‘What kind of work?  TV?’

Maria holds the phone with one hand and pulls at her bottom lip with the other.  It is the first time she had heard her agent’s voice in over a month.

‘No, stage.  You play a magician’s assistant.’

‘How many lines?’ she sighs.

‘None, not exactly.  It’s more of a physical part.  Listen Maria, I’m going to be honest with you, they need someone pretty, young and blonde and you’re the closest thing I have on the books.  Right now this is all I have for you....’

She closes her eyes as her hand moves from her lip to her light brown hair.  She begins twisting strands around her finger and tugs them from the nape of her neck.

‘When you say that I play the part of a magician’s assistant, do you really mean that I will be a magician’s assistant, in a magic show?’

‘Yes.  But it’s in front of hundreds of people.  And it’s a good opportunity to get into theatre work, believe me…’

She braces herself to put the phone down, and then opens her eyes. 

What she sees makes her reconsider. 

Her telephone is in her hallway, which is in her living room, which also contains her kitchen.  Nearby is her bedroom which holds a single bed and her bathroom which has space only for a shower.  What illuminates all of this is the auburn glow of the evening sun as it tosses a final beam through the slant in her thread-bare brown curtains, curtains dressing her window which shivers against it’s pane in the wind, the wind that circles her ankles via the draft from her door.  On the stove in the corner of her vision, a pan and a tin of beans become slowly inseparable above an icicle of blue heat.  Beneath her elbow, four unopened brown envelopes with plastic windows partly cover a thick brown ring etched onto the wood by a coffee mug.  They are pinned down by a green ashtray in which the base is no longer visible. 

She picks up a pen from beside the telephone and poises it on the pad of yellow paper.

‘Where do I have to go?’

At the back door to the theatre Maria stops to remove her hood and to flatten her hair.  She tries the handle, and, finding it unlocked, steps immediately into a dark corridor with a dim light some way in front of her to the left.  Waking towards it she eventually emerges on a stage where two men pass her carrying an awkwardly shaped piece of MDF with a rainbow painted onto it. 

Sitting on a upturned plastic box in a spot light is a light bulb-shaped man dressed on his bottom half in a pair of white sequined trousers and on his top half in nothing at all.  He is jabbing impatiently at what looks like a foot peddle with the end of a long screwdriver, hissing occasionally through a set of purple lips.  In the glare of the spotlight, beads of sweat are gathering in the wide lanes between his thinning hair, rolling into one another and trickling down onto his temples.  She stands there for a full minute before he looks up at her once, and then back down to the device.

‘If you’re here about tonight you need to head backstage into the green room.  Your costume should be hanging up with all the others.  Rehearsals start in half an hour.’

Maria begins to ask where exactly she should go when the man loses his temper and throws both items onto the floor of the stage, where they bounce along and skid off the edge landing on some of the instruments in the band section.  The man stands up and swears and marches towards it as she turns awkwardly and leaves.

In the green room, a woman of about fifty is flitting between two mannequins with a tape measure dangling between her teeth and a needle in her hand.  She is short and broad and has a mouth that turns down at the ends.  Her eyes are swallowed by the grey caverns of their sockets, so that her face appears weary even as her body bristles with a focused energy.

‘Are you the costume designer?’

The woman looks at Maria and gives her a worn smile through the tape measure, before letting it drop from her mouth.

‘Costume designer, props manager and make-up artist love, all in one.  And you must be the beautiful assistant?’

Maria proceeds with the uncertainly that comes over a person when they are asked a question that ought to sound sarcastic but has been delivered straight, and just nods, trying to adjust to the lightening and stuffy air of the room. 

‘This will be yours then’ says the woman, and hands Maria a leotard made of the same white sequined material that hung below the belly of the angry magician on the stage.  She notices patches under the arms where the sequins have fallen away, a light brown stain on one of the knees and a frayed edge at one sleeve where a small ladder had appeared and was threatening to grow.

‘Normally I work in television’ she finds herself telling the woman as she leans over her.  Though behind Maria is the cramped green room with it’s chaos of decaying pantomime props, and behind that the walls of the rapidly fading theatre, the one that announces it’s programme in sheets of plastic pulled across the front of the building by blue rope that lets it flutter apologetically in the wind, the one she sits in at that moment, the sight of her own reflection in the oddly complete frame of bulbs and the dutiful solitude of the woman as she applies her makeup instils Maria with a sense of fantasy, and with it a growing confidence.  Like a best man with a glass for courage, she drinks more deeply each time she speaks.

‘I had a repeat part in Emerdale’ she says of her most successful time as an extra to date.  And it is true: there she is in three episodes, drinking a gin and tonic by the dart board and whispering to an anonymous man in a flat cap.

That had been when things were good and looked as though they might remain good for ever.  He had tickled the bottom of her feet when she came on screen and smiled,  and while she stumbled from one disclaimer to the next, trying to reign in her own pride with static self-deprecations, he never took his eye from the screen until  it was finished, and then he turned off the television in a flick of his wrist and threw the remote onto the floor, bore down over her with deliberate drama, and then looked at her, and then kissed her, and then undressed her as if he had never done any of these things before. 

‘This is just to tide me over really – my agent says I should do some theatre work from time to time, to keep me in tune with ‘real acting’.  Truth be told I’m more worried about my auditions next week.’

She has an audition next week that was true: for a massive television part that could make her a millionaire.  It was for a reality television show, and she and thousands other people were going to queue up for hours for the same thing.  Two nights before, Maria and her friend Abbey had taken three bottles of wine between them before they could convince themselves that applying to the show would be fun (if it’s cold they can just leave), something to do for a day out (they never see each other enough), a chance to see some of the freaks that apply (the kind of wacky thing they used to do when they were still students).  Neither woman would let on that they had and would spent large periods of the day wondering what exactly the producers of such a show would be looking for when they select this years contestants: musing whether they should effect some sort of racial prejudice, go in nothing but a mini skirt and bra, or feign some grating laugh that might hit some sort of trigger point getting them through to the next round. 

‘Ladies and Gentlemen!  For my next trick, I am going to have to ask that those of you of a nervous or fragile disposition to leave the auditorium right now…’

It is the fourth time Maria has heard the same words in only a few hours, but the first time she has heard them delivered with any enthusiasm.  She can barely make out the crowd from where she stands, but she can feel the stillness of their expectation as the magician, transformed somehow into a twirling, tucked-in showman, stalks the edge of the stage, delivering his bread and butter hyperbole with a well-worked eyebrow and a neat, hysterical chuckle.  Behind him and in front of her is cage with bars around all sides.  She knows that all she need to at this point is stand and smile, and then when prompted, stride into the cage and give a worried pout. 

Throughout the night’s performance, as she has grinned with incessant (or in her mind, demented) vigour, passing giant playing cards or holding out top hats to the magician whom they all watched, she felt as though an enormous though as yet indefinable realization was coming over her, and she burnt to be off stage so she could analyses it properly.  For an hour she occupied the linial space between the centre of attention and the fidgeting crowd, and she saw now that it was the space she had glimpsed before many times.  When her father blithely asked her if she could even be considered an actress at all when all she had managed was extra work and a couple of voiceless cable adverts, a billboard in the North-West, and a bit-part in a pilot that never aired.  Or when her friends visited for the first time after her divorce, and though they tried to be a sympathetic presence, to elicit from her her pain and sorrow, she had gotten drunk and not shut up all night, leaping from one energetic anecdote to the next with tireless zeal, until the last of them had left with a shake of their head and a last-ditch squeeze of her hand. 

‘… For this is a feat of breath-taking proportions, one that shall stay with you forever.  For my next trick Ladies and Gentleman, I shall make my beautiful assistant… DISAPPEAR!’

And this is her queue to step forward, still grinning into the shadow of the light, up the small walkway and into the cage.  Maria stands there behind the bars, with her hands on her hips, feeling the tiny sequences beneath her finger tips, as the cage is rushed forward to the edge of the stage.  And as the magician drones on, and as she coverts her silly grin to a small circle of concern and places a theatrical finger to her chin, she looks out at the newly revealed rows of faces and tries to share a look with one of them – any of them, through her preposterous expression. 

After her 6th form play, she remembers - such a roaring success! - her and Annie Taylor, the lead parts in A Streetcar Named Desire, receiving a standing ovation from everyone, even the stubborn teenagers who were forced to be there.  They went back for their own bow at the very end and somebody WHOOP WHOOPed so loud that everyone else laughed a little and clapped even harder.  And the words on her last ever report as she left that year, beneath her A*: 'Maria should have a very bright future in acting, if she so desires.

If she so desires.  It was in her hands and she could feel it there, warm and calm and ready to burst forward like clasped bird.

‘... Once we have applied the curtain of the magic circle….’

And slowly the faces of the crowd are folded away in satin, and darkness covers her in the cage.  It begins to spin and spin on its wheels and magician goes on and on and on.

The line had meant the world to Maria.  And yet what had it amounted to, this well-meaning turn of a pen by a teacher.  She had wanted all her life from that point onwards to be the centre of peoples worlds, and yet as she stood at the centre of her own, there was no one else there with her, not the man who had left her when it all became too much, not her friends who’s career had went forward as hers went back, not her parents who could never locate her in their view of how a woman should live her life. 

‘… You saw there were no trap doors, you saw there were no secret compartments, no way out of this cage.  You saw it with your own eyes Ladies and Gentlemen.  And so as we spin and spin but a few more times…’

Maria relaxes her expression finally and hunches down on her knees.  As the cage spins and spins, she hears the magicians voice somehow growing softer and softer, and her stomach somehow turning, like a rolling pile of laundry inside of her.

‘…and now, with the final magic touch, we… see…’

All of a sudden she feels herself pulled backwards from the bottom of her spine so sharply she can’t register a scream.  Her whole body folds in two like a stapler as her face and shins rush together.  There is a sounds like zip breaking, a momentary sensation of falling, and then complete silence.

When Maria next opens her eyes and looks around, she finds she is a rectangular room lit by bright orange strip lighting.  The walls are green and faintly dirty, and there is no furniture except a bench that extends all around the perimeter a foot from the floor.  There are hundreds of other women sat on it, all dressed like her, in sparkly leotards and sequined dresses, some in matching hot pants and crop tops, some in extravagant single-piece bathing costumes with fur and bells, all of them bright arrays of colours, blues and pinks and yellows and reds.  None of the women look at her.  Most stare at the floor with frowns or mumble to one another in low voices.  She looks up and realises the room and the women stretch further then she can see. 

The woman next to her looks about sixty years old.  She has thick purple lipstick on that has smudged at the edge and flaked off beneath her nose.  She is wearing a tight spandex suit in bright red and yellow stripes and a cigarette, half smoked but stubbed out, hangs limply from her mouth.  She shuffles up to the woman on her other side creating a space, and notions to Maria to sit down in it.  Maria does.

‘Where am I?’ she asks the woman, who responds by rolling her eyes in another direction. 

‘Where am I?’ she repeats more loudly.  No body moves or looks in her direction. 

She doesn't ask again.