Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [98]
But they didn’t.
He remained sitting on the sofa, feeling foolish and ignored.
In horror, he was forced to contemplate the unthinkable – that maybe this was for real. Then, to his massive relief, he saw Joe emerging from the little office with Mr Jackson. At last this fiasco could be sorted out! But they strolled past without even looking at him, chatting about Mr Jackson’s children.
Lorcan jumped off the sofa and, skidding and getting caught in cables, ran after them. ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded.
Joe turned to Lorcan in what appeared to be genuine surprise. ‘You’re still here? What for?’
‘You’ve made your point, man,’ Lorcan said, his face hard. He twisted his mouth into a smile. ‘I’m ready to start work again. We’ve got an ad to make here!’
‘You’re off the job,’ Joe said.
‘So I was a naughty boy,’ Lorcan sneered, holding out his hand and smacking his wrist. ‘OK? Punished. Now, let’s get back to work and stop wasting time.’
‘We’ve got another actor.’
‘What do you need another actor for?’ Lorcan contrived a laugh.
‘Lorcan, I understand that sometimes people – actors especially – need to be coaxed before they give their best, but your behaviour was so disdainful it’s clear you don’t want to be a part of this,’ Joe said. ‘I don’t believe in forcing people to do things they don’t want to do. It’s much more productive for me – and you – if I deal with someone who’s genuinely enthusiastic.’
Lorcan suddenly realized he couldn’t sense any malice from Joe. The great gaping hole in the middle of Lorcan’s psyche gave a squeeze as it met its polar opposite in Joe Roth: someone with a strong moral centre. With shocking clarity, Lorcan understood that the bastard wasn’t ordering him off the job out of spite, he was doing it because he thought it was the right thing for both of them. How odd.
‘I think you’d better leave,’ Joe said.
Lorcan glared. Finally he was in no doubt that this was genuinely happening. ‘You’re making the worst mistake of your pathetic little career,’ he sneered. ‘I wouldn’t work with an amateur like you if you paid me. I’m out of here.’
He picked his way through the cables and headed for the door, still holding out a slender hope that Joe would say, ‘OK, all right, come back, you’ve learnt your lesson.’ But nothing doing. Pausing only to shout over his shoulder, ‘You’ll never work in this town again,’ Lorcan found himself on the street, wandering. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He was so shocked, he couldn’t even get properly angry.
The butter commercial would have paid thousands. Thousands. Apart from the initial fee, there would have been residuals every time it was shown. And Joe Roth had denied them to him. Joe Roth had as good as stolen the money. Lorcan vowed revenge – Joe Roth’s ass is grass and I am the lawnmower – but in a dazed, demoralized kind of way.
How could this happen to him? How could he have misread the situation so badly? Granted, he’d behaved atrociously, but people had always indulged him before. In Ireland in 1992 he’d done a commercial for washing-powder where he made them do sixty-nine takes before he decided to do it right. Not once had there been a hint of a suggestion that he be replaced. That’s the way they expected a star to carry on. Hey, they loved him for it!
He’d thought the whole star machine was about to crank up for him again, that this was just the start of another phase in his career. So sure was he that his days in the doldrums were over that he’d already gone back to behaving like a star in anticipation of it. But this wasn’t Dublin at the start of the nineties, it was London at the dawn of a new millennium. Another world, with different rules, but no one had warned him until it was too late.
That all the kudos and acclaim had been snatched from his grasp before he’d even tasted it was unthinkable. That he was the one responsible was unbearable. He had no choice but to go home and duck calls from his furious