so long since I had a proper audition for a proper part – since Murder in Manhattan, nearly a year ago, in fact – and that’s all I ask. That I’m given the chance to show what I can do, even if I end up being too old or too young or too fat or not fat enough or just not right for one of a million reasons. If I can do that, then I’m allowed to think of myself as an actress and not someone whose career is working in a shitty call centre.