101 Pieces of Me Read Free Page A

still on. Without the board I felt naked, though I was wearing a light dress, a pair of borrowed shoes and my best underwear.
    “
Move
, Miss Freebody!” came the instruction. “And don’t look at the camera!”
    What did Lillian Hall-Davis do when the camera was on her? Into my mind came her face, flickering high above me on the screen, glowing with beauty and life. Copying her, as I had done so many times before, I took a few steps in a small circle, looking over my shoulder when I turned my back. I put my hands on my hips and swayed from side to side, trying not to imagine what I looked like. Maybe the invisible people behind the lights were smiling at my discomfiture. Anxiety swept over me; I bit my lip, recognizing dimly that I had forgotten to breathe. I took a big gasp of air, searching the blackness for any sign of someone who might tell me if what I was doing was acceptable, or stop me. But no one spoke. All I heard was the noise of the camera and my own rushing breath.
    On and on it went. I seemed to have been standing in this wilderness of light for ages, moving my body awkwardly, like a child made to perform at a birthday party. Unlike such a child, though, I would not be indulged by my audience.
    “Miss Freebody!” called a different voice from the darkness. “Dennis has asked you twice. If I ask you a third time, do you think you could possibly not look into the camera?”

I could not see who had spoken. The voice was male, confident, well-modulated. The voice of a man in charge. I was relieved he had arrived. Surely he would soon tell the camera operator to stop filming. The imminent end to my ordeal gave me courage. “Where shall I look, then?” I asked.
    “Look at
me
, if it would help.” And the man stepped in front of the light.
    He looked young, in his mid-twenties, and wore a suit and a thin moustache. I liked his face; it was boyish yet serious, with an expression of sympathy. “Just speak to me as if you had met me in the street,” he told me. “Now, how did you travel to the studio today? By omnibus or train? Move your head a little, out of my shadow, and I want to see some animation in your face as we speak.”
    It was a great deal easier when there was someone to address. “By train,” I said tilting my chin.
    “Use your hands too,” he said. “Did you come from Waterloo?”
    “Yes, I did!” I had ceased to be myself. I was outside my own body, watching this stranger performing as if she were in a film. I put my hands on my cheeks and widened my eyes. “All the way from Waterloo on a train!”
    “And was your seat comfortable?”
    I took my hands away, lowered my chin and gazed up at him, pretending, as I had done all my life, to be someone else. If no one liked my attempt to be a film star, at least I would have the comfort of knowing it was not Sarah Freebody who had made such an idiot of herself but a formless, nameless product of her imagination. “Oh, it was splendidly comfortable, sir!” I assured the man.
    “No need to call me sir, Miss Freebody.” I felt his hand upon my wrist, and he turned to the darkness behind him. “Dennis, I believe we have enough.”
    “Cut!” said Dennis, and the noise of the camera stopped.
    The man turned back to me and shook my hand. “Thank you very much. That was very nice. Please do stay for lunch, then a car will take you to the station.”
    It was over. The dead glass eye of the camera was no longer following me. I could feel perspiration trickling between my shoulder blades. Exhaustion spread through my body. “Could I have a glass of water?” I asked.
    “Jeanette, water for Miss Freebody!” ordered Dennis.
    I sat on a canvas chair and drank the water, watching Dennis and the man who had spoken to me standing in the corner, talking and nodding. I wondered who the man was. Dennis’s superior, evidently, but how important? I was grateful to him, whoever he was. I had been floundering, and if he had not actually rescued me, he