Last Chance Saloon (22 page)

JaneAnn went into paroxysms of praise about Katherine’s flat. ‘It’s pure lovely! Like something belonging to a fillum star.’

‘No, it’s not.’ Katherine shrugged. ‘You’d want to see Liv’s flat.
Hers
is like something belonging to a film star.’

‘She’s a fine, handsome girl,’ JaneAnn said. ‘All the way from Switzerland.’

‘Sweden,’ Milo corrected.

‘Sweden, if you want,’ JaneAnn conceded. ‘Wasn’t she a grand girl, Milo?’

‘She’d a fine set of teeth and lovely manners. Now where will I put these?’

Katherine looked, and to her surprise there was food all over the kitchen table. A boiled ham, brown bread wrapped in a tea-towel, rashers, black pudding, butter, tea, scones and what looked like a roast chicken wrapped in tinfoil.

‘Oh, you shouldn’t have brought food,’ Katherine wailed. That morning she’d gone out and bought acres of food in honour of her guests. They’d never get through it all. Her fridge hadn’t seen this much action, ever.

‘We can’t land in here on top of you and expect you to feed us,’ Milo said.

‘He’s right. We can’t.’ Timothy spoke. A rare event.

‘Will you have a sandwich?’ JaneAnn urged.

‘No, no, I’m fine,’ Katherine said.

‘But you have to eat something. There isn’t a pick on you. Sure, there isn’t, Timothy?’

‘Faith, there isn’t.’

‘Sure there isn’t, Milo?’

‘Leave poor Katherine alone.’

‘Poor baby,’ she heard Thomas call from the kitchen. ‘Come here and be cuddled.’

Tara’s heart lifted and relief made her light. Thomas was being nice to her.
Thank God
. Only now that things were OK
could she admit how tense and weird they’d been since – well, since they’d had that dreadful conversation about her getting pregnant. But what a shame that it took a crisis to fix things.

She rushed into the kitchen, just in time to see Beryl snuggle into Thomas’s chest. ‘Where were you?’ he demanded brusquely.

‘At the hospital.’ She was confused. What about her cuddle?

‘I asked you to feed Beryl this morning, and you forgot,’ he accused. ‘Poor baby.’ He stroked his face against the cat’s. ‘Poor hungry baby.’

With a cold, hard, little thump to her heart, Tara realized he’d been talking to the bloody cat all along. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said wearily, ‘but I had other things on my mind.’

Thomas sighed. ‘What do we think of girls who care more about their friends than feeding Beryl?’ he asked Beryl. ‘We’re not impressed, are we? No.’ He shook his head, and so, it seemed to Tara, did Beryl.

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Tara exploded. Thomas’s insecurity had always been behind his unpleasantness to her friends, but this was going too far. ‘Fintan’s got cancer!’

‘Oh, really?’ Thomas asked, disbelievingly.

‘Yes, really.’

‘But think about it, Tara, his lymphatic system is part of his immune system. And he has a
deficiency
with his immune system. Maybe an
acquired
deficiency with his immune system…’

‘Thomas, Fintan doesn’t have Aids. He’s HIV negative.’

Thomas huffed and puffed scathingly.

‘He’s got cancer,’ Tara reiterated.

‘Well, what does he expect?’ Thomas demanded. ‘It’s bludeh unnatural what they get up to.’

‘Thomas, you don’t get cancer from having anal sex.’

Thomas winced and put his hands over Beryl’s ears. ‘Do you have to be so brutal?’

Tara eyed him for a long, silent, thoughtful time. ‘Do
you
have to be so brutal?’ she eventually heard herself reply.

Lorcan’s so-called career was causing him great anxiety. The morning after Amy had set the filth on him he’d done an audition for understudy to Hamlet. And not just a church-hall production either, but a real play, with real actors, with a real audience paying – most importantly – real money.

As he waited a full week to hear if he’d got the part, Lorcan intoned repeatedly, ‘If I don’t get it, I’ll
die
.’ I’ll just
die
.’

But it looked like he could hold off on the dying for a while. On Monday evening his agent rang him and told him he’d been called back for a second audition, and there were only three other candidates.

Lorcan still hadn’t spoken to Amy, even though she had now left well over a hundred messages on his machine, of varying tenor. On some she sounded jolly and upbeat, chirruping, ‘Hi, there! Amy calling. Hoped to catch you in. Oh dear, never mind! Trust all is well with you, we must get together for a drink sometime. ‘Bye for now.’ These usually came at the start of the evening.

Later on, at about nine o’clock, the mood changed to sombre. ‘It’s Amy here. I need to speak to you. There are some matters that we must discuss. We can’t just leave things as they are. It’s irresponsible. It’s your duty to talk to me. Call me.’

Then, after midnight, she turned nasty. Her voice was usually drunk and tearful. ‘’S me,’ she’d say thickly. ‘Jusht calling to say I won’t be calling you any more. I’ve got lotsh of offers from other men, and do you know something? I’m glad,
glad
I’m not going out with you any more. You made me completely bloody miserable the whole goddamn time. You’re a total sadist and I’ve met a lovely man at work, and he thinksh I’m fantashtic and I jusht want you to know that you needn’t worry about me because I’m fine. Just
FINE
. Got that? Fine. F. I. N. N. Never been happier, actual –
BEEEEEP
,’ as she went over the message time.

Seconds later she always rang back. ‘’S me,’ she’d say again. ‘Look, I’m sorry, very sorry. You’re not a total sadist and there isn’t any lovely man at work. Just give me a call some time, because this is terrible.’ Then she filled the rest of the message time sobbing. He never returned any of her calls.

When he got off the train, he made a bargain with himself. If he could walk from the station to the King’s Head without standing on a crack in the pavement, he’d get the part. And if he didn’t get the part? ‘Well, I’ll die,’ he whispered in horror. ‘I’ll have no choice but to die!’

Lorcan was the last of the four short-listed candidates and the moment he began watching the others auditioning, he
almost expired from insecurity, racked with jealousy and terror because the others seemed variously, younger, taller, fitter, richer, better-trained, more experienced and better connected than him. He hated feeling this way. But, as always, Lorcan hid his sense of inadequacy under a veneer of arrogance.

And then it was his turn. He did Hamlet’s soliloquy, standing alone on the stage, under one spotlight, his large, lean body contorted with indecision, confusion writhing across his beautiful face.

‘He gives good tormented procrastinator,’ Heidi, the stage manager, murmured.

‘He does,’ the director agreed.

When he finished, Lorcan had to clamp his jaw closed to stop himself pleading, ‘Please tell me I was good. Please let me be in this production.’

He wasn’t to know that the person they’d really wanted to understudy Hamlet had accepted the lead in
The Iceman Cometh
at the Almeida. So when Heidi told him he’d got the part, he had a moment of joyous disbelief, before the pendulum of his self-esteem swung violently in the opposite direction. Instantly he was thinking that this was nothing less than his due.
Of course they’d picked him. Why wouldn’t they?
His recent terror melted like snow in the sun.

‘Congratulations.’ Heidi beamed.

Lorcan gave an Aw-shucks-it-was-nothing grin.

‘I know it’s only the understudy role to Frasier Tippett,’ she said, ‘but well done.’

‘Yeah, well, maybe Frasier Tippett will have a terrible accident. You never know and here’s hoping.’ Lorcan elaborately crossed his fingers, flashed Heidi a devastating smile, and lounged away.

Heidi’s beam wavered, wobbled, then disappeared. Frasier Tippett was her boyfriend.

The following day Lorcan was due to make a television commercial for butter. He’d had the audition six weeks before, and when he’d got the part he’d been unutterably grateful. Television ads paid phenomenally well. It was possible to earn enough to live on for a year. But now that he was about to be restored to his rightful home – in the spotlight of serious theatre – his mammoth ego was back in the driving seat. Why should he be grateful for the butter ad? So what if it paid thousands? They were lucky to get him, and he intended that they knew all about it.

At the appointed hour – well, only forty minutes after it – he showed up at a freezing cold, windowless converted warehouse in Chalk Farm to begin shooting. He was greeted by a mob of hysterical people – producers, directors, casting agents, best-boys, advertising executives, representatives of the Butter Board, make-up girls, stylists, hairdressers and the countless people who appeared on every shoot to stand around drinking tea, with keys and bleepers hanging from their belts.

I control all this
, Lorcan thought, savouring the sensation of invincibility.
I’m back
. Wonderful stuff.

‘Where’ve you been? We tried to ring you on your mobile, but your agent says you don’t have one!’ Ffyon, the producer, gasped. ‘Surely there’s some mistake?’

‘No mistake,’ Lorcan smiled, his low voice soothing Ffyon. ‘I don’t have a mobile.’

‘But why ever not?’

‘No peace with a mobile,’ Lorcan lied. No money to buy one, more like.

After climbing over an ocean of orange cables to shake hands
with the bigwigs from the advertising agency and the Butter Board, Lorcan was ferried off to Make-up. Next, a young girl approached him with a comb and a can of hair-spray, but Lorcan caught her arm tightly and arrested its progress. ‘Don’t touch the hair,’ he said curtly.

‘But…’

‘No one touches the hair unless I say so.’

Lorcan treated his hair like a prize-winning pet. He indulged it, pampered it, gave it little titbits when it behaved itself and was very reluctant to entrust it to the care of strangers.

Then it was time for Wardrobe. After myriad changes, the two stylists had to admit that, despite the truckloads of garments they’d brought, Lorcan looked at his most devastating in his own clothes – faded jeans and a turquoise silk shirt which made his eyes look violet.

‘OK, you can wear them,’ Mandii conceded.

‘But they have to be ironed,’ Vanessa said quickly. She wanted to see him standing in his socks and underpants just one more time. She’d never seen a man so unspeakably beautiful. His legs long and muscled, his waist tiny, his back broad, his chest hard. And his skin a smooth, taut gold that just begged to be touched.

Finally, two hours after his arrival, Lorcan was almost ready. For the final touch, he swept his hair back off his beautiful forehead. The hand that held the hairdresser’s comb twitched involuntarily.

‘Worth Butter, take one,’ the director shouted. The clapperboard went down and the cameraman sprang into action.

A sitting room had been mocked up and sat, like a carpeted, spotlit island, in the vastness of the concrete floor. The ad began with Lorcan draping his lean, powerful body on a purple velvet sofa, one foot on the other knee, a plate of toast on his lap.
The camera panned over him and the idea was that he’d look up, arch an eyebrow, smile and say, ‘Real butter?’ Then take a crunchy bite from the slice of toast, followed by a knowing, sexy pause. Before he continued, with a soul-intimate smile, ‘Because I’m worth it.’

He’d been fantastic in the audition. Absolutely blinding. If there were Oscars for butter appreciation Lorcan would have got one. The people who cast him weren’t to know that he hadn’t eaten for over a day and that his genuine hunger had given great conviction to his performance.

But things were different now. He’d got a part in a proper play, he was a serious actor and he didn’t want anyone to be in any doubt about it. So he overacted wildly, still in pompous, boomy, Shakespearean mode from his audition the day before.

‘Action. And, Lorcan…’

Projecting from his diaphragm to the back rows, Lorcan bellowed out, ‘REAL BUTTER?’ like it was the start of Hamlet’s soliloquy. People at the furthermost reaches of the room winced and the cameraman was almost deafened. No one would have been surprised if Lorcan had continued, ‘Real butter? That is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Flora…’

‘Cut, cut,’ Mikhail, the director, shouted. ‘OK, take two, let’s make it a tad quieter this time, shall we?’

Just as the cameras began to roll for take two, Lorcan yelled, ‘Just a minute. Is this
butter
on the toast?’

‘Yes,’ confirmed Melissa, who was in charge of toast-making.

‘Yuk,’ Lorcan declared dramatically, throwing the plate on to the couch. ‘Yuk, yuk, yuk. Are you trying to kill me? That stuff clogs your arteries.’

Mr Jackson from the Butter Board looked stricken.

‘Get me some low-fat spread,’ Lorcan ordered. So while Melissa ran to the nearest grocery shop Jeremy, the casting agent, spoke in soothing tones to Mr Jackson, assuring him warmly that no one would know it wasn’t butter on the toast and that Lorcan would do a great job even though he didn’t believe in the product. But even with polyunsaturated spread, the Shakespeare continued unabated.

‘Take ten. And, Lorcan…’

‘REAL BUTTER?’ he declaimed once more, this time sounding like he was ready to do Lady Macbeth’s speech. Everyone expected him to continue, ‘Is this REAL BUTTER which I see before me, the butter-knife toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not and yet I see thee still.’

‘Cut, cut, cut!’ Mikhail called. ‘Please, Lorcan…’

‘Who is this clown?’ Mr Jackson looked around for the young man from the advertising agency to sort things out. ‘Have a word with him,’ he urged. ‘Mikhail and Jeremy are getting nowhere.’

Lorcan was having a whale of a time and was delighted to see Mr Expensive Suit from the ad agency approach him. Another opportunity for caprice.

‘How about keeping it more conversational?’ he suggested to Lorcan. ‘More chatty?’

‘What’s your name?’ Lorcan demanded imperiously, even though they’d been introduced when Lorcan first arrived.

‘Joe. Joe Roth.’

‘OK, Joe Joe Roth, let me tell you something. I’ve done more commercials than you’ve had hot women. Telling me what to do is like teaching your granny to suck cocks.’

Joe sighed to himself. He could have done without this. He had a lot on his mind, including an important presentation to a breakfast cereal company the following day. Playing nursemaid
to spoilt-brat actors wasn’t really his thing. Especially considering he hadn’t even cast the commercial – it was something he’d inherited when his predecessor had been sacked from Breen Helmsford. But at the end of the day the responsibility was his.

Lorcan assumed a defiant and provocative glare, as he itched for a fight. Gleefully, he wondered if he’d be able to make Joe Joe Roth cry – it’d been a while since he’d had such an opportunity. But to his dismay, Joe just gently reiterated his suggestion that Lorcan say the lines in a friendly, unhammy way. Which shook Lorcan. Who was this prick with his fat salary and pretty-boy looks and unexpected self-possession?

Joe Roth was tougher than Lorcan had assumed. Stronger measures were called for. To even things up, Lorcan became even more over-the-top with each subsequent shot. Eventually on take twenty-two, out of pure badness, just because he knew he could, he whined, ‘What’s my motivation here?’

‘A pay cheque?’ Joe deadpanned, leaning against the wall, his arms folded. No more Mr Nice-guy.

‘I am an artist,’ Lorcan declared haughtily.

‘Maybe that’s what’s wrong,’ Joe said, drily. ‘We asked for an actor.’

Lorcan narrowed his eyes.

Mandii and Vanessa nudged each other and looked at Joe. Sexy.

‘OK. Here we go again,’ the director called. ‘More toast, Melissa! Take twenty-three, and, Lorcan…’

‘Real butter?’ Lorcan said, in just the right pitch.

At last
, everyone thought, in a frantic exhalation of relief.

Lorcan took a bite from the slice of toast, smiled wolfishly at the camera, and in the same beautiful, mellow voice said, ‘It gives you heart-attacks.’