Sweet Sorrow(57)

The Blue Note Café opened in the same September week as my sixteenth birthday and my father suggested that we combine celebrations and have an opening party for family and friends and our regular customers. There were fairy lights and candles, Dad played with his band, the last time he ever played in public, toning down his jazz stylings and playing the wedding party set instead. Mum sang, there was dancing and, as the pubs closed, curious faces pressed against the window. We felt famous in our town, successful, a little beacon on the dreary high street. I’d taken to drinking from discarded glasses, anything I could find, and so was too fuzzy-headed to recall the last part of the evening.

But I do remember that my father took the microphone and gave a speech in which he talked about his fine young son – sixteen years! How did that happen! – his beautiful daughter Billie, so smart, the inspiration Mum had provided, about his hopes for this amazing new venture after a rough couple of years. Cribbed from ceremonies seen on TV, the speech was sentimental but I think, know, that I cried a little. Perhaps all families have these fleeting moments when, without ever saying as much, they take each other in and think, we work and we fit together and we love each other and if we can remain like this, all will be fine.

But my father’s optimism was misplaced, an acceptance speech for an award that had not been given. At Christmas time, the last shop closed, leaving nowhere to hide the ruinous debt that he had been moving from one failed enterprise to the next.





Stage Laughter


Each day, the company grew, bringing new faces to the circle on the Great Lawn.

‘Hello, my name’s Sam,’ said a handsome minstrel in a collarless cotton shirt and waistcoat. ‘I’ll be providing the music and playing various small roles!’

‘And I’m Grace,’ said the pale girl at his side, her long hair flowing down past the low waist of her dress, the kind of girl you’d see, said George, with her arms around a unicorn. Sam and Grace – Simon and Garfunkel, Alex called them – were Ivor’s friends from the Oxford Mediaeval Society, though what happened at such a society, and why anyone would join, was another incomprehensible glimpse of the world of university. Perhaps it gave them access to the arsenal of tambours and recorders, stringed gourds and tiny bells that would provide the music for the show, backed, they told us, with cool, modern club beats.

‘Fuck-ing hell,’ said Alex. Grizzled veterans of Theatre Sports week, we were cynical and wary of new recruits.

‘Troubadours,’ sniffed Helen, who had been quietly assembling her own crack team.

‘Hello, my name’s Chris, and I’m going to be helping Helen on the design.’

‘Hello, my name is also Chris!’ (gales of laughter – I swear, these people) ‘and I’m also going to be helping with design and stage management!’ Chris and Chris had the same lank hair, the same mushroomy complexions, the same immense bunches of keys and jangling penknives attached to the hip of the same black jeans with a prison warden’s silver chain. One of Polly’s distant outhouses had been transformed into the tech headquarters, commanded by Helen from behind an immense architect’s drawing board, and here they laughed at private jokes, surrounded by squalor that in itself seemed like a set, the den of a computer hacker or serial killer: Coke cans, scraps of balsa wood, filthy, furred mugs and half-eaten pasties, squeezed-out tubes of aircraft glue, empty crisp packets, scissors and scalpels and rolls of chicken wire. Somewhere in the mess they’d concealed their own toasted-sandwich maker and a supply of white bread, processed cheese and brown sauce, and this became a source of great envy. But ‘Actors – Keep Out!’ said a handwritten sign in comic-book lettering, and we were further discouraged from entering by the blare of Goth (Chris’s choice) and burbling trance (the choice of Chris), which they played at volumes loud enough to end a siege.

The private coaching continued long after I’d expected Fran to lose interest, returning to the meadow, turning the pages, scene by scene, line by line. ‘We’re working on my part!’ I insisted as Helen slapped the dried grass from my back, but it’s true that an awareness of the proximity of Fran’s hip or head would sometimes cause my attention to lapse, to wonder what might happen if I were to lean across and kiss her while she explained the importance of iambics. ‘You kiss by the book’, says Juliet in the play. If it ever happened, I wanted very much to kiss by the book.

‘Are you listening to me?’ said Fran.

‘I’m listening,’ and as the days went by I did improve. Just as watching a foreign film with subtitles can lull you into believing you know the language, reading scenes with Fran provided the illusion of competence, and I found that I stumbled less, and sometimes got through great stretches with an eloquence that took me by surprise. Reading with Fran was like playing tennis with a competitor who wanted me to win, knocking the ball back courteously to my racket. Self-consciousness and embarrassment faded. I still didn’t know what to do with my hands but I no longer spoke as if reading from the bottom of an optician’s chart.

Of course all this would be wasted if, as expected, I was replaced. It was one thing to hide in the crowd scenes but to speak and be heard, this was an entirely different matter, and I imagined Ivor and Alina engaged in frantic backstage negotiations with members of the Lakeside Players, the Cygnet Amateur Dramatic Guild, the Chalk Down Stagers, for any boy, girl, man or woman who might take my place. On Monday, I wouldn’t have minded. By Thursday, I wasn’t so sure.