Glenda is charged with this operation. She wears a uniform made up of a black pencil skirt, a white fitted shirt and a little rayon scarf in the colors of the company tied at her neck like an air stewardess. She sits behind a little desk next to the large, inviting windows at the front of the shop, where dreams of extravagance and domestic bliss are displayed on glossy placards.
“It’s going okay,” Glenda says, when Lorenzo asks. “I mean, I’m obviously completely incompetent, but the project itself seems to be progressing. And progress is a good thing, right? We’re looking to blank-slate some properties in Soho at the moment, actually. The architect’s already done the sketches.” She shows Lorenzo a picture on her phone.
They finish their drinks and Lorenzo buys another round. He pays for everything when they go out, being older and, when they met, her senior colleague. When he returns to the table, she asks him if he’s got any auditions coming up. Glenda is relatively new to the world of theater and has not learned that, for an actor, this is quite an annoying question.
“Ah, no,” replies Lorenzo reluctantly. He lowers his head and grasps the two little paper cocktail straws between his lips and pulls some of the liquid into his mouth.
“Have you spoken to Joanne about it?” Joanne is the managing director of the talent agency for which Lorenzo works part-time and is also Lorenzo’s agent. “Have you been in contact with Tamzin Chapworth? What has Yolanda said?”
“Oh, um, no, and nothing much.”
Glenda fixes Lorenzo with a patronizing look that, in Lorenzo’s view, is not appropriate for a younger and less experienced person to fix on an older and more experienced person.
“I did speak to Joanne about making more of an effort with TV work,” Lorenzo offers.
“That’s good. I don’t know why you were so reluctant before.”
Glenda means well but doesn’t understand his situation as well as she thinks she does. His reasons for being ambivalent about TV work are complex. A few years ago, he was on an episode of a popular spy drama. He played a Radical Islamist. On another occasion, he was on a long-running police procedural and played a Radical Islamist. Lorenzo’s dad came from Sri Lanka and his mum came from Italy, and both were Catholics, but casting directors overlooked these subtleties. It wouldn’t have felt much better to be cast in these roles repeatedly had his heritage been Pakistani Muslim, but somehow the obliviousness of TV executives to who he was and the particularities of his background were especially galling.
“Joanne did suggest a TV thing to me last week, actually, but I told her I wasn’t interested.”
“Why would you do that?”
“The show sounded awful. Like, really awful. Not my kind of thing at all.”
She asks him how he knows this without having yet been to the audition.
“I just know.” Lorenzo hopes this will be the end of the interrogation.
“You’re so principled,” she says.
“Is that a compliment or a criticism, I can’t tell.”
“In general it’s a compliment, I’ve heard.” Her demeanor becomes more serious. “Really though, I admire you for it. I think it’s very noble. But it’s frustrating seeing all sorts of talentless people on the telly while you sit here with me drinking. I mean, I love that I get to spend time with you in person rather than watching you on a screen, but also there’re lots of great things getting made that I think you should be a part of.”
“This isn’t going to be one of them, believe me.”
“But it might lead to further work. It’ll help you make connections.”
“That’s possible. It would be painful, but possible.”
She keeps on at him until he promises to attend the audition. The prospect makes him feel queasy. He used to think the constant rejection associated with his chosen career would get easier as he got older. He’s now thirty-three and it’s harder than ever.
The Archbishop
Debbie McGee wakes. She creeps from the secluded corner of the damp cellar to the wider room, where her companions sit in an unstructured semicircle; a parody of a mutual-help group. They sit with their backs against the stone walls or slumped forward with heads on knees. They sit on repurposed palettes, rancid mattresses or on the hard floor. Syringes lie around in degrees of decay, rust on their needles and filthy fingerprints on their pistons. Clear acetate bags that were once suppositories can be seen discarded and shit-stained beneath sheets of newspaper and chip-shop wrapping. Silver spoons with scorched bellies glitter in the dust.
“Blessed be the ground,” says the man they call the Archbishop. “Blessed be the ground beneath our feet. Blessed be the soil that scuffs our skin. Blessed be the earth that holds our fathers’ bones and feeds the worms and bees.”
“Bees don’t eat earth!” snaps the man they call Paul Daniels.
“Blessed be the rocks that hold our cities in place. Blessed be the stones that aid the rocks. Blessed be the iron ore. Blessed be the tin. Blessed be the—”
“What about the magma?” asks Paul Daniels. “There’s magma beneath the rocks and stones, right in the center of the earth. What about blessing the magma?”
“Blessed be the rivers that cut through the earth. Blessed be the underground lakes and seas. Blessed be the fossils. The ammonites. The Devil’s Toenails. Blessed be the sleeping dragons that wait
