Then before he’s had time to finish his final word, his hand is gone and so is he, leaving Laura breathless and staring at an empty gap.
The pain in her head seems to shift to her heart, her entire chest aches. She slides down the wall, pushes the door closed and sits on the floor until the room gets dark, feeling yet another great loss in her life.
What has she done?
25
Laura was wrong about Bo’s luck. It goes from bad to worse for her documentary as the public gets behind Lyrebird. Before she knows what’s happening, Laura has been granted an emergency passport to fly to Australia. Mouth to Mouth productions are absolutely not allowed to accompany her on the trip. After the revelation of Lyrebird’s sad and solitary life, she is firmly in the nation’s hearts. They want to help her get along as much as possible.
By Sunday evening, carrying a new small carry-on case, Laura boards a flight to Australia. She will arrive on Tuesday morning at 06.25. She will do interviews and a photoshoot on Tuesday, the big TV appearance on Wednesday, then will leave Australia on Thursday at 22.25, returning to Dublin on Saturday night at 11.20. Two days in Australia. She will be back in time for her semi-final performance on Monday.
Despite her early arrival, Laura has to begin work at twelve. The assumption is that she’ll have had plenty of rest in first-class during her twenty-three-hour journey. In reality, she barely blinked, there was so much to take in, to process. She’d never been at an airport before, nor on a plane, and once on the plane she kept mimicking the sounds – much to the air steward’s frustration as she mimicked the ping of the call button. He stopped coming to her after the first four times, but then when she really needed him to help her with her tray, he wasn’t there.
She’s wide-eyed and alert on the way to her hotel. There is so much to see, she has been greeted at the airport by more photographers and reporters, then bundled into a black jeep. She’s taken to the Langham Hotel, to a beautiful hotel suite. She soaks in a bath and is starting to nod off when Bianca phones to tell her the car is ready to take her to the photoshoot in the Dandenong Ranges.
Laura sits in the back seat of the car, quietly, no conversation between her and Bianca, but she’s happy with that. There is so much of this new world to take in. The new accents, sounds, smells, the new look. Despite wanting to immerse herself in what feels like a new world, she can’t help but feel detached. It’s as though there is a piece of her missing, a piece that she has left at home. She’s homesick. She’s felt like this twice in her life: when she moved from her family home to the Toolin cottage and when she moved from that home to Dublin. She feels disconnected, like the same person but in the wrong place. It is a surreal feeling, while everybody carries on as normal around her.
Photo with Lyrebird, is all the schedule says, but what Laura discovers on arrival is that the destination for the photoshoot is an enchanting boutique wedding venue called Lyrebird Falls, set within the evergreen forest of the Dandenong Ranges on the edge of Melbourne.
A crew waits for her. She shakes so many hands and hears so many names that go out of her head immediately, she barely has a chance to look around before she is seated in a chair for hair and make-up. Everyone is friendly and chatty, everyone is dressed in black, but she can’t help feeling disconnected, like she’s there but on the outside, watching everybody. She can’t get inside the moment.
They have all seen her audition on StarrQuest. They all ask her polite questions about her talent, where did she learn to do it, how did she learn to do it? She has no answers for them and they fall into a polite silence. Bianca tells her she should prepare some of these answers in her head, for future interviews. Laura mulls over all of these questions, never having had to analyse herself and her actions so much in her life. Why does she do the things that she does, why is she the person she is? Laura wonders why these things are in any way important to other people.
Despite the hair and make-up team being familiar with her audition piece, they are concerned with her spontaneous bursts. The stylist unzips a bag, Laura mimics it.
‘Are you okay?’
She unfolds a fantastic rail that magically appears from a small bag, and begins to hang the clothes.
Laura mimics the sound of the hairspray.
‘Do you need some water?’