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No, but he knew how she thought it was. Mum hadn’t had a call from her agent in over ten years, but she still somehow thought it could happen at any moment for her. That somewhere out there, some hungry young director with just the right project was thinking, “You know who we need for this? A washed-up nineties soap star who fried her brain with cocaine back in the day.”
“How’s university?” Bella asked. She sat at the small kitchen table and ran her thin fingers over the cracks in the Formica.
“Good,” Ambrose said. He headed for the fridge and was glad to see that there was at least butter and some ham slices. “Has Mrs. Ahmadi been giving you a lift to the shops for groceries?”
Mrs. Ahmadi lived in the last unit. Ambrose paid her fifty dollars a week to take Mum grocery shopping. It strained his budget, sure, but Mum didn’t like to use buses, and she didn’t drive.
“Yes, it’s fine,” Bella said vaguely. She was vague about most things, but the fact the fridge was stocked probably meant she was right for once. Her eyes brightened. “How is your acting going?”
“It’s good,” Ambrose said, plastering a smile on his face as he pulled the butter out of the fridge.
“You said you were in a play?” Bella asked.
“Rehearsing for one,” Ambrose corrected, even though it was a lie. He hadn’t had a real acting job, or even a callback, in over twelve months, hence his side gig.
“You should do television,” Bella said. “You have the right face for television!”
Like it was that easy.
“Yeah,” Ambrose said. “But I want to concentrate on getting into NIDA first, remember?”
Bella smiled brilliantly. “Of course!”
The National Institute of Dramatic Arts had already passed three times on Ambrose, but hey, what was growing up with Bella Newman but a study in how to handle rejection? Or, more precisely, a study in how to delude yourself into believing you were a working actor when nothing could be further from the truth.
The thing was, Ambrose was an actor. He was studying acting at the University of Sydney, and he wanted to go to NIDA. That right there was a solid plan. And he had credits. Okay, so most of them were over ten years old now, but he still got the occasional royalty cheque from that old cordial commercial—it popped up on the same ‘Where Are They Now?’ shows that Mum did—so he wasn’t totally washed up at twenty-one, right? He’d even been on Neighbours (Child on Skateboard #1). He had more going for him than most of his classmates did…just not recently, that was all.
Ambrose made his sandwich and glanced at his mum, and wondered if in twenty years they’d both be sitting in this flat, believing that a call from their agent would come in any second now.
Maybe he should have been an accountant like Isadora.
His nose wrinkled at the thought of it.
All that maths…fuck that.
He sat down at the table with his mum and ate his sandwich while she smiled at him.
“Tell me about your play,” she said.
“It’s by a new writer,” Ambrose said around a mouthful of sandwich. “I have no idea how he got the funding. I think he must be the producer’s nephew or something. Every week it’s like a new rewrite, and someone quitting or getting recast.”
The imaginary play had to be a disaster, he figured, so it would make sense when there was no opening night.
“Not you though?” Bella asked, her brow furrowing.
“Nah,” Ambrose said with a grin. “They like me.”
And Bella’s smile was so proud that Ambrose had to look away.
A walk, a bus and two different trains got him home again to Newtown. It was already dark, but the house he shared with a bunch of mates from uni was warmly lit—their former housemate’s ex-girlfriend never did come back for all those strings of fairy lights, so they were still hung up all around the place—and welcoming. The house was an old terrace house, and definitely the poor cousin of all its neighbours. It’d be worth millions if it ever went to auction, and it leaned just on the charming side of decrepit. Ambrose had often thought the only things holding it up were the places on either side. Their terrace sagged like a drunk being supported home by two mates after a big night out.
Their landlord, Mr. Erskine, was very, very old, and very, very crazy. He was also a lifesaver, because no way in hell could Ambrose and his housemates afford to get a new place if Mr. Erskine ever decided to sell, but he’d told them a bunch of times they were safe until he died. Which would have been more reassuring if he wasn’t ninety-three, but Ambrose supposed it was a valuable daily reminder that there were no such things as certainties in life.
Harry was in the small kitchen staring unhappily into the microwave when Ambrose got home. “Oh, hey. How’s your mum?”
“Good,” Ambrose said. “How did you get masala on the ceiling?”
“Reheating leftovers,” Harry said, grimacing.
