Waiting for Callback Read online

  She sounded like my mum. And my dad. And quite a few other people now I came to think about it.

  ‘Archie did hold me in his manly arms last week.’

  ‘Whaaaaaat!’

  ‘It was only because we were partners in the Trust Game.’

  ‘What’s the Trust Game? And can I play it with Archie too?’

  ‘We all stand in pairs and you have to close your eyes and fall back and trust the other person to catch you. And no you can’t.’ It’s been known to go horribly wrong. But it hadn’t that time and the Trust Game was now my absolutely favourite drama game.

  ‘Was there any . . . tension?’

  ‘Not enough. But I sometimes think he’s watching me in class.’

  ‘That’s definitely a good sign. He’s probably a little bit obsessed with you.’

  ‘Or maybe I’m just a little bit obsessed with him and super aware of his every glance.’

  Moss grimaced; that was possible.

  Actually, that was true.

  ‘Maybe you should take up smoking and then you can go outside and smoke together on your break and get close.’ Moss waggled her eyebrows in a frankly disturbing way. ‘That’s how Aba got with Rob on their cello course.’

  ‘Yep, I can totally see how that would work . . . except I don’t think he smokes . . . Also we don’t get breaks . . . Also I’m not taking up smoking for a guy; even the smell makes me sick so I’d probably throw up which would not be smooth . . . Also my mum would kill me.’

  ‘All good points. So maybe not my best idea?’

  ‘Maybe not. Anyway, he’s probably got a girlfriend,’ I said, examining my hair for split ends.

  ‘He probably doesn’t. Most guys don’t. Not if they can get a girl without committing.’ Moss read a lot of advice columns, but not much of it translated to our lives. ‘Maybe he’ll be at the social. Can you wait that long?’

  The social was the annual party run by the PTA for our year and up and boys from St John’s (the closest boys’ school) were invited (i.e. made to come). It wasn’t until after the Christmas holidays and the fact that we were already talking about it was a tragic reflection on our social lives. But it was the only exception to our school’s strict ‘No Boys’ policy (well, except for a smuggling incident involving a girl in the sixth form, her boyfriend and the changing rooms, but nobody would give us any details and that was Never Going to Happen Again).

  ‘How is that possible? Archie doesn’t even go to St John’s.’

  Moss shrugged. ‘It’s probably for the best.’

  It probably was. The classy venue for the social was the sports hall.

  Nothing good has ever happened to me in a sports hall.

  ‘Elektra!’ I spun round to see my mother striding towards the gates, waving a hairbrush in a manic fashion to get my attention. Like I/anyone could have missed her; I’m pretty sure they heard her in the staffroom.

  ‘Aaaaw, look, everyone, Elektra’s mummy’s come to pick her up in her little car. That’s so sweet,’ Flissy said, calling a black cab on her iPhone, applying lipgloss and embarrassing me all at the same time. Which was impressive multitasking. But as soon as my mum got within hearing distance the charm offensive was turned on. ‘Hello, Mrs Jones,’ she said.

  ‘James,’ I corrected, but they both ignored me. Moss was miming being sick behind Flissy’s back. I loved Moss.

  ‘I adore your bag.’ Flissy was literally talking down to her. My (short) mum looked pathetically pleased by the attention. She hadn’t noticed that Flissy was carrying the newer, shinier version of the same bag.

  ‘I do hope Elektra isn’t too upset.’ What the? Flissy had a weird expression on her face. I think it was meant to be concern, but that was obviously an unfamiliar emotion for her.

  ‘Upset? Elektra, what happened?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, trying to steer Mum towards the car (which was a perfectly ordinary size).

  ‘About the biology test? Oh, she didn’t tell you her mark? Eeek, sorry, Elektra!’ Sure, she was really sorry. ‘I probably wouldn’t have told my mum either – wouldn’t have wanted her to worry.’ Flissy smiled ‘sweetly’. ‘Must go, my taxi’s here. So nice to talk to you, Mrs Jones.’

  On the one hand, Flissy had just admired my mother’s handbag and told the truth. On the other hand, she was toxic.

  I hugged Moss and hurried my mother away from the gates and into the car before anyone else could say anything to her and before she could say anything about anything in front of anybody. Luckily, she was distracted.

  ‘Darling! Your agent called!’

  Thank God she hadn’t said that in front of Flissy.

  ‘And?’ I tried to sound casual, but I’m not sure I managed it.

  ‘You’ve got an audition! Seat belt, seat belt.’

  ‘What for? What? Really? When?’ I was buckling and babbling.

  ‘Well, in about . . .’ she looked at her watch while reversing very dangerously out of the car park, ‘fifty minutes.’

  It wasn’t meant to happen like this. Somehow I was meant to feel prepared and ready to be cast. I didn’t. I was going in there metaphorically naked. I needed time to prepare – dramatically (I’d planned on begging Lens to give me lots of one-to-one tuition before every audition), physically (I had a spot lurking in my left eyebrow) and emotionally (I was so not calm).

  ‘Have I got any lines to learn?’ I asked Mum, looking at my watch, but hardly able to read the time I was so stressy.

  ‘No,’ said my mother, narrowly missing running over my maths teacher (wasted opportunity), ‘but don’t worry. Stella’s filled me in on everything you need to know. They’re looking for a dead girl – well, to be accurate, a good actress who can convincingly portray a dead girl.’ She was obviously parroting Stella.

  ‘A dead girl? How hard can that be?’ I was crushed. At first sight, it didn’t sound like the role had a lot of potential.

  ‘Well, Stella said they were looking for a strong actress.’

  ‘She was just trying to be nice. What if this is my first audition because she thinks that’s all I can do – be dead.’

  My mother looked at me carefully.

  ‘Keep your eyes on the road, Mum, or I will be a dead child.’

  She didn’t say anything, just handed me a tube of spot concealer.

  Now I came to think about it (and now that I only had about twenty-five minutes to go) maybe convincingly portraying a dead girl did require talent. I mean, what exactly did dead girls look like?

  What do dead girls look like? It was an emergency so I texted Moss.

  ???????????

  Audition!!!!!!!!

  Oh. My. God. And then, How dead?

  ‘How dead am I?’ I asked my mum.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, like, have I just drawn my last breath or am I practically decomposing? Do I have a tinge of blue about the lips or am I at the maggots stage?’

  My mother shuddered. ‘I don’t know, Elektra. Stella just said dead.’

  ‘You didn’t ask?’ I wailed.

  ‘She sounded busy.’

  I don’t know how dead I am, I texted Moss, wishing there were an emoticon for despair (there probably was, but not on my ancient phone).

  I meant how did you die? Disease? Knife? Poison? Gunshot wound to the head? Or sleep? She was right on it.

  ‘Mum, did you ask how I died?’ I asked, wondering how you could die of sleep.

  She shook her head. It didn’t seem to have occurred to her to find out anything useful at all.

  Mosssss, nightmare. I don’t know how I died.

  I think it will make a difference. Not sure what Google images to look at.

  Yep, presumably, dead girls who’d just gone through something very violent – or worse – would look different to girls who’d just quietly stopped breathing. Maybe it was a period drama and I had been carried away by consumption or whatever it was that carried teenage girls away in period dramas – although I wasn
’t sure I was thin enough to carry off death by consumption. Maybe it was a ghost thing – then the character would have potential. Cool but unlikely.

  Google pics of dead girls are gross and prob not very helpful. Suggest you go with the flow. You will be a beautiful corpse.

  I won’t be a beautiful corpse. I am wearing school uniform

  Even Moss couldn’t think of an upbeat reply to that one.

  ‘Mum, have I got time to go home and get changed? I can’t go like this.’

  ‘We’ve hardly got time to get there full stop. Don’t worry. Stella said your school uniform would be perfect.’

  ‘But it’s purple. I can’t die in purple.’ I was prepared to do my very best, even in these difficult circumstances, but how good could I be wearing purple polyester?

  ‘The colour brings out your eyes,’ Mum said (lied), but nothing was going to reconcile me to looking like an aubergine. Also my skirt (bought ‘to last’) was at least three sizes too big. I was a tragic, droopy, nervous aubergine with mud-brown eyes. Maybe I was going to die of shame.

  I tried calling Lens, but he didn’t pick up. Then I tried Daisy . . . Nope, she wasn’t picking up either. What if she was my competition? Daisy would be a beautiful corpse. Eulalie didn’t answer either. I needed her to tell me how super/sensationnelle/craquante I was.

  What I didn’t need to do was sit in the car with my stressy mum.

  ‘Go into every audition knowing that you’re an equal and expect to be treated as such.’

  Romola Garai

  The audition was somewhere in Soho and usually I’d have been fascinated by all the gay bars and sex shops (what or who was behind those weird beaded curtain things? Did I even want to know? Yes.) But I was too busy getting really freaked out about being late for the audition and not knowing how to be dead so we could have been anywhere. We ended up parking on a single yellow line and Mum started trying to clean me up like I was a toddler, still rubbing away at some ink marks on my arms with a saliva-damp tissue as we ran to the address that Stella had given her.

  I’d expected some flashy media offices with multiple screens in reception and those arty bottles of Coca-Cola lined up like a gallery display; instead, it was just some rented rooms in a run-down old building.

  There was a typed notice sellotaped to the door:

  AUDITIONS FOR GREENLIGHT PROJECT 2 SECOND FLOOR

  Even without that, we’d have known that we were in the right place by the two girls in school uniform, pretty much the same age as me, coming out as we were going in. They looked at me and I looked at them: everyone sizing up the competition (predictably they had more flattering uniforms).

  Even my mum was quiet on the way upstairs. There was a narrow landing and at the end of it, standing guard in front of a closed door, a pale young man wearing a lilac pashmina.

  ‘Name?’ he asked so listlessly that he could have been near death himself.

  ‘Elek—’ Mum began.

  ‘Elektra James,’ I cut across her because I knew my own name.

  Mr Pashmina ticked me off without even looking up and gestured up at a tatty half-landing. ‘First door to the right and take a seat. They’ll see you in a mo.’

  Six other ‘dead schoolgirl’ hopefuls were sitting on narrow hard-backed chairs in a tiny waiting room. None of them were Daisy (thankfully). I was on my own, Stella’s only hope. The room was stuffy. It was like a dentist’s waiting room, but without the weird smell (good) or the trashy magazines (bad). Five of the girls were accompanied by anxious-looking women (I’m guessing their mums); one girl was with an even more stressed-out-looking man (definitely her dad: they looked practically identical). There was an extra mother pacing by the barred window.

  All the girls were wearing school uniform. One of them was working a real St Trinian’s look; if they were looking for a slutty dead schoolgirl, she would definitely get the part. You could tell the girls who’d done this before: they’d brought something to read. One particularly cool girl, who was rocking a simple black-and-white uniform as if it were indie Chanel, was knitting.

  My mother started saying hello to everyone, but one of the mothers gestured to a large sign on the wall that said Perfect Quiet, Please, Taping in thick red marker and Mum (who always obeyed signs) lapsed into embarrassed silence.

  I was grateful.

  The ‘mo’ Mr Pashmina promised stretched into what seemed like hours. Every ten minutes or so, a subdued or excited-looking girl would come in, collect a random parent and depart, followed five minutes later by Mr Pashmina with his clipboard. He would stage-whisper the next name and a girl would get up and follow him.

  I tried to look like I was silently wishing them good luck, but deep down I wasn’t. Who would?

  I was the last girl to be called. I had reread a discarded Evening Standard three times by then (the top news story, Psychic sheep predicts election victory, still made no sense), my phone battery had died and I was a weird mixture of really nervous and really, really bored. I’d got to the stage of wishing I’d brought my physics homework with me (Ohm’s law which is less relaxing than it sounds).

  I followed Mr Pashmina, ignoring my mother who was pointlessly fumbling in her handbag for the hairbrush. I was shaking a little and I needed to go to the loo, even though I’d already been for about a hundred nervy micro wees.

  The audition room was really small. There were two women sitting behind a desk, one of them watching replays on a camcorder. They looked a bit tired and the room smelled of ham sandwiches. I’m not sure what I’d expected at an audition, but it wasn’t this.

  The older woman smiled warmly at me. ‘Hello, come on in. You’re Elektra James?’

  I nodded and she made a tick against my name on a depressingly long list.

  ‘I’m Lily and this is Anna. Did your agent . . .’ She looked down at her list. ‘Oh, yes, Stella Haden – did Stella have a chance to explain the role to you?’

  ‘Sort of; I know it’s a dead schoolgirl. I don’t know what sort of dead. I mean I don’t know how she died.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that at this stage. It’s early days.’ It didn’t seem to occur to Lily that I might worry less if I had some idea what I was meant to be doing.

  ‘I haven’t learned any lines or anything.’

  ‘No, that’s because the role is a non-speaking one.’

  Ah. They laughed and I blushed and because they were nice they tried to pretend they’d just been coughing.

  ‘OK, let’s get your ident done first,’ said Lily. I looked at her blankly.

  She handed me a big rectangle of wipe-clean card. It was mostly empty space, but across the bottom was written Dead Drop (which I guessed was the name of whatever this was) and Greenlight (which I’d worked out was the name of the production company) and 3rd December.

  ‘Here.’ She passed me a black marker pen. ‘Just write your name on the card, hold it up in front of you and we’ll take a photo. Stand over by the white wall. No, don’t hold it in front of your face. The whole point is that we can see who you are. Yes, that’ll do. Now turn to each side . . . Perfect.’

  The other woman, Anna, captured me on her camera looking like a criminal.

  As soon as she took the picture, I had a nasty feeling that I might have spelled my name wrong. I was feeling a bit brain foggy.

  That was pretty much the most active thing I had to do. After that, they just photographed me from every angle and measured my height. Why? I was going to be dead, presumably lying down – surely I could just curl up a bit into the desired length? Maybe not. What did I know?

  Less than five minutes later, I found myself back out in the corridor and went to reclaim my mother.

  She started up before we’d left the room, far less the building.

  ‘How was it, darling?’ Cringe.

  I made ‘don’t talk now’ faces at her, but she was practised at ignoring those. We passed Mr Pashmina on the way out.

  ‘Thank you so much for seeing Elektra
,’ she gushed (loudly). ‘Such an exciting experience for her. So, we just wait to hear now, do we?’

  Cringe.

  Mr Pashmina just looked blank. He’d obviously forgotten who we were. Just as well.

  I dragged Mum down the narrow stairs and out into the now dark street. The cold air smelled of coffee and cake from the cafe next door. It was a really good smell, cinnamon and chocolate and vanilla in the mix. I was hungry, but I could see a couple of the ‘dead schoolgirls’ and their mothers inside and I didn’t trust Mum to keep her voice down or, even worse, not to start talking to them, so I steered her back to the car. We had a parking ticket; of course we did.

  ‘So, tell me what happened in there?’ Mum said, shoving the ticket into her bag. I was impressed that she wasn’t freaking out about the ticket or saying it was my fault (which it sort of was).

  I shrugged. ‘Not much really.’

  ‘What did they ask you to do?’

  ‘Really nothing.’ Which was disappointing for both of us.

  ‘Something must have happened. What did they say to you?’ She hates it when I don’t tell her stuff; it’s a problem – she needs to work on her attachment (to me) issues.

  Obviously, the first thing I did when I got in the car was plug my phone into the charger and check my messages.

  Just stay calm, smile at them and do what they say. (Daisy, the pro.)

  Just enjoy yourself, it’s all good experience. (Lens, the teacher.)

  You will be FABULEUSE. (This was followed by a long line of not entirely appropriate emoticons about half of which wouldn’t display on my screen – Eulalie had a new iPhone and was getting in touch with her inner teenager by downloading multiple weird apps) How can they not love you? You are YOU. (getting pretty French and existential there.)

  Don’t panic. There are lots of images of dead girls in school uniform. Even purple school uniform. Moss would probably have nightmares for years and I wouldn’t even get the part.

  I scrolled down; fifteen texts between them, all pretty much saying the same thing – it would be great, I would be great (except for a typically random one from my dad that was just a really poor joke about cows). But I wasn’t feeling great. There’s something depressing about reading advice after you’ve already done something and when you’re pretty sure you didn’t take any of it.