One Life by Rebecca Frayn

Author:Rebecca Frayn [Frayn, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781416502708
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

8

If work is a masquerade now, it’s a useful one. Though I have to strive hard to maintain the impression of committed professional only so recently second nature to me, it’s true that in the doing of a project, there are moments of forgetfulness, whole minutes at a time where I find I’ve been entirely distracted by the intricacies of the task in hand.

But today is a bad day. Some unexplained delay means I have nothing to do but sit idly waiting in the hotel lobby, and in the lull the sorrowing is ebbing through me again. I’m waiting to shoot someone called Bo Fisher. ‘She’s a famous television star,’ Johnny had said when I told him I was about to turn the job down. ‘It may not be as highbrow as you’d like, but it’ll take your mind off things. Do you good.’

The lobby is one of those generic wood panelled ones, with an open fire, intended to indicate discreet English good taste. There was a period where I spent much of my time in hotels like this, waiting to photograph the latest celebrity, on the latest promotional round. I’d fancied my career might be going somewhere then. But I’d soon lost inspiration in the anodyne nowhere-land of the hotel bedroom. Quickly wearied of the stars with their blank eyes glazed by boredom or jet lag, and the hovering publicist who snapped at your heels like a worrisome terrier.

‘Sorry, sorry! Running late!’ today’s publicist trills, appearing abruptly at my side. ‘Bo’s a little under the weather today. Been up all night with a teething baby. You know how it is.’ She rolls her eyes in a humorously despairing gesture. ‘So I’ve promised her, absolutely promised her, that you’ll be in and out in half an hour . ’

She feels familiar, though she appears not to recognise me. We exchange polite small talk on the way to the suite, and I wrack my brains, trying to place her. She is taking a call while I begin setting up, when suddenly it comes to me. Al Pacino. She had been his publicist some years ago, and overseen a shoot I had done with him. Here in this same hotel.

He had, I recall now, the day flooding back from some dark recess of memory, been unaccountably congenial, watching me work with interest. More accustomed to invisibility, to being just another faceless factotum in the marketing and publicity machine, I’d been unsettled by his scrutiny. But it had also emboldened me. And after a while, despairing of the pastel-coloured hotel suite, I’d suggested that we adjourn to the roof of the hotel to get some skyline shots. And greatly to my surprise, Pacino had readily agreed, despite the fact it had meant braving the cold, and navigating a steep rusty ladder.

This same publicist, now so immersed in her phone call, had been visibly put out at the departure from protocol. But she’d teetered up the ladder behind us on dainty kitten heels, close

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