All She Wants

by Jonathan Harvey

  16

  Never have another relationship with a man as long as I live.

  17

  This doesn’t make me a lesbian.

  18

  Unless I meet a really hot woman (i.e., Cameron Diaz) who tries it on with me and think, What the heck.

  19

  Why did I write ‘what the heck’?

  20

  Give up acting and find a real job.

  21

  Go back to the supermarket, I guess.

  22

  Move out of Mum and Dad’s and into a spinster flat in a spinster part of Liverpool.

  23

  Kill myself.

  24

  But change my mind at the last minute because even being a spinster is better than being shat on by yet another bloke.

  25

  Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.

  26

  I hope to God that’s not a song about self-love/flicking.

  I knew which hotel to go to, as I had made the booking for Stuart. I had checked the route from the station and decided to walk, as it was such a lovely day. The salty sea air would invigorate me, I decided, as I plugged in my iPod and took courage from the thumping bass of Destiny’s Child’s ‘Survivor’. I found myself doing what I often do when listening to music and started walking in time to the beat, but as it was quite slow I snapped the iPod off and quickened my pace. Why had he let me book it? The silly boy had obviously been calling my bluff.

  The Palladino, which had described itself as a B & B with rock ‘n’ roll aspirations, was located in one of the cute little side streets of white stucco Regency houses that run up the hill from the seafront. I was there within fifteen minutes. I looked up at the building, which was trying its hardest to look like faded glamour with its cracked plaster work and leopard-skin drapes, walked up the steps and into the narrow hallway. In the absence of a reception I wandered into the first room I found, a bar. All the tables were empty, but there was a Gothy looking girl behind the bar painting her nails black.

  ‘Yo,’ she said, and blew on her nails as she waggled her hand in the air.

  ‘Hi, is there a reception?’ I ventured, all smiles.

  ‘Like, this is the bar and the reception, but we’re fully booked. Shit.’

  She looked really disappointed that she couldn’t offer me a room, so I quickly made her feel better about herself. I was good like that.

  ‘Actually I’m here to surprise one of the guests? Stuart Moses? He’s in the Blues Brothers room.’

  When I’d booked it I’d felt it was apt.

  ‘I’m his sister,’ I added quickly, in case she realized I was in fact his lover come to catch him at it with his pretend lesbian lover. She looked even more disappointed.

  ‘Shit, he’s gone out. Shit.’

  ‘Oh.’ I tried my hardest to hide my disappointment.

  ‘For, like, brunch.’

  ‘Right. With his girlfriend?’ I asked, just to make sure she got the message. I was his sister! I even started modulating my accent to vague Essex in an attempt to sound similar.

  The receptionist/barmaid/gothic monstrosity shook her head.

  ‘No, he’s on his own.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Shit.’

  Odd. Very odd. Ah, now I got it. He’d gone to meet her for brunch. Maybe she was staying somewhere else. Some pretend lesbiany hotel.

  ‘You don’t know where he’s gone, do you? Only I’ve come all the way from London.’

  ‘Shit! That really sucks.’

  I nodded. It did indeed suck. A bit like Lesbo Features would be sucking him post eggs benedict, no doubt. I saw that Gothy Golightly was smiling.

  ‘I do know where he’s gone, though, coz I made the booking for him.’

  ‘Oh brilliant.’

  ‘I shouldn’t really tell you coz it’s, like, health and safety and stuff . . .’

  ‘Client confidentiality?’ I corrected her.

  ‘But he’s gone to Mollie Maguire’s. It’s really cool.’

  Brilliant.

  ‘Molly Maguire’s?’

  She nodded. ‘On Church Street.’

  Brillianter.

  ‘Was the booking for one or . . .?’

  She shook her head. ‘Two. Definitely two. I guess he was meeting someone.’

  I nodded. Bingo!

  ‘Unless he was really hungry.’

  ‘Can you tell me how I get to Church Street?’

  She nodded. ‘God this is so exciting. I love surprising people. Oh he’s going to be over the moon.’

  I nodded. ‘I can’t wait to see the look on his little face,’ I beamed.

  She took a Post-it note and drew me a pretty crap map.

  Seven minutes later I was standing outside Molly Maguire’s. It was a rather jolly, rough-and-ready bistro with a black canvas awning covering a few tables outside. I pretended to read the menu, which was framed outside the front door, before peering inside at the busy, bustling eaterie. The waiters and waitresses were wearing long, almost floor-length black aprons. The customers on the whole tended to be twenty- and thirty-somethings eating fry-ups and reading the Sunday papers.

  And then a waiter moved off from a table and I saw him. He was sat right at the back, his hand stretched out across the table. He was talking to someone. Not animatedly, quite calmly. What was he doing with his hand?

  My heart was thumping in my chest. This was it. This was the moment of truth. My moment. Come on, Jodie! You can do this!

  I joojed my hair up, smoothed down my top, rearranged my necklace, then headed inside. The air was rich with jovial conversations and I walked slowly through the restaurant as T’Pau’s ‘China In Your Hand’ was playing. I didn’t take my eyes off Stuart, but he didn’t see me. The nearer I got, the more of his arm I could see. Then I saw that his hand was in someone else’s. And as I arrived at the table I finally caught my first glimpse of her.

  I got a shock. She was old. She wasn’t decrepit, far from it. She was rather beautiful in a downmarket Catherine Deneuve kind of way, and she wasn’t dressed too dissimilarly to me. She was looking at Stuart intently, hands clasped. I was behind him now, staring at her, amazed. She had to be fifty. She might have had work done on her eyes, but her neck was a giveaway. Suddenly she looked at me and I glared back.

  ‘Can I help you? she asked. She was quite posh. This couldn’t be Mandy, surely. This woman didn’t look like a painter and decorator who texted things like ‘grow a vag’. This had to be someone else.

  Stuart looked round and saw me, and his eyes widened in shock.

  ‘Do you love him?’ I asked, looking back to her.

  ‘Jodie!’ There was no hiding the anger in Stuart’s voice.

  ‘Yes,’ the woman said.

  She was sitting on a bench that ran along the side of the wall, so I nestled in next to her, resting my bag in my lap. She reluctantly budged up to accommodate me. I clocked her handbag on the floor. Expensive.

  ‘And do you love her?’ I asked Stuart.

  ‘This is not what you think,’ he said, then looked at Granny Features. ‘This is Jodie.’

  The woman looked at me and smiled. I frowned back.

  ‘Are you Mandy?’

  Stuart looked confused. So did she. She shook her head.

  ‘I’m Jan,’ she said.

  I looked back at Stuart.

  ‘I didn’t know you were into arl biddies.’

  Stuart rolled his eyes.

  ‘Jan’s not my bit on the side, Jodie.’

  Yeah, right!

  ‘She’s . . .’ He struggled to find the words.

  ‘An old slag?’ I ventured, then looked at Jan, whose lip was curling in what I took to be fury. Ha! Good!

  ‘Tell her,’ said Jan, sounding pissed off. I felt like slapping her.

  Stuart swallowed, took a sip of his orange juice, then said, ‘She’s my mum.’

  I gulped.

  TWENTY

  I ha
d screwed up. Much as I’d like to be able to say this was the first time I’d ever screwed up, that would, of course, be complete nonsense. I’d screwed up many times. My life appeared to be one long series of self-inflicted catastrophes. I may as well have walked round with a big sign around my neck saying, ‘AVOID. I SCREW UP. I SCREW MYSELF UP AND I’LL PROBABLY SCREW YOU UP, TOO. BUT I WON’T SCREW YOUR SHELVES UP BECAUSE I AM CRAP AT DIY.’ And yet again, post screw-up – a phase I was used to being in, though it brought me little comfort – I felt stupid. I must have been completely stupid if I felt stupid so often.

  Many of the details of what had happened I could cope with. I could get my head round the fact that Stuart had gone behind my back and made contact with his mum. I wasn’t particularly happy about it, but I got it. I could see that when his mum had got in touch, via letter, he’d been so startled and confused that he’d kept it secret, unsure how it would pan out. I felt he might have handled it better if he’d been honest and shared his anxieties – and this pretty major life event, let’s be honest – with me, but I understood why he’d kept it quiet. I understood when he said that he’d never been so afraid in his life, afraid she was going to be a nightmare and that it would be as messy as the circumstances when she’d left him as a toddler. I understood when he explained that he had clammed up and had no idea why he’d chosen to hide it, apart from that he was afraid of the outcome. I could deal with all that. I could also deal with the relief that he wasn’t in fact having an affair. This was good news.

  I sat in the reception of Crystal TV’s London offices, dressed in a dowdy cardy and lopsided beret, contemplating all of this. I contemplated the fact, too, that Stuart hadn’t really spoken to me since the previous weekend in Brighton. He’d arrived back at the flat about four hours after me. I was sat waiting on the sofa, ready to talk and apologize, but he just ignored me and stomped round the flat doing mundane things like putting dirty clothes in the washing machine and returning his toiletry bag to the cupboard under the bathroom sink. But the seething silence that accompanied his actions made them full of foreboding. How long could he keep on ignoring me? Eventually I got up and went to find him in the bedroom, where he was, for reasons best known to himself, remaking the bed.

  ‘Stu, I’m sorry,’ I said, almost inaudibly. But he ignored me and carried on flattening sheets with the palms of his hands, plumping up scatter cushions. There was something oddly anachronistic about it. The huffy male in a foul mood doing something so stereotypically feminine as making a bed.

  ‘Stu,’ I repeated, but he wouldn’t even acknowledge my presence. He picked up a silky throw from the floor and launched it into the air so it fell on the bed like a landing parachute. It fell diagonally and as I bent to straighten the corner nearest me, he . . . Well, it all happened so fast. But at the same time it felt like slow motion. I saw him lunging towards me. I stepped back. But not soon enough. He pushed me away from the bed so that I stumbled backwards and fell ungracefully to the floor. I landed on a hummock of shoes. He jolted back, landing on the bed, stared at me and hissed. Yes hissed.

  ‘I can make my own fucking bed.’

  ‘Wanker,’ I heard myself saying. Which was neither big, nor clever, nor even witty. He stared at me for what felt like ages, then he stood up and looked down at me. I actually thought he was going to kick me. He didn’t.

  ‘Why am I even bothering?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want to be anywhere near you.’

  And with that he walked out of the room.

  I sat on the shoes for a bit longer, then hoiked myself up and slipped onto a corner of the bed – much more comfy on the arse cheeks. I stared at the mess of shoes, processing what had just happened. He had never raised a hand to me before. OK, so he still hadn’t. He’d lunged at me and shoved me, jabbing me in the arm to be precise. But it was so out of character. No matter how much I might have deserved it – well, not it exactly, but deserved some comeback for my blatant display of mistrust – I was pretty sure I hadn’t deserved that. And now I didn’t want to leave the room. I was scared of what he might do next. Rather than irritate him further, or throw more fuel on the fire, I decided to stay put. But before I had time to deliberate about when I might venture into another room – I’d have to go to the loo at some point, unless I found a novel use for my faux Mulberry handbag – a piece of paper came floating through the open door. I flinched, unsure what it was at first. Then I saw it was, in fact, a paper plane. Why had he thrown a paper plane into the room? It landed in the corner. I got up and bent to pick it up, then returned to the safety of the bed and unfolded the plane. In the centre of the creased paper Stuart had written, ‘That was out of order. Sorry, bit mad.’

  Feeling it was now safe to leave the room I got up and headed into the kitchen, where I dropped the former plane into the bin. I put my coat on, headed out and walked. I walked for hours with no sense of direction or purpose, just the need to avoid. Once I returned home I saw that he’d camped out on our sofa, leaving me to sleep alone in our three-quarter-size bed. Even though it was tiny, it felt cavernous. The empty side of the mattress was stained with longing and regret. He’d marked the sofa out as his territory and, OK, so ‘not speaking’ was a bit of an exaggeration, we spoke, it was just that the pinched, cursory sentences we uttered to one another were served with a side order of bitterness and a huge sprinkling of resentment. Getting the cold shoulder made me retreat into myself, question myself, punish myself – nothing new there then. On the upside, though, on that week in particular I had just the distraction I needed to take my mind off it all. That week I had an audition to prepare for.

  I decided that although I was never going to get the part of Nun Features on Acacia Avenue, I may as well approach my audition professionally, just as we’d been taught at drama school. So I set about writing a character study of her, trying to work out who she was, where she came from, what made her tick, that kind of thing. I bought a new Hello Kitty jotter from Paperchase and wrote on the front of it in big glittery pen, ‘SISTER AGATHA CHARACTER STUDY’. Here’s what I wrote inside:

  SISTER AGATHA

  What I know about her from the miserly, tiny bit of script I’ve seen:

  •

  She’s a nun.

  •

  She has people confessing murders to her.

  •

  She knows someone called Joan.

  •

  Before taking her vows she knew the love of a bad man and the comfort of the whiskey bottle.

  •

  She knew isolation and despair.

  •

  She has lived through the horror of a supermarket fire.

  My thoughts on Sister Agatha:

  •

  Probably Irish. All nuns on telly are?

  •

  Not too interested in clothes or make-up.

  •

  Before becoming a nun she was going out with an Irish farmer who was also her half cousin, and because of inbreeding was also her half brother. On discovering this she took to the bottle, took an overdose of pills and had to have her stomach pumped. When she came round the hospital chaplain was so nice she decided to become a nun and never looked back.

  God she sounded dull. It was all so dark. There was no way I was going to get this part. At college I’d been praised for my comic timing and scene-stealing abilities. I was never going to be able to do that with the constraints of a wimple and a life full of pain, so I decided to make her a little bit more interesting. I crossed out all of the above and wrote a new back story for her. One I could have some fun with. One that might make me, Jodie McGee, stick out from all the other actresses going for the part.

  Page 2:

  •

  She is from Liverpool and has a strong Liverpudlian accent. (No one will make her a Scouser, so I’ll stick out. Brilliant.)

  •

  She does have an interest in clothes, and will always try and glam her habit up with some clever accessorizing. When she was young she dream
t of being a fashion designer, even going so far as to design her own wedding dress (sounds familiar!).

  •

  All of her friends were very surprised when she decided to become a nun.

  •

  She likes a laugh.

  •

  She’s a compulsive liar. She’ll make up stories to show people she empathizes with them.

  •

  She became a nun in the way Whoopi Goldberg did in Sister Act, coz she was on the run from someone or something. Not the mafia, but maybe she had some dodgy dealings with Liverpool’s underworld, lived with a gangster, saw him kill someone and ran away to find Catholicism to avoid being fingered by the fuzz, and coz she felt guilty about it.

  •

  She is a laugh. She’d be great fun in the pub. But she can’t drink too much or she gets maudlin and runs the risk of blurting out her guilty secret (gangster murder, blood on her Capri pants etc.).

  •

  She started the supermarket fire?

  •

  Note to self: Remember what Rupert said when I played the secretary in that Pinter thing. ‘You are blessed with the arched lip of a true comedienne.’ ARCH THE LIP. NO ONE ELSE WILL DO THAT.

  I had grown to really like Sister Agatha now. So much so I was desperate to get the part, if only to stop someone else getting it and playing it the boring way, where she was just another humdrum nun. A nundrum. In fact, I wrote on Page 3, ‘Use phrase “nundrum” in audition. Shows you’ve thought about it. Shows you care etc.’

  I was hungry for it. Thirsty for it. Gagging for it.

  ‘Jodie McGee?’ the receptionist called out. I stood up and adjusted my puffball skirt (I wanted to show she was quirky). ‘If you’d take the lift to the eighteenth floor.’