Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [61]
For a few years he’d starred in an Irish soap, playing a philandering rake. Which was extremely handy because he was able to excuse his appalling behaviour off-screen by saying he was a method actor. Despite the capriciousness of his television character (which was only a watery imitation of the real thing) Lorcan was a huge sex-symbol. Fêted and drooled over. He met the Taoiseach and the President and it was a poor day that he didn’t receive a pair of knickers in the post. Even when the tabloids published a bitter tirade from the wife who’d supported him through the lean years and whom he’d abandoned as soon as the good times began to roll, adulation for him didn’t waver. But, for Lorcan, it wasn’t enough – nothing ever was. He felt uncomfortable about his success with the Irish. They hadn’t a clue, he suspected. OK, so they’re one of the most articulate and literate nations on earth, but he needed to be endorsed by people who really, you know, mattered.
So, about four years earlier, amid a media circus, he took his leave of Ireland. ‘I’m not getting any younger,’ he joked with the journalists. Although he didn’t mean a word of it – he thought he was immortal.
Then off he went to Hollywood to show them how it was done. He reckoned it would be only a matter of days before he was lounging beside his very own azure-blue swimming-pool, drowning under scripts, beating off directors with sticks.
However, it came as a very unpleasant shock to discover that Hollywood had reached its quota of sexy Irishmen. Three was reckoned to be enough. Pierce Brosnan, Liam Neeson and Gabriel Byrne did the trick nicely, thanks very much. Apparently Scottish actors had become the current flavour of the month, with Hollywood unable to get enough of them. Briefly, Lorcan considered changing his name to Ewan.
Undaunted, he accepted the part of a gay cyber-vampire biker in an art-house movie where the walls fell over every time someone closed a door. And for which he was never paid, as the money ran out less than half-way through shooting. Hot on the heels of that success he was offered a part – the starring role, actually – in an adult film when a director noticed in a men’s room that Lorcan had the right credentials for the job.
Then he was no longer undaunted. Then he was very daunted indeed. The only azure-blue swimming-pools he’d come within an ass’s roar of were the ones he ended up cleaning for a living.
The day finally came, during his fourteenth month of ‘resting’, when he was forced to admit that things hadn’t worked out – he just couldn’t bring himself to use the word ‘failed’. He was living in a roasting hot, airless, twelve by twelve room with a ‘window effect’ – no window but a closed plastic blind hanging on a square of the bare concrete wall – in Little Tijuana. Marshmallow Cheerios had been his breakfast, lunch and dinner for the past week. His car had been reclaimed, so that he had to ride the bus three hours across town to get to auditions. Not that there were many auditions – Lorcan was such an undesirable in Hollywood he probably wouldn’t have been able to get arrested.
Up until then, success had followed him, magnet-like. Realizing it had abandoned him caused excruciating agonies of terror and insecurity. His ego was so big yet so fragile that he always needed more than everyone else did just to tick over. More success, more acclaim, more money, more women. It was imperative to leave this place where he was a nobody.
He had just about enough money for his plane fare back to Europe. But there was no way he was going home to Ireland. Not after the way they’d lied to him, telling him he was a star when he clearly wasn’t. Instead he went to London, hoping to hide his humiliation in its vastness. He moved into a tiny, dingy room in Camden, where his flatmate was an affable, tubby man called Benjy who earned his living processing parking fines.
Then Lorcan desperately set about trying to recover lost