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I still couldn’t look at him. I had that dead-inside feeling that was all too familiar. ‘I didn’t get that Netflix series.’
Luke sighed. ‘Shit. Sorry about that. I know you thought it went well.’
‘It did go well. But, as usual, they’ve gone for someone who already has an amazing career going on. A “name”, they call it.’
‘Do you know who?’
I shook my head. ‘Richard Madden probably. He’s in everything at the moment. I suppose they think it’ll be a guaranteed hit with him attached to it.’
Luke had seen me like this loads of times. He was actually the one person I didn’t have to pretend to be all right in front of.
‘You’ll feel better in a few days,’ said Luke. ‘I know it’s tough now, but you’ll pick yourself up, do another casting, get another job. You always do.’
‘I know,’ I replied. ‘It’s just that you take the time to live with these characters, and almost become them in your head. And then, when you don’t get a chance to actually play that part … it feels like a kind of grief in a way. I know that sounds pretentious, but that’s how it is.’
Luke poured me a sneaky whisky and slid it to me under the bar. ‘Get that down you,’ he said.
I knocked it back before anyone saw.
‘Thanks for not thinking I’m pathetic,’ I said to him.
Luke patted my back reassuringly. ‘Never, mate. I can’t pretend to understand, not really, but the whole acting world feels messed up to me. At least you’re putting yourself out there in the first place.’
And I, for possibly the first time, felt a pang of envy for Luke’s simple life. For his lack of ambition, for the happiness he gleaned from being duty manager of a pub, for his loved-up life with his childhood sweetheart of a girlfriend.
It was gone ten when she came in, the girl with the red jumper and the dangly earrings. She was with a couple of friends, sat at the corner table drinking JD and Cokes. She made a beeline for me when she came to get their third round. I hoped she wasn’t going to make me talk, because although I felt marginally better, I wasn’t up for anything more than very basic conversation.
‘Hiya,’ she said, all chirpy. She had a northern accent; Manchester, maybe.
‘What can I get you?’ I asked, keeping it professional.
Under normal circumstances, it tended to make your shift go faster if you chatted to the patrons. Not if they were too drunk, though, because then they’d go on and on and you’d have to pretend to go and change a barrel or something just to get away. But I’d met some nice people at work. People who were easier to talk to and seemingly more interested in my life than my actual blood relatives were.
‘Can you do cocktails?’ she asked.
‘Um, yeah,’ I said, thinking: Please don’t order cocktails. They required the kind of effort and panache that I did not possess this evening.
‘In that case, three Cosmopolitans, please,’ she said in an annoyingly cheerful manner, as though she thought she was doing me a favour.
I smiled tightly.
It took me ages to find the cocktail shaker, that’s how rarely we used it.
‘Do you work here a lot, then?’ she asked, leaning on the bar.
‘Um, now and again,’ I replied, glancing up.
‘What else do you do?’
I poured six double shots of vodka into the shaker. ‘I’m an actor,’ I said.
Her face lit up. ‘Nice! Would I have seen you in anything?’
I nearly said: I don’t know, would you?
‘Not sure,’ I said. ‘Possibly not, unless you go to the theatre a lot. Or you’re a Holby City superfan and have watched the two episodes I happen to have been in.’
She screwed up her face. ‘I’m a medical student, so that’s the last thing I want to watch when I have time off. Also, it’s not at all realistic.’
