Chapter Nine
Laurie
stood outside the Rayne’s End theatre in East Hill. A thin December
sleet was falling. Already it had penetrated the jacket Sash had
loaned him, and he was cold.
He
didn’t really mind. He had just left a coffee shop up the road,
where Sasha had bought them both breakfast before heading off to
his shift at the car wash. Sasha had paid for their bus fares from
Birchwood and a copy of the Stage, which he had folded and
smilingly left by Laurie’s plate. He hadn’t leaned across the table
and kissed Laurie good-bye in the middle of the crowded café, but
the look he had left him with was somehow better yet. It had stayed
with him, as warm and real as the lingering soreness inside
him.
The
Rayne’s End Empire was a million miles away, in style and purpose,
from the plush little Twilight on the Strand. All he had wanted of
that place was a refuge, somewhere to be that wasn’t home. What he
wanted from the grim redbrick in front of him now was a job. The
chill sinking down into the bruised bones of his ribs and face was
a friend to him, repressing the jump of his nerves.
He’d
thought he had to apply, when he saw an advert in the paper for
auditions. Apply, fill in forms, supply full personal details, then
wait. The process had been so daunting—and, he now knew, his own
motivation so slight—that he’d never got further than putting a red
marker ring around the ad. He was still fairly sure that formal
application was the protocol, but he couldn’t wait.
He
tugged up the collar of Sasha’s coat, drawing comfort from the
scent of him. Then he climbed the concrete side steps that led to
the door marked AUDITIONS—just a sheet of A4 in a plastic folder,
felt-tip letters starting to blur in the damp—and pushed it open.
Beyond it lay a small office, empty at the moment, though he could
hear a buzz of conversation in the next room. Deciding to take his
chances as he found them, Laurie did not stop to find whoever was
meant to be fielding the candidates as they arrived. He padded
silently into the corridor and listened, taking stock.
If
Laurie knew nothing else, he knew theatres. The darkness that
descended on him as soon as he was well away from the outside world
was reassuring to him rather than disorienting. This corridor, with
its slow curve, must lead around the auditorium. Good. Offices
behind him, so stage to the front. A few steps into the half-light
confirmed it. Voices, one patiently reading and the other chiming
in for all it was worth. A little closer and Laurie could pick out
act, scene, and players. A pair of double doors was ahead of him,
their peculiar heaviness familiar to his hand. Accomplished at
opening and closing these in perfect silence, Laurie let himself
into the auditorium.
Seven young men of about his own age were gathered in the
fifth row back from the stage. An eighth was up there, making a
mess of Hamlet’s first dialogue encounter with poor bewildered
Ophelia. The reader, an unlikely maiden in his fifties, was doing
his best to prompt as well as provide Ophelia’s lines, but it was
plainly slow going, and Hamlet was starting to sweat. Laurie raised
an eyebrow. The weaknesses of others were not ordinarily pleasing
to him, but the moment might be opportune. He went and sat down,
very quietly, at the end of the fifth row. The boy in the seat next
to him gave him a polite, puzzled glance. Who are you? Laurie, who would
normally have told him, with full background and apologies, simply
flashed him a smile and settled to watch the performance as if he
owned the place, actors, furniture, and all.
Bristling, the other boy turned his attention back to the
stage, where the director was thanking the would-be Hamlet with a
don’t-call-us politeness Laurie knew well. He took his moment. The
stage assistant stood up, clipboard in hand, and gestured for the
next candidate. “That’s me,” Laurie said, getting calmly to his
feet. Peripherally he saw the young man on the far end of the row
turn a startled look on him, but he ignored it. “Laurence Fitzroy,
here for Hamlet or anyone else you need.”
The
director took the board from his assistant and ran his finger down
the page. “Well, we’re only casting Hamlet this afternoon, son,
and…” He paused, frowning. “Furthermore, I don’t have your name
here. Did you register?”
“No. I can do this play, any part, start to finish without
looking. You don’t even need to rehearse me. I’m here to save you
some time.”
That
last had possibly been a bit much. The director came to the edge of
the stage and raked a repressive gaze over Laurie and the other
hopefuls who were now gaping in outrage. “I see how you came by
those bruises,” he said conversationally. “Sorry, Mr. Fitzroy.
There’s a process, or you don’t step on this stage.”
Laurie
shrugged. “Okay. I can do it just as well down here.”
He
picked up from the point of the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia
where the other boy had trailed off. For his first few lines, he
made no shift of stance or expression, not even taking his hands
from his pockets, and he was vaguely aware of the assistant laying
her clipboard aside and vaulting down into the pit as if to meet
and restrain him bodily from the impromptu performance. Equally
calmly, he saw the director’s expression slowly change, saw him
gesture to the girl to wait.
A few
lines in, Laurie paused. The reader, off-kilter, frantically began
looking through his copy for Ophelia’s response, but Laurie lifted
a silencing hand to him. He left it a beat or two, then, once more
without movement or gesture, shifted roles. He could not have
explained how he did it if his life had depended on it. Rehearsing
dialogue in mirrors, he had seen that he still presented his
outward masculine self. And yet, as if by an effort to look through
shifting veils or water, a girl would be there too—or a woman, or a
man three times his age and weight, or whoever else was
required.
So Laurie became Ophelia. He folded up the fabric of Hamlet in
his mind, found its remembered connections and punched through it
to achieve coherent passage between parts. He became, in rapid
succession, Polonius, Gertrude, a frazzled combination
Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern. Claudius was easy, the shambling and
lecherous old king a simple memory of his father, shining from his
flesh like a sickening beam. How like
Hyperion to a fucking satyr… He continued
until he was exhausted, and then he stopped.
The
director stood on the edge of the stage, hands on his hips, his
frown made terrible and comical at once by the upward-blazing
footlights. He waited for a while as if to be sure Laurie was quite
finished. Then he said, “I can’t decide if you’re a genius or a
freak. But either way, Mr. Fitzroy, you must apply. Actors need
discipline as well as talent.”
Laurie
nodded. He wholly agreed, and he could see that what he had done
wasn’t fair to the other boys waiting their chance. “I don’t have
time,” he said. “But thanks anyway.”
He got
as far as the aisle before the whispering began. The acoustics were
good, and theatrical people were rarely capable of holding a
discreet argument, even sotto voce. Still he knew his best bet was
to keep walking, and his hand was on the door when the assistant,
panting from her dash across the auditorium, ducked under his arm
to block his exit. “This casting’s to replace a dropout,” she said.
“We open in three nights’ time. Can you start
straightaway?”
“Yes. I’d have to.” Laurie looked past her shoulder to where
the director was studiously trying not to take an interest in the
outcome of the conversation. His projection was excellent too, and
he didn’t need to raise his voice. “I’d have to be paid in cash,
and I’d need the first week in advance.”
The
director’s head jerked up. “What?” he boomed. “Do you think we’re
running some sort of sweatshop here? National Insurance number and
Equity card, or the deal’s off.”
Laurie’s second retreat was as genuine as his first. He knew
he was good, but had no experience of his power to turn talent into
cash. To make people drop everything to get him. He made his way
out of the Rayne’s End Empire, head down, hands in his pockets,
because he knew another company in the area needed a Torvald for
their Doll’s House—a Dora too, and Laurie was prepared to give them either—and
after that he had a whole day’s worth of hunting mapped out, circle
after numbered circle in the Stage. He knew that getting knocked
back was part of the business, and that his list of demands
would—should, anyway—preclude him from almost everywhere. If all
else failed, he had made Sasha promise to help him find a niche in
the car-wash trade.
A faint
metallic rattle behind him. Halfway down the Empire’s steps, Laurie
glanced back. This time the poor assistant was struggling with the
heavy exterior doors. On an instinct less of hope than habitual
courtesy, Laurie turned around and went to pull one open for
her.
“Come back,” she said. “Come in.”
She led
him to an office off the reception hall, where a flurried-looking
woman in her fifties was sitting down behind a desk, putting on her
glasses and reaching for a file. A cash box was open at her elbow.
Laurie politely ignored this and sat down on the chair the
assistant pointed out to him. “Alison, are you sure about this?”
the woman asked. “It’s very irregular.”
“It’s a bloody outrage,” the assistant agreed. “But Mr. Jacobs
insists. He’s sent the other boys away.”
The
woman raised her eyebrows. “Oh, God. You’d better be good, son. And
watch your back on your way home.”
* *
*
Laurie
shook hands with Alison on the theatre steps. The rain had stopped,
and a dull silver sunlight was struggling through the overcast. He
had a hundred pounds in cash in his coat’s inner pocket, carefully
zipped up. Laurie had been known to go out partying with that much