The door when she found it was not what Zoe expected. Usually, in her experience, sound studios these days were in pretty swanky office buildings. This was not a swanky office building, it was the sort of apartment block that she imagined was used as safe flats by the secret services of countries that didn’t have a lot of money. She wondered if Salman Rushdie had ever stayed in Mycroft Mansions, and if so did he and his coppers have happy memories of it? Still it wasn’t that unusual, she told herself after all, she had recorded voice-overs for documentaries and radio ads and training films in all kinds of strange buildings all over London. At least the studio was in a part of London where a lot of the best voice-over studios were, north of Oxford Street in the garment district which spreads east from Regent Street for a couple of blocks till it runs up against the straggle of the Middlesex Hospital’s many outstations of sickness. Pity though, it was the pukka proper studios that she really liked, where a boy in baggy pants went and got you any kind of coffee you wanted and there were bowls of sticky chocolate stuff for you to clagg up your mouth with.

Radiotracks, where they only had bowls of apples and mini choc bars for you to eat free, was in the next street, she’d done the narration there for a documentary made by the Discovery Channel about blunderbusses. And of course there was Saunders and Gordon back of the Tottenham Court Road with its big squishy sofas and help-yourself bar stacked with pain au chocolat and Danish pastries, loads of different teas and coffee, all the mags and the day’s newspapers. Though like any leading actress she didn’t actually read the newspapers, it was considered bad form. You were allowed to bring a copy of the Guardian to rehearsals or onto the set but only to do the crossword between takes. Other actors were disapproving if you were too clued up on foreign affairs or the stock market, if you ostentatiously read the Economist or Frankfurter Aligemeine at rehearsals; it implied a lack of interest in the real world, which was the interior world of the actor. When Zoe got a commercials job at Saunders and Gordon she tried not to eat the day before and to turn up as early as possible and get discreetly stuck in. Rory Bremner was usually in there talking about cricket to the pretty receptionists in six or seven of his four hundred different voices but as far as she could see he wasn’t getting a free meal, he just didn’t seem to have anywhere else to go.

Zoe looked down the brass plate that seemed to have at least a thousand door bells on it. There it was at the bottom: Soda Soundstudio, Basement. She pressed the button, there was a buzz and the iris of a little video camera squirmed open and stared at her. ‘Errogh?’ said a mutilated voice in the wall.

‘Oh hi,’ she shouted, ‘Zoe Renoir, twelve o’clock, I’m here to do the voice-over for the CD Rom thingy!’

‘Baismeng!’ said the voice and let her in with an electric rattle of the lock. She entered a long dark hallway with blank doors leading off every couple of feet, suggesting each flat was about thirty inches wide. A voice called her from a stairwell leading down into blackness at the other end of the corridor. ‘Sonsoodio, don ear.’ Her fingers found one of those timer light switches that you press into the wall. For perhaps one second the hallway was grimly illuminated before the switch sprang back out with an emphatic ‘boing!’ like it wasn’t its job to light up the corridor. So instead she felt her way along the wall till a dim light from an open door at the bottom of the stairwell allowed her to descend the stairs.

The basement flat had a large metal studded door painted a dirty white, the head of a small Oriental-looking man was poking round it. ‘Sonsoodio in ear,’ he repeated and held the door open. Zoe entered and found herself in another ill-lit passageway. The man led her into what had once been the living room of the basement apartment. It was rather charmingly decorated and would have been a nice room if there hadn’t been a huge sound mixing desk of the latest kind, several gigantic speakers and a bank of TV monitors rammed into it. Sitting at the desk in a big leather office chair, like that black boy with the weird sunglasses thingy who drove the Starship Voyager, was a tubby young man with long greasy hair; on a low sofa were three other men, one instantly spottable as a London advertising type in the standard issue Paul Smith suit, the other two smartly dressed Orientals in suits not made by anybody called anything like Smith. The sound engineer ignored her while twiddling various knobs on his desk in a random way, the other three on the couch rose as Zoe entered.

The Media bloke held out his hand: ‘Zoe, um Tom Mantle from Earwig, the production company, these gentlemen are the clients, Mr Urapo and Mr Sweichian.’ Both men bowed and shook Zoe’s hand. Tom waved in the direction of the engineer, ‘That is Beanie.’ An abstracted wave. The man who had shown her in did not get introduced. ‘Now I don’t believe you ye seen the script.’

‘No,’ said Zoe. ‘Which is a pirry, ‘cos I usually like to have a good look at the script, get familiar with it, almost learn it,’ she lied. Zoe did at least one voice-over a day and she forgot them as soon as she did them, indeed she didn’t pay much attention as she was doing them, singing the words up and down while thinking of other things.

‘Yomp, sorry about that, still you’ll pick it up as you go along. You’ll be voicing a CD Rom with pictures which will be distributed to certain key figures in the industry that our clients are wishing to enter as new players, they can play it on der computers. So here’s the script.’ He handed Zoe five stapled-together sheets of paper with closely typed words on them. ‘Might as well get started, you wanna go into the booth?’ For the first time she saw in one corner what was formerly a small box room, now converted into a sound-proof booth. She skipped in. Beanie shut the door behind her and locked it with a chromed metal lever. She was in a space four foot square, looking back out into the living room through a small double-glazed window of thick glass. Inside was a table with a TV monitor on it, a table lamp, two pencils, a chair, a set of headphones, a green light on a wire and a big German microphone on a stand with a mesh shield in front of it to catch spit and flying food.

Zoe sat down in the chair. No sound entered the booth. The actress stared out at the quintet moving their mouths like well-dressed men-fish in an aquarium. She felt not quite right. It had been dinned into them at the youth theatre then at drama school that they had to do everything they could to advance their careers, it wasn’t nearly enough to be talented, the business of acting had to be the only thing in their lives, they had to make contacts, get along with people — but she didn’t know where she was with this lot, there was a funny vibe she’d never encountered before. Her friend Trink from drama school had one of those Psion Organisers, a 7a, the most advanced kind he said. He could talk into it, tell it things and later it would talk to him and tell him things back. What he did was, he would make a note of anybody who could help his career, up and coming directors, casting directors, writers and so on and enter all their details into his Psion, then if he met them at a first night or something he could slip off to the loo and get a briefing, then come back and act like their biggest fan. Many people had been freaked out to hear Trink’s voice coming from a lavatory stall at the Old Vic, whispering secrets to himself in RADA-trained tones. Still, she thought a Psion, even the more powerful 7a, was no substitute for a nice pair of tits. Most actresses were good-looking, beautiful even, and being amongst so many pretty ones taught you not to value your looks but it was also implied that you would use them whenever you could. Zoe wasn’t stupid though, she knew instinctively not to try anything fresh with anybody in that other room; she might as well have tried to get off with the Procurator of The Free Church of Scotland as to try anything with Tom, Beanie, Mr Urapo or Mr Sweichian.

She turned in the chair and put her Tellytubby backpack on the floor, looked inside it and realised with a jink of fear that she didn’t have her lucky pig with her. Well, that wasn’t a good start. She liked to have her lucky pottery pig with her when she did a job or went for an audition or had a cervical smear. She was so frightened so much of the time and she thought her pig kept her safe, protected her like a guard pig, standing square on its stumpy pottery legs, defying the forces of evil to harm her … brave pig. There were so many of them, actors, actresses, like you would watch in The Bill and apart from the regular cast there were loads of actors in it and in the next episode there was a whole different bunch of actors and you never saw the first bunch again on the telly ever, and those were the successful ones who got on the telly even the once.

The CD Rom had a timecode running along the bottom of it, giving minutes, seconds and tenths of a second. The bits that needed voice-over would be played to her and a green light would tell her when to start talking, the timecode was also printed on her script and that told her when she needed to stop speaking by. Beanie spoke to her over her headphones. ‘I need a sound level, tell me what you had for breakfast.’

‘A nice piece of grilled lettuce dressed with lemon juice and there’s this new live bacteria drink tha—’

‘Yeah that’s fine. I’ll run the picture and give you a light.’

The small TV on the desk in front of her came to life. A big clock appeared on it then the images began, bright blue sea mixing to coral reefs, tropical fish darting in and out, then small tropical islands covered in palm trees. The green light flashed and she began to read. ‘The South China Seas, famous for azure blue lagoons, palm-fringed beaches and …’

She paused as the script told her to and waited for the light to come on again. As it did the image cut to shaky footage of small boats rammed with armed men smashing through the surf.

‘… pirates! Rapacious, bloodthirsty, rampaging pirates!’

The pictures stopped and Tom spoke to her over the headphones.

‘That was great, Zoe, fablious. Let’s try it once more for luck. Have a bit more fun with it.’ So they did.

Then the pictures fast forwarded a bit up to the next section they wanted her to voice over.

‘Nearly a century after Joseph Conrad wrote of the colourful robbers he called “vagabonds of the sea”, the pirates of the South China Seas are highly organised, technically advanced criminals and now they are expanding into Europe.’ She thought this sounded like one of those documentaries she’d done but why had they said it was a CD Rom? On screen the speed boats were bucking in the wake of a huge merchant ship. Grappling hooks were thrown and the men in the boats, rifles slung across their backs, climbed like racoons up the ropes and onto the unseen deck of the ship. She read on.

‘We are those pirates, the pirates of the South China Seas and we are looking to make alliances in your area. If we are your friend we are loyal and true, if you are our enemy we are implacable.’

On the deck of the freighter the gunmen had the crew lined up in front of them. The pirates began firing with their rifles and the sailors staggered about for a bit and then fell down in a heap.

Zoe suddenly had a horrifying thought. Her agent, who she usually told what she was doing every second of the day, didn’t know she was here, in fact she’d lied and said she was going to an auction of unwanted greyhounds. It would be up there on the board in the office in big felt-tip letters: ‘9/6 Zoe auct, unwnt grhnds.’ The CD Rom people had phoned her direct and offered her a buy-out flat fee of five hundred pounds which had seemed like a lot of money for something that wasn’t going to be broadcast. So Zoe’s agent didn’t know about this job, she was cutting her out of her fee, in fact the CD Rom people had expressly told her not to mention it to her agent. What suddenly struck Zoe was, was she getting paid enough for this? What if it wasn’t sufficient? What if she was getting shafted? She thought she might try phoning her agent and asking, all casual like, what the right fee for a thing like this might be. Would her agent be annoyed with her? She’d phoned her yesterday when Zoe’d thought she was pregnant to ask if she thought Zoe should get an abortion now or wait till after the East Enders audition. How was she supposed to remember the woman’s fucking IVF treatment had failed for the ninth time? She decided to phone, after all her agent was one of her best friends. She took out her mobile but there were no ‘steps to heaven’, that’s what she called the little ascending bars on the display that showed what the signal strength of her phone was; there was no whisper of a signal here. The pictures had frozen on the screen with a grinning pirate brandishing his gun. She spoke into the microphone, ‘Erm, hello … erm can I make a quick phone call on your landline, I can’t get a signal in here on my mobo?’

Beanie’s voice came back at her through the cans. ‘No the phones aren’t working.’ She was sure she’d seen one of the Orientals on the phone a few minutes ago, but anyway it would have been difficult to talk about the fee in front of them so she would just have to make the best if it.

Pictures, green light. ‘Throughout the reefs and islands in the South China Seas the pirates are feared for their recklessness, cunning and lack of pity. Take the practice of phantom ships, you simply order or buy a vessel for US$350,000 and we seize a ship for you. If you want a crew on board we will keep them for you. If you don’t, we will simply throw them overboard. Or let us say you have an enemy, would you like this to happen to them?’ The picture on the screen was of a large bare room, in the centre was a Chinese man tied to a chair and naked to the waist. He looked like he was in some kind of abandoned factory. Above his head there were bare pipes hanging from brackets, dangling chains, large industrial metal doors and around him rough unpainted brick walls. But you never knew; for instance, there was a sound studio called Space, off Carnaby Street, that was done out like a spaceship, the doors to the sound booths were like airlocks and all the speakers were housed in swoopy blobby cabinets that looked like they were in the middle of a flashback, and there was this other very weird studio called ADR round the back of Kings Cross where there was a stream running half-way up the walls, all the seating was made out of the boots of cars, Minis converted into couches, and you got upstairs to the recording suites through a door opening out of a large tree in the corner of the reception.

Green light blinking. ‘This is the famous Chinese actor Tony Cho, he thought himself a big man, big Kung Fu expert, didn’t think he needed his old friends from Macau.’

She recognised the guy, she’d read about him in the Stage in an article concerning the dangers of working overseas unprotected by the mighty power of Equity, though it didn’t look like Peter Postlethwaite and the general council were going to come swinging through the windows to rescue Tony Cho. Several other men came into view, wheeling what Zoe recognised from a week on Casualty as one of those machines they shock heart-attack patients back to life with. But of course Tony was alive, at that moment. One of the pirates put the paddles on Tony Cho’s chest and gave him a jolt of electricity. He twisted in pain. Zoe watched this intently, she hoped one day to play in Death and the Maiden and you couldn’t pay for research material like this. They waited a bit then gave the actor another higher shot of electricity. Suddenly he pissed himself, a fountain of yellow urine.

Zoe wondered if she would be able to piss on demand; she’d been naked at the Almeida and she’d wanked herself at the National but a stream of piss once a night and twice on Saturdays, well that would be a thing to get a girl noticed. It wasn’t that she wondered whether she could do the pissing from a physical point of view, more whether she was mentally prepared for it. She hadn’t minded the nakedness at the Almeida that much really after a while, but she’d hated the wanking at the National. Thing was though you couldn’t demur at any of that stuff, you couldn’t even act like it was an issue: ‘Want me to wank? to fuck? to pee? Sure no problem, I’ll do it right here in this church hall in Shepherds Bush, I’ll do it at a festival in Dundee, I’ll do it in front of my Auntie Janice and go for cannelloni with her afterwards.’ If you didn’t jump to it, directors wouldn’t use you, you’d get a reputation. And for once it was actually worse for the boys, you couldn’t go more than three visits to the theatre these days without seeing some poor actor’s wizened dick. Her friend Mong from drama school said his mum had seen more of his penis in the last few years than she had when he was a baby. It was funny really, in the non-acting world you got a bad reputation from wandering about with your cock out, in the acting world it was the reverse.

The pictures started up again and the nagging green light blinked; the screen was split into four showing various types of criminal activity, drug smuggling, piracy, prostitution and people being gunned down on the streets of some Chinese town.

She was on the last page of script now. ‘Whatever you want we can get it for you, drugs, slaves, ships and a speciality of ours is contract killing to a very high standard. In many instances the authorities will not know that a murder has occurred thinking it an accident, or an unexplained disappearance and the target will never be aware that they have been singled out for extermination. But be very certain before you hire us — remember, your own life is at risk if you do not keep up payments.’

They went over some things a few more times and then she was finished.

Beanie came and let her out of the booth with a gift of fresh cold air. Zoe went back into the control room to say goodbye to Tom and the Chinese men. This was always an awkward time for the insecure voice-over artist, an uneasy saying of goodbyes when they want you gone but you’d like to sniff out what they really thought of you, but you find yourself out in the street with thoughts of the engineer hitting the ‘delete’ button and the producer already on the phone to Caroline Quentin’s agent. ‘Bye, bye, bye’ (she said) to everyone and Zoe was out in the street, surprised that it was still daylight. She felt like she’d been filmed underground for a month.

She must have walked for quite a while though she couldn’t really remember. She stopped suddenly in the middle of the pavement, so that a grumpy man walked into the back of her. Looking around Zoe saw she was on a street near Broadcasting House, standing outside a minuscule old-fashioned sandwich bar called the Sandwich Boutique (how Sixties was that?). So tiny was it that for storage they used the space above the ceiling tiles. The sandwich bar man was right then coming down a ladder backwards from a square black hole in the roof. She had a sudden overwhelming impulse to sneak in there while the sandwich bar man was fussing over his Snickers bars and climb the ladder up to the black square. It looked so safe up there in the ceiling, suspended above the diced watery ham egg mayonnaise and minty lamb on ciabatta. But just then she saw her friend Mook from the RSC over the road so she waved to him and ran across the traffic, shrieking. They kissed and stood there for ages chatting and then they went and got a new kind of Brazilian bikini wax together.