by Hazel Osmond
‘You here for the Drama-Club meeting?’ the barman called and Mack heard one of the men at the table tut.
When Mack admitted he was, the barman said, ‘They’re out back. Sonia said you’d be coming. Get you a drink?’
Despite desperately wanting a vodka and tonic, he bought Matt Harper a pint of something called ‘Sheep’s Tackle’ and headed towards an archway at the back of the room, aware that the surge of adrenalin now roaring around his body was taking his mind off his sore heels. He glanced at his watch. Only five past seven, she might not be here yet.
Under the arch he went and had to conclude that no, she definitely wasn’t here yet, unless she was an old lady of about eighty dressed in a lilac suit, one of two men or a full-sized snooker table jammed up against the far wall.
The man facing him with a pinched little face and a turned-down mouth had given him an unfriendly look when he’d walked in, but the other bloke, the one with his back to him, had turned and smiled. His eyebrows were so thick and dark, Mack had thought for an instant that he had black masking tape stuck on his face, and those, along with his short, closely cropped hair, should have made him look threatening. Instead the open face and that broad smile suggested a child’s drawing of a big, friendly clown without the make-up.
‘Are you him,’ the pinched-looking man said, ‘the writer guy from Brindley?’
‘Yes, yes I am. Matt Harper, pleased to meet you.’
‘Sonia said you were young.’ The man reached out for the glass of red wine in front of him and sipped it as if he was swallowing down vinegar.
Before Mack could apologise for his age, the friendly-looking clown stood up, ‘Hey, give o’er, Neale, divvn’t start all that.’
Mack wasn’t sure the guy was talking English, but as he was coming towards him with his hand out he guessed he was introducing himself. It was the roughest hand Mack had ever held, like the coarsest sandpaper. ‘I’m Doug,’ the guy said, ‘this here is Neale and this is Marjorie.’ The woman inclined her head graciously.
‘Divvn’t be hard on Neale,’ Doug said, letting go of Mack’s hand, ‘he’s just papping himself that you’ll muscle him oot.’
Mack must have looked confused or deaf because Marjorie leaned forward.
‘Doug is from Ashington originally,’ she said as if that was explanation enough.
‘Aye, I’ll gan more slowly,’ Doug nodded. ‘Forgot you were a southerner. Sit down.’
Mack sat down, taking a sip of his beer to give himself a little breathing space.
OK, nobody here to worry about – happy idiot, old woman and sulky saddo.
As if he’d heard his opinion of him, Neale said, quite aggressively, ‘I suppose you’ve done lots of acting?’
‘No,’ Mack lied, having done quite a bit of acting at school and a lot more as a journalist. ‘And I’m not looking for a part in your play. Just happy to help backstage out of the limelight. Never done this kind of thing before, but it seemed a good way to meet people. It can get a bit lonely, you know, walking, writing and living alone.’
Had that last sentiment been a bit too much? Well, that was Matt Harper for you: earnest and enthusiastic.
Neale looked sadly at his wineglass. ‘You might not want to act, but when Finlay sees how young you are …’
‘The important thing with Shakespeare,’ Marjorie butted in, ‘is speaking the verse properly. So few people can. Clear enunciation, feel the rhythm, don’t gabble. Feel, feel, feel.’
‘Aye, Marjorie, you’re not wrong,’ Doug said earnestly, but he winked surreptitiously at Mack.
At least the happy idiot looked like a bit of fun, even though his inability to speak English might be something of a barrier.
‘Many more to come?’ Mack asked, taking his cagoule off and bundling it up so that the Ordnance-Survey map in the inside pocket was visible.
‘Oh aye, standing room only when they all get here.’
Mack took a sip of his drink and moved his stool a little so that he had a view of the archway: always better to see the target before it saw you. Two middle-aged men appeared. The one in a suit had very little hair; the other had a lot of it, ginger and tied back in a ponytail.
Ah, something office-based and ageing hippy.
They were introduced as Gerry and Steve and after shaking hands they commented on how young he was.
‘Says he hasn’t done any acting,’ Neale got in morosely before Mack could speak.
‘That won’t matter when Finlay sees him,’ ginger-haired Steve said, and both men went and sat on a different table and started to discuss him in low voices.
So, not making any enemies and just fitting in. That’s going well.
‘They’ll get o’er it,’ Doug said with a little laugh, ‘divvn’t sweat.’
‘Oh Doug.’ Marjorie had a pained expression on her powdered face.
Doug grinned. ‘Apologies. I meant, divvn’t perspire.’
Mack hid his smile at that and took off his fleece, trying to ignore the whiff of his own sweat. He placed his glasses on the table.
‘Nice jumper,’ Doug said.
A few more men arrived, all older than him and all shook his hand warily. ‘Sodding Hell,’ a particularly dissolute-looking guy called Angus said, ‘you’re no more than a baby.’
After that, women started to arrive and with each one Mack felt his heart speed and then slow as it became obvious it was not Jennifer. Doug kept up a stream of introductions: ‘This is Susan, she’s our stage manager’, ‘Here’s Lydia and Wendy, they’re Costumes’, ‘Say hello to Pamela’.
Mack gave up trying to remember names as it got closer and closer to half past seven and he felt more and more jittery. A young woman walked through the arch and his anticipation peaked and then fell away as Doug said, ‘This is Jocelyn.’ The woman slid her gaze over him, and Mack decided that he didn’t much care for her. Despite her vitality and shiny, bouncy hair, there was something mean-looking about her face.
‘Jesus,’ she said, plonking her bag down on a table, ‘you’ll have this lot booking in for Botox.’ She finished off with a snide little laugh and just on the edge of his vision he saw Doug make an irritated movement of his head.
Right, so, you don’t like her either.
‘I hear,’ Jocelyn said, ‘that you’re from Bristol. And what is it you’re writing? Something about Northumberland?’
Answering that was easy, he’d rehearsed it enough. People nodded as they listened, and he waited for the next, inevitable question about whether he’d written any other books.
‘Yes, about walking … in Dorset and North Somerset.’
Jocelyn smirked. ‘How many did you sell, three, four?’
There was that irritated movement from Doug again.
Another little rush of people came in before a woman walked under the arch whom Mack sincerely hoped was Jennifer. With everything pushed up and pert, her tiny waist accentuated by a wide belt, she was gorgeous. Ripe, one might even say. Her brown, shoulder-length hair was silky, her mouth was a pillowy pout and she had those big eyes you could swim in; naked if you were lucky. He was beginning to regret that he had made up a girlfriend.
Even her walk had a seductive air to it, a little wiggle that did lovely things to her tight top.
Doug caught his look. ‘This is Lisa,’ he said.
Mack wondered whether if he put his glasses on he would look like a sexy swot.
Lisa gave him a slow, loaded smile. ‘Hello, Matt. You’re the writer, aren’t you? Got any pencils you need sharpening?’
‘Right,’ Doug said abruptly. ‘You want to give me a hand at the bar, Matt?’
‘Word of warning,’ Doug said when they were ordering the drinks, ‘you want to watch that Lisa. She’s a bit of a man-eater.’
Yesssssssss.
Doug’s masking-tape eyebrows met his hairline. ‘She’s had a go at most of the men in the group and last year some of Finlay’s sixth-formers came to help backstage, and it was carnage.�
� Doug handed the barman some money. ‘I mean, divvn’t get me wrong, she’s a smashing lass. Really good accountant, canny actress, just has a lay ’em and leave ’em attitude, you know?’
What a wasted opportunity.
‘I see.’ He tried to look Matt Harper’s brand of shocked.
‘Aye, well, thought I better warn you seeing as Sonia said you had a lass. Been gannin’ out long?’
‘Couple of years,’ Mack said hoping he’d managed to sound happy about it. ‘And thanks for the warning, but I don’t think Lisa would be interested in me.’
‘You’ve got a pulse and your own teeth,’ Doug said, pocketing his change and handing Mack two pints of beer to carry, ‘she’ll definitely be interested.’
Mack returned to the back room with something of a spring in his step and under Doug’s direction got the drinks to the right people before deciding that the pint he’d drunk earlier was now pressing on his bladder.
‘Just going to the bathroom,’ he said loudly, pleased at how that had come out slightly old-fashioned. Still no sign of Jennifer or this Finlay bloke, but they couldn’t be long; it was after half past and there was, as Doug had said, now standing room only. Passing Lisa, he gave her a smile, aiming for something that looked encouraging without being promiscuous. He was spoken for, after all. That made him laugh to himself in the toilets and he had to remind himself to focus.
Remember who you’re meant to be. Stop getting distracted by the lovely Lisa. You’re here for Jennifer. She’s the target.
He arrived back in the bar to find two new people had arrived, and from the knot of people gathered around them, he guessed they must be Finlay and Jennifer. He felt his stomach tighten and his mouth go dry, but in some weird way, he was looking forward to getting started.
Bring it on.
‘This is Matt,’ Doug said, spotting him. ‘Matt, this is Finlay.’ The lanky man by Doug’s side came towards him, his hand outstretched and beaming as if Mack was his long-lost relative, but Mack wasn’t sure later whether he did ever shake Finlay’s hand because as he reached forward he saw the woman with the blonde hair turn to look at him and his mind registered the lovely posture and the beautiful high cheekbones before the reason why there had been no picture of her in O’Dowd’s briefing file became horribly clear.
He stared at the scar on the right-hand side of her face running in a jagged line from the corner of her eye to the corner of her mouth, branching out at a couple of points mid-cheek to form tributaries that disappeared under her hair at ear level. Where it touched the corner of her eye it made the upper eyelid droop a little.
His first thought was that whatever had happened to her, she was lucky not to have lost that eye.
His second one was crap, crap, crap, crap, crap.
CHAPTER 9
Jennifer saw the look of disgust in the new guy’s eyes before he could hide it and turned away immediately, head down. She took a deep breath in and let it out, and by then Finlay had taken charge, pumping the guy’s hand up and down and saying how marvellous it was to see him.
‘We don’t bite, do we?’ Finlay said, indicating the group with a sweep of one of his long arms, and Jennifer looked around for somewhere to hide. Neale leaped up as if his piles had just burst into flame. Sitting down, she ducked behind the fuss of getting out her A4 pad and a pen.
Finlay called the meeting to order, and she glanced up to see Doug was watching her, and when he smiled, encouragingly, there was such sweetness in his big face that she wished she felt able to smile back.
She was aware that this new guy, Matt Harper, was sitting off to her left and she guessed he would be staring at Finlay with a glassy expression, and that wild horses wouldn’t get him to look her way again. She’d seen it before; he’d be sorry he couldn’t have handled it better and now terrified that if he did look at her again it would seem as if he was gawping.
She wrote the date on her pad and forced herself to concentrate on Finlay working his magic, enthusing them all with his eagerness. Keep her mind on that, and the first shockwave of humiliation would go.
‘So, another Shakespeare,’ Finlay said. ‘You did such a fantastic job on the Scottish play it’s a pity to let all that experience go to waste.’
‘Not to mention the scenery,’ Doug added.
People laughed and Jennifer saw that Matt Harper was about a beat too slow to join in, as if he was only doing it because he’d suddenly realised everyone else was. Probably as chewed up as her. She noted how Lisa had managed to bag the stool next to him.
Well, her first impression of him, the one she’d grabbed before scurrying behind her hair, had been right: he was good-looking. The kind of good-looking that made all your nerve endings shift about. Certainly the sexiest guy she’d seen since she’d come back home. Brown hair, quite shaggy, with a slight wave in it, and brown eyes. Bit of stubble. She looked down at her pad of paper. Made her think of a pirate somehow; all he needed was an earring. A pirate in a horrible jumper.
‘What do we know about Twelfth Night then?’ Finlay said when he had their attention again.
Jennifer wrote down ‘Twelfth Night’ on the pad for no other reason than it made her think about something other than what had just happened. She turned her head slightly so he was just on the edge of her vision. Despite his lumpy jumper, Matt Harper looked quite athletic, not solid. Nice legs. Good hands.
‘Twelfth Night isn’t a tragedy, of course, but it does deal with the big themes – love and its delusions, deception, mistaken identities. A twin brother and sister, Sebastian and Viola, get shipwrecked and each thinks the other is dead. Alone in a strange land, Viola dresses as a man …’
‘Whoa, it’s that kind of play is it?’ Doug asked, again to much laughter.
‘… and gains employment with a duke called Orsino. Now, this duke is in love with a lady called Olivia, and he gives our Viola the task of carrying love messages to her. But Olivia doesn’t want the Duke and the poor woman falls for Viola, whom, obviously, she thinks is a man. In the meantime, Viola herself has fallen for the Duke.’
‘Just a normal day on The Jeremy Kyle Show,’ Angus joked.
Jennifer wondered why she had imagined this Matt Harper would be middle-aged.
‘Will it be in modern dress again?’ someone asked.
Jennifer wrote down ‘modern dress’ and looked at the words as if they meant nothing to her.
‘No, Elizabethan costume this time.’
Jennifer distinctly heard Lisa say, ‘Have you ever worn a codpiece, Matt?’ and Jocelyn, sitting opposite, looked at Matt Harper as if she wanted to take a bite out of him.
‘Jealous Jocelyn,’ Jennifer wrote on the pad and then hurriedly scratched it through and replaced it with ‘Elizabethan costume’.
Why do I always have to be on the outside looking in these days?
‘The important thing with Shakespeare,’ Marjorie announced, ‘is speaking the verse properly. So few people can. Clear enunciation, feel the rhythm, don’t gabble. Feel, feel, feel.’
There were a few covert smiles around the group, but Finlay practically left the ground. ‘Exactly, Marjorie. You’ve hit the nail on the head again.’ The way he clapped his hands together suggested he wanted to start rehearsing right there and then.
Was it envy she was feeling now? She didn’t know, hard to tease it out from the other feelings of discontent. It was these moments of meeting someone new that made her feel most cruelly the gap between what things had been like before and what they were like now. She could still remember that delicious feeling of being at the start of something; recognising that the other person found you as attractive as you found them. The teasing and pirouetting of a good flirt. All gone. She wasn’t even going to think what a man would do if she came on to him.
‘Scripts are on the pool table,’ Finlay said. ‘Auditions Monday, hall over the road as normal. Isn’t that right, Jennifer?’
She started. ‘Isn’t what right?’
‘Vi
llage hall,’ he said patiently, ‘booked for Monday for the auditions?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Six thirty, no, sorry, seven thirty. Um … No, it’s seven … seven … Sorry.’ Brilliant. Now Matt Harper was going to think it wasn’t only her face that had got damaged.
‘So, Jen will pass round a pad. Put your name on it and whether you want to act or help backstage.’
Matt Harper put his hand up.
‘Can you give me some idea of the timescale involved, for rehearsals and then the play? Sorry, the rest of you probably know all this off by heart.’
‘Matt, my dear man,’ Finlay said using the heel of his hand to pummel at his forehead, ‘I am an idiot. Everyone, this is Matt, here writing a book, comes from –’ Finlay raised his eyebrows and Matt said ‘Bristol’, and a couple of people made ‘ooh arrr’ noises before Finlay went on – ‘In answer to your very sensible question, we only have a six-week rehearsal period, but it’s three rehearsals a week – Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, plus some Sunday afternoons as we get nearer to performing. Play dates? Thursday, April fifteenth and Friday, April sixteenth. Just before Easter. All quite intense, I’m afraid.’
Jennifer saw Matt Harper put on some glasses and write something in a notebook. Now he looked like a pirate who probably had A-levels in piracy. She passed the pad to Pamela on her left.
‘So, Harper?’ Lisa’s voice drifted across. ‘Probably Viking blood in you. They were always round here pillaging. How’s your pillaging?’
She didn’t hear Matt Harper’s reply because Pamela had reached out and grabbed her hand. Jennifer braced herself. Poor Pamela, she saw herself as a caring, sympathetic person and would be mortified to know people called her ‘the leech’ behind her back.
‘Are you all right, Jennifer?’ she said, her head at an angle and her thick glasses magnifying her eyes so that she seemed like a very caring owl. ‘Only I couldn’t help noticing that awkward moment with the new man, can I just suggest—’
‘Sorry, Pamela,’ Jennifer was already getting up, ‘I’ve just remembered I need to help bring the sheep in for the night.’
