‘And . . . cut!’ Esme yelled triumphantly at the end of the scene.
Finn closed his eyes and raised his face to the ceiling, his ritual for returning to himself. When he looked back at Esme, she was scribbling notes on her script. He waited until she put the lid back on her pen and turned to face him. ‘So?’ he said.
An enormous smile spread across her face. ‘Rob Lowe looks and a Matthew McConaughey voice. You’re going to send mothers and their teenage daughters to the emergency room.’
Finn laughed. ‘Any notes?’ he said, knowing full well there wasn’t a scene in the history of cinema that Esme didn’t think she could improve.
‘Oh, I’ve got notes,’ she said. ‘Let’s start with making you less smarmy and more bemused at the beginning of the scene. I hated your guts from the minute you opened your mouth.’
Finn was used to this level of critique. Esme wasn’t interested in softening the blows – it wouldn’t work for either of them. So he listened intently to the rest of her observations, deciding as she spoke which micro adjustments he would need to make to play the character perfectly.
They spent the next four hours doing take after take after take, until Esme was satisfied and Finn was absolutely spent.
Chapter Sixteen
Three days.
That was it.
They gave the trainees three days off to study for an exam that was so wide in its breadth that nobody could ever know it all. There would always be something you missed, something you didn’t see, somewhere you couldn’t go. But Kelly was going to make damn sure she covered as much as any person who had ever gone before her.
Three days. Plus two more on the weekend. Five days until she ran headlong into her destiny.
Numbers. That’s what it came down to now. Twenty-four hours in a day. Fourteen for study. Four wasted on food, personal needs and short breaks. Six given over to sleep. Then, come Monday, two parts to the exam, one hundred and seventy questions in total. Five hours and twenty minutes across the day. Seventy minutes for lunch between the two papers.
One day that will change it all.
She woke early. Ate little. Only turned her phone on twice a day and ignored any message that wasn’t essential, which basically meant she only responded to Finn. He was trying to be encouraging and, although he knew her better than anyone in the world, he would never know what this pressure was like. Only the other trainees could know.
But even they were cast aside now.
Kelly was the only person left who mattered.
One chance.
One hundred per cent.
Zero margin for error.
***
Eighteen out of twenty. It was a good score, her teacher said. Only two words wrong. And she was at the top of the Grade Two spelling level, after all. If she did the same tests as the other kids, she’d get everything right, all the time.
But it wasn’t good enough. Kelly knew that. She knew she needed to do better.
Kelly took the test out of her school bag and placed it on the dining room table. Her older brother, Fergus, was kicking a football in the backyard with a school friend. Their nanny, Rita, was fixing some afternoon tea.
Rita brought a plate over to where Kelly sat. ‘There you are, sweetheart. Peanut butter sandwiches and choc-chip cookies. Do you want some juice as well?’
‘No, thank you, Rita,’ Kelly said. ‘The cookies already have enough sugar in them.’
Rita frowned and shook her head. She grumbled something Kelly couldn’t hear as she walked back to the kitchen.
Kelly fetched a stack of blank paper from the printer and split it into two piles, which she laid alongside her test. She took a bite of the peanut butter sandwich and wrote the words she had misspelled on the top sheets of each pile:liableandcharisma. She started withliable, copying the word out in neat rows. Over and over and over she wrote until her wrist ached. Kelly filled the page, occasionally brushing away cookie crumbs, then shook out her hand and started on the next sheet.
She remembered what her dad had told her: ‘There’s perfection at one end of the scale, Kelly, and failure at the other. Nothing in between. There’s no such thing as good enough for people like us.’
Eighteen out of twenty wasn’t good enough. She would never again spell liable or charisma wrong.
