The Confusion of Karen Carpenter

by Jonathan Harvey

  ‘Can you put me on speakerphone, Ivanka? I want to sing them a LULLABYE.’

  Oh no. My boss was phoning her kids from inside a toilet. I heard Eva strain quietly then start to sing, ‘Hush, Little Baby, Don’t You Cry’. As she did I heard something falling into water.

  Oh God. My boss was singing her kids to sleep while taking a dump. I felt sick. Talk about multitasking. I got up, flushed, unbolted the door and went out to do some damage-repair to my panda eyes. Trudy stood by the basins, touching up her lippy

  ‘Isn’t Stu with you tonight?’ she fished.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Did you not see Brunch With Bronwen?’

  Trudy looked at me. ‘God, babe. I’ve watched it like eighty times on YouTube. So it was true?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t making it up.’

  She rubbed my arm and cocked her head to one side again.

  ‘Oh, babe. It was really brave of you to try and have a boyfriend who wasn’t in the business. But, babe, people like us aren’t meant to date civilians.’

  She turned back to her other best friend, the mirror, and added, ‘So, did he find out about your little . . . affair and stuff?’

  I was about to argue with her – I had not been having an affair – but before I could say anything she was talking again.

  ‘You know what you need, babe?’

  I chuckled and examined my chest in the mirror. ‘A boob job?’

  Trudy laughed. ‘Apart from that, babe!’ And she opened her massive handbag. I peered inside. It was completely full of miniatures. (Drinks. Not miniature anything else, like miniature furniture. That would have been weird.)

  She winked at me.

  ‘A drink.’

  I smiled. Maybe she was right.

  An hour later and boy was I feeling a lot better. I think I’d had five miniatures by then. Or maybe six. Enough to feel nice and warm. Like on Christmas Day. But a nice Christmas Day. Not the sort of Christmas Day where your husband beats you up or your dog eats the turkey. You know, the sort of Christmas Day you might get on Acacia Avenue – a nice nostalgic Christmas Day where you’ve got all the presents you want and you’ve eaten too much turkey and the dog doesn’t fart and your boyfriend isn’t, like, ‘Give me a blow job during Victoria Wood,’ etc., ‘Coz it’s, like, women’s comedy and it’ll help me get into it.’

  Like go fuck yourself, Stu.

  And then I remembered. I wasn’t with Stu any more.

  God, this was a long night. And the seats were really uncomfortable. I was wedged in between that new girl who played the chip shop assistant with OCD whose name I could never remember, and the sweet one who played tearaway Asian teenager Supjit (I was convinced Supjit was a made-up name, invented by lazy/racist storyliners). There was a tribalistic feeling in the hall, with each quarter of the stalls area holding cast members of the different soaps, penned in like horses on slaughter day, each team power-screaming for their representative nominee as the names were read out. It was getting so heated I half expected to see loo roll and chairs come flying above our heads every time Acacia Avenue was name-checked.

  I felt my mobile pulse in my bag and pulled it out to check for texts, hoping against hope that it might be from Our Joey. But no, it was from Jason, who played Dodgy Rog, Acacia Avenues much loathed drug dealer.

  Nice rack.

  I looked round and saw him sat a few rows behind. He winked and took a swig from a bottle of lager he’d snuck in. I shook my head playfully, then turned back round to see Trudy mouthing, ‘D’you want another absinthe?’ I didn’t realize how good I was at lip-reading till then and nodded eagerly. She handed me another miniature and I unscrewed the top and glugged it greedily. This stuff was great: it had almost made me forget all my worries over the past few weeks and the upcoming serial-killer story. They were just announcing Best Storyline. As Acacia Avenue was declared victorious for its ‘evil Pippa escapes from prison and pretends to be her nice identical twin (with tragic consequences for the Nandras)’ storyline, the entire cast and crew leapt to their feet in a frenzy of self-congratulation. Cameras zoomed up the aisle towards us and I found myself performing for them, suddenly bursting into tears with pride. The two actresses on either side of me caught on quickly and followed suit. It had the desired effect: a camera jabbed in our faces, beaming our tears into millions of living rooms. Eva, some of the writers and the actresses who played Pippa and Feroza Nandra practically flew towards the stage, with Eva screaming, ‘Can you BELIEVE this? This is SO deserved. SO deserved,’ to the wrong area of seating. She was shouting it to EastEnders.

  ‘Well done, guys. Well DONE, guys!’

  She clearly hadn’t put her contacts in. When she reached the stage she screamed into the mic, ‘GOD, YOU GUYS GET IT RIGHT SOMETIMES! WOWZER!’

  I thought I might be a little bit tipsy because I started to zone out and wonder if Stu might be watching me. Yeah right, Jodie, dream on. If he was watching this, he’d probably be sticking pins in a doll of you. I tried to think of something else.

  I wondered if Mrs Mendelson might be watching. Mrs Mendelson was my drama teacher in the 90s. She ran the Myrtle Mendelson School of Drama and Disco, South Merseyside, with a rod of iron and a well-oiled metronome in a couple of rooms above a betting shop two nights a week and all day Saturdays. I was her star pupil. No mean feat when, according to Mrs Mendelson, ‘South Merseyside is a breeding ground for stars. They’ve all come from here. Smile!’

  At which point her thirty eager students, standing straight backed in rows of five facing her, smiled as though we were on dangerously strong anti-depressants.

  ‘And . . . Look worried!’

  The thirty wannabes switched from beaming grins to furrowed brows and lip biting in an instant.

  This was one of Mrs Mendelson’s techniques: instant emotion.

  ‘You never know when you’re going to be called upon to instantly emote. When you are arrested on The Bill, when you have to choose which conjoined twin to lose on Casualty, even selecting a sweet at The Kabin on Coronation Street. Will you have hours to get into character and practice ‘the Method’? No. You will have to instantly emote. And . . . be scared!’

  The furrowed brows gave way to wide-eyed terror, hands jumped to faces. I whimpered out loud like a kicked puppy.

  ‘Very good, Miss McGee. Never be frightened to make a noise. They can always switch the boom off if they no likey And relax!’

  We relaxed. Mrs Mendelson grabbed her stick and crab-walked to the toilet. This was a little ritual of hers: disappearing to the ladies’ room every twenty minutes with her lorry-sized handbag to ‘powder my accoutrements’. She was a strange woman, Mrs Mendelson, with her victory-roll hairdo and clip-on earrings that looked like sucked boiled sweets. She had a habit of unclipping them during a lesson and then putting them back on later without so much as a glance towards a mirror, leaving the earrings at mismatching levels on her ears. She always spoke as if playing to the back row, and had a habit of rolling her Rs so aggressively that strangers passing the Myrtle Mendelson School of Drama and Disco, South Merseyside, might have mistaken it for machine-gun fire. She would return from the toilet cherry red of face, having secretly knocked back some vodka from a hip flask. After each comfort break she’d flop into a chair, come over a bit misty-eyed and regale us with tales of her life in weekly rep in the 50s and how Sir John Gielgud once made a pass at her then boyfriend when they were in Salad Days in Chipping Norton. I loved these tales and would hurry home to repeat them at the dinner table to Our Joey and Mum and Dad. I was really good at taking her off, so even though the family rarely met Mrs Mendelson, they felt they knew her intimately.

  I hoped she could see me tonight and be proud. Purists might have poo-pooed her instant emotion technique – I could hardly imagine Fiona Shaw employing it when performing Medea – but on a soap like Acacia Avenue it was an invaluable tool. I had a reputation at work for being able to cry buckets on cue. When the writers saw
how good I was they started writing tears into nearly every episode. Sister Agatha was frequently sobbing over the Godlessness of the world, or her ill-fated kiss, and in a recent episode I’d even had to bawl about finding some litter on Acacia Avenue, whilst uttering the immortal line, ‘Why, dear Lord? Why do they do it?’ The memory made me shiver.

  Trudy slipped me another absinthe and again I found my mind wandering back to Stu. In the big scheme of things I should have been married by now. I should have had seven children, three dogs, annual holidays somewhere fancy and a macrobiotic chef. Instead I was twenty-eight, and already washed up and over the hill. I felt like crying.

  Suddenly I was being nudged. The Supjit girl leaned in.

  ‘You next, Jodie. Good luck!’

  I appeared to have slumped down in my seat. I could see two Trudies and they were both mouthing, ‘You OK, babe?’

  I tried to sit up. Straight back, eye on the sky, as Mrs Mendelson used to say. Some cheesy pop presenter walked onstage and said, ‘And now the award for best dramatic performance by an actress. Let’s have a look at the nominations.’

  For some reason, I started to giggle uncontrollably.

  Jonathan Harvey comes from Liverpool and is a multi-award-winning writer of plays, films, sitcoms and Britain’s longest-running drama serial.

  Jonathans theatre work includes the award-winning Beautiful Thing (Bush Theatre, Donmar Warehouse, Duke of York’s. Winner: John Whiting Award. Nominated: Olivier Award for Best Comedy), Babies (Royal Court Theatre. Winner: Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright. Winner: George Devine Award), Rupert Street Lonely Hearts Club (English Touring Theatre, Donmar Warehouse, Criterion Theatre. Winner: Manchester Evening News Award for Best New Play. Winner: City Life Magazine Award for Best New Play). Other plays include Corrie! (Lowry Theatre and National Tour. Winner: Manchester Evening News Award for Best Special Entertainment), Canary (Liverpool Playhouse, Hampstead Theatre and English Touring Theatre), Hushabye Mountain (English Touring Theatre, Hampstead Theatre), Guiding Star (Everyman Theatre, Royal National Theatre), Boom Bang a Bang (Bush Theatre), Mohair (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs) and Wildfire (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs). Jonathan also co-wrote the musical Closer to Heaven with the Pet Shop Boys.

  For television Jonathan created and wrote three series of the BAFTA-nominated Gimme Gimme Gimme for the BBC, two series of Beautiful People (winner: Best Comedy, Banff TV Festival), the double BAFTA-nominated Best Friends, Von Trapped! and Birthday Girl. He co-wrote Panto! with John Bishop.

  Jonathan has also written for the shows Rev (winner: BAFTA for Best Sitcom) Shameless, The Catherine Tate Show, At Home With the Braithwaites, Lilies, Great Night Out and Murder Most Horrid. To date he has written over a hundred episodes of Coronation Street.

  Jonathans film work includes Beautiful Thing for Film Four (winner: Outstanding Film, GLAAD Awards, New York; winner: Best Film, London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival; winner: Best Screenplay, Fort Lauderdale Film Festival; and Winner: Grand Prix, Paris Film Festival; winner: Jury Award, San Paolo International Film Festival).

  But perhaps most telling of all, he also won the Spacehopper Championships at Butlins Pwllheli in 1976.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Last time I had a book published, the acknowledgements were longer than War and Peace, so this time I’m keeping it brief. Ish. So. To my hairdresser, Chantay-Oolay at Jeffrey Soubriquet – you’re a star and take years off me. Can you squeeze me in at two?

  Oh okay, I’ll be serious.

  Continued thanks to my agent Gordon Wise at Curtis Brown for his belief and encouragement. Thanks to Wayne Brookes, Camilla Elworthy, Jeremy Trevathan and everyone at Pan Macmillan for making me laugh so much, and for publishing my books, and correcting my punctuation. Also to Michael McCoy and Alec Drysdale at Independent for keeping me employed and employable the rest of the time.

  In respect to this particular book, I owe a debt of gratitude to many people who helped me with research. Thank you to Mark Winnock for answering my questions about working on the London Underground. Thanks to Dr Lesley French for discussing Karen’s state of mind and the therapy she explores later in the book. Thanks to Jojo Moyes for giving me honest feedback on the first book and telling me to dig a bit deeper this time. And thanks to Angela Sinden for being a great sounding board when I got stuck on a story point. (A painful place to be.)

  I used to be a teacher, but it was a very long time ago, so thank you to all the teachers I have spoken to in the last year at parties and on buses who answered such questions as ‘Do they still have registers?’ and ‘What’s an interactive whiteboard?’. Thank you also to Mike Christie and Andy McKenzie for sourcing me some DVDs of Educating Essex. It brought a million memories flooding back.

  To all the kids I used to teach who are now in their 30s and yet still call me Sir. Thanks for that.

  Hilariously huge thanks to Kate Tobin for bidding a lot of money in aid of the Sussex Beacon to have a character named after her in the book. The Sussex Beacon is a specialist hospice and care centre for those living with and affected by HIV/AIDS. In Sussex, believe it or not.

  And finally, thank you to anyone who bothered to contact me after the first book via Twitter, Facebook etc. to tell me you’d enjoyed it. I am buoyant with gratitude.

  First published 2013 by Pan Books

  This electronic edition published 2013 by Pan Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

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  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-230-77058-4

  Copyright © Jonathan Harvey 2013

  The right of Jonathan Harvey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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