Chapter 26
26
MINNIE
Now
‘Ms Byrne?’
Minnie had sunk so low into the lobby sofa that it became an effort to bounce up out of it. The black Lycra of her ballerina bodyvest felt a bit sticky. She needed air after three and a half hours of waiting, of holding her breath. It was a quarter past three, and she was about to give up.
‘That’s me!’ she said as she managed to get up. ‘Was me!’ she joked flimsily, as she fell back into the copious velvet in what felt like slow motion. She still wasn’t happy about it.
The American assistant with a headpiece curled around her ear and a tablet in her hand gave an impatient, patronising smile. She must have been around the same age as Minnie but wore her access to Wim Fischer and Viola Rubin as her currency.
Minnie got back up, grabbing her bag and stuffing her thin scarf and the copy of Paris Match into it and followed the woman down the corridors to a lift. The smell of Korean viburnum, sweet and succulent, came from the courtyard, and Minnie inhaled theatrically.
‘Wow don’t you love that smell? Reminds me of the past.’ She thought about Hampstead Heath; the Byrne home in Ireland. The sweet honeysuckle smell of summer evenings.
The woman didn’t answer.
Minnie had to remember not to witter. Sometimes she could be too friendly. Sometimes she talked so much she knew even as she was speaking that she was making a situation worse and not better. It was the point at which her power started to slide away. She hated having to remember to not be affable and open, it went against every fibre of her being.
They got in the lift and the assistant pressed a button.
‘Busy day?’ Minnie asked as the doors closed.
‘Crazy…’ the assistant said, rolling her eyes and jabbing the button at the top, not a drop of an apology for having kept Minnie waiting for hours, without even a glass of water.
‘I bet. But I am so psyched to meet Viola. She’s a hero!’
‘Ms Rubin had to go to another meeting. She left.’
‘Oh.’
Maybe the assistant did think Minnie was press.
Shit.
‘Do you know I’m here for an audition?’
The woman looked at her clipboard and ran her finger down a list of names.
‘Yes, that’s fine. Mr Fischer is very good at this,’ she said. ‘His eye is amazing .’
The lift opened onto a light and airy room, where men and women seemed to be milling around quietly, as if trying not to wake a sleeping toddler. A young man was packing away a screen with Swindlers artwork on it. Two security guards were talking about Kylian Mbappé in low voices. Another woman was zhuzhing up some flowers on a coffee table and straightening a chair. The assistant gave one of the security guards a nod and opened a set of closed double doors that led to another chamber, where a woman in a pencil skirt and fuchsia pink shirt with a pussy bow collar strode through.
‘Good luck,’ she said, giving Minnie a penetrating smile, and headed out.
Minnie nodded.
‘Sit,’ the assistant said, waving a hand to the sofa in the middle of this suite. Minnie sunk into another sofa and looked around the room. How many more rooms went off this one? An elegant carriage clock on an ornate mantel said it was almost half past three. How long would it take to get to the Jardin du Luxembourg from here? Jesse said it was walkable.
Where the hell was Viola Rubin? This was Minnie’s shot to meet the best in Hollywood.
Surely she didn’t have a hope of being cast without a casting director there to see her audition.
I’ll just having to fucking smash this.
The assistant knocked twice on the double doors the woman with the pink pussy bow had just come through and let herself in.
‘Mr Fischer, I have Minette Byrne for you,’ she announced, to a room beyond the capacious suite.
‘I’ll be just a second,’ he called, as if from the bathroom. A German accent. A voice Minnie recognised from interviews and award shows on television.
How embarrassing , Minnie thought. Might she have just caught Wim Fischer having a poo between appointments? She winced to think.
‘He won’t be a moment,’ the assistant said expeditiously. She left the room and walked back into the antechamber with the security guards, to wherever else this network of opulent tunnels led to.
Minnie felt uneasy as she listened to the noise of Paris’ boulevards outside. A beep. Motorbikes. The siren of a foreign emergency vehicle. She looked around the room devoid of personal effects. Minnie had met plenty of famous people before. There was often an actor or an artist spending long weekend lunches with the Byrnes. She wasn’t as fazed as most might be. Although she was hyper curious to meet Wim Fischer, and even more excited by the prospect of starring in one of his films. She really wanted this part.
Remember your lines, remember your lines.
Minnie started to mentally recite them.
Maybe she was actually going to run the scene with Wim Fischer himself. Maybe there wasn’t another assistant in there. When she’d auditioned for the part in a Marvel movie the director hadn’t even looked up as Minnie played the scene out with a bored casting assistant.
Minnie heard a toilet flush softly in the distance. A trickle of running water.
‘Actually, Ms Byrne, why don’t you come in?’
She looked cautiously towards the voice beyond the suite.
‘I’m just taking a moment after one hell of a day.’
Minnie walked through what looked like a bedroom and followed the echo of his thick German accent.
This is weird.
It could only be a bathroom off that.
This is fucking weird , she thought, as she walked in and saw Wim Fischer in a bubble bath. She hoped he wasn’t naked under the foam, but wondered, why wouldn’t he be?
Minnie looked behind her, to see if anyone had seen her. One part of her felt like an intruder, another part felt abandoned. She reminded herself she hadn’t asked for any of this. She had just wanted to audition with Viola Rubin. She had earned an audition with Viola Rubin.
Maybe it’s a German thing.
Her family had stayed at a spa in Baden Baden when they went Interrailing one summer in her teens. All five children were mortified by the men slapping their naked bottoms and balls on the wooden slats of the sauna, as they spread their legs and inhaled the purifying air. Maybe Wim Fischer was that kind of guy. Maybe Minnie was being a prude. Maybe she was being too British.
Still, it felt wrong.
This was a business meeting.
‘Velcome, take a seat!’ he said, indicating the closed lid of the toilet. Minnie didn’t want to sit on a toilet, even with the lid down, so she hovered in the doorway. Her boots felt clumpy and inappropriate against the elegant marble floor, but she wasn’t going to take them off.
‘Erm, hello, Mr Fischer. I’m here for the?—’
‘I know who you are! The youngest Byrne child! And aren’t you precious?’
Minnie was uncertain. Her parents hadn’t worked with Wim Fischer, she knew that. So what did he know about her?
She tried not to look at him sitting in the bath but didn’t know where else to look. He was talking to her. Wim Fischer didn’t look like the enfant terrible of moviemaking to her, but it had probably been twenty years since he had been called that. He was a small man with a puff of thinning curly hair and a delicate gold chain around his neck with what looked like a bar of gold bullion on the end of it.
Minnie nodded politely and pointed her thumb over her shoulder behind her.
‘I can wait outside you know, no hurry.’
I’ve been waiting fucking hours as it is.
Except there was a hurry. She thought of Jesse and wished he were here so she could sense check this with him. She wished she could run out. She needed to be at the Jardin du Luxembourg in half an hour and this bullshit audition had already taken up too much time. Hollywood’s enfant terrible looked like an old man, shrivelled as he luxuriated in a marble sunken tub.
‘Sit down, sit down!’ he directed, more forcefully, nodding to the toilet. Minnie looked around. Maybe this was how she was going to have to do the audition. Sitting on a toilet playing out the scene with a naked director in the bath. She thought about the scene she had gone over and over in her head. It was set in a bar after closing. A tense discussion between a hitwoman, a Mafioso and a corrupt cop. She so wanted this role.
Minnie sat, tentatively and primly, on the lid of the toilet, and crossed her legs.
‘Shall I go from the top of the scene my agent shared with me?’
‘Hmm, I like to improvise a little.’ Wim Fischer shrugged, unapologetically. ‘Why don’t you get in with me, ja ? We can do the scene together like that. Make some real eye contacts.’
Wim Fischer said this as if it were perfectly normal.
Minnie thought of the woman who had led her here. How unsisterly it was of her to put her in this situation. Did she have a clue this was happening? Worse, of course, of Wim Fischer for making her feel like this. Perhaps he invited his assistant into his bath all the time and she struggled to say, No. Geraldine and Jeremy hadn’t known much about him, they tended to do more stage than film work, although Geraldine had been in lots of films in supporting roles. And all of the Harry Potters of course. Minnie knew they wouldn’t be very happy if they saw how uncomfortable Wim Fischer was making their daughter feel right now.
‘Is this a joke?’ Minnie got the courage to ask, with a nervous smile.
‘I beg your pardons?’ Wim said, his accent almost comical. Except there was nothing funny about the situation.
‘Is this a test?’ Minnie asked, flabbergasted.
‘A test, my dear?’ Wim Fischer looked neutral, although of course it was a test, it was an audition.
Minnie dug deep to find her voice.
‘Are you testing me?’ She cleared her throat. ‘Are you being the parody of a creepy film director, just to test me?’
Wim Fischer’s face was passive. Bemused even.
‘I just thought you might like to fuck me. Get some chemistry. See how we would work together. Whether we would make a great team.’ He said it so matter-of-factly Minnie wondered if her entire life had been a lie. She sat on the toilet feeling revolted and repulsed. Did her mother ever have to do this? The famous Geraldine Byrne. Be put under pressure and duress; was she ever pressed upon, or worse, by the creepy Fischers and Weinsteins of the world?
She thought of her mother’s face. She envisaged the outrage on it. She imagined her, shouting, voiceless, in the opposite corner of the bathroom, telling Minnie to get the hell out and run.
Minnie rose from the closed lid of the toilet seat, feeling slightly nauseous as she stood and steadied herself. She thought she might be sick but didn’t want to lift the lid or stay in the room a second longer. She put her hand over her mouth, her palms shaking and lowered her shoulders, before leaning onto the door frame for support.
She looked back at Wim Fischer, still waiting for his response as he started to stroke his penis in the water.
‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself?’ Minnie said, as she took a deep breath and walked out of the bathroom, through the bedroom, the suite, and into the lift, committing career suicide with every step.