A Fairy Tale for Christmas

by Chrissie Manby

  ‘What are you doing?’ Kirsty asked. ‘Isn’t it a bit late to be making alterations to the script now everyone’s learned their lines? If you’re changing Vince’s lines, you’ll need to give him another fortnight to get used to them.’

  Vince had a great memory for dirty jokes, but the script seemed to evade him.

  ‘I’m just changing one of the songs,’ said Jon.

  ‘Whose song?’

  ‘One between you and Buttons.’

  ‘Which one? I don’t know that Trevor will be too excited at the prospect of having to learn something new at this stage either.’

  ‘He probably won’t have to learn anything. He’ll know it already. The song is from his era.’

  Jon finished typing something into his document. He grinned to himself, as though hearing a private joke.

  ‘Which song?’ Kirsty asked again. She was growing suspicious, though she didn’t quite know why.

  ‘I know how much you don’t like singing “If I Can’t Have You” with Trevor.’

  That was true. Kirsty wasn’t sure that Jon’s version of the seventies disco classic, which he had entitled “If You Can’t Be Mine” really worked in the context of the panto and she especially disliked the sexy dance that Trevor insisted went along with it. Not because it was sexy so much as because she feared he might break a hip.

  ‘So I’ve swapped it for something much better.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Remember that little boy at the audition today? The one with the spoons?’

  ‘Thomas Nuttall. Yes.’

  ‘Well, that song he sang was perfect. It’s just right for the scene. Buttons is in love with Cinderella but he can’t tell her. So, instead of declaring his true passion, he turns it into a joke and sings—’

  ‘“Your Feet’s Too Big”.’ Kirsty filled in the punch-line.

  ‘Exactly!’ Jon rocked back in his chair. ‘It’s absolutely genius. We can get Thomas to come on with his spoons while you and Buttons are singing it.’

  ‘Great.’

  Kirsty turned her back on him and went into the kitchen. Jon followed close behind.

  ‘What’s the matter? It could be really funny. People will love it.’

  ‘A really good joke,’ Kirsty agreed. ‘At my expense.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What do you mean, what do I mean? Why are you suddenly always going on about the size of my feet?’

  ‘Darling, I wouldn’t joke about them if they really were monstrous. It’s just a tease.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel like that.’

  ‘Look, if your feet really were huge, I wouldn’t dare take the mickey. As it is, they’re only slightly bigger than average and, as you said, you’d fall over without them.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Jon tried to cuddle her from behind. ‘Where’s your sense of humour?’

  Kirsty pulled out of his embrace and tried to ignore him. She opened the fridge and pulled out a bag of salad. Salad, again. On such a miserable wet and cold evening when all she really wanted was something filling and warming like a nice big shepherd’s pie. But it was a fast day – as Jon kept reminding her – and salad was all they were allowed.

  She pulled the salad bag open, tipped half the leaves onto her plate and half onto Jon’s. Then she garnished it with two slimy-looking pieces of ready-poached salmon that she struggled to get out of their plastic tray. It was a very uninspiring supper. All the time, Jon was dancing around her, trying to make her laugh and smile again. He might have had an easier job were Kirsty not facing another evening listening to her tummy rumble and complain about the short rations. She’d wasted half that day’s calories on one stick of Twix.

  But then Jon blew it big time. As Kirsty turned from the kitchen counter to slap their plates down on the table, he came towards her with his jazz hands, singing the blasted song.

  ‘Oh. That’s it!’ Kirsty put the plates down so hard that one of the pieces of salmon leaped off the plate and onto the kitchen floor, where it landed on one of Kirsty’s feet.

  ‘Don’t say that if my feet were smaller, the salmon would have missed,’ she warned him. ‘Don’t say anything.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to—’

  ‘Don’t!’

  Kirsty abandoned all hope of a successful fast day and made herself some cheese on toast. She let Jon have the remaining piece of salmon.

  He looked pained all the time he was eating, as though her outburst had been entirely unprovoked and unreasonable. He did that, Kirsty had noticed recently. If he provoked her and she retaliated, he always somehow managed to make it seem as though he was the victim of an unexpected attack. And he was generally so good at appearing hurt that she would end up feeling guilty and, before she knew it, she would be trying to appease him. Doing what she could to make him feel better when she was the one who should be smarting. That was a very special skill.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Jon later, as they were watching the news. ‘I’m going to leave “If I Can’t Have You” in that scene. “Feet’s Too Big” doesn’t have the right tone. And I’m sure Trevor would be disappointed if he didn’t get to show off his disco prowess.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Kirsty.

  But she was left feeling that she’d been a bad sport and by bedtime she was sure that’s exactly what Jon had intended because the only way to feel better about the whole thing would be to agree that he was right after all and give in. Which was exactly what she did the following morning.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Write the bloody song into the show.’

  ‘I knew you’d come round,’ said Jon. He sang it all day long.

  By this time, Kirsty and Jon had been in Newbay for two months. Because they were renting the flat through one of Jon’s father’s friends, they had a fairly flexible arrangement. They’d signed a six-month lease but would be able to leave sooner if and when they got work in another part of the country.

  Like Jon, Kirsty had a theatrical agent who was busy looking out for opportunities on Kirsty’s behalf. While working on the cruise ship, Kirsty had put together a show reel that had been getting lots of positive feedback from casting agents and producers. Her agent assured her it was a matter of time before she was offered some work.

  But Kirsty was not about to take any old job. She had moved back to the UK to be with Jon and thus the last thing she wanted to do was take a part in a musical in Edinburgh while Jon was all the way down south in Newbay. Every time Kirsty’s agent suggested something new, Kirsty would weigh it up in terms of what it might mean for her relationship. After all, Jon had told her, when he asked her to come to Newbay, that he couldn’t bear the thought of being away from her for any longer than a weekend.

  ‘Now I’ve got you in my life,’ he said. ‘It seems impossible that I was ever without you.’

  He called her his soul mate. His muse.

  The ideal scenario was that they would both find work in London. They didn’t have to be in the same show. They just had to be in the same city. London, with its West End and its fringe theatres and its film and television companies was the place where they were also most likely to find opportunities that would suit them both. It was where Kirsty was concentrating her search.

  Jon, however, was suddenly thinking further afield.

  ‘Berlin could really work for me,’ he announced the night after he’d upset Kirsty with all that Feet’s Too Big business.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Kirsty asked.

  ‘They’ve got a really vibrant arts scene. Or Prague. Prague could be good too.’

  ‘But what could I do there?’ Kirsty asked.

  Jon’s background was very different from hers. He went to a fancy school and actually spoke German and French and some Italian and probably Japanese for all Kirsty knew. He had studied drama. Ultimately, he wanted to be a ‘serious’ theatre director doing Shakespeare, Pinter, Beckett. Kirsty’s talents definitely lay elsewhere. Was there room
for a cruise singer in Berlin?

  The conversation left Kirsty feeling unsettled, even if Jon did promise her that he wasn’t about to run off overseas without telling her. They would take all decisions about their next step together. They were a team. Weren’t they? And Kirsty’s career mattered just as much as his.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The children’s rehearsals got underway the weekend after the auditions.

  There were strict rules regarding the appearance of children in stage productions. The first was that there was a limit to the number of performances they were allowed to take part in. The second and most important rule was that the children were to be chaperoned at all times. When they weren’t needed on stage, they were confined to a rehearsal/dressing room under the watchful eye of a responsible adult who’d passed all the necessary CRB checks. When it was time to go down to the auditorium, the chaperone would accompany the children all the way and watch from the wings every minute they were on stage.

  The NEWTS took all these rules very seriously indeed. Thankfully, there were those among their number who actually enjoyed wrangling over-excited children on performance nights. There were a couple of older ladies – Gwyneth and Megan – who were always first to volunteer. With their own children and grandchildren long since grown up, the noise and the bad behaviour were a novelty to them. By contrast, most of the parents of the children involved in the NEWTS’ shows were mysteriously busy on rehearsal and show nights. After dropping their children off at the stage door, they always had to go back to work to ‘finish a project’ or dash round to Grandma’s to ‘help the old dear out’. For them NEWTS was a very cheap baby-sitting service.

  Ben was not so lucky.

  Though she had met some of the other children who would be performing alongside her at the auditions, Thea said she was nervous about spending time at the theatre without having her father nearby. So Ben had to attend the first rehearsal with her.

  Ben thought he would sit at the side of the room with a book. He wasn’t going to get away with that. Thea wanted to know that Ben was paying attention.

  ‘Did you see that, Daddy? Did you see that?’ she would ask every couple of minutes.

  The children chosen to play the mice had a great many songs and dances to learn. Ben had no doubt that Thea would learn the songs very quickly but the dances … Well …

  ‘Thea,’ Elaine called. ‘Thea, come closer to the front, sweetheart. You need to watch my steps. Start with the right foot. No, sweetheart, your other right … That’s better. Just watch what I’m doing and do exactly the same thing. Is everybody ready? A-one, a-two, a-three …’

  The dances seemed a good deal more complicated than the few they’d had to master for the audition. Somehow, Thea always seemed to end up travelling across the room in the opposite direction from everyone else.

  ‘That’s all right, sweetheart,’ Elaine reassured her. ‘We’ve got plenty of time to practice and I’m sure Daddy’s going to help you at home.’

  Elaine looked at Ben, who shrugged and pulled a face that said, ‘I haven’t a clue.’

  ‘In fact,’ said Elaine then. ‘Everybody in the room should learn this one. Gwyneth? Megan?’ Elaine gestured to Ben. ‘Thea’s daddy?’ She didn’t know his name yet.

  ‘Ben,’ he obliged.

  ‘Ben. Would you mind coming into the middle of the room for this next bit. Then when Thea’s practising later, you’ll know how the dance is supposed to go. And when you’re on stage, boys and girls, you’re going to have to dance alongside the adults. This is to give you some practice of getting out of the way of their great big feet. Come on.’

  Elaine would accept no excuses. She took Ben by both hands and hauled him out of his chair.

  Ben felt like the BFG, standing in the middle of a sea of tiny eight and nine year olds. Gwyneth and Megan were both fairly small and didn’t stick out half so much.

  ‘You might actually remember this one, Ben,’ Elaine told him.

  She pressed a few keys on her laptop and the theme to Saturday Night Fever filled the room.

  ‘I’m not that old,’ said Ben.

  ‘Oh, I know this,’ said Gwyneth, moving straight into the dance everyone knew in the 1970s.

  ‘Excellent. Follow Gwyneth’s lead,’ Elaine shouted over the music. ‘Step, step, step …’

  Thea’s faced was creased with concentration, matching her father’s. Ben realised he had to move or be trampled. He did the side-wind across the floor with the best of them. Arm actions too. And, within a couple of minutes, he realised he was rather enjoying it. He didn’t sit down for the rest of the rehearsal.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to join the adult chorus, Ben?’ asked Elaine.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  While the children (and Ben) learned their song and dance routines, rehearsals continued for the adults too. But as the members of the main cast perfected their performances for the stage, it seemed they had stopped pretending to be anything other than their very worst selves in real life. On the third full Sunday rehearsal, Vince did not arrive with Bernie. She told her cast-mates that Vince seemed to be fighting off the flu. She hoped he would arrive later in the day. Trevor Fernlea took Bernie at her word and said he hoped Vince made a swift recovery but some of the others were less generous.

  ‘Flu?’ Annette snorted. ‘More like a hangover. He’s sleeping it off.’

  The Giggle Twins agreed. ‘Tell him to take more water with it,’ said George.

  ‘I wonder whose bed Vince is sleeping the flu off in,’ said Andrew Giggle.

  Bernie stoically ignored them. Kirsty tried to ignore the innuendo too. She wasn’t sure she liked the way the gossip was going. Bernie never stooped to gossip herself and Kirsty could tell she was upset.

  ‘How did you and Vince meet?’ Kirsty asked during a tea break, hoping to distract Bernie with small talk. Asking people how they met their beloved usually led to a happy conversation.

  ‘Oh. It’s not in the least bit romantic,’ said Bernie, though she was already smiling at the memory, just as Kirsty had hoped. ‘I broke a tooth. There used to be a French restaurant in the old town. It was called Chez Jacques and it was terribly pretentious. And very expensive. All about seasonal food grown locally. Everything organic. They even produced their own snails.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. And ordering those was my mistake. I was on a boring date with a very pompous actuary. I think I ordered the snails in a misguided attempt to shock him. Well, one of them had some grit in it. I bit down and cracked a molar. I was in agony. Vince was the only dentist I could find who would see me on a Sunday. And the rest is history, as they say.’

  She looked wistful.

  ‘On our first date he took me to an Italian. Spaghetti’s altogether less dangerous than snails. You know, we’ll have been married for twenty years this December.’

  ‘That’s quite an achievement,’ said Kirsty.

  ‘Oh, it’s been easy,’ said Bernie. ‘He makes me laugh every day. That’s the most important thing in a relationship. The ability to lift each other up. He’s always been able to do that for me. And he always brings me a cup of tea first thing.’ She smiled at the thought.

  Kirsty wondered if Vince even knew how much Bernie loved him.

  Just then, George Giggle joined them by the kettle.

  ‘How’s Vince’s flu?’ he asked, making air quotation marks around the word ‘flu’.

  Bernie frowned.

  It was worse when, a little later on, Annette remarked, ‘Well, The Cockle Picker will have opened by now. I don’t suppose we’ll see Vince until tomorrow.’

  The Cockle Picker was one of Vince’s favourite pubs.

  As it happened, Vince did turn up after lunch. It was immediately obvious to everyone in the rehearsal room that he’d had a few ‘sharpeners’ on his way in though. He was swaying as he walked into the centre of the circle of mismatched chairs for his scene with Cinderella. Kirsty couldn’t help re
coiling from the strong smell of alcohol on his breath as he spat his lines all over her. He seemed like a different man from the one she’d last seen leading a sing-song in the theatre bar on Friday night, after she and Jon had gone to watch a different set of NEWTS in Separate Tables. Then Kirsty had enjoyed duetting with him on that Elvis classic ‘Suspicious Minds’.

  It wasn’t just the smell of alcohol on Vince’s breath that was a problem. Vince couldn’t remember his lines. At one point, he skipped eight pages of script, leaving Kirsty, Annette and the Giggle Twins baffled. When Jon pointed out that Vince had jumped ahead, Vince swore it was an easy mistake to make. Especially when the script was so bloody repetitive. He seemed to have forgotten that Jon actually wrote the thing.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to put your suggestions in writing,’ said Jon.

  ‘Go for it, Euripides,’ said George Giggle.

  ‘Look, everybody. Can we just get on with it?’ asked Lauren. ‘I’ve got to be in the TV studio at seven tomorrow morning. I need to get my beauty sleep.’

  ‘Well, if you could ever put your phone down for long enough to notice your cue,’ said Jon. ‘We could get through everything a whole lot faster.’

  ‘Oh!’ Lauren took great offence and retreated to the ladies’ room.

  ‘We know what you’re doing. We know what you’re do-ing!’ chanted George and Andrew as she left. It was what they did every time one of the cast members went for a ‘comfort break’. Apparently, it was the punch-line of their children’s act. It was infuriating. But in this case, Lauren would be doing exactly what everyone expected.

  As soon as Lauren had left the room, Kirsty opened the Instagram app on her phone and counted the seconds until Lauren posted a selfie. The light in the ladies’ room was very flattering and Lauren never failed to take advantage. This time, she went for a moody look and commented beneath: ‘Beginning to understand how hard the likes of Suranne Jones and Sarah Lancashire work. #acting #givingiteverything.’