‘Jodie?’
‘Well, it was nothing really.’
I felt so stupid. Why had I hidden it from everyone all these years? Everyone carried some pain around with them, no matter what shape it took. It still left an ache in the heart, no matter what had caused it. Why did I think I was different from anyone else? What made me so special, so superior? Everyone else had loved unburdening themselves to the group each week during our course. Why had I held back and felt I didn’t need to? It was time to bite the bullet and show everyone else I didn’t think I was superior, possibly just more scared of being ridiculed than most.
‘I got married. Only the day I did, I discovered my husband was having an affair.’
People were nodding sympathetically. Some looked disappointed. Not very salacious.
‘With my brother.’
A few eyes widened at that.
‘I think about it every day.’
Rupert nodded sagely, a parent whose child has finally owned up to stealing from the cookie jar and is apologizing for it. Maybe I was in for a reprieve.
‘Finally,’ he said. ‘Now, you know the drill. You have broken the terms of your contract. Please collect your stuff from your locker and vacate the premises. You are no longer a student at L.A.D.S.’
‘But . . .’
‘I wish you all the best in the future, both personally and professionally. I am sure you will do some wonderful work on this journey you have already embarked on.’
‘I’m really sorry, Rupert.’
‘As I am, too. I liked you, Jodie. I gave you a chance. And you betrayed my trust.’
I wasn’t going to win. I was in the same room where, a few years earlier, I had stood, overdressed, as my mum came in to berate Rupert for keeping me so late when we had a train to catch. Then I had been hopeful about my glittering career in showbiz. Now I had blown it.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Yes, you said.’
I couldn’t look at the group. It was too embarrassing. I headed for the door. As I did I heard Rupert brightening and clapping his hands to energize everyone.
‘Right! Come on! Let’s do some great work.’
At the door I hesitated. Possibly because this was so scary. I was stepping into a whole new world. The last time I had done this was when I’d stepped out of Sandalan to head to the wedding. Then I was full of excitement, the air heavy with promise. This time there was no positivity, only the knowledge that I had messed up. Big time. Now I had no flat, no college course, no future basically.
M.F.U.
I stood on the street outside L.A.D.S. weighing up my options. I had very few. I walked slowly up and down, unsure where I should go. I checked in my purse. I had the grand total of three pounds and eighty-two pence. That wouldn’t get me to Liverpool, so I had to rule that out. It might get me a Big Mac happy meal, so I wouldn’t go hungry and have to sell a kidney just yet, but it wouldn’t see me through the day. Now, I was by no means a spiritual person. I didn’t sit cross-legged on a floor each morning chanting for world peace and a house in the Cotswolds. Nor did I genuflect at the drop of a hat or mistake shooting stars for UFOs. In fact, I’d never even seen a shooting star and doubted their existence, never mind God’s. But in that moment, I’m not afraid to admit it, I said a little prayer. I looked to the skies and said, ‘Dear God. Please help me see what I am meant to do right now. I have no bloody idea. Sorry for swearing. Is bloody still seen as swearing these days? Well, anyways, you were around yonks ago so it probably is – sorry about that. I just need some guidance. A sign. Your loving daughter, Jodie.’
That made me feel a bit icky.
‘OK, so I’m not really your loving daughter coz I hardly ever believe in you. But any guidance gratefully received. Thanks. And I mean that. Amen. Over and out.’
Just as I finished saying my prayer, a sky-blue Volkswagen Beetle slowed down and pulled up. The passenger window slipped down and I stepped forward. Who was in the car? Surely this was a sign from God! Blimey, he did exist. Inside the car, in the driver’s seat, sat a balding man in his fifties with – bizarrely – dandruff on the collar of his jacket.
‘Yes?’ I bleated, eager for words of wisdom. This would be . . . the sign!
He looked at me, squinting through varifocals. Gosh the Lord’s messengers were a funny-looking lot.
He opened his mouth and I waited.
He said, ‘How much, love?’
‘Sorry?’
‘How much?’
I screwed my eyes up. Then realization hit me like a slap round the chops.
‘Sorry, do you think I’m a prostitute?’
He nodded.
‘Well, I’m not.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’
‘It’s OK.’ I smiled, backing away.
As he pulled off I heard him call, ‘It’s just you really look like one!’
I pulled my faux-fur coat around me and tottered off up the street. Surely God was going to send me a sign? And then I saw one. Straight ahead of me. Almost glowing in the sunlight.
A phone box.
It reminded me of something.
I dug in my pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper, ripped from the back page of a Thompson’s Local Directory. It had a number scrawled on it. I went into the box, ignoring the faint whiff of urine, took a fifty pence piece from my purse and put it in the slot. I dialled the number, heard it ring, then . . .
‘Hello?’
‘Stuart, it’s Jodie.’
‘All right darlin’. How’s it going, babe? I was just thinking about you.’
He sounded genuinely thrilled to hear from me. Not, as I had feared, pissed off that I’d rung him on his mobile while he was at work.
‘Er, not well.’
‘Hang on, I’ll just get down me ladder.’
I heard the clanking of Puma on metal.
‘What’s up?’
‘Oh it’s just . . . I’m sorry to phone you on the mobile, but you said to call you any time and I just didn’t know what to do.’
‘Why? What’s happened?’
‘Well, I’ve been kicked off my course and, well, Moth’s kicked me out of the flat.’
‘Fuckin ’ell. With friends like her, who needs enemas?’
‘I just don’t know what to do.’
‘Right,’ he sounded decisive. It thrilled me. ‘What you do is this. You go round my gaff and you ring flat three and ask Jennifer for the key. She’s in the flat below me and she keeps a spare. I’ll call her now and tell her you’re on your way. Then you let yourself in to my place. You chill out there till I get back tonight and we’ll have a talk and sort it all out. All right, Treacle?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
God I felt relieved.
‘Now I’ve got to get back to work, but listen, Jodie, yeah? It’s all gonna be OK.’
‘OK.’
Was it? Was it really? There was something about his confidence that made me think he could be right.
‘Have a nice bath. Watch some telly. Use my phone, do whatever. I’ll be back about six and I’ll bring a takeaway. D’you like Chinese?’
‘Yes.’
‘Cushty. And remember.’
‘What?’ I felt helpless and fragile in the glow of his no-nonsense go-getting dynamism.
‘If this is sink or swim, I’m blowing up your armbands.’
I smiled.
‘Easy,’ he said, and hung up.
I hung up.
Easy.
EIGHTEEN
86C Clapham Road
London SW9
15 January 2010
Dear Joey,
God, you don’t know how weird this feels after all these years!
And now I’ve started writing, I’m not sure what to say. So I’ll start with the boring option and say how are you? Well, I hope.
I have been wanting to write for ages now, but I’ve been putting it off and putting it off. And then last week I broke my leg! So I’m laid up in bed with nothi
ng to do but think and reflect and watch daytime telly, so there’s no avoiding it. I’m confronting my fears, feeling the pain, or whatever it is they say. Here goes!
(Sorry. I seem to be using exclamation marks a lot. Will try not to! Sorry. I mean, will try not to.)
As you can see I’m still living in London. After I got kicked out of drama school (did Mum tell you? I was mortified when she phoned up the boss of the school and called him a ‘silly Yorkshire pudding’), I got a little bit lucky coz I was in a run of adverts with Charlie Twatface, the chef off the telly. You probably already know this, but what you won’t know is, I still have people screaming shite about fish fingers in my face whenever I leave the house. Imagine. Your sister. Famous. And for being in a fucking fish finger advert. Whatever happened to art, darling?!
(Sorry. Exclamations again. Grrrr!)
The other thing that happened when I left drama school was that I moved in with my new fella, Stu. And I’ve been with him ever since. He’s gorgeous, Joey. I was going to say you’d fancy him, but I don’t want to tempt fate! (Only messing.)
No, Stu’s straight. I made him sign an affidavit when we got together saying that if I ever caught him indulging in anything from heavy petting to full-on dirties with a male member of a) my family or b) the species, I had every entitlement to chop his bollocks off and use them as earrings. So far, so good. (Touch wood – oh, that’s Formica, hang on . . . Wood touched.)
OK, so I’m being slightly flippant, but I just wanted to show you I’ve moved on and hold less of a grudge now than I did five years ago. Call it the healing power of love. Or call it finally going out with someone who actually knows who they are and what they want. If only I’d found that in the first place!
I was completely gutted when I found you doing what you were doing, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t still hurt, but I appreciate your writing to me (ages ago, I know) and I understand that we were all that bit younger, and of course I also understand the beguiling, magical powers of Greg Valentine. Even if I do think he’s a complete twat now. (Do you know Mum has him over for dinner? Feels sorry for him she says. Bitch!) And I suppose me having the current boyf puts everything in perspective a bit, if that makes sense.
Not sure what Mum’s told you about Stu. I can never work out whether she likes him. She laughs at his jokes, but he’s so blokey he like . . . fills the room when he’s there, and I think she likes that and feels threatened by it all at the same time. Like, if he was to breathe out too quickly, all her knick-knacks would vanish in the slipstream. She sometimes looks at him like she’s not sure whether to slap him or snog him. And I feel a bit the same. (Ha ha, don’t tell him I said that if you ever meet him. Ah, I hope you do.)
What’s your fella like? God, I feel so bad, I can’t remember his name. I remember you saying he was dead nice, though, and I hope you’re still together and all’s going well. (I could ring Mum and ask, but I’d rather she didn’t know I was writing to you – she’ll only get excited and I’d rather play this by ear for now, just between you and me. Does that make sense? Hope so – God, the subterfuge I had to go through to get your current address! I had to get Hayls and Debs involved. Hilarious.)
Anyway, listen, I’m rambling now, so I’m gonna sign off and say ta-ra for now. I don’t half miss you, Joey, and it’d be dead nice to see you soon.
Loads of love,
Jodie AKA Fish Finger Woman (easy on the breadcrumbs!)
P.S. You may be wondering how I broke my leg. Let me just say, I was dressed as a mermaid promoting frozen crab sticks in a shopping centre in Bethnal Green when I slipped my flippers on some spilt olive oil. Arse over tit. Thwack. Ouch.
P.P.S. Nightcap?
P.P.P.S. Daytime telly is shite. Just gonna lie here now and wait for Stu to get back from work and ask him to fly to the postbox. Laters!
Wow! Two years I’d been with Stuart now. How had that happened? It seemed to have whizzed by in the blink of an eye. Two years was twenty-four months. Twenty-four months was one hundred and four weeks. A hundred and four weeks was seven hundred and thirty days, which was a shitload of hours if you could be bothered to work it out. We’d rarely had so much as a night apart, and all in his tiny flat on the Clapham Road, which had gradually morphed into our tiny flat, my few possessions crammed up against his. The slim IKEA wardrobe, perfect for a single man, was now obese with a mixture of Fred Perry shirts and glittery disco tops. The sad shelf in the bathroom packed with so many Calvin Klein for Men products and girly Clarins tubes it reminded me of one of those boats you saw on the news, packed with people escaping a war-torn country. Our tastes were intermingled on the walls, Blues Brothers posters rubbing up against Audrey Hepburn looking elegant with a cigarette holder (and not a little disapproving of her wallmates).
The road outside remained the same, but Moth had long gone. I’d seen her moving her stuff out one day and she’d deigned to give me a teary hug as I ran out to say goodbye, her tweedy parents looking on disapprovingly as they’d parked their four by four on a red route. She’d wished me luck with my adverts, then hopped in the back of the car and disappeared without so much as a backwards glance. I knew from the college website that there were regular reunions of everyone in my year, but for some reason I was never invited. I knew full well the reason. I was persona non grata because I’d been kicked off the course with a month or so to go. It felt so unfair. I’d done the majority of the work. OK, so I’d fucked up and broken the rules, but I hadn’t exactly broken the law or anything. I hadn’t broken any hearts either, I’d been that wrapped up in my steely determination to succeed. Or in my steely determination not to disclose the dreadful secret of my doomed marriage. In the clearer light of hindsight I saw that Rupert had had a point. Not regarding booting me off the course, but in terms of my reluctance to open up. I’d been so scared of appearing a fool. I’d had too much experience of that particular sensation to want to go there again. Some days I wished I had. Some days I wished I’d blurted it all out in one of our group bonding exercises. Other days I was glad I hadn’t. Other days I understood why I’d chosen that path. But the pitying looks the rest of the class had given me that last day could make my cheeks redden, even now. I’d become a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of my biggest fears at drama school was that everyone would find me out for who I really was: a fraud. Someone who didn’t deserve to be there. A supermarket shelf-stacker who’d been a minor success in a theatre club equivalent of a school play, but little more. Certainly not sophisticated or articulate or worldly wise in the ways of the theatre world. Certainly not someone who deserved a place amongst them. I had been so determined to fit in, to excel, but I hadn’t. I’d hidden my bad times, my messy times, my emotional bad hair days, and they’d found me out. I just thought they’d find me out for not being a very good actress, not for attempting to cover up my pain.
On other days, though, I didn’t give a damn. I’d film another advert with the cheeky chappy chef, two grand would drop into my bank account and I’d think, Screw the lot of them. Who needs to treat drama school as some sort of unqualified psychotherapy course when there was money to be made?
But the two grands wouldn’t last very long – not with London prices – and as I got overdrawn again, and relied on Stuart to bail me out and pay for . . . well, everything really, then the worries about my behaviour would resurface.
Stuart was unsentimental about the whole thing.
‘Listen, Princess,’ he’d say. ‘How many ads have you done since leaving college?’
‘Ten.’
‘Ten, babe. At two grand a pop. You’ve earned more in your first two years of acting than most of those muppets’ll earn in a lifetime. And you earned it acting. Not temping, or being a traffic warden, or robbing a bank, or on your back with your legs splayed, but doing what you love doing. What you were trained to do.’
That always perked me up. Though I could have done without the prostitute analogy, truth be told.
I kept an eye
out for what my fellow ex-students were up to. Amanda appeared to be doing, bizarrely, quite a bit of musical theatre. I’d seen her name – in tiny writing – on a board outside a theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue in a new musical based on the back catalogue of some obscure Britpop band. It ran for all of four weeks, but by the time I bit the bullet and decided to go and see it, and maybe pop backstage afterwards to congratulate her, I found the show had been pulled and a stand-up comedian was playing there instead. I saw Moth in a Crimewatch reconstruction about a somewhat overweight estate agent who’d been brutally maimed. I sent a card to her parents’ address telling her how good she’d been, but never heard back. Oliver had set up his own website to promote himself, which I sometimes looked at, but it mainly consisted of moody black and white snaps of himself, and his ‘latest news’ section boasted little more than a play called Foosteps on my Heart at a pub theatre in Highbury (‘pics to follow!’ – they never did). Everyone else seemed to have disappeared into oblivion.
Two years of being with Stuart meant we were well and truly past the lovey-dovey stage. Or, as I called it, the ‘cute sandwich’ stage. Let me explain:
The Cute Sandwich Stage (definition):
A phrase I invented to describe the opening months of a relationship, where you think everything your partner does is undeniably gorgeous, adorable and cute. For instance, on our first trip to Liverpool for Stuart to meet Mum and Dad, we bought a load of sandwiches from W.H. Smith at Euston Station. When Stuart nipped to the loo on the train I gazed lovingly at the empty sandwich wrappers that littered our table. I sighed warmly at his discarded, half-eaten tuna and sweetcorn on brown and thought, Ah. That’s his sandwich. It’s so . . . cute. Coz it’s his – Aw – and caressed it lovingly.
Yes, I caressed a sandwich.
Because that sandwich told a story. OK, so it wasn’t the greatest story ever told, as it was a story about him popping to the loo while I gazed at our snacks, but it spoke of us working as a team; it spoke of mystery. And even if that story was about us doing something mundane, it was still unbearably romantic, because everything about him then was cute, as everything about him was still new.
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