A WAG Abroad. Alison Kervin

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СКАЧАТЬ I could impress my daughter as much as Dean does.

      The two of them begin walking. ‘Quickly,’ I cry. ‘I’ve found some lovely friends for you. Look!’

      The three girls are slouching against the wall, necking the champagne. One of them is even running her heavily glossed lips up and down the neck of the bottle in a gesture which has the two other girls choking with laughter.

      I march Paskia over to them in a whirl of excitement. Imagine if Pask could get herself in with the cool girls? She’d start accessorizing properly and having fun. I just want to see her happy, dressed up and made up like a prom queen. Maybe one day she too will perform fellatio on a champagne bottle, but let’s not run before we can walk. Such a hope remains a dim and distant wish.

      ‘This is my daughter, Paskia-Rose,’ I say, pushing Pask towards the girls entirely against her will, but knowing it’s in her best interests.

      ‘I’m Cecily-Sue,’ says the dark-haired girl. ‘Call me Cecil.’

      ‘Natasha-May,’ says the least groomed of the girls. She has long auburn hair that would benefit from a little glitter and a lot of bleach.

      ‘I’m Carrie-Ann,’ says the third girl, who’s perfect. She stands, menacingly, with her short skirt and her long legs. She’s tanned and has lovely blonde hair that hangs like a thick curtain across her face. She makes no eye contact, chews gum and drinks champagne at the same time. She’s got ‘troublemaker’ written all over her. I want to adopt her.

      ‘Come on,’ says Dean. ‘Let’s carry on having a look round.’

      ‘OK, but Pask, why don’t you stay here with the nice girls, and we’ll come back and get you later?’

      The girls stand there, scowling and exuding menace through every pore. How I wish I were a teenager again. What fun they’re having!

      ‘I’ll come with you and Dad,’ says Pask, moving off towards the other side of Dean.

      I say my goodbyes and tell the girls they’re all beautiful, and we walk off round the back of the school where there are tennis courts dotted around a huge athletics track. Across the courts, all dressed in white and bashing a little ball backwards and forwards to each other, are girls of all shapes and sizes. Why would they do that?

      ‘I can’t wait to start,’ Pask is saying as she takes in all the sports facilities. ‘This school is awesome.’

      ‘And you’ve already made some nice friends,’ I say. ‘Those girls seemed lovely.’

      ‘I think they were troublemakers,’ insists Pask. ‘You know – the way they were hanging around the back, wearing makeup and stuff. And drinking! Did you see that? I can’t believe they sneaked alcohol into school.’

      ‘They’re just having fun,’ I say, but my lovely, perfect, sports-mad daughter’s having none of it. She shakes her head and we wander off towards the pool block where she gets more excited than is appropriate at the thought of making it onto the swim team.

      ‘I think my times will be good enough,’ she says with glee as she studies the noticeboard. ‘I’m definitely going to the trials.’

      We hurry back to the Principal’s office, Paskia and Dean delighted with the sports facilities and me feeling more hope than I’ve felt in a long time that my beautiful child may grow into the sort of teenager I can be proud of.

      ‘Principal Cooper please,’ we ask of the smartly dressed girl in reception, but it’s Mr Barkett who comes out to see us.

      ‘Sorry, Principal’s tied up at the moment. There’s been some very uncustomary and deeply regrettable behaviour that she needs to deal with immediately.’

      ‘Oh,’ we chorus because it doesn’t seem like the sort of school where deeply regrettable behaviour takes place. I’m tempted to ask what sort of behaviour we’re talking about here, when he volunteers the information.

      ‘Three girls. Caught drinking,’ he mouths. ‘Terrible. We’ve called their mothers to the school. Dreadful business.’

       1.30 p.m.

      ‘The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain,’ I say, pronouncing each word as clearly as my Luton-laced accent will allow. We’re on Sunset Boulevard and all that stands between me and a stunning career as a glittering leading actress is Gareth managing to find the right building and me passing a simple audition. As far as I can see, the Oscar’s practically mine.

      ‘That’s it,’ I say, just as Gareth’s beginning to lose the will to live. The non-sequential numbering coupled with the fact that it’s the longest road in the world and I didn’t know which part of it we had to go to was making him very irate. His green eyes were blazing and, frankly, I feared for the life of the cab driver who cut him up.

      Gareth pulls over, almost taking out a cyclist in the process, and I gather my things together. ‘Do you think I should portray myself as the new Marilyn?’ I ask. I suddenly feel nervous. I don’t know how to act.

      ‘What do you think, Dean? Marilyn?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I only know about football. You decide.’

      ‘You don’t think they’ll want me to recite Shakespeare or anything, do you?’

      ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, Candyfloss,’ he says. ‘But you never know with these people. Film people love books and stuff, don’t they?’

      He’s very wise, is Dean. ‘Does my makeup look OK?’ I ask. I redid it in the loos at Pask’s school so that it now stands about three inches off my face. They’ll expect me to be camera-ready. I don’t want to let myself down.

      ‘Yeah,’ says Dean without looking, and we jump out of the car and head to the building. The reception area is painted a bright, glossy orange. Dean says that if I put my head back against it, it looks as if my features are painted onto the wall, so similar is the painted interior’s colour to that of my foundation.

      ‘Tracie Martin?’ asks a rather scruffy guy with khaki shorts and a baggy grey T-shirt that’s seen better days. ‘Follow me for the screen test.’ He’s not what I was expecting at all, but I wave goodbye to Dean and teeter off after the man.

      ‘Through there,’ he says dismissively, signalling towards a large, messy room with four men standing in it, surrounded by technical-looking equipment

      ‘Tracie Martin?’ asks one.

      ‘That’s me,’ I say with confidence, giving them my best smile.

      ‘Great. Glad you could make it. Are you ready to get going?’

      ‘Absolutely,’ I say, with a shake of my blonde mane.

      The room has rugged wooded floorboards and bits of white masking tape all over the place. It’s not very LA at all. More like the sort of place you’d find in Camden High Street than on Sunset Boulevard. There’s peeling paint and piles of cables lying all over the floor – knotted and twisted together. I’ll need to recall this when people ask me about the audition. I need to remember the moment when my acting career began.

      If СКАЧАТЬ