SEPTEMBER 1992 #2
It was not as though I missed my chance—there were other parties and further gatherings.
But I fell into old patterns—performing rather than being present.
CADS tested for that too—your sociability and how well you worked in a group.
I could channel it during class, but the moment we left the safety of the studios, I became unmoored.
So I declined the invitations until they eventually stopped coming.
In truth, it didn’t even occur to me that I was lonely. That friendship might be something you needed rather than a distraction from the things that counted—achievement, talent, and success. I thought myself above such things.
We’d been there a week before we performed those monologues for one another.
Watching each one, I realized we were all doing the same thing: sussing out future competition. You could see who had natural talent, but worse, you could see people improving around you. You realized a threat could come from any direction and could catch you unaware at any time.
And you began to look at each other, wondering who your competition on the outside would be. Who would take the agents, the roles, the spotlight.
And then, when Harper’s hand shot up—repeatedly—during my critique, you realized who would be first in line to stab you in the back.
My plan for the monologues had been simple: I would practice, perform well, and do myself proud. I wanted to beat Harper, yes, but I wanted to outshine everyone in the room—whether they were speaking the same words as me or not.
Harper, however, had a different approach.
“I don’t think Nadine is engaging with the whole audience, just those sitting in the front row. It’s about transforming the universal space, right? Not just the stage?
“It felt rushed, the pacing too quick—it’s throwing off the meter. We need to linger in it.
“It’s unclear who she’s addressing in the scene—I think she could focus it a little more.”
Beside her, Zoe Holland snickered. “The diction is all wrong for Major Barbara. She comes from wealth, and she’s talking about class, so why is she northern?”
In CADS, those aspects were clearly mutually exclusive—and it didn’t matter anyway because it wasn’t true. I’d been pressing out the Yorkshire from my accent for the last decade, ironing each creasing vowel into the sort of bland, generic lilt that might actually make it to a screen.
“I suppose overall,” Harper finished. “I just don’t get the impression the topic means all that much to the narrator, where we should be feeling its value.”
Maybe it was a coincidence. Value. Maybe the critiques were genuine—we’d all made them. I’d made harsher comments myself. But Harper’s felt like a barrage until even those who’d watched me enraptured were nodding, rewriting their memories of my deficiencies.
My throat was too swollen to even volley my own back.
When her turn came, she stepped up with determination and a hint of vulnerability, like perhaps beneath it all that drive was faltering.
Her gravity followed her to the stage—and she was luminous.
No transformation of the type I strived for, where a character could be embodied.
She acted like she’d wrestled the character into submission and imbued them into her own skin.
Her, but not. Them, but not. Something otherworldly entirely.
And captivating—in each fluttering lash, each shift of her narrow hips, each breathless whisper.
The critiques were flimsy, most just thinly veiled praise.
“Excellent work, all.” Clive nodded at the end, snapping his notebook shut. “Certainly a first step to building the thicker skin you’ll all need in an industry like this.”
———
“Excuse me, excuse me!”
I jolted so suddenly I knocked the cold coffee off the library table, and the man calling out to me just managed to whip a book out of its spill path. “Sorry,” he said. “That’s what I wanted to avoid—you kept budging it as you turned.”
I threw a bundle of napkins at the coffee as he turned the book over in his hands.
“The Meisner technique? I didn’t think they were teaching that while Peterson’s on sabbatical.”
“They’re not,” I said, stifling a yawn. “But my last critique said I struggled with projecting beyond the front row.” And with my pacing. And with my addressee. And with the value of my themes. “I’ve practiced, but I want to make sure it’s fixed, so … well, at this point I’ll try anything.”
My grandfather once told me that was the difference between the good and the great—that anyone could act, but the best knew how to assess their own work.
(His passion had grown out of a love for photography, then film itself, composition, effect, and clever camera work.
If he was still alive, I’d drag him to a studio and set him loose on the cutting room floor.) Acting was a studiable craft, so here I was, flicking through pages like they might hold the answers.
“You’re here every day,” the man said. I took a quick assessment of him: lanky and wiry, not helped by the fact that he was smothered by an oversized jacket.
Definitely not an actor. We got less easy to spot as the years went on, even if we never quite dropped the all-black outfits.
But this man had so little presence it was impossible to imagine him in front of the camera.
“So are you,” I countered—not that I’d seen him before, but he had to be to make such a declaration.
He nodded, a little absent-mindedly. “I’m working on a screenplay.”
“Isn’t everyone?”
I’d meant it as a joke—at CADS you were harder pushed to find someone who wasn’t working on a screenplay—but as I was beginning to learn from my improvisation module, I didn’t have the best comedic timing, and it sounded blunt even to my own ears.
Thankfully the man laughed. “I know, hardly original. And maybe it won’t go anywhere, but I’m enjoying it. So, do you hate your flatmates, or are the library desks simply more comfortable than a well-used dorm-room bed?”
“Both, I think.”
CADS didn’t have its own residence halls, so you had to source your own.
The cheapest I could find was a tower in Bethnal Green, full of students from universities across London.
Everyone in my flat seemed to get along well with one another—or at least, they enjoyed blasting Nirvana while they got high together before traveling to various grimy clubs.
No wonder I was falling asleep at library tables.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept through the night without being interrupted by their stumbling home.
The guy next door to me, Amos Thomson, was a fashion student at Central Saint Martins, and the one time I asked him to keep it down when he got in from whichever party he’d charmed his way into, he’d just arched an eyebrow at me and said, “Honey, you know this is supposed to be fun, right? Come knock on my door if you ever pull that stick out of your ass.”
I avoided being there as much as I could.
“Thank god the library is open twenty-four hours,” I added.
“The film studio is, too, if you ever fancy a change. I’m Ivan. I’m on the directing masters, and I could definitely do with the feedback. I can help with your front-row problem too. It could be mutually beneficial.”
It would turn out most of my friendships were.
Of course I had no idea just how beneficial Ivan would be, not until we ran through a Hitchcock marathon one weekend.
On screen, Alice winced at every resounding “knife,” and I felt tears wet my cheeks.
My father had been watching North by Northwest when I told him the first of my acting school offers had come through.
He hadn’t even paused, just snorted and said, “You couldn’t pay me to live in London.
” I’d prepared for all manner of my parents’ condemnations—that I was wasting my money, my time, their money and time—but the disinterest cut.
And I don’t know why it hit me then—only that no, drama school had not been all I had hoped it would be.
Mostly, yes, but not all. And I’d started to wonder if it was worth it—because I was out on my own here.
No family to rely on. No friends to confide in.
So completely alone, and right now, with Ivan by my side, I felt a little bit less so—and that just made clear how gaping the chasm within me was.
We would become friends eventually—the sort no one else really understood. But in that moment we were just two people alone together. Watching a film in the quiet.
I’d spent my whole life being told no one cared about the things I did—and here was someone who did. That was enough for me.
If I’m really honest, that was everything for me.
Ivan paused the film a few minutes from the end. “I wanted to give you this. Please don’t be weird about it.”
A library card, with his student ID number.
“They don’t trust the undergraduates,” he said. “But the postgrad library has all the same books, and you can take them out whenever you want. I thought I lost my card a while back, and I got a replacement and then found it, so I have a spare.”