Less Than Three Read online

  So I walked, down past the British Museum into the leafy heart of Bloomsbury in July. I found the bookshop easily enough – a little black fronted place clearly in love with its own clutter, still running on the intellectual fumes of Virginia and Vita and John Maynard Keynes and that whole gaggle of horny brainboxes. There were faded posters in the window – a pixie-faced Katherine Mansfield with a notebook on her lap, a pointillist male nude and a studio portrait of Ottoline Morell, showcasing her handsome, horsey features in profile.

  I hung around outside for a moment, wondering whether I should go in or not, but then I saw someone move inside and there he was.

  Magdalene Robin – Roxane, so called! A subtle wit – a precieuse.

  It had to be him. Curly, dark blond hair tied in a clumsy knot behind his head. Scruffy beard. He was halfway up a stepladder, his waist tiny in a tight black t-shirt. He turned his head to check his footing and I caught a glimpse of a tip-tilted nose. That explained the offer of money, because he was cute. I wasn’t even gay, and I could see that.

  2

  I should have expected my next financial emergency. The writing had been on the wall – or rather on the Patreon page for the podcast – for some time. Thirteen patrons. Unlucky for some, definitely for me. So I was in no position to turn down paid acting work.

  “All right,” I told Simon, over the phone. “I’ll do it.”

  “Do what?” he said, like he’d already forgotten.

  “Well, assuming you haven’t done it already, I’ll go and chat up your crush for you.”

  He made a small, surprised noise. “Really?”

  “Yes,” I said, dismally refreshing the Patreon page one more time. “This is…well, this is awkward, but you know that podcast drama I did?”

  “What? The one that sounded like it had been recorded on a laptop microphone at the bottom of the Thames?”

  “Yes.”

  “The one where I said ‘Oh, don’t do that. These people are amateurs and you’ll never get paid’?”

  “Yes, all right.”

  “The one where you heard the first episode, curled up like a hedgehog and said if anyone asked if it was you on that podcast I was to deny all knowledge—”

  “—and say it couldn’t have been me because I was far too busy doing porn at the time. Yes. I know. Simon, you know I’m basically doing you a favour here, don’t you? You might want to avoid antagonising me.”

  “I’m not antagonising,” he said. “I’m just getting the facts straight in my head. I take it you didn’t get paid, then?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. How much do you need?”

  “Couple of hundred. Three…”

  “Three hundred?”

  “You’re a fucking surgeon, Simon.”

  “Junior orthopaedic surgeon,” he said. “It’s going to be a while before I’m pulling down consultant level cash. And even then I’d make more money if I’d become a footballer.”

  “You wouldn’t,” I said. “I’ve seen you play football. You were always running away from the ball.”

  “That’s because it was a heavy, leather projectile travelling rapidly towards my face.”

  “Yes, but you were the goalkeeper.”

  He huffed down the phone at me. “And does that somehow negate the laws of physics?”

  “No, it doesn’t. Please don’t get onto Sir Isaac Newton again. Do you want to bang this bookseller or not?”

  “Bang?”

  “Yeah. You know…”

  “Yes, I know. I do have a medical degree. At least I’m aware of how that works.” He sighed. “Look, it’s not about banging, Nathan. It’s about romance. It’s about persuading him to have a drink with me so that I can—”

  “—bang him?”

  “No.”

  “Wait – you don’t want to bang him? Sexual relationships are really not your forte, are they?”

  Actually the whole business of gayness wasn’t Simon’s forte. He’d only been to Pride once and had developed a migraine after about thirty minutes, citing noisy disco music as the cause. The eyebrow situation bore testament to his on-off relationship with personal grooming, he despised musical theatre and his fashion sense sucked so hard that I had to go round and raid his wardrobe for a polycotton button-down and a pair of khakis that sagged at the knee.

  “You know, tailoring would do you a world of good,” I said, picking at the ugly blue shirt. “I could cut armholes in a cardboard box and it would fit better than this.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I want him to be attracted to me for my mind.”

  “That’s all very laudable, but you do know the plot of Cyrano de Bergerac, right? Roxane loved Christian because he was beautiful and she couldn’t see past Cyrano’s schnoz.”

  “Yes, but Cyrano got the girl in the end, didn’t he?”

  “No,” I said, fiddling with the collar of the shirt. It made my neck look like it belonged to a ventriloquist’s dummy. “He died and Roxane spent the rest of her life in mourning, because her marriage had been based on an illusion and she missed her chance at a deeper happiness with Cyrano.”

  Simon looked up from the overlarge couch that dominated his Lavender Hill living room. “Are you sure?” he said. “I don’t remember it ending like that.”

  “It does. Trust me, I’m an actor. You know bones, I know plays.” I advanced on him with a Nair strip. “Now sit still.”

  “What? No – what are you doing?”

  “Eyebrows,” I said. “If you want me to impersonate you successfully then we’re going to have to have the same number of eyebrows. Two each.”

  “No. Get away from me with that thing.”

  “Simon, it’s this or plucking, and this is faster and hurts less. Alternatively, you could wait for my eyebrows to grow back and meet in the middle, but that could take a while.”

  “If they’re anything like mine, they probably grow quickly.”

  “Not that quickly,” I said. “And I’ve been waxing for years. I might have fucked the follicles permanently, like Auntie Liz did to her eyebrows in the nineties. Now stop being a baby and sit still.”

  He actually whimpered as I laid the wax strip in place. I had no idea how that worked, because this was the same person who had once – while carving the Christmas turkey, of all things – conversationally explained how to remove a human breastbone. “If it’s an elderly subject then you can more or less snap the ribs by hand,” he’d said, while Nana swooned quietly into the cranberry sauce. “Depending on the degree of osteoporosis, of course.”

  I whisked away the strip. He blinked, like he’d been waiting to flinch and then found he hadn’t needed to. Two eyebrows. Much better. Could have used a trim, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.

  “All right,” he said. “You got your script?”

  I had. It was all very simple. I would sidle into the bookshop, ask about a book and strike up a conversation with Robert the Hot Bookseller. But not so simple that Simon could have done it, apparently. The next day I went to Bloomsbury and made my debut.

  The bookshop smelled like a bookshop. Not like Waterstones. This was old book smell, a scent far more distinguished than vulgar new book smell. Old book smell said that this was a bookshop where you were safe from the crassness of celebrity biographies and coffee table books. There was none of that niff of glossy print around here, just a mannered mustiness that said this was a serious bookshop for serious readers. I liked it, and that made it easier to inhabit my role, because it was a place I knew my brother must have felt comfortable in, before Cupid – as he so often did – got all inconsiderate about where he was aiming his arrows.

  Robert looked up when I walked in the door. He gave me a vague, polite smile and I returned it as I wandered past the counter. If it had been me I’d have simply walked straight up and asked him outright if he had what I was looking for, but I wasn’t me. I was Simon, and Simon would make several nervous, Second Shepherd circuits of the shop before scr
ewing his courage to the sticking place.

  I lurked behind the shelves, stealing glimpses through the books. Simon had taste when it came to men. I had to give him credit for that, even if he had no taste in clothes and no conception of how welcome stories about autopsies were at the dinner table. All of his exes had fitted the same mould – thoughtful, intelligent, well read – although none of them had been quite as arrestingly pretty as this one. His hair kept falling loose from its messy knot, a golden corkscrew falling against his jaw and catching on the threads of his beard. He was typing something on a screen, and his lips moved as he read, which on the face of it was not a good sign. Adorable airhead? Perhaps he wasn’t Simon’s type after all.

  Curiosity got the better of me. I delurked and approached the counter. He looked up and set down his tablet on the counter, shutting off the screen with a press of his finger and a tiny, electronic click. “Hi,” he said. “Can I help?”

  “Joseph Bell,” I said, cutting out the preamble, Simon style. “A Manual Of The Operations Of Surgery. Do you have a copy?”

  He sucked his lower lip into his mouth for a moment. “Uhm…maybe? If there is one, I have a feeling I know where it is.” His accent had a faint lilt to it – Irish or Scottish. He stepped out from behind the counter, almost close enough to brush by me as he passed. A faint breeze of sweat and spice as he raised his arms to retie his hair. “This way.”

  I followed him, between untidy shelves that had clearly never heard a thing about the Dewey decimal system. For some reason we appeared to be moving into the fiction section. “Wait – it’s non-fiction…” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “But there’s usually only one reason why people come looking for Joseph Bell.” He led me towards the D’s. Doyle.

  “Sherlock Holmes,” I said.

  He ran his thumb along the spines. “Now,” he said, and the soft vowel sound thrilled me. Ulster. One of the toughest accents for an actor to nail. “You a big Sherlock Holmes fan then?”

  “Of course. Who isn’t?”

  Robert laughed. “Me,” he said, with a flash of apology.

  “Really?”

  “I know. It’s not a popular opinion, but the stories never quite land for me. I want them to, because I like some of them, but I always feel like I can see Doyle bending reality in order to make Holmes look that much more extraordinary, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’ve never really thought about it like that before,” I said.

  He shrugged and plucked the book from the shelf, then handed it to me with a shy smile. His eyes were a clear, bright blue. “It’s like that thing,” he said. “Where Holmes is an expert in the study of cigar ash. Like, I could accept that, because it’s the kind of weird thing that he would study, but for it to come up in the solution of three different mysteries? Study In Scarlet, Boscombe Valley Mystery and The Hound Of The Baskervilles…” He counted them off on his fingers. “It’s all a bit too convenient, don’t you think?”

  “No, I suppose you’re right.”

  “It’s lazy writing, really. But then again, he never liked Sherlock Holmes all that much.”

  “No. Well, he killed him, after all,” I said. “And then was forced to resurrect him—”

  “—due to popular demand. And resented it.” He giggled. “Poor old Sir Arthur. He wanted to be off writing dense historical novels that would bore the pigeon poo off a statue. Or talking to the ghosts that his wife claimed lived in her head. That or making a complete fool of himself over a couple of teenage girls who were good with a camera.” He caught himself and smiled. “I’m sorry. I’m going on a bit, aren’t I?”

  “It’s only fair,” I said. “After I bored you to death with Newton and Hooke the last time I was here.”

  “Oh,” he said, as recognition dawned. “Standing on the shoulders of giants. I’m so sorry. I have the worst memory for faces.” He frowned as he looked at me. “Did you have a different hair the last time?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Had my cowlick reasserted itself? I decided not to tell him that the last time he’d seen ‘me’ I’d had one less eyebrow than I had now. If he was even partially faceblind, I’d been handed a gift.

  “So do you work around here?” he asked, as we headed back to the counter.

  “Nearby. Over at University College Hospital.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Are you a doctor?”

  “Um…surgeon, actually.”

  “Wow.”

  “Junior orthopaedic,” I said, playing it down, Simon style. “We’re a ways down the surgeon food chain. We have to sit at our own table at lunch and all the cardio-thoracic guys make fun of us. Oh, and the brain surgeons take turns flushing our heads down the toilet.”

  He laughed at that, and so did I, because his full throated laugh went from sea lion to bullfrog and took a left somewhere at ‘mating walrus.’ I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that. “Well, I think it’s very impressive,” he said, and I almost wished I was a surgeon in that moment, because impressing him felt strangely good. His gaze lingered and I realised this was going to be a lot easier than I’d thought; trust Simon not to notice when someone was into him.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, giving me a cue to escape.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “Work.” I fished out the phone, trying to look like it was an urgent page calling me to the operating theatre, where they needed me to repair a pianist’s prize winning hands or something equally heroic. “Listen,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m barking up the wrong tree here, but would you like to go out for a drink sometime?”

  “You’re not,” he said, and blushed. Actually blushed. “Barking up the wrong tree, that is. I’m Rob, by the way.”

  “Simon. Nice to meet you.” Jesus. I had a call back. Apparently my lounge lizard version of Valmont had landed. “I’m sorry, I really must go, but…”

  “…no, totally.”

  We swapped numbers and I messaged Simon – You’re on. Roxane is into you. – and then hurried back across the river to the South Bank, where Rupa the director was waiting for me.

  Poppy was there, too. She was nose deep in her script and when I walked in she raised a hand in greeting – not looking up – in the enviably casual way of an actor who had definitely got the part. Surely she was too young?

  “Thanks for coming at such short notice,” Rupa said, shaking my hand with a hard, dry grip. She had tiny wrists, but her bare, brown arms said she was no stranger to the gym. She sized me up and frowned. “Did you do something different with your hair?”

  “No,” I said, because I’d caught sight of myself in the window of a Tube train and the cowlick had been very much back in business before I’d even hit the Northern Line. By the time I’d crossed the river it was in danger of going full Something About Mary. “Not that I know of.”

  She looked me up and down. “Strange,” she said. “You look completely different from how I remember.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to say that normally I wouldn’t be seen dead in the clothes I was wearing, but then I realised she was paying me a compliment. I looked like Simon. Not that I didn’t anyway, but more so than usual.

  “Aa-nyway,” said Rupa, handing me a spare script. “I wanted to give you another go, so can we go from Act One, Scene One? Take it from ‘Cecile Volanges?’”

  Poppy stirred from her hard, plastic chair, and we got into it, the opening scene where the Marquise asks Valmont to seduce Cecile and he demurs, because he thinks it’s beneath him, and besides, he has a bigger fish to fry in the virtuous shape of Madame de Tourvel. Right away I could see why Rupa had called me back – her choice of Valmont had to be informed by who worked best with Poppy, because Poppy had talent.

  She couldn’t have been much more than twenty-five, but she worked her youth to her advantage, so that Merteuil’s arrogance and vindictiveness came across as the confidence of someone young enough to still believe themselves untouchable. Even in her yoga pants and spagh
etti strap top, I could see the lacquered, drawing room monster she would become in costume. She fanned and nodded and flirted, her eyes so dark they were almost unfathomable. Perfect casting. All I could do was bob along in her fragrant, poisonous wake and hope I wasn’t going all Leslie Phillips again.

  “Well, this is weird,” said Rupa, when we’d finished reading.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know what you did,” she said. “But keep doing it. It’s like you’re a totally different person to the one who auditioned the other day.”

  “Uh…thank you?” I said, already trying to unravel what this meant. I was wearing Simon’s clothes and maybe I was still slightly borrowing his demeanour, and did that then mean that Simon was a better actor than me? No. Of course it fucking didn’t. What was I thinking? Second Shepherd, for God’s sake. “I would have done better in the first audition, but I got this phone call, you see—”

  She waved a hand. “Yeah, I remember. You got a break, kid. My previous Valmont fell off a hotel balcony in Majorca.”

  “Oh shit,” I said. “Is he okay?”

  “Not really. Luckily a bush broke his fall, but he’s in plaster up to the mid-thigh. Not going to be doing much midnight sneaking around chateaux like that.”

  “Yikes. I know we say break a leg, but ow.”

  “I know, right?” said Poppy. “Maybe the role’s cursed. Like in Poltergeist. Or The Exorcist.”

  “Poppy, don’t say things like that. We just found a new Valmont. I don’t need him vomiting pea soup.” Rupa eyed me anxiously. “You’re not going to spew pea soup, are you?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Although I have been known to cast aspersions on people’s mums.”

  “Oh, haven’t we all?” she said. “That’s just standard rush hour Tube stuff.” She closed her script. “Good. Well, that’s the first hurdle cleared. Hope you play as well with our Tourvel.”

  “Where’s she?”

  “Leeds,” said Rupa. “She’s got a job as a background extra on Emmerdale. She’ll be back next week. I’ll let you know as and when.”