Last Chance Saloon

by Marian Keyes

  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.

  33

  While they waited for the result of the bone-marrow biopsy, and Fintan almost drowned in a sea of visitors and get-well cards, life took the liberty of going on.

  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.

  On Tuesday morning, as Lorcan got the tube to the Angel he felt that everyone on the train must know how important his journey was. That the air around him was surely buzzing with momentousness. Look at them all, he thought, in pity. Off to their sad little jobs. In a way I almost envy them, it’d be great to have nothing to worry about. The burden of being an unacknowledged genius was a heavy one. But what can you do?

  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 b
e 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.’

  34

  ‘OK, Lorcan,’ Joe strode forward, a pleasant smile on his face. ‘It’s clear you don’t want to make this commercial. Let’s put you out of your misery right now. You’re officially off the job.’

  Lorcan opened his mouth to say something scathing, but Joe continued briskly, ‘Naturally you won’t receive your fee and you may be obliged to compensate us for the costs incurred this morning.’

  As Lorcan gaped, Joe turned to the room at large. ‘Everyone, sorry about your wasted time. Please bear with us while we try to get another actor. Jeremy, what do you reckon? How about Frasier Tippett?’ Joe turned back to Lorcan, who was in a pose of frozen languidness on the couch, his face a picture of surprise. ‘Still here?’ Joe asked. ‘Would you mind leaving, please? Our insurance doesn’t cover us for people on-site who aren’t working.’

  Lorcan was shocked. It seemed he’d greatly underestimated Joe Joe Roth. It did not do to call his bluff. ‘Hey,’ he said, with an awkward wave of his hand. His voice came out as a croak. ‘Lighten up, would you, man?’

  Joe ignored him, as Jeremy handed him a mobile saying, ‘It’s Alicia, Frasier Tippett’s agent.’

  Joe spoke quietly into the phone, before announcing with a big smile, ‘Good news, everyone, Frasier Tippett will be here in an hour. Amuse yourselves until then. Go for a bite to eat, get some air.’

  Then Joe turned his back and walked away. Lorcan was speechless with astonishment. No one had ever done this before to him. Of course Joe was joking about Frasier Tippett coming, but all the same it was a pretty elaborate hoax.

  Lorcan continued to sit on the purple sofa, as he waited for Joe to return and the shooting to recommence. But, to his alarm, everyone appeared to be leaving. Picking up bags and jackets, drifting off in twos and threes, chattering about going to the pub for a quick pint or a sandwich. There went the cameraman with Mandii and Vanessa in tow, off went the best-boy with the hairdresser, there went Melissa and Ffyon. ‘Let’s go for a toasted sandwich,’ Ffyon suggested.

  Melissa paled. ‘Not toast,’ she said quietly.

  Soon there was almost no one left. Of course, they hadn’t really gone, Lorcan told himself. In a moment they’d rush back in the door and yell, ‘Gotcha!’

  But they didn’t.

  He remained
sitting on the sofa, feeling foolish and ignored.

  In horror, he was forced to contemplate the unthinkable – that maybe this was for real. Then, to his massive relief, he saw Joe emerging from the little office with Mr Jackson. At last this fiasco could be sorted out! But they strolled past without even looking at him, chatting about Mr Jackson’s children.

  Lorcan jumped off the sofa and, skidding and getting caught in cables, ran after them. ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded.

  Joe turned to Lorcan in what appeared to be genuine surprise. ‘You’re still here? What for?’

  ‘You’ve made your point, man,’ Lorcan said, his face hard. He twisted his mouth into a smile. ‘I’m ready to start work again. We’ve got an ad to make here!’

  ‘You’re off the job,’ Joe said.

  ‘So I was a naughty boy,’ Lorcan sneered, holding out his hand and smacking his wrist. ‘OK? Punished. Now, let’s get back to work and stop wasting time.’

  ‘We’ve got another actor.’

  ‘What do you need another actor for?’ Lorcan contrived a laugh.

  ‘Lorcan, I understand that sometimes people – actors especially – need to be coaxed before they give their best, but your behaviour was so disdainful it’s clear you don’t want to be a part of this,’ Joe said. ‘I don’t believe in forcing people to do things they don’t want to do. It’s much more productive for me – and you – if I deal with someone who’s genuinely enthusiastic.’

  Lorcan suddenly realized he couldn’t sense any malice from Joe. The great gaping hole in the middle of Lorcan’s psyche gave a squeeze as it met its polar opposite in Joe Roth: someone with a strong moral centre. With shocking clarity, Lorcan understood that the bastard wasn’t ordering him off the job out of spite, he was doing it because he thought it was the right thing for both of them. How odd.

  ‘I think you’d better leave,’ Joe said.

  Lorcan glared. Finally he was in no doubt that this was genuinely happening. ‘You’re making the worst mistake of your pathetic little career,’ he sneered. ‘I wouldn’t work with an amateur like you if you paid me. I’m out of here.’