The Audition

HE GOT OUT of bed in silence; no singing, no Busby Berkeley routine with the toaster and a large sliced pan. He might have been nervous. He might have been suspicious or bored or transmundane. I would have checked, but my training got the better of me and I found myself treating him like a very stupid person.

‘Don’t worry, you’ll be a big hit,’ I said. ‘Just give them that smile.’ I was going to say ‘Knock’em dead,’ but stopped myself. I told him to wear the whiter of his two white shirts, buttoned up to the neck and no tie. Then I undid the top button. ‘Perfect,’ I said and told him to tuck his vest into his underpants and then his shirt into his trousers, so that he would be overlapped and interlocked from the waist down like a dovetail joint, because, I said, I have always found this a help when the going gets rough.

‘Nervous?’

‘I don’t have nerves,’ he said.

‘Good.’

‘I have doubts. I have the complication of perfect desire.’

‘Well you should be all right so.’

I thought he might be fretting about going in front of a camera so I told him how Frank had said that he would jump bang through the lens and land in your lap.

‘Exactly,’ said Stephen. ‘What happens if I jump bang through the lens and land in someone’s lap?’ And that was only the first thing on the list. What would happen if he stood in front of a camera and nothing came out at the other end? What would happen if he went through the camera and his electronic version was left standing on the studio floor? Or maybe the camera really did steal people’s souls, in which case, would there be any of him left? Where would he go? There was also the problem of light. Would he be naturally overexposed? Could the camera pick up something as essentially ineffable as he, Stephen must be?

Which made me wonder why, when it comes to being on telly, everyone reacts in the same way.

‘It’s a bit late now,’ I said. ‘And anyway, you are supposed to know all these things.’

‘There are so many places I could get lost,’ said Stephen. ‘There’s at least three feet between me and the camera. And then what?’

‘Then you hit the heart of the nation.’

‘You know what I mean,’ he said. So I told him.

‘Three cameras. Right? You go down through the lenses, along the cables and up into the control room,’ I said, ‘where you get chopped up, joined together, whizzed along under a few corridors, round a few corners, into a room full of circuits that chew you up, split you up, run you through Presentation and bang you off the transmitter.’

‘And?’ said Stephen.

‘You go flying through the air at the speed of light. Child’s play. For you.’

‘What kind of flying?’ said Stephen.

‘How should I know? It’s a wave (it’s a particle! it’s a wave! it’s a particle!). It’s a wave, whatever that means. It’s just a few little squiggly lines coming out of the transmitter.’

‘No.’

‘No. For real and in three dimensions it’s more like a globe, with the transmitter in the middle. One globe expanding after the other, like an onion that never stops exploding.’

‘Shit,’ said Stephen.

‘But you’re still not on telly.’ I was enjoying myself.

The journey to work was spent with Stephen dodging and feinting in the front seat as we picked our way through all the gory scraps of people and pictures that ricocheted off the road; waves hitting the ground at random, bouncing off traffic, sinking into pedestrians, getting eaten by cattle, drowning in Dublin Bay, or swinging past Jupiter on their way to the Horsehead Nebula. But some of them at least would end up wrapping the cablelink aerials and slithering down the wires into people’s homes.

‘There,’ I said. ‘Fame at last.’

‘That’s what I’m worried about,’ said Stephen. ‘There’s nothing in those boxes, or a little bit of nothing. I could get lost in that vacuum. I could get stuck, in that little bit of nothing-at-all, in the middle of someone’s TV.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘You’re fired across. They shoot you across, like out of a cannon.’

‘Not me,’ said Stephen.

‘It happens all the time,’ I said. ‘It’s not hard. It’s not you. It’s a signal.’

‘You fool. You fool,’ said Stephen. ‘That’s exactly what an angel is.’

When I reach the office, pulling him in like a sacrificial bull with eyes like plums and a garland around his neck, no-one takes any notice. I tell Jo I have an auditionee and she says ‘Well what’s he doing here? Ring up hospitality for …’ and then she looks at him.

‘Hello,’ she says, mops herself up off the floor and leads him away.

I ask Marcus to take the auditions on his own. ‘Personal interest.’ Knowing that there’s nothing he likes better than getting me out of the room.

The television in the outer office is on the blink, as if I needed to be reminded that Stephen is in the building. Jo comes back and fiddles through the static, trying to get a feed from the audition room. I do a running order, already a day late, while she shifts through a series of blank screens with a Bulgarian choir singing through each one. I think I see my bathroom in a music video with a river running over the floor. Some people applaud like Americans. There is a cow in a church burning her wet nose on the candles. Jo laughs and twists the vertical hold. The screen dies. She starts to hum it back to life again.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I know that place. I know that place. That’s the place where I was born.’ Which is when the LoveWagon comes charging out of her office.

‘Who is that guy?’ she says. ‘Get him up here.’

Jo keeps adjusting the back of the set until the LoveWagon realises that she works in an office and not in a soap opera.

‘Jo, have you got the number of the audition room handy? I wouldn’t mind having a word with Marcus.’

Attention does not suit Stephen. He comes back from his audition, passes me in the office, turns and winks by the LoveWagon’s open door, which closes after him with a melting, metallic click and does not open again for forty-three and a half minutes. From behind it comes the sound of laughter, softened by the wood. The light shifts with a passing shower, the room shrinks, then dilates. Marcus smiles a tight little smile.

‘Marry me, Grace,’ he says, ‘and I’ll turn your money green.’

When the office door opens, they are both standing there as if they had never moved from the spot. The LoveWagon is smiling in a private way, as if we all like her and none of us are in the room.

‘Just say the word,’ she says.

‘I will. Thanks Gillian.’

Gillian? When I have finished vomiting in the wastepaper basket I see the LoveWagon call Marcus in.

‘What happened to work around here?’ I say. ‘What happened to the design meeting? I have to go filming and Staging is giving us horseshit about the trampoline. Graphics is out sick. Who wants to go to lunch?’

‘In a minute,’ says Frank. Stephen, unimpressed, is looking at the photographs which Frank is back to shuffling, like a gambler down on his luck.

‘Anyway I’ve no fucking time for lunch.’

‘Bring you back a sandwich,’ says Frank, and the two of them walk out the door with a bad attempt at dialogue. ‘So. What do you fancy for the Filly’s Maiden at Navan?’

After a few minutes I follow them out, if only to stop that fucking stupid, sad fucking imitation that passes for fucking male conversation.

I find them in the canteen where Stephen is eating an apple. Frank is smoking, he is saying:

‘Dungarvan, France, Disneyland, France again. Where’s that? Jesus, Tubbercurry.’

‘And these are the children?’ says Stephen, with a curiosity that only I know to be biological.

‘Friends’ kids. Here,’ says Frank, ‘mother and child.’

Frank’s wife is in bed with a new baby and a nightdress that looks oceanic. She is laughing at an older woman who is making an extreme face at the baby. She is wearing a plastic baby’s dribbler, with a scoop-up base and a picture of Donald Duck. It looks hard and unpleasant against the tenderness of her breasts which have made the change from sexual to maternal, or tried to. The older woman, too, looks like she is in pain.

‘And her own mother.’ says Frank.

‘Apron,’ says Stephen, setting the picture on the table and taking up the rest. He shuffles through to Disneyland where Frank’s wife is talking to Alice in Wonderland. She looks like she is discussing the price of sausages. Alice in Wonderland looks concerned about the price of sausages.

‘Apron,’ says Stephen, sets this picture on the first and shuffles again to a barbecue on a summer’s day, this time with real sausages. Frank’s wife is standing behind the grill. She has an empty green wine bottle in her hand, held up to her eye like a telescope. She is looking at the sun through the wine bottle and the top of the bib is distorted and green.

‘Apron,’ says Stephen. At which point I give in and go up for food.

When I come back, Stephen is arranging the pictures by lampshades. Frank has gone blank.

‘Here, eat this,’ I say to Stephen, shoving over a plate of chicken in puff pastry. ‘It’ll put hairs on your chest.’

‘Lampshade,’ he says. ‘Lampshade. Lampshade. Two lampshades.’

‘Frank?’ I say.

‘OK, OK,’ says Frank, and gathers himself up and joins the queue.

‘So how did it go?’ I say to Stephen, whose palm is still open on the table, a stack of pictures weighing it down.

‘What?’

‘The audition.’

‘Perfect.’

‘No mid-air collisions?’

Stephen told me he had found out what it was all for. He told me that nothing hurt so much as being on screen, but that since it wasn’t really him, it hurt something else.

‘It was you,’ I say.

‘But I feel fine.’

He felt better than fine. You could see things in his eyes.

‘Here she is in 1979’, Frank’s wife’s torso is gently inclined. She is bent over in the way that wives in the Fifties hinged themselves at the waist in order to extract perfect cakes from their electric stoves. Her profile obscures the eyes and nose of a crying child. The child is in motion. Its two hands are helplessly extended and flinging dirt through the air.

‘You have to strip them down,’ says Stephen.

‘She’s leaving me,’ says Frank to no-one.

‘You have to peel them away,’ says Stephen, ‘one layer at a time.’

‘Leave him alone,’ I say.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ says Frank. A wet skin of tears has formed on his eyes. How can I help him when my own body is a blur? How can I help him when Stephen is leaving me?

‘Hang on,’ says Stephen. ‘Try turning them upside-down.’ He sets the photos on their head and gazes at them as if they finally made sense. And it is true that somewhere in this tangle of colour is a thin film of awareness. She wants him, whether or not she knows he is there.

‘At what?’ says Frank. ‘The lampshade?’

When I get back, the LoveWagon is sidling around the office, bumping her hip off the side of desks and reading whatever is lying there with a careless, downward glance. Marcus is standing with the phone wedged between neck and shoulder and a sheaf of papers in his hands. It is the way he shoots someone if he wants to say that they are ‘highly’ successful. Sometimes I think that there is no-one on the line.

‘Is he yours?’ she says, in her girlie voice.

‘No,’ I say.

‘Lucky you.’