Loveless (Osemanverse #10)(106)

I coughed loudly.

‘HEY,’ I repeated, louder this time, and they reluctantly broke apart, Rooney looking a little irritated and Pip adjusting her glasses, looking like she’d just been punched. ‘We have a play to perform?’

Jason and Sunil were sitting on the edge of the stage, sharing a packet of salted popcorn. As soon as they saw us enter, Jason raised both his arms in triumph, while Sunil said, ‘Thank God.’ Jason then ran over, picked me up, and carried me all the way on to the stage while I laughed hysterically and tried to escape.

‘We’re doing it!’ he said, spinning us around. ‘We’re doing the play!’

‘I feel like I’m going to cry,’ Sunil said, and then stuffed three more pieces of popcorn into his mouth.

Rooney clapped her hands loudly. ‘No more time for being happy! We need to get changed before people start arriving!’

And so we did. Jason and Sunil had already arranged all our costumes, props and set backstage, so we all got changed into our first set of costumes, then spent ten minutes arranging the set we’d managed to craft with our limited resources – my papier-maché pillar, which we placed on the centre-left, and a garland covered in stars that we somehow, after much deliberation between Jason and Rooney, managed to attach to one of the backdrop rails. When we hoisted it up, it looked like little stars were raining down from the ceiling.

We also had a chair in many of our scenes, but the best thing we could find was a red plastic thing in the wings. ‘I have an idea,’ said Rooney, and she leapt off the front of the stage to grab the flowers that I’d left on a front-row seat. She brought them up on to the stage and started sellotaping flowers to the chair.

By the time she’d finished, the chair had been transformed into a throne of flowers.

It was ten minutes until our performance when I started to wonder who was actually going to attend this show.

Obviously Sadie had been invited, since she was judging it. And I could guess that Sunil would have invited Jess. But would that be it? Two audience members?

I peeked out from behind the curtains and waited, and soon I was proven very, very wrong.

First, a few people I recognised from Pride Soc showed up. Sunil immediately went out to greet them, and eventually gestured for the rest of us to come say hi. Moments later, another small group of people arrived, and Sunil introduced them as his friends from his orchestra. They all started rambling about how much they’d been looking forward to this.

I didn’t know whether that scared me or excited me.

Next, Sadie arrived with a couple of friends. She came to say a quick hello before sitting down in the front row, the most intimidating choice of seat possible.

Soon after, Jess arrived, and after saying hi to the Pride Soc gang, went to see Sadie. They hugged and sat down together, seeming to be good friends. University was a small world.

A gaggle of large boys showed up and I had no idea who they were until Jason went over to greet them – they were a few of his rowing teammates. And then two other people showed up, again complete strangers to me, but Pip ran over to them, hugged them and then introduced them as Lizzie and Leo, two friends she’d made at LatAm Soc.

I didn’t have anyone who came along specifically to see me. Neither did Rooney.

I didn’t mind, though. Who I had here – these four people – was enough.

And despite my lack of contribution, we had an audience. Enough to fill up three whole rows of seats.

Maybe that wasn’t a lot. But it felt like a lot to me. It felt like what we were doing mattered.

At three minutes to two, the five of us gathered in the right wing and huddled up.

‘Does anyone else feel like they need to shit?’ asked Pip.

‘Yes,’ said Rooney immediately, while Sunil said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t exactly put it like that.’

‘We’re going to be fine,’ said Jason. ‘Everyone relax.’

‘You telling me to relax makes me even less relaxed,’ said Pip.

‘Whatever happens,’ I said, ‘it’s been fun, right? It’s all been fun.’

Everyone nodded. We all knew it had.

Whatever happened with the play, with the society, with our strange little friendship group …

It had all been so much fun.

‘Let’s do this,’ said Jason, and we all put our hands in.





Jason was on stage first. With a microphone and dressed as Romeo – in brightly coloured contrasting prints.

‘This is just a little pre-show announcement,’ he said. ‘Firstly – thank you everyone for coming. Very nice to see such a large and impressive turnout, no doubt thanks to our incredibly extensive publicity campaign.’

There were some chortles in the audience.

‘Secondly, I just wanted to inform you that we’ve had some … mild issues, trying to prepare this play. We had some … cast disputes. And we’ve had to rush through some of the final scenes. Everything is fine now, we hope, but … it’s been quite the journey getting here. There’ve been a lot of tears and heated WhatsApp messages.’

There were more chuckles in the crowd.

‘For those of you who don’t know,’ Jason continued, ‘we at the Shakespeare Society decided that for our first ever show, we would perform a selection of scenes rather than just one play. All of these scenes are, in one way or another, about love – but we leave it up to you to interpret what sort of love these scenes are depicting. Pure, toxic, romantic, platonic – we wanted to explore all sorts. In any case, it’s going to be quite a bit shorter than a regular play, so we’ll all get out in time for a late pub lunch.’