The Unfinished Symphony of You and Me Read online

  Fi certainly had a point. Mum’s reaction to our new jobs had been, at best, lukewarm.

  Fi had just been made a soloist with the Royal Ballet after being part of the corps de ballet for three years. I had recently finished my degree in costume design so she had been pimping my CV around the wardrobe department at the Royal Opera House, although neither of us expected anything to come of it. But three weeks ago I’d been called in for an interview and had been offered a dresser’s job. AT THE ROYAL OPERA HOUSE! I had been so grateful and delighted that I had burst out into the piazza in Covent Garden and screamed, then whooped all the way back to Stourbridge, where Mum took one look at me and hissed, ‘Pat! Someone in London’s spiked her with them magic mushrooms and Ecstasy tablets! Pat! Pat! What’ll we do?’

  My job was only a bottom-rung-of-the-ladder affair but it would eventually lead me to my dream, which was to be a proper, senior costume person in the world of opera. A supervisor, maybe even a designer. A job that kept me out of the limelight but surrounded by my beloved opera? It was a miracle!

  And I’d really believed that a career involving textiles and clothes-making would thrill my parents. Aged eighteen they had met at Hall’s, a clothing factory on the Hagley road, and had worked there ever since: Mum had taught me how to load a bobbin even before she showed me how to use the kettle. One of the few times I’d seen pride in her face was when I won a regional dressmaking competition in Dudley aged sixteen.

  But my shiny new career hadn’t thrilled them. There had not been even a fraction of the pride there had been when Dennis (who had, of course, married Lisa from next door) started a self-storage company called CrateWorld in Harrow.

  In fact, Mum had been really quite aghast. ‘The Royal Opera House?’ she said anxiously, as if I’d just announced that I was off to work at an exotic massage spa. ‘But there’ll be all sorts of people there! Show-offs. Snobs. Homos.’

  Dad, who rarely took any notice of what anyone was saying, looked up over his glasses. ‘Really?’ he asked. ‘Gays?’

  Mum nodded, her face siren red with alarm. Dad puffed harder on his pipe. ‘Well then …’ Even he looked concerned, which was quite a big deal because Dad didn’t do emotions. He cleared his throat. ‘It sounds like a good job, our Sal, but will you enjoy it? All of those singers? I mean, we’re proud and all, but –’

  ‘But we’re not sure this job is you,’ Mum interrupted.

  I felt my eyes smart. What did they even know about me? Mum avoided talking about anything that wasn’t a logistical arrangement and Dad avoided talking about anything full stop. You don’t know me, I thought angrily, saying nothing. You don’t know anything about me.

  ‘And it could be dangerous for you, working in the same place as Fiona,’ Mum added, suddenly shifty. ‘What if she causes trouble and it rubs off bad on you? You should keep your distance.’

  I should have known. Should have known that anything to do with theatre would be too much for them. Too noisy. Too jazz-bandsy. Too like Aunty Mandy and all the trouble she’d caused, running away from home to have a fling with an actor, then having to return to Stourbridge single, pregnant and disgraced.

  ‘I guess they were a little bit unenthusiastic,’ I conceded sadly to Fiona. ‘About all of this.’ I gestured grandly towards the rubbish dump out of the window, as if it were a premium view of the Thames from a penthouse.

  ‘A little bit unenthusiastic?’ Fiona replied indignantly. She put her carton of bolognese back in its plastic bag to signal that she had now stopped eating. I ignored her. Fiona rarely ate more than five mouthfuls of her dinner. She could always be relied on to drink, however, and before continuing she took a long gulp of cheap wine direct from the bottle.

  ‘Sally, our mother – your mother, to be precise – is a bitch.’

  ‘Oh, Fiona, come on …’

  ‘No! Stop making excuses for her! She should be proud of you! Proud of us!’ Her eyes were flashing.

  ‘She is, underneath it all.’

  ‘Is she bollocks! She’s ashamed! She’s embarrassed! She’s cross that we’re both working in a theatre, even though it’s not a bloody theatre, it’s a world-famous opera house, just because of what my mum did. Why can’t she let it go?’

  ‘Um, because she lost her sister in a really awful way and she decided to blame it all on –’

  ‘On what?’ Fiona snarled. ‘The performing arts? She can’t cocking well hold the performing arts responsible for what happened! My mum was a mentalist! She shagged an actor who didn’t care about her! Whatever! It happens all the time! Why are we being made to feel guilty because we’ve happened to work in a vaguely similar industry? Jesus!’ She glugged at the wine with accomplished venom.

  I glanced round the room as if to seek help, but found only the reflection of my half-exposed bum in the mirror; paper-white and bashful.

  ‘Your mum,’ Fiona continued, her voice now wobbling like a drunk ballerina, ‘is about as warm and loving as a dishcloth. And she’s made you feel shit, yet again, for taking a job that isn’t in a bloody textiles factory. Even though nobody in England works in a textiles factory any more. Why do you keep on defending her?’

  ‘She just doesn’t understand my job …’ I began lamely, then petered out. Everything Fiona had just said was true. When I thought about my own childhood, I felt quite resentful. But when I thought about Fi’s, I felt the twisting ropes of rage. I needed to change the subject.

  ‘I bet she hates you living with me,’ Fiona said quietly.

  ‘Of course not! Look, Freckle, you’re right. They’re shit, properly shit, so let’s just agree on that and move on.’

  ‘Humph,’ she said darkly.

  I swallowed a mouthful of bolognese without chewing and burned my mouth. Damn Fiona. She was so good at winding me up.

  ‘Seriously, let’s not talk about them.’ I sounded laid-back, even though that wasn’t how I felt. ‘We can do what we want, Freckle, with or without Mum’s blessing. We’re adults now.’

  Fiona took another swig of the wine and I watched her deciding whether or not to push it a little further. She decided not to. ‘S’pose so … But I’m not so sure about this “adult” thing, Sally.’ She grinned eventually. ‘This morning when I walked into your room you were telling Carrot that he was a big handsome boy.’

  ‘He is!’

  ‘You’re a twonk.’ She sighed. ‘But, teddy bears aside, we are adults, and there’s no reason why working in the theatre is going to turn us into mentalists like my mum. SO THERE.’ She stuck her fork into my spag bol and twirled it round. (It didn’t count if she ate extra food from someone else’s plate.)

  Clinking our forks against the bottle of wine, we made a pact. From now on, we would be proper grown-ups.

  We got really drunk and choreographed a contemporary ballet in our empty sitting room, then got a bus into Soho where we staggered around looking for somewhere cool and grown-up to dance. Somehow we got sidetracked and ended up buying vibrators and going for tea and cake at three thirty a.m. It was one of those blissful nights when Fiona fell asleep before she got drunk enough to start causing trouble.

  I was happy.

  Scene Two

  The next day was my first at the opera house. I smelt like methylated spirits. I was collected from the stage door by my new colleague Faye, who wore écru slacks; she smelt of organic oat bran and west London. Immediately, I regretted my cheap outfit.

  Following Faye through the endless corridors, I wondered when my first tea break would be. My head was doughy and my brain full of dense fog. I desperately needed a lie-down and a high-fat snack. Balls. Why had I gone out drinking the night before my first day here? Did I have to do everything Fiona suggested? I was a moron of desperate severity.

  But then I was rescued by the most wonderful sound, a tannoy announcement made by a woman with a silky voice: ‘Mr Allen and Miss Jepson, this is your five-minute call. That’s your five-minute call, Mr Allen and Miss Jepson.’

  It w
asn’t the names or the announcement that excited me: it was the sound of music in the background. The announcer must be practically on stage herself, within metres of what I immediately identified as Così fan tutte.

  ‘Così fan tutte!’ I exclaimed at Faye and her écrus.

  She looked pleased. ‘Yes, well done!’

  An extraordinary sensation of relief flooded me, rolling away the filthy waves of hangover. Finally. Finally I was somewhere where it was impressive to know about opera. I need never hide it again, I thought dazedly. This is amazing!

  A man was walking towards us in a suit and I presumed he was some sort of executive until he started making zooming noises with his voice.

  ‘ZzzeeeeeeeEEEEEeeee,’ he zoomed, suddenly breaking off and making a speedboat sound through his lips. He was wearing heavy makeup.

  I realized it was Thomas Allen and nearly passed out. Thomas Allen was dead famous. So famous that I owned a DVD masterclass with him. I goggled at him and he smiled back in a very pleasant manner. ‘Hello,’ he said, breaking off from his speedboat noises.

  I stared like a moron for a few more seconds, then remembered that people liked me because I was as cool as a cucumber. In fact, that had been one of the major pieces of feedback from my successful interview.

  I smiled, and said calmly, ‘Oh, hi, Thomas.’

  He nodded and walked on, still smiling pleasantly.

  I grinned. I might be as drunk as a stoat and smelly as a ferret but I was going to love this job. And I was really going to nail it.

  And, as it turned out, I did. Unfortunately on that first day my vibrator went off in my bag (I had forgotten to remove it because I was still drunk) and it rattled so loudly that one of my colleagues asked Security to open the locker. And the next day my inexperienced dressing was responsible for a bass’s trousers falling slowly to his feet during a duet – but, minor mishaps aside, I took it on quickly. I kitted myself out in soft, tasteful fabrics that smelt of Cornish crops and felt like peach skin (and then didn’t have enough money to eat anything other than cheap bread for the first month, but that was fine).

  I became Sally Howlett the Rock. I knew what I was doing when it came to clothes and costumes. Things involving fabrics and scissors and measurements. Boxes of buttons, safety pins, hooks and eyes, spools of thread and ribbon and piping. Notions, those bits were called. I’d wander through the stores, piled high with boxes of scraps and swatches of material, and I’d wish desperately that Mum and Dad would one day agree to come and visit because they would bloody love this place.

  As a dresser I had what was called a plot for each opera performance: an important list of instructions that told me whose costume to change and when. The plots at first sounded mental – ‘Take Marchesa Act III dress to SR quick change area; ***ORANGE BRA!!***, strike Café des Amis stuff’ – but I learned quickly how to decipher them.

  Once again I became popular because of my unflappable nature and ability to problem-solve. I got on with everyone I met, massaged the egos of singers whose egos needed massaging and settled into a routine of unthreatening friendship with the rest. To my surprise, many of them were very normal. And even the grandiose ones who referred to ‘The Voice’ in the third person seemed to enjoy my Black Country accent and matter-of-fact world view. They liked that I had a bum as big as theirs, and that I’d managed to call a singer named Regina Wheatley ‘Vagina Weekly’.

  There was a delightful baritone called Brian Hurst, whom I particularly loved. He was from Huddersfield so his accent was as out of place as mine. We ate chips from Rock & Soul in Covent Garden. Sometimes pies. He was heaven. He was quite a star, and sang in opera houses across the world, but he drank dandelion and burdock and never tantrumed, and often I’d find him smiling at me as I sprinted past with a bum patch for a singer who was tantruming because someone had just dared spray hairspray near The Voice.

  ‘You’re a good influence on us loonies,’ he told me.

  And there was the music. All day, every day, through the tannoy, on the stage, in the dressing rooms, in the rehearsal rooms. Scales, arpeggios, arias, recitatives. Big, booming choruses that made me want to punch the air and bellow through a theatrical beard. For the first time in my life, I felt I was at home.

  The wardrobe staff, who had originally seemed so alien to me, with their cool casual trousers and elegant crops, must have appreciated my hard work because they offered me a wardrobe assistant’s job after only nine months.

  The first day I hung up my coat amid the hanging rails and steamers I felt a thrill that was rivalled only by mastering a difficult aria in my own wardrobe.

  After two years in that job I got a further promotion and after another year I’d saved enough money to contribute a small deposit towards a tiny new-build flat by the canal in the southern reaches of Islington. On my twenty-sixth birthday I opened the door to my dream hidey-hole: extremely clean, orderly and carefully designed. Clever storage space. A car park with a gate. A pristine white bathroom and gentle, humming stillness.

  It was heaven after the cramped, paper-thin-walled house of my childhood, decorated with an impossible combination of austerity and tack. Or the squalid flats that Fiona and I had rented since moving in together.

  Fi, who had not saved so much as a penny in the last four years, moved her chaos to my little second bedroom and paid me a pathetic rent. Mum grumbled sporadically about me needing to separate myself from her: wasn’t it enough that we worked together?

  I ignored her and carried on being Fiona’s unofficial mother. It suited everyone perfectly and we had a lot of fun.

  Scene Three

  Not long after starting at the opera house, I made two important friends.

  The first was Barry from Barry Island, a principal dancer with biceps like tiny rocks and the best Welsh accent I had ever heard. I didn’t work with him – I was opera, not ballet – but he was impossible to miss. One morning as I sat with a pain au chocolat in the canteen, gazing over Covent Garden market, I was joined by a very pale, very beautiful man with piercing sea-coloured eyes and a tub of grilled chicken.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said, as I looked sympathetically at his breakfast. ‘I can’t eat no pastries.’ He opened the tub with affected sadness, then grinned evilly at me. ‘If I did I’d end up with one of these’ – he gestured at my belly, which was poking through my dress – ‘and they’d sack me. Not being funny or nothin’.’

  I told him that I was cool about being chubby if it meant I could eat delicious freshly cooked pastries whenever I wanted.

  His face crumpled with desire. ‘Freshly cooked?’ he said hoarsely, staring at my pain au chocolat. Without warning he grabbed it and took a large bite. ‘Aaah,’ he moaned. ‘Now that’s what I’m talking about.’

  I burst out laughing. ‘My cousin does that,’ I said, ‘all the time. Do you know her? Fiona Lane?’

  The man grinned and revealed perfectly white teeth. ‘Oh, yeah, Fiona. She’s a right little one, I’ll tell you that for nothing.’

  God, his accent. It killed me. I loved it. I stared adoringly at him and told him it was the best accent I’d ever heard. ‘Well, thank you, Chicken,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I call you Chicken? It seems right, as I sit here on this lovely morning eating chicken.’ I nodded my assent (and became Chicken for ever more).

  ‘Great. Well, I’m Barry and I come from Barry Island in the great country of Wales, and I have to tell you that I’m in agony.’ He opened up the plastic tub and put a small, sad morsel into his mouth.

  ‘Why?’

  He lowered his voice to a brave whisper: ‘It’s my dance belt, Chicken.’

  I looked blankly at him. ‘Dance belt?’

  ‘The dance belt,’ he told me, in tones of deep Welsh tragedy, ‘is a terrible thing I have to wear every day and hate more than I can tell you. It’s a G-string and it covers my tiny penis with a great big mound of wadding. It spreads it all out into a … a soft bulge. Like a horse’s ball bag, you know.’

&
nbsp; I shuddered.

  Barry looked grateful. ‘Thank you for understanding, Chicken,’ he said emotionally. ‘Thank you. You don’t know how lucky you are, being able to wear all those … those bedsheets around yourself.’

  I fiddled with my voluminous linen skirt and felt like a bit of a tool. I knew I fitted in with the wardrobe lot now but I still wasn’t convinced that this look was very me.

  The next day I bumped into Barry in the canteen, this time with Fiona, and we somehow arranged to go dog racing in Walthamstow the following Saturday. At the stadium Barry started playing Madonna on his phone and nearly got us into a punch-up. Fiona made the very uncharacteristic move of ordering chicken in a basket but then passed out drunk in it. And I managed to give my number to a minor-league gangster from Essex.

  Drunk as lords, we ended up back at my flat and the next day I forced both ballet dancers to have a proper fry-up. As we ate our sausages and bacon we listened to the messages that my randy suitor had left on my answer-phone at three a.m. – a romantic little line about how he wanted to drink peach Bellinis off my ‘bangers’ – and laughed until we cried. And that was that.

  The other firm friend I made was Bea. Bea was Italian and extremely rich. It was never clear to me why she was working, really, but she was incredibly good at her job. Beatriz Maria Stefanini was a supervisor in the makeup and wigs department and she was just about as fabulous as it was possible to be without being a handbag.

  She was – in every sense – the toughest person I’d ever met. I had always seen myself as quietly strong but in truth that was only because the people in my life tended to be weak or mad. But Bea was something else. She was a force. An opera in herself.

  We became friends when she caught me standing in the wings, rooted to the spot, as I watched Brian the baritone bowling around the stage in The Magic Flute with a moustache somehow attached to the crotch of his cream trousers. It was the funniest and most dreadful merkin in history, and it was my fault.