If It Wasn't For Sarah

by Lynne Roberts

  Chapter 4.

  Despite having to do most of it in our spare time, by the beginning of the second week of the term the main planning for the Dance/Drama was done and everyone ended up pretty happy. Most of the parts were worked out, mainly those ones that needed the most rehearsing, and Ms Cutter said she’d ‘help us’ choose the others later on.

  The ballet girls got to be fairies, naturally, as they were not about to miss out on a chance to swan about in fancy dresses, and as Brian was stage manager he would shout instructions to everyone from the wings. At Ms Cutter’s suggestion, or rather instruction, I got to be the prompt.

  ‘You have written the production, after all, Chelsea,’ she said. ‘So you are the person who knows it best and the obvious choice for prompt.’

  I was going to point out that Shakespeare had actually written it, all I’d done was to muck it around and mix it up a bit, but there wasn’t much chance of him making an appearance to be prompt! Not that Sarah would need much prompting, and not many people had lines apart from her. For which they were all thankful, believe me. I was so pleased not to be a witch or a donkey I weakly agreed, as I knew there was no chance of the ballet girls letting me be a fairy. I would have liked to do the Lady MacBeth scene though. I really fancied myself as an anguished murderess, wringing my blood stained hands. But Sarah wasn’t having any of it.

  ‘I have to do that part, Chelsea,’ she explained patiently.

  ‘But you’re doing lots of other parts. It surely wouldn’t matter if I did just that one,’ I pleaded.

  ‘I have to do it. It is a pivotal part of my role,’ Sarah replied firmly, so that was that. It didn’t stop me practising being Lady MacBeth at home, though. I stood in front of my bedroom mirror moaning and pretending to sleepwalk. That lasted until I looked up one day and saw Billy looking at me with an astounded expression.

  ‘Are you feeling sick?’ he asked. ‘Why have you got your eyes closed and your face all twisted up like that?’

  ‘Go away,’ I roared and slammed the door. I tried to get back into the mood but I bumped my knee on the edge of a drawer and decided to keep my eyes open after that. So I gave up and decided to accept the role of prompt graciously.

  Ms Cutter told Brian he could organise the rehearsals. He was getting bossier by the day and had started wearing sunglasses everywhere. He said it was so people wouldn’t recognise him and ask him for autographs. The teachers all made him take them off in class, though, which kind of spoiled the effect.

  ‘I don’t want to have all of us in the media suite together at the same time as it would be too crowded,’ Brian announced one morning, ‘so I’ve set up a rehearsal timetable. We’ll have fairies on Monday, witches on Tuesday, ghosts on Wednesday and I’ll decide the others later in the week.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Ms Cutter. ‘Well done, Brian.’ He looked smug at this, as he usually gets told off most of the time. Some of the other boys muttered a bit but they couldn’t complain with Ms Cutter standing there. And anyway, to do him justice, Brian had decently organised the boys so their rehearsals wouldn’t clash with any of the sports practices.

  We could only have the media suite for the first half of every lunch hour as the other classes used it for their stuff as well. That worked out well as people went straight there when the bell went. Otherwise they would have scattered all over the place to eat their lunch and it would have taken ages to get them all to come back on time. It did mean that they all complained about being hungry and tried to stuff down their sandwiches when they thought no one was looking.

  Sarah and I had to go to every rehearsal. Sarah because she was in every scene, and me to prompt and do any rewriting Sarah decided she wanted. Not that I could rewrite Shakespeare! Ms Cutter would have had fourteen fits. But I could put in extra bits if they were needed, which meant carting around our huge book of Shakespeare every day in case it was needed. I reckoned I had a promising career ahead of me as a weightlifter!

  The first rehearsal was okay – just. Sarah was Titania, the queen of the fairies. She said her bit then sat looking decorative while the ballet girls danced around her. They had pretty definite ideas on the sort of dance they were prepared to do, so I stayed well out of it. It turned out they had been working on stuff with their ballet teacher and even had the music. They had cheated with that. They were supposed to sing a sort of fairy chorus together as they danced but I guess they didn’t want the rest of us to hear them puffing and panting. So Gemma’s mother had got the niece of a friend of hers, who was training to be a singer, to sing the words along with the music and record it for them on tape. She had really worked fast! I was going to object to that, seeing Sarah and I hadn’t been consulted, but decided it was one less thing we didn’t have to do.

  Janice watched from the side. She had already asked if she could be a fairy but Gemma had turned her down flat. I can’t say I blamed her. Janice didn’t exactly look like a fairy. Janice is… how can I put this in a politically correct way? Okay, I can’t. Janice is fat. She’s not unhealthy fat with double chins or anything. She’s just thick and sort of solid. She says she has big bones, which is why she thumps when she walks. She says she’s not fat, it’s because she’s not tall enough, and when she grows another thirty centimetres she will be perfectly in proportion. I’m a bit doubtful. I’ve seen Janice’s parents and they’re both about as tall as Janice is now. So if I were Janice, I wouldn’t be holding my breath!

  The ballet girls danced around the room with Gemma calling out instructions.

  ‘No, no, I’m in front,’ said Gemma loudly, pushing Violet to the back as she twirled around with her arms outstretched.

  ‘You’ll have to move over a little, darling’ Brian pointed out. ‘You mustn’t stand in front of Sarah.’ Now Gemma has always loathed Brian since the time in Year Five when he put a spider in her desk and she screamed the place down and our teacher told her not to be a ‘silly little girl.’ Any other time she would have hit him for talking to her like that, but she wasn’t prepared to upset Sarah too much in case she made me write the ballet girls out of the production. They all gave Brian filthy looks and Gemma, who is the absolute leader, said,

  ‘Of course we won’t stand in front of Sarah. She is far too important, aren’t you Sarah?’

  Sarah ignored this and Brian pretended he hadn’t heard it.

  ‘We’ll all just stand at the back then, shall we?’ suggested Gemma sarcastically. ‘Perhaps we should just stand still instead of dancing, so that we don’t take the attention away from Sarah. Or perhaps you’d prefer it if we didn’t bother coming onto the stage at all? I mean as the stage manager, Brian, obviously your wishes are paramount. It doesn’t matter what we think. We are merely here to do what you want us to.’ All the ballet girls fumed and pouted at Sarah who looked unconcerned as she read her lines to herself. Brian was starting to look agitated when fortunately Mr Murdoch, the head of department came in. Otherwise things could have got very nasty.

  I missed the next rehearsal, which was the one with the witches, as I had an appointment in town to have my braces tightened. It’s not too bad, as Mum always takes me to town for the whole day and we do some shopping. She buys me a really great lunch in a café before the orthodontist. She does it because the first time I went I came home and screamed and yelled and fussed about how much the braces hurt – well they did! I howled and asked to go and have them off again but Mum said no, because she wanted me to have lovely, straight teeth and ‘I would be grateful when I was older.’ I said I’d be grateful now if I had them removed and I was happy to live with crooked teeth. Dad said no because it was costing a zillion dollars to have it done and all the family was going to have to live on bread and water for the next two years. Plus, all the extra work he would have to do was giving him grey hairs before his time. I pointed out that if I had the braces off it wouldn’t cost him anything but he said he had signed a contract so he would have to pay for them anyway so we had to keep going and ‘a bi
t of pain never hurt anyone.’

  I should have reminded him of that when he was changing the car tyre, that time last summer when we had a puncture, and he dropped the jack on his bare foot. Malcolm and Billy both learnt two new swear words that day and Mum fussed over Dad like he was a baby. He put on a limp every time he remembered for weeks and got to sit with his foot on a stool and eat his dinner in front of TV. We are not allowed to eat in front of the TV on pain of death. It is so unfair.

  So Mum feels sorry for me on orthodontist days and makes it a special ‘girls’ shopping time. Mind you, it would be better if her ideas were a bit more up to date. This time we were going past a shoe shop when I pointed out, very reasonably I thought, that I needed another pair of shoes.

  Mum said, ‘Of course you don’t need any more shoes, Chelsea. The ones you have are perfectly adequate.’

  ‘But I do need another pair of shoes. You can’t expect me to wear my school shoes when I go out.’

  ‘Why not?’ Mum asked

  ‘Why not? It’s obvious why not,’ I raged. ‘They are school shoes. They are terrible. Boring brown with sensible laces and flat rubber soles. Urk. Whoever chose them obviously has no fashion sense. Brown shoes are not ‘in’ and I doubt they ever will be.’

  ‘As far as I am concerned, sneakers for sports plus school shoes plus gumboots plus slippers plus jandals are as many types of footwear as any person could possibly need. After all, you can only wear one pair at a time.’

  ‘You don’t understand. Of course I need another pair. Everyone else has two pairs of shoes or even more. I’m the only person in the class who has to wear their school shoes when they go out. And all because you and Dad are so mean you won’t buy me any others.’

  ‘That’s quite enough, young lady. Sometimes I think that all you do is think of me as an Eftpos card instead of a person. I am certainly not intending to buy you yet another pair of shoes and nagging won’t get you anywhere. Nor will sulking,’ Mum added as I scowled at her. I tried very hard to pretend I didn’t know her or belong with her after that. I pretended I was helping an old lady cross the road when she grabbed my hand. Honestly! You’d think I was still four years old!

  I figured it was worth having a try for a new T-shirt. Stacy and Angela had each bought one to rehearse in and they looked really awesome.

  ‘I need a black T-shirt for rehearsals,’ I announced at the dinner table.

  Mum and Dad ignored me and went on eating their tea.

  ‘Dad, can I have a black T-shirt? They don’t cost as much as shoes,’ I asked. He’s usually a softer touch than Mum if you can get him in the right mood. Unfortunately this didn’t seem to be the time.

  ‘No,’ he said bluntly.

  ‘But everyone else has one,’ I pleaded. It was almost true. Lots of the girls were wearing black T-shirts that year. Long baggy ones that hung down almost to the knees and preferably had a picture of a Harley Davidson on the front. Well, you’d have thought that I’d asked to fly to the moon. Talk about a fuss! Mum went berserk and said,

  ‘You have plenty of clothes already. Why don’t you wear that nice blue top I bought you from Farmers?’

  ‘My blue top! No one is wearing blue tops! I’ll get laughed out of class,’ I protested.

  Dad said, ‘I think you look lovely in whatever you wear.’

  I’m not forgiving that in a hurry. I intend to turn up in a sack to his next firm’s picnic and see if he still thinks that.

  I tried everything to get a black T-shirt. I pointed out that Sarah had one. My mother said,

  ‘How nice for Sarah.’

  I threatened to go on a hunger strike unless I got one.

  Malcolm said ‘Great,’ and Billy said, ‘Are you starting now? Can we eat your pudding then?’

  My father said, ‘Don’t be so silly. Eat up your broccoli at once.’

  I said I would die of shame at being the only girl in my class who didn’t own a black T-shirt because her parents were too mean to get me one and that they’d be sorry when I was dead. That got me sent to my room and Malcolm and Billy got to eat my pudding after all but it still didn’t get me a black T-shirt. I had to wear my blue top after all and it was so shameful and uncool that I’m sure it has scarred my life and I’ll probably have to spend years in therapy when I’m older.

  I’ll definitely need therapy for the end of year disaster. I’m not likely to forget that in a hurry.