Chapter 1
The first week after the phone call with Nat feels like a daze.
She sends me the script and for the next few days I become a woman on a mission – running spreadsheets by day at my desk job at the paper company; reading scripts late into the night in a caffeine-fuelled haze.
Surviving on fumes. I’ve always believed in controlling what you can, in circumstances like these – faced with such an unpredictable career, all I have until the moment in the room is the words on the page.
Knowing them as well as I can. Burning them into the furthest reaches of my mind until I can recite them in my sleep.
And this audition will be less predictable than most, given the fact that Avi will be there.
So I can’t afford for there to be any other variables.
This is what my life has been for the last few years: a double life.
A life that consists only of work and auditions.
Scrunched-up scripts in my bag, on the bus.
Calls with Nat. Attempt after attempt to get to the next role, the next part.
Trying to do everything I can to reach the impossible dream that I’ve nurtured carefully since I was a teenager and my parents convinced me to audition for the school play in an effort to encourage me to be more sociable.
But then, suddenly, struggling to fit in seemed not to matter so much.
Because when I was on stage, being someone else, I felt free.
The Saturday night before my audition the following Monday, I sit in my room, flicking through the book the film is based on.
It’s an old detective series, first published when I was a teenager.
I haven’t opened this particular copy in a while – this is the first one I bought and usually I save it for the memories.
Some of the glue in the spine has worn out, so pages have a tendency to fall out, and I had to buy myself a new copy to read and reread.
I remember the first time I picked the book up in a shop, intrigued by the lock and key on the cover.
Then opening it and becoming obsessed. The books tell the story of Amelia Blackthorn, a female detective determined to forge her own way in the world.
People think she’s too sharp-edged, and sometimes she doesn’t quite fit in.
But she always solves the case with a mixture of grit and determination, and not giving a flying fuck what the Victorian men around her think.
Together with her assistant, Jackson – the part Avi will be playing – they’re like a more modern, female-led Sherlock and Watson, combing the streets of London for unsolved mysteries.
The plot of this film would be the first mystery she solves: a series of ritual killings of young women in London, which is traced back to a secret society operating out of a gentlemen’s club in Pall Mall.
It’s brilliant and pacy, and full of intrigue.
A dream role. But that isn’t why it’s special to me.
It’s special to me because it’s the book – the series – I used to hide under my desk at school and secretly read once I finished my work.
No matter where I was, no matter where we moved to or how little I felt I was fitting in, I could turn to its pages.
Everything else melting away as soon as I entered the world of Amelia Blackthorn.
Strong and brave Amelia. Unapologetically herself.
An alter ego I could inhabit when Lara Francis didn’t feel like enough.
And, still, it’s been the book I return to as an adult.
When I need guidance, or wisdom. Or just a sense that I can do something.
I pull the book down from the shelf and flick through its opening pages, waiting for that feeling to come over me – to find Amelia’s strength of will. Her resolve, her determination.
But instead, something falls out.
I pick it up, thinking it’s going to be a page from the book. But it isn’t. It’s a list – one I made when I was sixteen. At the sixth school I went to. The one I was bullied at.
When I get out of here, I will:
1. Pursue acting with everything I can, not letting anything get in my way
2. Get my first role in a film
3. Not care about what anyone thinks (especially Alison)
I smile at the last one – because it’s about my sister.
Who did, and still does, have many opinions about my life.
Ones I still find it hard not to care about sometimes, even more than a decade later.
I scan down the list one more time, a feeling passing through me – of nostalgia, of determination.
But before I can dwell on it for too long, there’s a knock at my door.
‘Hello?’ I call out. It’ll probably be my flatmate Hannah, who runs the drama club at her school.
I feel a twinge of guilt and anticipation; she’s been waiting for me to respond to her request for me to come and give a talk to her students about being an actor.
A talk I have been avoiding giving her an answer about – because, until this moment, I didn’t really feel like an actor.
More like someone who was repeatedly trying and failing to achieve a dream that might end up being out of her reach entirely.
It’s not Hannah, though. Spencer, my other housemate, pops his head in. He’s a musical-theatre actor, and the one who posted the spare-room advert for this flat on Facebook a year ago.
‘Tea?’ he asks. He’s holding two cups.
Spencer is almost as laser-focused as I am, often having to cancel social arrangements to make auditions.
We might not have evolved beyond professional allies over the past year, but I feel like he has my back.
Sometimes he’ll even step in to run lines with me when I need a scene partner for a self-tape.
It’s nice to live with someone who understands how much you need to give for a career in show business to work.
‘Thank you,’ I say, a flicker of warmth passing across my chest at the gesture.
‘We missed you at fajita night the other night,’ he says, and I feel a little bad. Spencer never expects me to attend the monthly flatmate dinners – especially when I have an audition to prepare for. But I said I’d try and make this one, and forgot.
‘Sorry,’ I reply, gesturing to the script. ‘Duty called.’
‘Do you have an audition?’
‘Oh,’ I say. I don’t often share details of my auditions with my flatmates, because I don’t like to jinx it. But Spencer looks so hopeful for me that it spills out. ‘I’ve got a screen test, actually.’
‘Lara, that’s amazing!’ he says, sitting down on the end of my bed.
I nod, then sit silently for a few seconds as he waits for me to offer more. But nothing comes. Most of my life is spent wondering what to say next. I’m never very good at these kinds of situations. Small talk has always been my sister Alison’s strong suit.
‘Well,’ he says, after I don’t offer anything else. My heart clenches a little as he gets up from the bed and moves towards the door. ‘Good luck with it.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, my throat dry.
Spencer nods and steps backwards, shutting the door.
And I turn my eyes back down to my script, my heart beating a little faster than it was before.
Running my eyes down it, looking at the dialogue I’ll be reading – opposite Avi.
His character Jackson’s lines seeming to leap off the page in this moment.
And in the next second, something has me self-destructively pulling out my phone.
Googling Avi Kumar. Pictures pop up: him strolling down the streets of London, him stepping out of a bar in LA.
I wonder if he got what he wanted, I find myself thinking, out of the blue.
He always used to say he wanted to be a theatre actor one day.
So when he got that first big movie role, I was surprised by how immediately he seemed to acclimatise to that lifestyle.
Postcards from LA appearing every couple of weeks with updates about his life.
It was a ritual we’d started – when he first moved I asked him to send me the cheesiest postcard he could find and after the first few he just kept going.
I’d return the favour, stopping by tourist shops on my way home from the pub.
Picking up pictures of London buses, of Big Ben.
To remind him of home. His looping handwriting used up all the space available, telling me about award shows.
Incredible moments he had on-set. It’s great out here, Lara, he wrote once.
I can’t wait for you to see it too. It lasted for six months.
Until he came home to visit and everything fell apart.
And after that, the postcards dried up completely.
I look towards the bed, to the box I’ve shoved under it. The stacks of postcards in it. Cards I’ve kept all this time. And I almost reach for it. But I stop myself.
Then I’m in my texts, scrolling through, finding the last conversation I had with him.
Last night was a mistake.
The same flash of hurt piercing my chest when I look at it now as it did back then.
Don’t be sentimental, Lara, I think.
But it’s hard not to be – because aside from being on stage or in front of a camera, there is only one other time in my life when I remember feeling that free.
And it was when I was with him.
The next day I arrive a few minutes early to meet my sister for lunch.
We’re meeting at our usual café: a local, around the corner from where she works.
I’m a little nervous because I didn’t tell her about the screen test, but my mum drew it out of me in a recent phone call and sent a message in the family group chat, wishing me luck tomorrow.
So she knows and she’ll be furious with me, probably.
I always find the balance so tricky with Alison: too much information about my life and she seems to delight in telling me where I’m going wrong, too little and she is hurt that I don’t share enough with her.