have you done?’
‘I didn’t do anything!’ Olly protests. ‘She was meant to be seeing her dad this evening, and he had to cancel.’
‘It’s nothing to do with my dad. Anyway, I’m fine. I’m not crying! In fact, I probably ought to be getting back downstairs, I’ve got an audition in … well, about three hours …’
‘Oh, God, not you, too.’ Nora Walker pulls a sympathetic face that makes her look just like her older brother, for a moment. ‘This is seriously the last one of these godawful things I’m agreeing to come to just to keep my mum happy. And you don’t look any keener on it than I am.’
I’m torn between sounding like a wuss who can’t stand up to my mum, and sounding like the sort of person who actually wants to star in The Sound of Music at the New Wimbledon Theatre.
‘Do you want to go and get a drink, or something?’ Nora Showbiz-Walker asks, in a properly mature-sounding voice, rather than the one I was trying to use with Dad earlier. ‘There’s a café just over the Broadway that does these really amazing smoothies.’
‘Oh, I know the one,’ Olly chips in. ‘They do a pretty good lemon drizzle cake, too.’
I’m starting to wonder if it shouldn’t be the Showbiz Walkers so much as the Food-Obsessed Walkers.
‘I can leave my little sister annoying everybody downstairs for a bit,’ Nora adds. ‘Or you could go and chaperone her, Olly.’
‘Oh. I thought I might come and have a smoothie and a bit of cake,’ Olly says, looking like a Labrador that’s just been deprived of a doggy treat. ‘It’s hours until we can get out of here.’
‘Fine,’ Nora sighs. ‘I’ll ask one of the mums to keep an eye on her. If you’d like to go and get a drink, Libby, that is?’
‘Yes. I’d love to.’
‘Ace. Why don’t you walk Libby over there, Ol, and I’ll go and find a random stage mum to watch Kitty.’
I don’t suggest that she ask my mum, unless she wants her little sister to end up suffering a nasty and suspicious accident that takes her out of the running for the part of Brigitta and, potentially, any other role for the rest of her child-acting life.
Olly looks hesitant for a moment – presumably concerned that, if left alone with me, I’ll start bawling like a baby again – but then Nora adds, cheerily, ‘And order me something with lots of pineapple and stuff in it. But not kiwi. I hate kiwi,’ and starts to head back down the aisle towards the doors. So he doesn’t really have much choice about the being-left-alone-with-me part.
Still, he’s a trooper, because he just starts to gather up his stuff ready to leave, while I do the same, and then we both start to make our way towards the Upper Circle exit doors too.
‘You’re wrong about The Matrix, by the way,’ he says, as we reach the doors and he holds one of them open for me. ‘I mean, it may not be Brunch at Bloomingdales, or whatever your Audrey Hepburn thing is called—’
‘It’s not called Brunch at Bloomingdale’s!’ I gasp, until I see his grin and realize that he’s joking.
‘Dinner at Debenhams, then?’ he hazards.
‘Supper at Selfridges?’ I suggest.
‘Lunch at Liberty’s?’
‘Tea at Tesco’s?’
‘Now, there’s a movie I’d definitely go and see,’ he says, with a bark of delighted laughter.
As we start down the half-billion stairs, I zip up my grey hooded top as far as it will go. This is partly to hide my own delighted smile – because I’m not sure I’ve ever made a boy laugh like that before – and partly because I don’t want anyone in the café to choke on their smoothie when a thirteen-year-old girl wanders in wearing an egg-yolk-yellow dirndl.
Everyone on set is looking suspiciously gorgeous this morning.
The catering bus is filling up quickly on our location shoot near King’s Cross this morning, with crew members already on their second (or third) bacon roll of the morning, and actors and actresses sipping, piously, at large mugs of tea and honey. All over the bus, people are looking as if they’re off for a Big Night Out. There are freshly blow-dried hairdos, newly fake-tanned legs, and more layers of mascara than you can shake a stick at. Everybody looks stunning.
And then there’s me.
Today is my first day in my brand-new speaking role, after months of being a random, silent extra.
Unfortunately, the role I’m playing is Warty Alien. So this morning I’m wearing the most grotesque costume you’ve ever seen in all your life.
I give it one last go with Frankie the Wardrobe assistant as she passes by my table now, just to see if there might have been some sort of mistake.
‘You’re absolutely sure,’ I say, ‘that I’m down on your list as Warty Alien? I mean, there couldn’t have been a spelling mistake? And it isn’t meant to be … I don’t know … Party Alien?’
See, that couldn’t be too bad. Especially if I could wear one of the alien costumes like my sister Cass wears, in her starring role as one of the Cat People. They’re actually quite sexy – skintight silvery bodysuit, mysterious eye mask, high-heeled knee boots – and even if I had to accessorize it, as Party Alien, with, say, a silly paper hat and a hula skirt, I’d still look halfway decent. Especially if I had to wear a hula skirt, in fact, because it would hide whatever horrors the silvery bodysuit would reveal in the bum region. Two birds, one stone!
‘Sorry, Libby. There’s no spelling mistake. Anyway, the part’s not actually called Warty Alien, you know. You’re down on my list as—’ Frankie glances down at the notepad she never lets more than two inches from her sight – ‘Extra-Terrestrial Spaceship Technician.’
(This basically means that I’m playing an alien version of a Kwik Fit mechanic, and explains why my one and only line – my Big Break! On National Television! – is: ‘But fixing the docking module could take days, Captain, maybe even weeks.’ Look, I never said it was a good line.)
‘OK, then,’ I say, desperately, ‘are you sure this is definitely the costume the Extra-Terrestrial Spaceship Technician is supposed to wear?’
‘Well, you’re more than welcome to query that with the Obergruppenführer. Because if there had been any kind of an error, it would be her mistake.’
The Obergruppenführer, otherwise (just not very often) known as Vanessa, is the production manager. It’s probably obvious, from her nickname, that she’s not the sort of person you want to accuse of making mistakes. Particularly not when you’re a lowly extra on a surprise hit TV show, with literally thousands of out-of-work actors ready to kill their own grandmothers to take your job instead.
