Olivia's First Term

by Lyn Gardner

  Olivia looked at her grandmother’s gnarled, claw-like fingers, so damaged by arthritis, and knew at once that Alicia was speaking from the heart.

  “But I don’t think it’s a physical problem,” said Olivia slowly.

  “What do you mean?”

  Olivia took a deep breath. There was something about her grandmother’s face that made her think she might understand the enormity of what had happened to Jack.

  “Well, Dad’s bones eventually knitted together and he felt ready to go back on the wire. Everyone from the circus was there to see him do it and cheer him on as he climbed the tower for the first time one morning some months after the accident.”

  “So what happened?” asked Alicia.

  “He stepped out on to the wire, and everyone cheered. He took a few steps. But almost immediately we knew something was wrong. He just stopped and stood quite frozen in the middle of the high-wire above our heads. He couldn’t go forwards and he couldn’t go back. It was as if he was paralysed.”

  “How did he get down again?”

  “I climbed up the opposite tower and stepped out on to the wire,” whispered Olivia. “I could see the beads of perspiration on his lip and the fear in his eyes, but it was as if my presence broke the spell. He suddenly moved towards me as if there had never been a problem and took my outstretched hand. But I could feel him trembling. He said, ‘Clearly I wasn’t quite as ready to return as I had thought. Thank you.’ Then he walked away. Nobody said anything, but all the other circus performers avoided meeting my eye.”

  There was a movement behind them. Olivia realised that her father had come back into the room and had been listening. She felt wretched, as if she had been caught betraying a terrible secret.

  “It’s all right, Liv,” said Jack, touching her cheek tenderly. “It’s good to face the truth. I’ve been trying to ignore it, and your grandmother has a right to know why we need her help.”

  He turned to Alicia.

  “There is an old circus saying, Alicia, which is that fear is a jealous mistress and once she has you in her grip, she never lets you go. Well, fear has caught me and is holding me tight. I’ve lost my nerve.”

  “Like some actors do with stage fright,” whispered Alicia with a little shudder.

  Jack nodded sadly. “I’ve watched Liv practise every day, but I haven’t been up there myself since. I can’t face the moment of stepping out on to the wire. It feels like a void waiting to swallow me up. Regrettably, there have been consequences. Audiences stopped coming and gradually the other performers drifted away too. I couldn’t blame them. Everyone’s got to eat. In the end, we found ourselves alone in Italy with no money. It was either Toni’s engagement ring or the battered old Big Top that had to go. Of course, there was no contest. I sold the Big Top and we had just enough to get back home to England.” Jack held their gazes, then he added fiercely, “But I’m going to defeat my demons and get back on the wire! I promise you, Liv and Eel. I will do it.”

  He smiled as if he was already thinking what that would feel like, but everyone else in the room had tears sliding down their cheeks.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Are you sure you won’t stay, Jack? There’s plenty of room,” said Alicia. “I know we have history, and that there has been bad feeling between us, but you really would be very welcome here. You are my son-in-law and the father of my daughter’s children. Giving you a home when you most need it is the least I can do.”

  “It’s kind of you, Alicia,” replied Jack. “But although my girls need a home, I can’t live on your charity. I’d feel useless. I need to go away for a while and try to restore the family fortunes. Besides, it would be too difficult with me here. I love the circus; you hate it. You love the theatre but since Toni’s death I find it too painful to watch anyone acting, because I always think how much better Toni would have been in the role. Before long, we’d be falling out again. It would never work. Besides, this place is full of Toni. This is where she grew up. I’d be living with a ghost looking over my shoulder. It’s better that I go.”

  “But where will you go?” asked Eel, who had just walked into the room with Olivia.

  “I’m going to stay with my old friend, Pablo. He’s got a spare room and he’s going to help me with my money-making idea.”

  “What is it?” asked Eel, clinging to his arm.

  “It’s a secret,” smiled Jack. “But who knows, maybe it will make us all millionaires!”

  “Cool,” said Eel. “I’d like you to be a millionaire and then you can pay me all the pocket money you owe me.”

  Olivia hadn’t really been listening. She was trying to think where she had heard the name Pablo before, but couldn’t remember. She was about to ask Jack when Alicia spoke.

  “Well, if you think that it’s best that you go, that’s all settled then. I’ll keep the girls here with me.” She held out her hand to Jack. “Goodbye, Jack, and good luck. I hope it all works out, I really do from the bottom of my heart. I’ll leave you to make your goodbyes and go and call you a taxi.”

  Alicia was trying to be tactful and allow the children some time alone with their father, but to Olivia it felt as though she was just trying to bundle Jack out of all their lives as quickly as possible.

  Their leave-taking with their father was emotional. “Be good for your grandmother, my lovelies,” said Jack, “and I’ll be back for you as soon as I can.”

  “Take me with you!” said Olivia. “I can help you. I won’t get in the way, I promise.”

  “Oh, Liv. I wish I could. But I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do on my own. The best way you can help me is by staying here with your gran where I know you’ll be safe and looked after. It won’t be for long, sweetie, I promise,” said her father, hugging both his daughters.

  Olivia felt rejected.

  “When you come back, I’ll be the bestest dancer in the whole world!” said Eel.

  “Have you asked Alicia where I can practise my high-wire walking?” asked Olivia, clinging to Jack’s arm.

  “Actually, Liv, I feel I’ve already asked enough. Your grandmother has offered you a home and an education. Wait a week or two until you’ve all got to know each other better and then ask her yourself. When she realises how much it means to you, I’m sure she’ll find you somewhere, but I just don’t feel I can ask her this very minute. She’s already doing so much for us.” He saw Olivia’s stricken face. “Stick it out, Olivia. Be brave. It won’t be for long, and all the things you learn here will be good for your tightrope-walking. A couple of months of rest from it won’t do any harm; it might even do you some good.”

  “A few months’ rest hasn’t done you any good, has it?” said Olivia furiously. As soon as the words were out, Olivia regretted them, but she couldn’t take them back or stop the terrible wounded look flashing across her father’s face. He hugged her close to him and kissed her.

  “I love you, Liv. I’m trying to make a future for us, a future that Toni would have been proud of. I’m sorry if you feel I’ve failed you, but I really am doing my best.”

  Olivia wanted to hug him forever and tell him how much she loved him, but she felt stung by his words, so she turned her face when he bent to give her one final kiss and didn’t see how hurt he was or the tear that glistened in his eye.

  She stood alone in the living room while Eel went with him down the stairs to the glass front doors. Suddenly Olivia knew she couldn’t let her father leave like that. She raced through the endless corridors and down the three flights of stairs to the foyer of the academy, desperate to say she was sorry and to tell him how much she loved him and that she thought he was the bravest man in the world.

  She tore out of the doors and stumbled breathlessly down the steps. But she was too late; the taxi was already disappearing around the corner. Olivia felt as if she had been kicked in the stomach, and the pain was worse because she knew it was self-inflicted.

  It was only later when she was lying in bed that Olivia remem
bered who Pablo was. He was Jack’s former agent, who had helped him to set up his most famous stunts. Stunts that were very dangerous and required nerves of steel. A little knot of fear settled in Olivia’s stomach and took up home there.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Olivia stood in the middle of the corridor, desperately studying her timetable and feeling as if she was caught in an endlessly revolving door from which there was no escape. Her brain had turned to mush and she couldn’t work out if she was supposed to be heading to singing in the Callas Rehearsal Room, musical theatre in the Sondheim Space or ballet in the Pavlova Studio. The Swan was like a rabbit warren spread out over three floors. Trying to find your way around was difficult, and nobody in her class except Georgia and Aeysha had made any attempt to help her. Even Tom McCavity, who had seemed so funny and nice, was now keeping his distance as if she had somehow offended him.

  She got out her map. Olivia knew that the theatre, cafeteria and school hall took up the whole of the ground floor of the huge building, but she had been surprised to discover that there were also music practice rooms there. The upper floors were even more warren-like – a mixture of classrooms and rehearsal rooms. Once, walking past an unmarked room, she had heard terrible screams and had rushed in thinking somebody was being murdered, only to discover that the seniors were rehearsing Macbeth. She had backed out of the room, red-faced and embarrassed.

  She kept turning up in the wrong rooms in the right clothes or the right rooms in the wrong clothes. She didn’t really care; she hated every class equally. She didn’t mind the morning academic classes so much, but the vocational lessons in the afternoon were hell. Fortunately they were a hell that stopped at 5 p.m. each day when the final bell sounded and the children tumbled wearily but excitedly out of their classes, rubbing their aching muscles and dreaming of their future careers in the theatre.

  Olivia wondered whether she might just sneak to the girls’ changing room, stay there for the rest of the day and hope nobody missed her, or whether Abbie Cardew or one of the prefects would discover her and send her to class. Abbie, at least, was always kind to her.

  Around her swirled children dressed in practice clothes, all heading purposefully towards their next classes, ballet shoes slung over their shoulders and copies of scripts or musical scores tucked under their arms. At the end of the corridor she spotted Eel skipping her way towards a jazz class, talking so animatedly with her new friends she didn’t even glance at her forlorn elder sister. Olivia wished that Eel would notice her and run up and take her hand, but she didn’t. Olivia was overwhelmed by a sense of grief: she had lost her old life, and her dad, and now she was losing Eel to the Swan and dancing. She had always been the one who had tried to keep her crazy little sister safe, but now it was Olivia who needed someone to hold her hand.

  More pupils passed by, including a group of older boys talking loudly about forming a boy band, and another boy, carrying a cello, who stopped for a moment to scan the upcoming auditions board and accidently rested it on Olivia’s toe. A gaggle of excited girls pushed past her to join a group of children being taken for a screen test for a remake of The Railway Children. Most of the children took no notice of her, but a few nudged each other as they passed. Olivia had already made an impression, and it wasn’t an entirely good one.

  Things had gone wrong over breakfast on the first day when Alicia was explaining the timetable to her granddaughters.

  “You’ll be taking all the dance options, Eel,” said Alicia, “and I’ll also be arranging a number of private classes for you. We’ll reassess the situation in a few weeks to see how you’re progressing.” Eel wriggled about in her chair and beamed happily.

  “Now, Olivia,” said Alicia, turning to her elder granddaughter. “It’s probably best if you follow a more general vocational curriculum until we discover where your talents lie.”

  “They lie in the circus,” said Olivia sulkily. She hadn’t slept a wink and felt as edgy as a crocodile in a handbag factory.

  “So Jack tells me. But I’m afraid there isn’t any circus training at the Swan. It’s really not an area in which we have any interest. We’re a performing arts school and our students are heading for the legitimate theatre or TV and the movies, not the sawdust ring.” Alicia was irritated by Olivia’s sulky face and spoke more harshly than she had intended.

  She’d spent so many lonely hours fantasising about being reunited with her grandchildren, and had spent so much time and effort trying to track them down. But now they were here, sitting at her breakfast table, Olivia’s resentful face just brought back all Alicia’s memories of her arguments with her own daughter. For Alicia, whose own career had been brutally cut short by illness rather than choice, her daughter’s decision to willingly give up the stage was incomprehensible, and she had never recovered from the shock of waking up one morning to find that Toni had run away to join Jack and the circus, abandoning both her mother and her career. She looked now at Olivia’s wan face and memories of Toni came flooding back. She turned away as tears filled her eyes. Even looking at Olivia felt tender and painful.

  Olivia watched her grandmother turn her back on her and felt totally bereft. Nobody cared about her or what she wanted; not Eel, who was thrilled to be at the Swan, not Jack, who, after all the talk of partnership, had clearly decided he didn’t need her, and definitely not Alicia, who hated the circus and seemed to hold some kind of personal grudge against her, too.

  A week later she still felt exactly the same. Jack had been impatient with her on the phone when she had complained about how horrible everything was at the Swan, such as having to do ballet with the seven-year-olds, which was downright humiliating.

  “I feel like an elephant in a room full of baby gazelles,” she said, but Jack had just laughed and said that elephants were much more interesting creatures than gazelles. Even Eel was unsympathetic when Olivia moaned about the Swan and about how she couldn’t practise the high-wire.

  “Why don’t you just ask Gran if there’s somewhere you can practise?”

  “She’ll only say no,” said Olivia, pushing out her bottom lip.

  “You don’t know until you ask,” said Eel patiently.

  “I do,” said Olivia. “She’s made it quite clear that she hates everything to do with the circus and thinks that circus artists are no better than performing sea lions. She even seems to think that the ring is still sawdust. It’s not worth the bother.”

  Eel shook her head. There was no point in arguing with her sister in this mood; she knew from past experience that you just had to wait for the sun to come out again from behind the cloud in Olivia’s head.

  Standing in the corridor, Olivia turned her timetable round again and realised that she was due in acting. She turned miserably on her heel and headed up the stairs, dragging her feet.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Olivia slipped into the Wilde Room, hoping that nobody would notice her, and tried to make herself invisible in a corner. The class had begun long ago. Aeysha, Tom and William Todd were acting out a scene from The Secret Garden. Olivia had seen the three of them sitting together at lunchtime in the school cafeteria, running over their lines together while they bolted down vegetable risotto. They were taking this performance in front of their twenty-four classmates and Mr Shaw as seriously as if they were acting before an audience of a thousand people in a West End theatre.

  Everyone watched them closely. At the end there was a tiny silence and then everyone applauded enthusiastically.

  “I really enjoyed that. Thank you,” said Sebastian Shaw, before giving the children some notes about their performances. “Don’t hurry too much, William; you’re inclined to gabble. Good work, Tom. I like the way you use stillness and silence on stage. Aeysha, you need to think a bit harder about how Mary Lennox really feels. She’s much more than just a monster; she behaves badly because she’s lost everything she loves: family, country, an entire way of life. You’ve got to find a way of making us understand that all s
he says and does is informed by that.”

  He invited the other children to constructively criticise the actors’ performances. Sebastian Shaw was always talking about how important it was for actors to learn to be self-critical and said that process began by learning to discuss – but not judge – other people’s performances.

  Olivia glanced around and caught Georgia looking at her. Most people in the class kept their distance from Olivia, but she often found Georgia looking at her as if she was on the verge of confessing something momentous to her. Olivia turned away without acknowledging her. She liked Georgia and she needed a friend, but she was wary because Georgia was always hanging around on the fringes of a group that had Katie Wilkes-Cox at its glittering centre. Olivia was determined not to have anything to do with a stage-school brat like her.

  It was Katie who stood up now and went to the front of the class. She flicked back her hair and then launched into a speech from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. She was playing Miranda, a young girl who has just witnessed a shipwreck in a terrible storm and is telling her father, Prospero, what she has seen and asking him to use his powers to stop the storm and save the ship’s passengers.

  “If by your art, my dearest father, you have

  Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.”

  Olivia watched, and thought about Jack and how the accident had turned their family life upside down and how he had been powerless to do anything about it. If Eel had never run into the road, they’d still be in Italy or maybe in Ireland or Brittany or Cornwall now, and she would be doing a double act with her dad. Instead she was at the stupid Swan Academy watching Katie Wilkes-Cox pretending to be somebody else. Not very well, in Olivia’s opinion. Katie, thought Olivia suddenly, wasn’t being Miranda, she was acting being Miranda. Rather too loudly and slightly hysterically. It was false, like everything else at the Swan, thought Olivia, who hated the fact that everyone was so bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and eager to please. The way the jazz teacher, Mrs Merman, always said, “Smile, children, smile,” made Olivia want to snarl with rage and bite her.