Candy

The audition for the role of ‘me’ took place in a dimly-lit room  on the third floor of an institutional building on the outskirts of Holborn. There were no other applicants. It had taken six weeks of graft to commit my life’s spoken output to memory, a singular feat of prep, plus any new words spoken in the interim had to be tacked on, with the consequence that I had tended to keep myself sheltered and secluded from speech in this time, or even thought, for fear of adding to the workload since thoughts count towards audition content. The panel of examiners were as severe as they were unkind. They were distant and unwilling to concede that this was more than a formality. They were unfriendly and harsh, they were superior and also supercilious. They chose their words with care; sharp, stilted words, if there can be such a thing, they spoke from behind the safety of their trestle table, their notes, their multifarious pieces of paper, never once letting their guard slip that they weren’t firmly behind the table and firmly not on my side with me, taking part in a common endeavour for the good of the game.

There was a most sneering passive-aggressive glint to at least one of the examiners which took shape as soon as I entered the room, though not necessarily a unity of distaste amongst the examiners as a set. It was unsettling then that the leer did not pervade and invade the whole room and that other slightly conflicting sentiments bubbled up here and there to the surface; once in a while a genuine look of care, a bare hint of the warmth of human talking to human seeped into the air, but this gave me a feeling of being undercut — it brought forth inconsistency — demanding that I monitor each and every faint, sigh and aside for its effect on the level of hostility, that I trace and follow its ebbs and flows, immediately aware that such monitoring was next to impossible, resulting in the realisation that further destabilisation was bound to set in. 

Would you like to start, yes/no, up to you, we don’t care, we’ve made up our minds, we really just don’t care, we’re also tired, fed up, we look tired, then we are tired. Shall we start with a quick chat? They fired out some pointed, overly personal questions before I started at the very beginning, reciting the words I had spoken and learnt, recalling and re-experiencing the thoughts, speaking the words precisely and without hiccup, recalling them one by one as they bypassed me once they had come out of my mouth, making the small amount of sense that the repetition of rote matter tends to make. 

And as I spoke the panel was silent and I felt keenly that they didn’t want to be silent at all for what turned out to be such a long period of time, or even for any period of time at all — I cannot quantify it in hours or weeks — but I was not instructed to stop and I repeated the words I had learnt right until the end, and it felt like they were humouring me to immense proportions, that they would refrain from butting in for lifetimes, that they didn’t have the slightest understanding of what I’d said and so what I was about to say, that they were supremely disinterested, that their glares of intent betrayed undisguised boredom, an almost stuporous keeling-over-dead level of boredom and that they probably hated me if they could even muster up the energy to do so.

When I did stop an awkward moment intruded since it is inappropriate to overtly signal the speech is over, to question dramatic instinct, but they didn’t actually know until a very obvious long pause had elapsed, and I thought that they would know, that they would have had an idea of the life I was reciting before them, but they didn’t, and whether I made a clear gesture or something a bit fudged is not something I can recall with clarity.

Then I was asked to leave the room but as soon as I had, I was called right back in. The call-in was as shrill as every other communication I had received from this particular examiner, not dissimilar to the way someone might commandeer a Corgi. It was a most monumental struggle, or feat of juggling or of heroism, or spasticity and contortion, definitely something very ungainly, how the examiners then communicated to me how I had got ‘me’ all wrong — this was utterly predictable — that though I had spoken the words correctly, which they were none the wiser on, though I had done very well, I had still completely missed the point. 

We would like you to try it again. No, not from the beginning. Can you go from the bit on the green by the art museum with your father in Glasgow. The other two examiners remained silent in the way that suggested that they were no longer permitted to speak.

As soon as I started up, in much the same vein and tone, with the same intent, the same drone — I was starting to bore myself by this point —  I was asked to STOP. Connect to the moment, think about what it means to you. Convince us. Commit to it. Really convince us. No, don’t move, keep still as you say it, why aren’t you looking at us, take your time now, yes, you can move in the space, use the space, yes, there, we felt that, we felt something then, we need to feel that this is you, that you are believable. It was forthright but I knew it was supposed to get me thinking. Try again, take your time, its about choices. When you’re ready. Take your time. 

But as soon as I moved, or even thought, or even didn’t think, or at least tried not to think, I sensed that they no longer felt the thing they were desiring to feel and that I had gone awry and I had sorely disappointed them, or more precisely, just plain irritated. I felt that then the right idea was to dissimulate and to appear and be as far as way from ‘me’ as I thought I could get, but as soon as I tried it I was called out on: NO, NO, don’t try that, that’s too much, or its not natural, now you’re just feeling sorry for yourself when I was actually about to burst into proper heaving sobs, ACTING IS ALL ABOUT CHOICES, DON’T LOOK DOWN, YOU CAN’T LOOK DOWN IN THE WORLD LIKE YOU DO IN YOUR MIND, THIS IS THE WORLD, THIS IS REAL PEOPLE FOR GOD’S SAKE. 

I only pretended to take my time to stop being hectored. I fixed my gaze on the panel as a whole, contritely delivering the bit as many times as requested. ‘You just want everyone to think you’re clever. You’re not that clever. Everything you say is so you can prove yourself. No, I don’t care, you're a fraud, it’s just fucking annoying really.’ I didn’t get the poignancy of these words, these moments, they seemed superfluous and not worthy of focussing on. Look at us as you say it though, we’re the other people on the green. I wondered who represented my father, still I followed the instruction lamely - there hadn’t been anyone in the vicinity except him. Show how angry you are that he embarrassed you, for showing off all the time, for belittling and sidelining you, for making you feel small. No, that’s resentment, that’s not anger. But I hadn’t been angry at all. It had been closer to bewilderment but who can name and know exactly what your feeling anyway?

In a panic it crossed my mind that they might have wanted me to reproduce the actual physical movements I had made in addition to speech, that I should then recall and reenact leaving the paving stones and walking up the steps and onto Argyle Street or wherever I had happened to wander off to. But it was so intricate, too intricate, my body had changed since then, my cells were different, the room would have had to have been a little bigger and better lit. My hair colour wasn’t the same. It was too late to change the whole approach. Surely they couldn’t also doubt that my own movements were mine.

I was then ushered out of the room for a longer period of time  than the first before being ushered back in. By dint of a very persistent and patronising head-cock, I was congratulated on having qualifiedly passed. I would need to put some more work in, like the targeted work we had just done on the incident with my father, and return for a further audition to be confirmed, and that I would receive a letter to that effect in due course. I had shown that I could do the work. They looked for a response. I said demurely it sounded fair and sensible. Any questions? No. Do we have any? No. 

I don’t remember saying goodbye as I left the room.