The floor swirls beneath Laura’s feet. She feels as though she’s sitting on a boat. This time yesterday she was in Australia. Was it yesterday or the day before? How much time did she lose in the air? She’s not sure. She knows it’s Monday night, the day of the semi-final. Yesterday was spent in rehearsals. Days ago she was in winter, today it’s summer. She can’t remember. The storm is building, the waves getting choppier. She reaches out to the wall to steady herself. Somebody catches her hand.
Gloria, the choreographer on StarrQuest. She throws her an angry look. ‘That’s the set,’ she hisses.
Of course. If Laura was to lean against it, the entire thing would have toppled. Or would it? Surely sets are made of stronger stuff than that? It’s wallpapered, floral, to look like someone’s living room – an old woman’s living room, by the looks of it, as the act before her settles down into their routine. She’s not sure what the old woman’s living room has got to do with the act, but then she’s not really focusing on what’s going on. Of course it’s not real, she has been surrounded by unreal things since she got here. Fake rooms are only the start of it. Exposed wires, fake walls, exposed ceilings, the underbelly, the back doors, the behind-the-scenes of the glamorous television world. She’s left hotels through kitchens, restaurants through fire exits, she’s entered buildings through back doors surrounded by trash more often than front doors. She crawls along the in between, the edges, the behinds, to suddenly be placed up front and in the middle. The expectation of her is that she must move through the darkness to emerge shining. The floor moves beneath her again as the jet lag takes hold of her. She squeezes her eyes closed and takes a deep breath.
‘Okay?’ Bianca asks. Despite Bianca being given a few days off to recuperate after their Australian trip she chose to return after one day for this evening’s performance, a gesture Laura hugely appreciates.
They are moments away from her live semi-final performance and they have left Laura until last so that she could rest. Apparently, it was Bianca’s idea. It’s allowed her a lie-down, while her head spun and her mind refused to shut down, going over and over everything that has happened to her over the past week. It would have been easier to keep moving. There’s little rest she could get in a small dressing room on a TV set. The building is throbbing with nervous energy, from the contestants to the producers. The show is under the microscope, receiving worldwide attention since Laura’s audition, and the pressure is on them to entertain the growing audience.
Nervous people have been telling Laura not to be nervous, panicked producers have been telling her not to panic. An exhausted host has been telling her she couldn’t possibly be tired when at her age he was travelling the world, a different country every day, a new set every night. Laura thought about reminding him how that schedule worked out for him. Drink, drugs, divorce, destruction, despair before rehab, a quiet life and then a reality show reboot. Young people don’t suffer jet lag, apparently, as if young people are impervious to the pain of those doling it out.
The ground shifts seismically beneath her again.
She breathes in slowly, out through her mouth. As soon as Laura boarded the plane to fly home, Bianca had handed her a ‘script’ for her next StarrQuest performance. It was considered that her rehearsed appearance on the Cory Cooke Show was such a success, and again a viral one, that they would help steer Laura’s next performance in a different direction, a direction they could predict, expect, manage, control, plan for.
‘You’ll be grand. Everyone’s tuning in to see you,’ Tommy the floor manager says, patting her arm.
Laura smiles lightly, no energy to summon up anything more. ‘I’m sure they’re not. It’s not that. It’s the jet lag …’
‘Ah sure you’re too young to be jet-lagged,’ he laughs.
Laura wonders if this is a line they’ve all been fed to keep her going, or if it’s something they truly believe.
She hears the sound of water lapping, oars hitting the side of the boat, and realises it’s coming from her. A memory of a boat trip with Mam and Gaga. On Tahila Lake, County Kerry on a rare summer holiday, off-season so no one saw them. Always off-season. Gaga hated the water, she couldn’t swim and sat on a nearby rock instead, knitting, but she helped with the gutting and cooking of the fish.
Tommy is watching her, a sad smile on his face.
‘Are you okay?’ Laura asks.