Читать книгу Ruby Parker: Film Star - Rowan Coleman - Страница 7

“I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as you think it was,” my mum said kindly, putting a steaming bowl of risotto in front of me. It was my favourite comfort food. My mum only ever made it for me on special occasions, or when I was feeling really fed up. I stared at it, feeling the heat coming from it brush against my already flaming cheeks.

“The only way it could have been worse,” I told her in a small thin voice, “was if I had actually thrown up on Mr Dubrovnik.” I screwed up my eyes and felt every internal part of me curl up and shrivel too. I just couldn’t believe what had happened. I couldn’t believe I had actually been literally sick with nerves. In public.

“But you read the lines, didn’t you?” Mum said, sitting next to me at the kitchen table. “It’s not as if you didn’t deliver the scene, and I bet you were fabulous.”

“I was terrible,” I groaned, banging my forehead with the heel of my hands. “Like a five-year-old in a nativity play.”

My cat Everest had hauled himself up on to the table top and was eyeing my risotto hopefully. Normally Mum would have shooed him off the table, but he was taking advantage of her concern over me and edged a little bit closer.

“Well, you finished the scene and that’s the main thing,” my mum said unconvincingly. “And remember, we said it wasn’t the end of the world if you didn’t get the part. All we have to do is work out what made you feel so terrible and make sure it doesn’t happen again next time.” I closed my eyes and forced myself to replay the scene one more time.

I had walked into the room, which was much bigger than I had expected, with many more people in it. It was a large room with whitewashed brick walls and a dusty wooden floor. Three sides of the room were lined with floor to ceiling mirrors and ballet bars. Maybe that was what made my nerves worse. Maybe because it seemed like there were thirty people there instead of just ten. Maybe because I could see myself from all of my not-so-brilliant angles.

Or it could have been the camera. After all those years on a soap I didn’t think the camera would freak me out at all, but I was wrong. It wasn’t the same kind of camera I was used to working with on Kensington Heights: big and clunky and friendly. It was just a digital camcorder on a spindly tripod. I knew exactly how I looked and sounded on a digital camcorder from when my dad sent a home videotape into Before They Were Famous a couple of years earlier. I was furious because I looked terrible—dumpy and awkward—and my voice sounded all stupid and high and not at all like it sounded in my head.

I had made myself look at Mr Dubrovnik, who was sitting in the middle of a row of four people, a man who was a bit older than my dad but with longish sandy hair and the kind of clothes I would have thought were far too young and trendy for my dad. And he was wearing a baseball cap, indoors, so I couldn’t really see his eyes. But his face was pointed in my direction and he seemed to be the only one of them looking actually at me. All the others were looking at a monitor that was showing them how I looked on digital camcorder. Which was rubbish.

I stood on my mark and waited for what seemed like ages before I remembered that Lisa had told us just to read without waiting to be cued.

“I don’t know who…” I began my first line just as Mr Dubrovnik spoke.

“You may begin,” he said at exactly the same time.

“Er, s…sorry,” I told him, stumbling over my words. “It’s just that she said that I…” I trailed off as I remembered what else Lisa had said about “chit-chat”. I took a deep breath and looked right down the barrel of the camera.

“I don’t know who you think you are!” I more or less shouted my first line.

“I’m your sister, Ember. Don’t you remember me at all?” Lisa replied, reading from the script completely deadpan without a trace of emotion. I struggled to stay in character, which was hard, as I felt like I was trying to have a heated argument with someone who expressed about as much emotion as a pre-recorded answerphone message.

“You!” I exclaimed haughtily. “You’re not my sister! I’m Polly Harris, daughter of Professor Darkly Harris—the chief curator of the British Museum.”

“No. No, you’re not,” Lisa continued as if she were reading the back of a packet of cornflakes. “You’re my little sister and you were stolen from our parents when you were just a baby. I’ve been searching for you all these years and now at last I’ve found you.”

The flatter and more disinterested Lisa’s voice seemed, the more over-the-top and loud my acting became. I knew I was bad, but it was like being at the top of a rollercoaster: I couldn’t stop myself from plunging further and further down into over-the-top acting.

“You’re lying!” I cried out so loudly my voice rang in my ears and echoed off the painted brick walls.

I did get to the end of my scene without forgetting any lines, that was true. I felt my legs shaking and my stomach wobbling and I delivered the last line with everything I had.

“GET AWAY FROM ME!” I shrieked so loudly I think the mirrors shook.

The sound of my own voice ringing in my ears gradually died away, and when it was gone there was complete silence.

And that was when I threw up. On my feet. On digital camcorder. In front of Hollywood’s hottest and most influential director and his entourage. I was as sick as Everest choking up a mammoth-sized hairball.

I don’t even know where it came from; it wasn’t as if I’d had anything to eat that morning. But suddenly, without any warning, I was bent over double and my stomach was heaving, and I heard this horrible rasping sound and realised it was coming from me.

I didn’t wait for Lisa Wells to show me out. I clamped my hand over my mouth and ran out of there as fast as I could, and when I was finally outside I collapsed against the first bit of wall I could find. I stood there for a moment, my forehead grazing the brick, and I waited until I could breathe steadily and the pavement stopped shifting beneath my feet.

I would have liked to have stayed there all day but I knew I had to go back to the café where the others were waiting. Laughing probably, and talking excitedly without a care in the world because none of them, I was fairly certain, had finished their audition in the same way I had. With retching.

“How did it go?” Nydia exclaimed when she saw me. The whole table stared at me, and I realised that the stricken look on my face might be giving the overall picture of how it went but had failed to fill in the necessary details.

“Bad,” I managed to say as I scraped back the remaining empty chair they had been saving for me. “Really bad.”

“No, it didn’t! I’m sure it didn’t,” Miss Greenstreet said kindly, patting the back of my hand. “I’m sure you were wonderful. I’m sure that all of you girls were just wonderful.”

It was then that I burst into tears.

“So remember what we said?” Mum said, picking up my fork, piling it high with risotto and then aiming it at my mouth. She did this, my mum, sometimes: when things were especially difficult, she’d forget the intervening twelve years and ten months since my birth and treat me like a baby again, even down to spoon-feeding me. I looked at the fork and then at her, and she laid it back in the bowl.

“What did we say?” she said gently, refusing to let go of babying me completely.

“That it’s not the end of the world,” I recited, seriously unconvinced.

“Because you did your best, didn’t you? And that’s all you can do, isn’t it?” Mum added in the slow, soft voice she used to comfort me with when I grazed my knees.

“I know,” I said darkly.

“And there will be other chances,” Mum said. “Lots of them.”

“Yes,” I said heavily. “There will be other chances.”

“And after all,” Mum seemed determined to wade on through her pep talk despite my total failure to be pepped up by it, “you have to get used to lows as well as highs if you want to be an…”

“An actor!” I snapped. “Yes, I do know, Mum!” I sighed and slumped in my chair, pushing my bowl of risotto away from me so that it slid to a stop by Everest’s neat little paws. He licked his lips.

There was no point in being angry with Mum. She wasn’t the one who had messed up the audition so badly that it could well go into the number one slot of the Top Ten All-Time Most Messed-up Auditions Chart.

“I’m sorry, Mum,” I said. “It’s just, well, I know all about taking rejection and getting used to it and picking myself up and dusting myself off and getting ready for the next challenge; we have classes on it at school. After all, one of the reasons I left Kensington Heights was so that I could experience all of that—stretch myself, find new challenges. But, well…I suppose I didn’t expect it to happen to me. Not really.” I chewed at my bottom lip. “Maybe it means that I can’t act. Maybe I’m really rubbish, after all. I only ever really played myself in Kensington Heights.”

It was true. When I left the show, my character Angel was a quite shy, not very popular and ever-so-slightly-dumpy thirteen-year-old—and so was I. I thought that if I played another character, one like Polly Harris, I might change too. I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.

“Ruby, you are not rubbish,” Mum said, using her old no-nonsense voice again. “You are wonderful! Look, you had one bad audition—it’s not…”

“The end of the world,” I finished for her, suddenly wishing more than anything that it was because anything—even an apocalypse—would be preferable to having to go to school in the morning.