Around
the final bend now, doing a steady thirty-five K, the finish line coming up,
but where are the crowds? Must be something to do with what’s going on in the
village up the road. The only one there is The Devil — how did he get down here
so quick?
MY LUCKY PIG
The door when she found it
was not what Zoe expected. Usually, in her experience, sound studios these days
were in pretty swanky office buildings. This was not a swanky office building,
it was the sort of apartment block that she imagined was used as safe flats by
the secret services of countries that didn’t have a lot of money. She wondered
if Salman Rushdie had ever stayed in Mycroft Mansions, and if so did he and his
coppers have happy memories of it? Still it wasn’t that unusual, she told
herself after all, she had recorded voice-overs for documentaries and radio ads
and training films in all kinds of strange buildings all over London. At least
the studio was in a part of London where a lot of the best voice-over studios
were, north of Oxford Street in the garment district which spreads east from
Regent Street for a couple of blocks till it runs up against the straggle of
the Middlesex Hospital’s many outstations of sickness. Pity though, it was the
pukka proper studios that she really liked, where a boy in baggy pants went and
got you any kind of coffee you wanted and there were bowls of sticky chocolate
stuff for you to clagg up your mouth with.
Radiotracks,
where they only had bowls of apples and mini choc bars for you to eat free, was
in the next street, she’d done the narration there for a documentary made by
the Discovery Channel about blunderbusses. And of course there was Saunders and
Gordon back of the Tottenham Court Road with its big squishy sofas and
help-yourself bar stacked with pain au chocolat and Danish pastries, loads of
different teas and coffee, all the mags and the day’s newspapers. Though like
any leading actress she didn’t actually read the newspapers, it was considered
bad form. You were allowed to bring a copy of the
Guardian
to rehearsals
or onto the set but only to do the crossword between takes. Other actors were
disapproving if you were too clued up on foreign affairs or the stock market,
if you ostentatiously read the
Economist
or
Frankfurter Aligemeine
at
rehearsals; it implied a lack of interest in the real world, which was the
interior world of the actor. When Zoe got a commercials job at Saunders and Gordon
she tried not to eat the day before and to turn up as early as possible and get
discreetly stuck in. Rory Bremner was usually in there talking about cricket to
the pretty receptionists in six or seven of his four hundred different voices
but as far as she could see he wasn’t getting a free meal, he just didn’t seem
to have anywhere else to go.
Zoe
looked down the brass plate that seemed to have at least a thousand door bells
on it. There it was at the bottom: Soda Soundstudio, Basement. She pressed the button,
there was a buzz and the iris of a little video camera squirmed open and stared
at her. ‘Errogh?’ said a mutilated voice in the wall.
‘Oh hi,’
she shouted, ‘Zoe Renoir, twelve o’clock, I’m here to do the voice-over for the
CD Rom thingy!’
‘Baismeng!’
said the voice and let her in with an electric rattle of the lock. She entered
a long dark hallway with blank doors leading off every couple of feet,
suggesting each flat was about thirty inches wide. A voice called her from a
stairwell leading down into blackness at the other end of the corridor. ‘Sonsoodio,
don ear.’ Her fingers found one of those timer light switches that you press
into the wall. For perhaps one second the hallway was grimly illuminated before
the switch sprang back out with an emphatic ‘boing!’ like it wasn’t its job to
light up the corridor. So instead she felt her way along the wall till a dim
light from an open door at the bottom of the stairwell allowed her to descend
the stairs.
The
basement flat had a large metal studded door painted a dirty white, the head of
a small Oriental-looking man was poking round it. ‘Sonsoodio in ear,’ he
repeated and held the door open. Zoe entered and found herself in another
ill-lit passageway. The man led her into what had once been the living room of
the basement apartment. It was rather charmingly decorated and would have been
a nice room if there hadn’t been a huge sound mixing desk of the latest kind,
several gigantic speakers and a bank of TV monitors rammed into it. Sitting at
the desk in a big leather office chair, like that black boy with the weird
sunglasses thingy who drove the
Starship Voyager,
was a tubby young man
with long greasy hair; on a low sofa were three other men, one instantly
spottable as a London advertising type in the standard issue Paul Smith suit,
the other two smartly dressed Orientals in suits not made by anybody called
anything like Smith. The sound engineer ignored her while twiddling various
knobs on his desk in a random way, the other three on the couch rose as Zoe entered.
The
Media bloke held out his hand: ‘Zoe, um Tom Mantle from Earwig, the production
company, these gentlemen are the clients, Mr Urapo and Mr Sweichian.’ Both men
bowed and shook Zoe’s hand. Tom waved in the direction of the engineer, ‘That
is Beanie.’ An abstracted wave. The man who had shown her in did not get
introduced. ‘Now I don’t believe you ye seen the script.’
‘No,’
said Zoe. ‘Which is a pirry, ‘cos I usually like to have a good look at the
script, get familiar with it, almost learn it,’ she lied. Zoe did at least one
voice-over a day and she forgot them as soon as she did them, indeed she didn’t
pay much attention as she was doing them, singing the words up and down while
thinking of other things.
‘Yomp,
sorry about that, still you’ll pick it up as you go along. You’ll be voicing a
CD Rom with pictures which will be distributed to certain key figures in the
industry that our clients are wishing to enter as new players, they can play it
on der computers. So here’s the script.’ He handed Zoe five stapled-together
sheets of paper with closely typed words on them. ‘Might as well get started,
you wanna go into the booth?’ For the first time she saw in one corner what was
formerly a small box room, now converted into a sound-proof booth. She skipped
in. Beanie shut the door behind her and locked it with a chromed metal lever.
She was in a space four foot square, looking back out into the living room
through a small double-glazed window of thick glass. Inside was a table with a
TV monitor on it, a table lamp, two pencils, a chair, a set of headphones, a
green light on a wire and a big German microphone on a stand with a mesh shield
in front of it to catch spit and flying food.
Zoe sat
down in the chair. No sound entered the booth. The actress stared out at the
quintet moving their mouths like well-dressed men-fish in an aquarium. She felt
not quite right. It had been dinned into them at the youth theatre then at
drama school that they had to do everything they could to advance their
careers, it wasn’t nearly enough to be talented, the business of acting had to
be the only thing in their lives, they had to make contacts, get along with
people — but she didn’t know where she was with this lot, there was a funny
vibe she’d never encountered before. Her friend Trink from drama school had one
of those Psion Organisers, a 7a, the most advanced kind he said. He could talk
into it, tell it things and later it would talk to him and tell him things
back. What he did was, he would make a note of anybody who could help his
career, up and coming directors, casting directors, writers and so on and enter
all their details into his Psion, then if he met them at a first night or
something he could slip off to the loo and get a briefing, then come back and
act like their biggest fan. Many people had been freaked out to hear Trink’s
voice coming from a lavatory stall at the Old Vic, whispering secrets to himself
in RADA-trained tones. Still, she thought a Psion, even the more powerful 7a,
was no substitute for a nice pair of tits. Most actresses were good-looking,
beautiful even, and being amongst so many pretty ones taught you not to value
your looks but it was also implied that you would use them whenever you could.
Zoe wasn’t stupid though, she knew instinctively not to try anything fresh with
anybody in that other room; she might as well have tried to get off with the
Procurator of The Free Church of Scotland as to try anything with Tom, Beanie,
Mr Urapo or Mr Sweichian.
She
turned in the chair and put her Tellytubby backpack on the floor, looked inside
it and realised with a jink of fear that she didn’t have her lucky pig with
her. Well, that wasn’t a good start. She liked to have her lucky pottery pig
with her when she did a job or went for an audition or had a cervical smear.
She was so frightened so much of the time and she thought her pig kept her
safe, protected her like a guard pig, standing square on its stumpy pottery
legs, defying the forces of evil to harm her … brave pig. There were so many
of them, actors, actresses, like you would watch in
The Bill
and apart
from the regular cast there were loads of actors in it and in the next episode
there was a whole different bunch of actors and you never saw the first bunch
again on the telly ever, and those were the successful ones who got on the
telly even the once.
The CD
Rom had a timecode running along the bottom of it, giving minutes, seconds and
tenths of a second. The bits that needed voice-over would be played to her and
a green light would tell her when to start talking, the timecode was also
printed on her script and that told her when she needed to stop speaking by.
Beanie spoke to her over her headphones. ‘I need a sound level, tell me what
you had for breakfast.’
‘A nice
piece of grilled lettuce dressed with lemon juice and there’s this new live
bacteria drink tha—’
‘Yeah
that’s fine. I’ll run the picture and give you a light.’
The
small TV on the desk in front of her came to life. A big clock appeared on it
then the images began, bright blue sea mixing to coral reefs, tropical fish
darting in and out, then small tropical islands covered in palm trees. The
green light flashed and she began to read. ‘The South China Seas, famous for
azure blue lagoons, palm-fringed beaches and …’
She
paused as the script told her to and waited for the light to come on again. As
it did the image cut to shaky footage of small boats rammed with armed men
smashing through the surf.
‘… pirates!
Rapacious, bloodthirsty, rampaging pirates!’
The
pictures stopped and Tom spoke to her over the headphones.
‘That
was great, Zoe, fablious. Let’s try it once more for luck. Have a bit more fun
with it.’ So they did.
Then
the pictures fast forwarded a bit up to the next section they wanted her to
voice over.
‘Nearly
a century after Joseph Conrad wrote of the colourful robbers he called “vagabonds
of the sea”, the pirates of the South China Seas are highly organised,
technically advanced criminals and now they are expanding into Europe.’ She
thought this sounded like one of those documentaries she’d done but why had
they said it was a CD Rom? On screen the speed boats were bucking in the wake
of a huge merchant ship. Grappling hooks were thrown and the men in the boats,
rifles slung across their backs, climbed like racoons up the ropes and onto the
unseen deck of the ship. She read on.
‘We are
those pirates, the pirates of the South China Seas and we are looking to make
alliances in your area. If we are your friend we are loyal and true, if you are
our enemy we are implacable.’
On the
deck of the freighter the gunmen had the crew lined up in front of them. The
pirates began firing with their rifles and the sailors staggered about for a
bit and then fell down in a heap.
Zoe
suddenly had a horrifying thought. Her agent, who she usually told what she was
doing every second of the day, didn’t know she was here, in fact she’d lied and
said she was going to an auction of unwanted greyhounds. It would be up there
on the board in the office in big felt-tip letters: ‘9/6 Zoe auct, unwnt
grhnds.’ The CD Rom people had phoned her direct and offered her a buy-out flat
fee of five hundred pounds which had seemed like a lot of money for something
that wasn’t going to be broadcast. So Zoe’s agent didn’t know about this job,
she was cutting her out of her fee, in fact the CD Rom people had expressly
told her not to mention it to her agent. What suddenly struck Zoe was, was she
getting paid enough for this? What if it wasn’t sufficient? What if she was
getting shafted? She thought she might try phoning her agent and asking, all
casual like, what the right fee for a thing like this might be. Would her agent
be annoyed with her? She’d phoned her yesterday when Zoe’d thought she was
pregnant to ask if she thought Zoe should get an abortion now or wait till
after the
East Enders
audition. How was she supposed to remember the
woman’s fucking IVF treatment had failed for the ninth time? She decided to
phone, after all her agent was one of her best friends. She took out her mobile
but there were no ‘steps to heaven’, that’s what she called the little
ascending bars on the display that showed what the signal strength of her phone
was; there was no whisper of a signal here. The pictures had frozen on the
screen with a grinning pirate brandishing his gun. She spoke into the microphone,
‘Erm, hello … erm can I make a quick phone call on your landline, I can’t get
a signal in here on my mobo?’