Lyrebird

by Cecelia Ahern

  Lyrebird: It’s been overwhelming but everybody has been so kind and coming here has been a fantastic experience. My life has utterly changed.

  She crumples up the page, feeling disgusted with herself. Like a performing monkey. Jack had pitched it to her as honing her skill, but it makes her think of the honing rod Gaga used to sharpen the carving knife for Sunday roasts. It always frightened her as a child, the sound, the image and the look on Gaga’s face as she ran the blade over the steel rod – especially as she knew what everybody thought about Gaga.

  The phone on the bedside rings and the intense pain returns to her head, behind her eyes. These migraines are getting worse. She ignores the phone, thinking it’s StarrGaze with something else for her to do. She doesn’t know or sense that it’s Solomon, as his morning begins, desperate to know if she’s okay. She climbs under the covers and buries her head with a pillow to block out the ringing. No more sounds.

  She falls asleep, naked in her bed, to the sound of Gaga honing the knife, realigning the edge of the knife blade over and over again, and that intense look on her face.

  26

  The floor swirls beneath Laura’s feet. She feels as though she’s sitting on a boat. This time yesterday she was in Australia. Was it yesterday or the day before? How much time did she lose in the air? She’s not sure. She knows it’s Monday night, the day of the semi-final. Yesterday was spent in rehearsals. Days ago she was in winter, today it’s summer. She can’t remember. The storm is building, the waves getting choppier. She reaches out to the wall to steady herself. Somebody catches her hand.

  Gloria, the choreographer on StarrQuest. She throws her an angry look. ‘That’s the set,’ she hisses.

  Of course. If Laura was to lean against it, the entire thing would have toppled. Or would it? Surely sets are made of stronger stuff than that? It’s wallpapered, floral, to look like someone’s living room – an old woman’s living room, by the looks of it, as the act before her settles down into their routine. She’s not sure what the old woman’s living room has got to do with the act, but then she’s not really focusing on what’s going on. Of course it’s not real, she has been surrounded by unreal things since she got here. Fake rooms are only the start of it. Exposed wires, fake walls, exposed ceilings, the underbelly, the back doors, the behind-the-scenes of the glamorous television world. She’s left hotels through kitchens, restaurants through fire exits, she’s entered buildings through back doors surrounded by trash more often than front doors. She crawls along the in between, the edges, the behinds, to suddenly be placed up front and in the middle. The expectation of her is that she must move through the darkness to emerge shining. The floor moves beneath her again as the jet lag takes hold of her. She squeezes her eyes closed and takes a deep breath.

  ‘Okay?’ Bianca asks. Despite Bianca being given a few days off to recuperate after their Australian trip she chose to return after one day for this evening’s performance, a gesture Laura hugely appreciates.

  They are moments away from her live semi-final performance and they have left Laura until last so that she could rest. Apparently, it was Bianca’s idea. It’s allowed her a lie-down, while her head spun and her mind refused to shut down, going over and over everything that has happened to her over the past week. It would have been easier to keep moving. There’s little rest she could get in a small dressing room on a TV set. The building is throbbing with nervous energy, from the contestants to the producers. The show is under the microscope, receiving worldwide attention since Laura’s audition, and the pressure is on them to entertain the growing audience.

  Nervous people have been telling Laura not to be nervous, panicked producers have been telling her not to panic. An exhausted host has been telling her she couldn’t possibly be tired when at her age he was travelling the world, a different country every day, a new set every night. Laura thought about reminding him how that schedule worked out for him. Drink, drugs, divorce, destruction, despair before rehab, a quiet life and then a reality show reboot. Young people don’t suffer jet lag, apparently, as if young people are impervious to the pain of those doling it out.

  The ground shifts seismically beneath her again.

  She breathes in slowly, out through her mouth. As soon as Laura boarded the plane to fly home, Bianca had handed her a ‘script’ for her next StarrQuest performance. It was considered that her rehearsed appearance on the Cory Cooke Show was such a success, and again a viral one, that they would help steer Laura’s next performance in a different direction, a direction they could predict, expect, manage, control, plan for.

  ‘You’ll be grand. Everyone’s tuning in to see you,’ Tommy the floor manager says, patting her arm.

  Laura smiles lightly, no energy to summon up anything more. ‘I’m sure they’re not. It’s not that. It’s the jet lag …’

  ‘Ah sure you’re too young to be jet-lagged,’ he laughs.

  Laura wonders if this is a line they’ve all been fed to keep her going, or if it’s something they truly believe.

  She hears the sound of water lapping, oars hitting the side of the boat, and realises it’s coming from her. A memory of a boat trip with Mam and Gaga. On Tahila Lake, County Kerry on a rare summer holiday, off-season so no one saw them. Always off-season. Gaga hated the water, she couldn’t swim and sat on a nearby rock instead, knitting, but she helped with the gutting and cooking of the fish.

  Tommy is watching her, a sad smile on his face.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Laura asks.

  ‘Yes. Yes,’ he shakes his head. ‘My dad was a fisherman. I used to go out on the boat with him sometimes.’ He goes to say more but stops. ‘Anyway, you don’t need to hear that … I’m sure people are always putting their stories on you. You took me back, that’s all.’

  The crowd applauds as the act finishes. Laura’s heart pounds, her mouth is dry, her legs are trembling. She needs water. The crowd roar as they go to a commercial break, it feels like her chest rattles with the crowd’s rumble. The adrenaline from the five-hundred-strong studio audience feeds her like electrical blue lines firing towards her heart and gut.

  The dancers line up around her, stretching their legs up and back behind their earlobes. They pat each other on the backs, on the arses, good luck. The choreographer, Gloria, oversees the routine; she’s dressed in black, heavy black eyeliner and the usual scowl on her face as she throws her eyes over everything and judges, calculates, appraises and adjudicates everything everyone says and does, not just how they dance. She catches Laura looking at her and starts to give her last-minute orders. Her face is all screwed up, twisted, and Laura tries to pay attention but all she hears is the sound of a corkscrew being twisted open, until it pops.

  Gloria frowns. Laura’s not sure how to explain herself.

  Tommy motions her forward. Laura’s stomach lurches. Everyone looks at her in surprise as she realises the vomiting sound has come from her. That time when she was new to foraging and chose the wrong mushrooms. Tommy looks at her, eyes wide and alarmed, unsure if she’s serious or not, but treating her as if she has actually physically vomited, so convincing was the retching sound. The last time she felt this nervous Solomon had helped her. She recalls the feel of his breath in her ear, his scent so close to her. He’d told her she was beautiful. His presence always calmed her and she longs for him to be here, but knows it was she who walked away from him. It’s her fault he’s not here.

  ‘Are you okay? Water?’

  His pupils are dilated. The panic, the fear, a live fucking show and the star has lost it.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Laura says shakily.

  She follows him to the stage, and as soon as she takes the few steps upward the crowd erupts in applause and cheers. Laura smiles shyly at the reaction, feeling less alone. She waves and takes her place on the stage, standing on the white mark that’s her opening spot. A woman in the front row grins, showing all her teeth, and gives her the thumbs up. Laura smiles. They’re just people. Lots of people. More people i
n one room than she’s met in her entire life, but it’s never the people she’s worried about – it’s herself.

  Tommy counts down to the return of the show. One minute. Dancers take their places, form their dramatic opening positions. Laura’s heart thumps in her chest, so loudly she’s sure the whole room can hear her. Suddenly the crowd explode with laughter and she realises that it was her making the heartbeat sound.

  She looks at Jack and he’s grinning. He winks. He looks exhausted as Harriet from make-up powders his face. He looks how Laura feels.

  Laura stands in the centre of the enormous stage, the dancers getting in place, the cameras in position while Laura’s VT plays.

  ‘The last week has changed my life completely. I went from a very quiet life in Cork to suddenly everyone knowing my name.’ Footage of her walking down Grafton Street, then a crowd chasing her. It’s all sped up, as though it’s an old Laurel and Hardy film. Posed, of course. Filmed yesterday – or was it this morning? And then they air the words she was unsure of saying. She had wished to phrase them differently and they had kindly allowed her to, but then they wanted one take to be said and done their way, for them to have. Naturally, that’s the take they use, each sentence sharply edited, her face zoomed in on closer for each one and made more dramatic by a booming drum to emphasise the stakes.

  ‘I don’t want to go back to being who I was.’ Boom.

  ‘This is my one chance to shine.’ Boom.

  ‘The whole world is watching me.’ Boom.

  ‘I’ll fight for my place in the final.’ Boom.

  ‘Watch out world.’ Boom.

  ‘The Lyrebird is coming.’ Boom.

  Laura cringes at the sound of her own voice. It sounds as empty as she had felt while saying it. She doesn’t even like that girl. She doesn’t like the girl they’re trying to portray. Doesn’t like the girls like her that are sitting at home, thinking about the one time in their lives that they will have to prove themselves. No such thing exists. Nothing so great ever hinges on one such moment.

  Suddenly the music starts, she feels the beat in her chest, the lights go up, the crowd cheer. It’s showtime.

  She starts walking. She’s on a treadmill, behind her on the large screen is footage of the woods. It’s animated. And it moves so that she appears to be walking through the forest. Her long blonde hair is tied into two braids that sit on each shoulder tied with two girlish red ribbons. She’s wearing a puffy-shouldered mini dress, a blue-and-white gingham apron and she holds a straw basket. She’s not sure if she’s supposed to be Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz or little Red Riding Hood. She didn’t care much when they’d shown her the costume after she’d gotten off her flight from Australia.

  She wears white pop socks and red Mary-Jane heels.

  The music playing is ‘If You Go Down to the Woods Today’, but a kind of remixed dance version. She makes the sound of her high heels on the ground and the audience laughs. Realistically, she’d told Gloria and anyone who’d listen that her heels would not make such a sound on the earth floor, but they’d explained it was a heightened reality. Laura comes across a house in the woods, it’s made from sweets. She eats some, licks some, making appropriate sounds and the crowd laugh. She makes a knocking sound on the door, the door opens and three sexy female pigs run out, chased by a male wolf. Laura peeks inside, she sees a handsome bear man – a topless male dancer. She tries out the three different men until she finds the one that’s just right. She moves across the stage, making appropriate sound effects that she was told to make, slapstick comedy, ducking and diving in Laurel and Hardy mime, making sounds in all the right places. It is quite the production; wardrobe must have hired out every panto costume going.

  After a dance routine where Laura awkwardly tries to keep up with the three sexy pigs, the three hunky bears and the others who are dressed as sexy woodland creatures, Laura ends up with the hunkiest bear of them all. He’s just right. A red heart-shaped spotlight frames them.

  StarrQuest special guest judge, drafted in for the semi-finals, star of stage and screen with her own stage school, Lisa Logan is on her feet clapping, hoping she’ll make it to the viral clip which will boost her flagging career. Laura steps on the thumb mark in the centre of the stage and waits for the judges’ feedback.

  ‘Lyrebird, hi,’ Lisa says excitedly. ‘Out of all the contestants tonight, I, like the rest of the world, was most excited to see what you’d deliver. I must admit, despite your obvious talent, I was confused as to how that would transfer into showbusiness – how can you make sounds viable? Relevant? How can sounds be commercial? But you’ve shown us tonight that it can be done. This is exactly the kind of cabaret/Vegas-style route that you should go down. You’re young, you’re sexy, you’re talented. You have ended this show on a high. Whooo!’ she screams, punching the air. The audience join in.

  Lisa Logan gives Lyrebird a gold thumbs up.

  Laura is surprised by her excitable reaction. They really see her doing this as a career? Does she even want to do this?

  Silence for Jack’s response.

  ‘Lyrebird,’ he rubs his stubble awkwardly, as if struggling with how to say it. ‘That was awful.’

  Boos from the crowd.

  ‘No, seriously it was.’ Over their booing and hissing he continues: ‘It was awkward. It was … to be honest, it was embarrassing, I was cringing for you. You looked uncomfortable. You’re not a dancer …’

  ‘No, she can’t dance,’ Lisa interrupts, agreeing. ‘But that was part of the comedy. It was funny.’

  ‘I don’t think she intended to be funny, did you, Lyrebird?’

  They both look at her. Silence.

  ‘I wanted it to be entertaining and hope the people in here and at home were entertained,’ she says with a smile.

  The crowd cheer.

  ‘No, Lyrebird. I think your strength is in what we saw you doing in your audition. Organic, earthy performances. Moving performances, where you transport the audience somewhere else. This was all wrong. This was a circus.’

  Boos.

  ‘As you know, only one act can go through to the final. Every night this week until the final. Have you been good enough tonight? My advice, if you go through, is to stick to the heartfelt pieces. Lyrebird, you’re in trouble. I hope the public give you another chance because I fear for your place in the final.’

  27

  Laura sits before Jack’s desk after the show. She got through to the final. She did it. But she didn’t feel the joy that she should be feeling. Jack looks exhausted, even worse without the make-up that he’s removing with a baby wipe.

  ‘How am I still awake?’ he says into his hands, rubbing furiously. He smudges his mascara. Laura can’t bring herself to tell him.

  ‘How are you holding up?’ Jack asks her. ‘Probably doing a lot better than me, you’re twenty years younger.’

  ‘I’m exhausted,’ she says.

  He must hear the change of tone in her voice because he looks at her, drops the tissue.

  ‘This is tough, isn’t it?’

  She nods, feeling drained.

  ‘Yeah, believe me, I’ve been there. In your shoes. I was probably the same age as you when my album went to number one in fifty countries. Crazy.’ He shakes his head. ‘I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know—’

  Curtis enters the room, and Jack sits up straighter. Curtis places a coffee down on the desk before Jack, then goes to his usual position at the side, like a shadow.

  ‘Thanks, man.’ Jack takes a sip and gets into business mode, giving her feedback as he has done for all the contestants seeking reassurance. Before and after the show, they gather around Jack at every opportunity eager for his attention and praise, and over the past two days out of sheer exhaustion Laura has stood back and watched, feeling as if they’re all birds loitering at an outdoor restaurant feeding on scraps of food and leftovers. They watch and wait, ready to be thrown anything by Jack their way; a compliment, a word of advice, a tip o
r a thinly veiled warning or critique. They catch it and they peck, peck, peck, analysing it, clinging to it, wanting to be filled by him, but they never are. They can never be fed enough praise, analysis, or dissection of themselves and their talent from the master.

  ‘Look, Lyrebird, don’t worry about tonight, it’s part of the show. Everyone has their ups and downs. It’s good for you to have a journey, to show that you, like them, have a struggle. But the audience chose to save you. Look at poor Rose and Tony, their act was a disaster. She fell on her face, dressed as a hotdog.’ He starts laughing, a smoker’s chesty laugh. ‘Did you see the ketchup …?’ He stops laughing when she doesn’t join in.

  ‘Tonight’s performance was written for me by your show while I was in Australia,’ Laura says to him, confused. ‘I was told to learn it on the flight. I had one day to learn the dance.’

  He sighs. ‘Rehearsal time was short, I understand, but believe me, the Australian trip was the chance of a lifetime. We debated it, but felt it was the best thing to do, and we needed you on the first semi-final show on the back of the Cory Cooke Show and before public interest waned. That trip was the trip of a lifetime, and any of the others would have chosen going there over a longer rehearsal.’

  ‘The others won’t even look at me.’

  ‘They’re jealous. Lyrebird, you’re going to win this show and everyone knows it.’

  Her mouth drops open. ‘Jack, you said I was awkward. You said it was awful. You said I can’t dance. You were embarrassed for me – cringing, in fact …’

  ‘That was true,’ he laughs. ‘It was fucking awful.’ He laughs alone. ‘Oh, come on. Lighten up.’

  ‘I didn’t want to do that routine. I told you I wasn’t a dancer. I told you it wasn’t me. We sat right here, I told you I didn’t like the script. You told me to do it.’

  ‘Lyrebird.’

  ‘My name is Laura!’ She bangs her hand down on the table.