Less Than Three

by Jess Whitecroft

  Copyright 2018 © by Jess Whitecroft

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover photography licensed by Shutterstock.

  Less Than Three

  by

  Jess Whitecroft

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  1

  I once faked my way into a Russell Group university.

  I didn’t have the qualifications. Out of the predicted grades I needed for university entrance, I was looking at a B in French, maybe a C in History and a definite A in Drama. I wasn’t even close to the broad sweep of A-stars needed to enter the hallowed halls of University College London, let alone train to be a doctor in one of the most prestigious teaching hospitals on the planet.

  But I got in. Or rather Simon did. He gave me the script, the likely questions they were going to ask, and a few little nuggets of knowledge that were worth dropping just to showcase my intellectual chops. And obviously I zhushed the whole thing up a bit by adding some human interest, about how I – Simon – had been curious about the inner workings of the human body ever since I was ten years old and my disaster of a brother – a good soul, but not that bright – had broken an arm while trampolining, and in doing so provided a graphic, if gory, lesson about how there were two bones in the forearm – the radius and the ulna.

  To this day, I’m sure that was what nailed it. Human interest is everything. The rest was easy. I didn’t have the qualifications, but I had the right face. Simon’s face. My face. I’d been staring right at it him since we were both a couple of curled pink flesh nuggets, face to face in our mother’s womb. We had lain side by side on changing tables, burbled at each other in high chairs, and then – when our eyes were old enough to focus and the creases in our brains were complicated enough to allow us to do so – stared at each other and marvelled at our sameness.

  And our differences; the scar on my arm that had no twin on his, the way his hair would comb flat at the front whereas mine never would, and – long before the other big difference between us became apparent – the total opposition of our respective personalities.

  I was Joseph in every school Nativity play. I’d have been Mary, too, given half the chance. And the donkey. And Baby Jesus. I would have turned the thing into a one-man show. Simon, on the other hand, was Third Shepherd material – the one who didn’t have to do anything but hold a toy lamb at the back and try to blend in with the scenery. And he really did blend in with the scenery, merging into it like a socially awkward chameleon. Years later, when he found out about the university entrance interview, he went into a meltdown only equalled by the time that Second Shepherd came down with a vomiting bug and Simon – bumped up the shepherd rankings – ended up with actual lines.

  It was his idea. I pretended to be him all the time, mostly because I thought it was funny. It never got old, wandering into a room by a separate door from the one he’d just left and watching Mum try to figure it out. Her eyes would dart from door to door then she’d look at me – hair carefully flattened, shoulders set at a Simon sort of angle – and say, “Nathan, stop pretending to be your brother. It’s annoying.”

  “I’m not Nathan. I’m Simon. Anyway, as I was saying…”

  I couldn’t very well turn him down after years of impersonating him, so I flattened my hair, took the train into London and introduced myself as Simon Forbes Gallagher, socially awkward brainbox and future doctor.

  It worked like a dream. He got into UCL and I went away convinced more than ever that I was going to earn that A-star in A-Level drama, except that the A-Level and subsequent Performing Arts degree I’d earned at Sussex wasn’t doing me any favours lately.

  I wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened, or even if it had been a gradual process at all. It seemed as though one day I’d gone for an audition and suddenly everyone around me appeared to be about twelve years old.

  “Hello, I’m Poppy,” said one such infant, prancing up onto the stage with a book in her hand. “I’m reading for the role of Cecile?”

  She’d brought the novel rather than the play. Rookie mistake, but she turned out to be rather good, capturing the bewilderment of a character who is basically – when you discard antique words like ‘seduced’ – a rape victim.

  Which made me her potential rapist, and that was even more unsettling than it was already, because she looked about fifteen. All the more reason she was likely to get it, because she looked the age she was supposed to be playing.

  “Poppy, can we hear you read something else?” said the director.

  “Um…yeah. Totally. I can do Blanche Dubois? I do a great Blanche Dubois.”

  The director laughed. “No. Stick to Christopher Hampton.” She reached up and handed Poppy her script, the page turned off. “Take a moment to read the exchange with Valmont on that page…yes, that role.”

  Poppy skipped back to the nearest seat, which happened to be the one next to me, and flashed me a tight smile as she opened the page. The director was now busy with a potential Merteuil, although I saw that Poppy’s page was also a Merteuil page, the one with the famous ‘win or die’ speech.

  “She wants you to read the Marquise?” I whispered.

  Poppy barely concealed her glee. “I know, right?”

  What? She was far too young. Unless the director was planning to go all Cruel Intentions with it and make all the characters younger, in which case I was fucked. I was thirty-one, which was nine years younger than Alan Rickman when he first played Valmont, but two years older than Colin Firth had been, which I thought put me in the perfect age bracket. John Malkovich was around thirty-five when he played the role, but everyone who knew anything knew he didn’t count: the role should have been Rickman’s.

  My phone buzzed. Everyone looked at me, and I looked around for the hole in the floor that I wished would swallow me up in that moment.

  “Excuse me, could you turn that off?” said the director, giving me a glare that could strip paint. There was no way I was getting this part now.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I could have sworn I turned it off.” But the damage was done. She hated me.

  It was Simon texting me. I need to see you.

  I muted the phone and quickly typed back. Yeah. Gonna need more details than that.

  Ten seconds, and the phone shivered in my hand. Can’t. Busy. Meet me at the Albany.

  That was Simon all over. It wasn’t that he didn’t do details, because he did, and how, but he wasn’t all that great at relevant details. I was about to text back and tell him that now wasn’t the time, but then the director called my name.

  “Nathan Gallagher?”

  “Yeah. Hi.”

  As soon as I took my place on the stage I knew I was fucked. She was looking at me with open dislike, and I couldn’t really blame her. Nobody wants to be that dickhead whose phone goes off in the middle of another actor’s monologue.

  “And you’re reading Valmont?” she said. “Is that right?”

  “That’s right. Yes.” I felt sweat run between my shoulder blades under my shirt. So much for the role of cool seducer.

  �
��Okay. Take it from ‘Why are you so angry with me?’”

  I biffed it. I knew it as soon as I started reading. I was so desperate to deliver a performance that would apologise for the phone faux pas that I turned ingratiating, even unctuous. I was supposed to be dangerous and irresistible, but my nerves sent me sliding sideways into the realm of Whitehall farce, and before I knew it I was delivering the lines like the lounge lizard bastard child of Terry Thomas and Leslie Phillips. Short of tacking a ‘ding-dong’ on the end of the lines I don’t think I could have come across much oilier.

  I heard the deathly words – “We’ll let you know,” – and headed off to Fitzrovia in a huff.

  My twin was waiting for me in the Albany. He was nestled in a booth, hugging a Kronenbourg and wearing a worried expression.

  “All right,” I said, taking a seat opposite. “What happened? Did you get struck off for leaving the surgical scissors wedged in someone’s spine?”

  “No,” he said. “Nothing like that.”

  “It had better be serious, Simon. Your phone call threw me off my game before an audition for the role I was born to play.”

  “Who? Cyrano de Bergerac?”

  I stared at his nose. It was a perfectly normal nose – a bit high on the bridge, perhaps, but there was no Cyrano about it. And it was identical to mine; my nose was one bone I hadn’t managed to break during the course of my accident-prone childhood. “What are you talking about?” I said. “We have the exact same nose. What’s going on? Why do you look like you’re about to tell me something is terminal?”

  “I met someone.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well, that’s good.”

  “No, it’s not,” said Simon. “It’s not good at all.”

  “Just so we’re clear,” I said. “We’re talking about a romantic prospect here?”

  He nodded miserably and my brain went into overdrive imagining scenarios in which meeting someone you liked could be a bad thing. Maybe the person was married, or smelly, or Nigel Farage. Or perhaps a werewolf, or someone like that German cannibal who used the internet to sate his curiosity about what it would be like to literally eat a dick. These were all very real possibilities. My brother’s love life – as far as I could tell – was a lot like Fifty Shades Of Grey: long periods of boredom interspersed with awkward conversations about cheese and Twinings tea bags.

  “All right,” I said. “What’s wrong with him?”

  Simon shrugged. “I have no way of knowing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t…” he said, frowning so hard that his eyebrows became one. “I can’t seem to work out what to say to him. I went into the bookshop where he works, the one just off Great Russell Street, you know? And I was going to talk to him, but I…” He sighed. “I froze up. I couldn’t do it.”

  We were going to have to go right back to basics with this one, I could tell. “What’s his name?”

  “Robert. Rob.”

  “Well, that’s a start. Species?”

  “Human. Definitely human.”

  “Also good.”

  “About five foot eight,” said Simon. “Blond hair. Lovely blue eyes. One of those beard things that young men seem to have a lot of these days.”

  It was my turn to frown. And I thought I’d felt old at that audition, but it was all relative. It wasn’t hard to feel like a spring chicken when your twin brother constantly came off like some baffled centenarian. “Okay,” I said. “And you haven’t talked to him at all?”

  “A bit,” he said. “Sort of. That is to say, I babbled about Hooke’s Micrographia – which he had a remarkable copy of, by the way – and then he got that look.”

  “What look?”

  “The one you do when you have no idea what I’m talking about.”

  “Oh, that one. No. That’s not a good look at all.”

  A lifetime of experience told me what had probably happened at the bookshop. Simon had latched onto a subject, got nervous and then kept talking. And talking. And talking. “What happened?” I said. “You didn’t go off on a Newton tangent, did you?”

  “I…I might have. You know he had personality clashes with Robert Hooke. The whole ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ thing. Did you know that was on the edge of the £2 coin, by the way?”

  Having handled currency before, I did.

  “I don’t think I said anything unusual,” he said. “But do you think it might have been a strange topic of conversation?”

  “I think it might have been a very Simon topic of conversation.”

  He folded his arms and sighed. “So, yes. Strange.”

  “A bit.”

  “See, this is why I need your help.”

  It took a minute for the implication to hit me, like one of those long, looping tangents that Simon only sometimes connected with the place he’d started from. And when it hit me I started to laugh.

  “No,” I said. “Abso-fucking-lutely not.”

  “Just to get me…in there…”

  “Nooope.”

  “You did it before.”

  “That was a University. Not a winsome bookseller named Robert. Besides, I’m straight.”

  “Funny,” said Simon. “I was under the impression that you were an actor?”

  “I am, but I’ve been playing you since before either of us even had pubes. It’s no challenge. At this stage in my career I should be stretching myself, not falling back on tried and tested roles.” I shook my head. “No wonder you had Cyrano on the brain.”

  “Look, it’s not a big deal. All I need to you to do is ask him out for a drink. As me. But…you know…not nervous. Cool. And then I’ll do the rest.”

  I stared back at my mirror image. He needed some pointers when it came to eyebrow grooming, but he wasn’t exactly hard to look at. Six foot tall, dark brown hair, blue-green eyes, strong jaw. “Why don’t you do it all?” I said. “I don’t mean to brag, but you’re good looking. And you’re a surgeon. That’s quite sexy, as long as you don’t tell any of your stories about spines, because those can be…unpleasant.”

  “Do you want money?” he said.

  “No,” I said, although I did. Everyone wants money, and I was getting to the point where I was starting to need it. The rent was due and I was deep into my overdraft. “I’m fine. I’m okay for money.”

  “I’m willing to pay you. It’s an acting job, after all.”

  Temptation slithered up to me like a friendly cat, bumping its chin knowingly under mine. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sort of busy. I’ve got a really good feeling about this Dangerous Liaisons thing.”

  “Yes, but you’ve done this before,” said Simon.

  “That was different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wasn’t really deceiving anyone. You had the grades. That place was yours by rights, and chances are you might have got it anyway if you’d gone to the interview.”

  Simon scoffed. “I wouldn’t and you know it. I would have gone into full sweaty meltdown mode. We’re talking Second Shepherd here.”

  “So? Does anyone really care if the person repairing their spine is socially awkward? The interview was a…a flourish. A formality. This is different. If you want an intimate relationship with a person then there’s no interview. There’s no marks to score or tests to ace. You just have to go in there and give them yourself. If you really like him, don’t you owe it to him to be honest with him from the get-go?”

  He sighed and wiped condensation from the side of his beer glass. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “I am right. I might not know a metatarsal bone from my own left foot, but I’m all about the emotional intelligence. Just…just ask him out. The worst he can say is no.”

  “No, the worst he can say is ‘I find you physically repulsive, intellectually vacuous, morally repugnant and stricken with the worst case of halitosis I’ve ever encountered in my life.’”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’ve really been lying awake at n
ight torturing yourself with this, haven’t you?”

  “A bit.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Here’s what you do. First, floss. Let’s put the halitosis thing to bed straight away.”

  “Noted.”

  “Secondly, eyebrow.”

  “What’s wrong with my eyebrows?”

  “Eyebrow. Singular. You’re supposed to have two. It’s bad enough being the Gallagher brothers without having the monobrow to match. It takes less time than flossing – wax strip down the middle, quick buzz with the eyebrow trimmer.”

  “Okay.”

  My phone shuddered in my pocket. It was getting on in the afternoon, and I had to find food before reporting to my other job in Floral Street. “As for the rest,” I said. “I may be biased, but I don’t think you’re physically repulsive, intellectually empty or morally repugnant, so just be yourself. I’m sure he’ll think you’re great, and if he doesn’t, fuck it. There are at least three point five million other men in this city.”

  “No, you’re right,” he said, with a sigh. “There are some things I have to do for myself.”

  “Things that are better for you having done them,” I said, sliding out of the seat. “Look, I have to go…”

  “I know. Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For talking some sense into me.”

  “Well, you know. It’s usually the other way round,” I said. “But I like to think I’m versatile.” I checked the phone, hoping against hope that it was a callback. It wasn’t. It was just a Twitter notification. “Okay. Covent Garden calls.”

  “Yeah.” He glanced at his own phone. “Oh, Nathan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Your metatarsals. They’re actually in your foot. I’m not sure if that was the joke, but…”

  “No. I thought that was metacarpals?”

  “No. That’s hands.”

  “See? That’s why you’re the doctor.”

  I wondered if I’d been right to let the ever slippery subject of money slide away too easily, but his offer had me more curious than anything else. Who was this man who had my brother in such a fluster? Besides, it was sort of on my way, and the summer had turned the Tube into an experience roughly similar to being crammed into a forty degree, subterranean sardine can.