Gloria, the choreographer on StarrQuest. She throws her an angry look. ‘That’s the set,’ she hisses.

Of course. If Laura was to lean against it, the entire thing would have toppled. Or would it? Surely sets are made of stronger stuff than that? It’s wallpapered, floral, to look like someone’s living room – an old woman’s living room, by the looks of it, as the act before her settles down into their routine. She’s not sure what the old woman’s living room has got to do with the act, but then she’s not really focusing on what’s going on. Of course it’s not real, she has been surrounded by unreal things since she got here. Fake rooms are only the start of it. Exposed wires, fake walls, exposed ceilings, the underbelly, the back doors, the behind-the-scenes of the glamorous television world. She’s left hotels through kitchens, restaurants through fire exits, she’s entered buildings through back doors surrounded by trash more often than front doors. She crawls along the in between, the edges, the behinds, to suddenly be placed up front and in the middle. The expectation of her is that she must move through the darkness to emerge shining. The floor moves beneath her again as the jet lag takes hold of her. She squeezes her eyes closed and takes a deep breath.

‘Okay?’ Bianca asks. Despite Bianca being given a few days off to recuperate after their Australian trip she chose to return after one day for this evening’s performance, a gesture Laura hugely appreciates.

They are moments away from her live semi-final performance and they have left Laura until last so that she could rest. Apparently, it was Bianca’s idea. It’s allowed her a lie-down, while her head spun and her mind refused to shut down, going over and over everything that has happened to her over the past week. It would have been easier to keep moving. There’s little rest she could get in a small dressing room on a TV set. The building is throbbing with nervous energy, from the contestants to the producers. The show is under the microscope, receiving worldwide attention since Laura’s audition, and the pressure is on them to entertain the growing audience.

Nervous people have been telling Laura not to be nervous, panicked producers have been telling her not to panic. An exhausted host has been telling her she couldn’t possibly be tired when at her age he was travelling the world, a different country every day, a new set every night. Laura thought about reminding him how that schedule worked out for him. Drink, drugs, divorce, destruction, despair before rehab, a quiet life and then a reality show reboot. Young people don’t suffer jet lag, apparently, as if young people are impervious to the pain of those doling it out.

The ground shifts seismically beneath her again.

She breathes in slowly, out through her mouth. As soon as Laura boarded the plane to fly home, Bianca had handed her a ‘script’ for her next StarrQuest performance. It was considered that her rehearsed appearance on the Cory Cooke Show was such a success, and again a viral one, that they would help steer Laura’s next performance in a different direction, a direction they could predict, expect, manage, control, plan for.

‘You’ll be grand. Everyone’s tuning in to see you,’ Tommy the floor manager says, patting her arm.

Laura smiles lightly, no energy to summon up anything more. ‘I’m sure they’re not. It’s not that. It’s the jet lag…’

‘Ah sure you’re too young to be jet-lagged,’ he laughs.

Laura wonders if this is a line they’ve all been fed to keep her going, or if it’s something they truly believe.

She hears the sound of water lapping, oars hitting the side of the boat, and realises it’s coming from her. A memory of a boat trip with Mam and Gaga. On Tahila Lake, County Kerry on a rare summer holiday, off-season so no one saw them. Always off-season. Gaga hated the water, she couldn’t swim and sat on a nearby rock instead, knitting, but she helped with the gutting and cooking of the fish.

Tommy is watching her, a sad smile on his face.

‘Are you okay?’ Laura asks.

‘Yes. Yes,’ he shakes his head. ‘My dad was a fisherman. I used to go out on the boat with him sometimes.’ He goes to say more but stops. ‘Anyway, you don’t need to hear that… I’m sure people are always putting their stories on you. You took me back, that’s all.’

The crowd applauds as the act finishes. Laura’s heart pounds, her mouth is dry, her legs are trembling. She needs water. The crowd roar as they go to a commercial break, it feels like her chest rattles with the crowd’s rumble. The adrenaline from the five-hundred-strong studio audience feeds her like electrical blue lines firing towards her heart and gut.

The dancers line up around her, stretching their legs up and back behind their earlobes. They pat each other on the backs, on the arses, good luck. The choreographer, Gloria, oversees the routine; she’s dressed in black, heavy black eyeliner and the usual scowl on her face as she throws her eyes over everything and judges, calculates, appraises and adjudicates everything everyone says and does, not just how they dance. She catches Laura looking at her and starts to give her last-minute orders. Her face is all screwed up, twisted, and Laura tries to pay attention but all she hears is the sound of a corkscrew being twisted open, until it pops.

Gloria frowns. Laura’s not sure how to explain herself.

Tommy motions her forward. Laura’s stomach lurches. Everyone looks at her in surprise as she realises the vomiting sound has come from her. That time when she was new to foraging and chose the wrong mushrooms. Tommy looks at her, eyes wide and alarmed, unsure if she’s serious or not, but treating her as if she has actually physically vomited, so convincing was the retching sound. The last time she felt this nervous Solomon had helped her. She recalls the feel of his breath in her ear, his scent so close to her. He’d told her she was beautiful. His presence always calmed her and she longs for him to be here, but knows it was she who walked away from him. It’s her fault he’s not here.

‘Are you okay? Water?’

His pupils are dilated. The panic, the fear, a live fucking show and the star has lost it.

‘I’m fine,’ Laura says shakily.

She follows him to the stage, and as soon as she takes the few steps upward the crowd erupts in applause and cheers. Laura smiles shyly at the reaction, feeling less alone. She waves and takes her place on the stage, standing on the white mark that’s her opening spot. A woman in the front row grins, showing all her teeth, and gives her the thumbs up. Laura smiles. They’re just people. Lots of people. More people in one room than she’s met in her entire life, but it’s never the people she’s worried about – it’s herself.

Tommy counts down to the return of the show. One minute. Dancers take their places, form their dramatic opening positions. Laura’s heart thumps in her chest, so loudly she’s sure the whole room can hear her. Suddenly the crowd explode with laughter and she realises that it was her making the heartbeat sound.

She looks at Jack and he’s grinning. He winks. He looks exhausted as Harriet from make-up powders his face. He looks how Laura feels.

Laura stands in the centre of the enormous stage, the dancers getting in place, the cameras in position while Laura’s VT plays.

‘The last week has changed my life completely. I went from a very quiet life in Cork to suddenly everyone knowing my name.’ Footage of her walking down Grafton Street, then a crowd chasing her. It’s all sped up, as though it’s an old Laurel and Hardy film. Posed, of course. Filmed yesterday – or was it this morning? And then they air the words she was unsure of saying. She had wished to phrase them differently and they had kindly allowed her to, but then they wanted one take to be said and done their way, for them to have. Naturally, that’s the take they use, each sentence sharply edited, her face zoomed in on closer for each one and made more dramatic by a booming drum to emphasise the stakes.

‘I don’t want to go back to being who I was.’ Boom.

‘This is my one chance to shine.’ Boom.

‘The whole world is watching me.’ Boom.

‘I’ll fight for my place in the final.’ Boom.

‘Watch out world.’ Boom.

‘The Lyrebird is coming.’ Boom.

Laura cringes at the sound of her own voice. It sounds as empty as she had felt while saying it. She doesn’t even like that girl. She doesn’t like the girl they’re trying to portray. Doesn’t like the girls like her that are sitting at home, thinking about the one time in their lives that they will have to prove themselves. No such thing exists. Nothing so great ever hinges on one such moment.

Suddenly the music starts, she feels the beat in her chest, the lights go up, the crowd cheer. It’s showtime.

She starts walking. She’s on a treadmill, behind her on the large screen is footage of the woods. It’s animated. And it moves so that she appears to be walking through the forest. Her long blonde hair is tied into two braids that sit on each shoulder tied with two girlish red ribbons. She’s wearing a puffy-shouldered mini dress, a blue-and-white gingham apron and she holds a straw basket. She’s not sure if she’s supposed to be Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz or little Red Riding Hood. She didn’t care much when they’d shown her the costume after she’d gotten off her flight from Australia.

She wears white pop socks and red Mary-Jane heels.

The music playing is ‘If You Go Down to the Woods Today’, but a kind of remixed dance version. She makes the sound of her high heels on the ground and the audience laughs. Realistically, she’d told Gloria and anyone who’d listen that her heels would not make such a sound on the earth floor, but they’d explained it was a heightened reality. Laura comes across a house in the woods, it’s made from sweets. She eats some, licks some, making appropriate sounds and the crowd laugh. She makes a knocking sound on the door, the door opens and three sexy female pigs run out, chased by a male wolf. Laura peeks inside, she sees a handsome bear man – a topless male dancer. She tries out the three different men until she finds the one that’s just right. She moves across the stage, making appropriate sound effects that she was told to make, slapstick comedy, ducking and diving in Laurel and Hardy mime, making sounds in all the right places. It is quite the production; wardrobe must have hired out every panto costume going.