A Fairy Tale for Christmas

by Chrissie Manby

  Kirsty shrivelled inside, but if Lauren was disappointed that she would no longer have Ben to herself, she didn’t show it. She quickly sat in the empty chair that should have been Jon’s. Ben fetched a fifth chair from another table.

  ‘We’re celebrating our engagement,’ said Jane. She flashed her fingers at her new friends.

  ‘Oh! Fab ring,’ said Lauren.

  ‘Very pretty,’ Ben agreed.

  ‘Rob’s just ordered some champagne. Will you both have a glass? Save us getting hammered if we have to finish the lot.’

  ‘I think I can do that,’ said Lauren.

  ‘Count me in,’ said Ben. ‘Thea’s with Mum tonight,’ he added, for Kirsty’s benefit she thought.

  ‘Are you sure you want to join us?’ said Kirsty. ‘We don’t want to interrupt if the two of you were planning to have dinner. Alone.’

  ‘Oh, we were just coming in for a drink,’ said Lauren. ‘Besides, I want to toast you for having saved my life.’

  ‘Hardly,’ said Kirsty.

  ‘Noooo!’ said Lauren. ‘You did.’ She turned to Jane. ‘Do you know what Kirsty did when I didn’t show up for rehearsal?’

  Lauren repeated the story for Jane. Thankfully, she still had no idea that Kirsty got stuck halfway through the window so that bit didn’t come out.

  ‘It’s just like Kirsty to care for people like that,’ Lauren concluded.

  ‘It is,’ said Jane. ‘She’s been my best friend for more than fifteen years. I’ll never forget how she cared for me.’

  Jane held Rob’s hand as she told Ben and Lauren about the cruise that should have been her honeymoon.

  ‘Oh, Kirsty,’ said Lauren, who was slightly tipsy by now. ‘You’re so lovely. You’re beautiful and you’re kind and you’re always thinking of others and—’

  ‘Jon is a very lucky man,’ said Ben.

  As soon as she was able, Kirsty dragged Jane into the ladies’.

  ‘They’re on a date,’ she hissed.

  ‘They are not on a date.’

  ‘They are and so now I’m sitting at the table like the biggest gooseberry in history with you lovebirds on one side and those wannabe lovebirds on the other.’

  ‘Well, what does it matter? Unless …’

  Kirsty knew what Jane was insinuating.

  ‘I just feel awkward, that’s all. I’m sure the last thing Lauren really wants is to be sitting with us.’

  ‘She seems fine with it to me. She’s having a great time talking to Rob about weather forecasting techniques. She’s hardly glanced at Ben. He, on the other hand … But it’s not Lauren he’s looking at—’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Have you really not noticed how he looks at you? On stage too. It makes your big scene with Prince Charming seem rather hollow. No chemistry there.’

  ‘Of course I don’t have any chemistry with Prince Charming. He’s being played by a woman. By Lauren.’

  ‘But you and Buttons … He’s completely besotted. And he’s such a nice bloke. So polite and attentive. And good-looking. I can see why you followed him down to the beach.’

  ‘That was just two friends going for a walk …’

  ‘If I wasn’t totally in love with Rob …’

  ‘You’ve had too much to drink,’ said Kirsty. ‘And so have I. I need to get back to the flat. Jon will be wondering where I’ve got to. He might be worrying.’

  She checked her phone. If Jon was worrying, there was no sign of it. No texts. No missed calls.

  ‘See,’ said Jane, looking at Kirsty’s phone over her shoulder. ‘Jon isn’t bothered.’

  The words stung. Though Jane hadn’t said anything explicitly negative about Jon since the phone conversation in which Kirsty had admitted Jon didn’t seem to value her career, Jane hadn’t been exactly gushing about him either. ‘You can stay out as late as you like,’ Jane concluded. ‘With us and lovely Ben.’

  They closed the restaurant. Just as on that night in the Indian, the waiters had to start the clear-up around them.

  ‘I’ll make sure Kirsty and Lauren get home,’ Ben told Jane. ‘We’re all going the same way.’

  ‘If you’re sure you’ll take proper care of them.’

  ‘I don’t need taking care of,’ Kirsty protested.

  ‘Oh yes she does,’ said Jane, giving herself the giggles as she appreciated the pantomime nature of her line.

  ‘Oh no she doesn’t,’ Kirsty said flatly in response.

  ‘Ben, it’s been so nice to meet you,’ said Jane, hanging on his arm as they wobbled towards the doors.

  ‘You too.’

  ‘You will come to our engagement party, won’t you? We’re going to have one at the beginning of February. January’s no fun when everyone is off the booze.’

  ‘I’m definitely coming,’ slurred Lauren. ‘You two have made me believe in real love.’

  ‘Real love is easy,’ said Jane. She looked straight at Kirsty. ‘You just have to let it happen.’

  The taxi dropped Lauren off first.

  Kirsty wished she could have a little time between leaving Ben in the taxi and letting herself into the flat but Ben, ever the gentleman, insisted that he and the cabbie would not move from the kerb until they were sure she was safely inside. So Kirsty had to let herself in and wave to let them know she was fine then try to carve out that necessary moment of solitude just inside the door. She didn’t manage long before Jon called from the bedroom, ‘Kirsty? Is that you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s a burglar.’

  ‘Ha ha, very funny,’ said Jon, in a voice that made it clear he didn’t find it funny at all. ‘What time is it? I waited up for ages.’

  Kirsty glanced at her watch. It was half past one.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Jane and I had lots to catch up on. I didn’t notice the time.’

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  She wondered why she didn’t want to tell him the engagement news or that Lauren and Ben had joined them to help celebrate. He would find out the following day that Ben and Lauren had been in the same restaurant. One of them was bound to mention it.

  Kirsty hung her coat on the peg in the hallway, took off her shoes so as not to spoil the carpet and padded into the bedroom. It was dark. She tried not to swear when she caught her shin on the corner of the bed. She’d have a big bruise the following morning. She wished she hadn’t had that last glass of fizz.

  ‘Ugh, garlic,’ said Jon when Kirsty leaned over him to give him a kiss.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  Jon mumbled and rolled over, burying his face in the pillow as though to defend himself from her stinky breath.

  Kirsty dutifully went to the bathroom and cleaned her teeth, giving herself a critical onceover in the mirror as she did so. She’d done a bad job of repairing her make-up after Jane announced the engagement and she burst into tears. If Ben had really spent half the night looking at her, it was probably only because her smudged eyeliner and mascara made her a dead ringer for Heath Ledger as The Joker in Batman. When she’d finished her teeth, she went to work on her face. The make-up remover wipe left long stripes where she swiped it.

  She looked sad and tired. She drank a glass of water in the hope that it would stave off a hangover that already seemed to be setting in.

  When her face was clean, Kirsty climbed into bed. She needed a cuddle but Jon was making it clear, by turning away from her and pretending to sleep – she knew he was pretending because he was so comically still – that he wasn’t going to give her the comfort she wanted. She could, she supposed, move closer to him and put her arm around his waist but that would not be the same. It struck Kirsty then that was the way it had always been in their relationship. Other women – women like Jane – could rely on the man in their life to make them feel protected and treasured through the simple medium of a bear hug. Jon never spontaneously hugged Kirsty. If he touched her affectionately these days, what began as affection often seemed to morph into a way of reminding her that she
had strayed off the bloody 5:2. A squeeze became a way of measuring her. He might as well be using those callipers that measure BMI.

  Kirsty lay on her side of the bed. She was just a few centimetres from Jon yet she felt as though she was a million miles away. All those years of being single, and yet she had never felt so alone as she did right then with the man she had followed halfway round the world.

  Chapter Seventy

  The following morning, Jon was a good deal more chirpy than Kirsty felt. He had little sympathy for her and her hangover.

  ‘You were supposed to be on a fast day.’

  ‘I can’t fast over Christmas,’ she said. ‘Or during a show run. How would I have the energy to get through it?’

  ‘I’m managing,’ said Jon.

  Of course. Jon and his discipline. Jon who could eat half a Twix.

  ‘Jane and Rob got engaged,’ said Kirsty to change the subject.

  ‘Oh.’ Jon looked up from his phone.

  ‘They’re really happy.’

  ‘That’s nice.’ He looked back down.

  ‘It was so good to see them both making plans for the future. Plans which include each other.’

  ‘Mmm-hmmm,’ Jon responded. Kirsty realised he wasn’t really listening to her. He confirmed it when he tapped out a text on his phone and announced.

  ‘Apparently Vince isn’t doing too well this morning. Bernie doesn’t know if he’s going to make it to the show tonight.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I don’t know what’s going on with him,’ Jon complained. ‘If I’d known he would be this bad, I never would have cast him.’

  It was on the tip of her tongue for Kirsty to tell Jon what she knew. So far she had told nobody about seeing Vince embracing a woman other than his wife, but it seemed to explain so much. She wondered if Bernie was OK. It was Vince and Bernie’s wedding anniversary tomorrow, if she remembered correctly.

  ‘I supposed this means I’d better start cramming his lines,’ said Jon.

  But, as before, Vince arrived with five minutes to go. He pushed past Bernie on his way to the dressing room. He didn’t seem to want to tell anyone where he had been. Everyone was sure they could smell booze.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Jon. ‘So long as he gets through the performance.’

  Elaine called ‘Beginners, please.’

  The show must go on.

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Having got through four performances without making any terrible mistakes, Ben was beginning to feel confident in his role. On the night of the twenty-ninth he got to the scene where the invitation to the ball is delivered to the Hardup House.

  He unravelled the scroll and gawped. Someone had replaced his lines – the only passage he wasn’t a hundred per cent sure of because he didn’t think he needed to be – with a print-out of a picture of a busty woman in – or more accurately half out of – a Santa suit. It wasn’t a particularly shocking photograph, but the surprise of finding Mrs Christmas instead of his lines inside the scroll definitely put Ben off his stride.

  At once Ben was sure he knew who had made the switch. Andrew and George Giggle regarded him passively, blinking their big, false Ugly Sister eyelashes.

  ‘What is it, Buttons?’ George asked. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

  Ben struggled to remember his line and, in the end, he had to look to Glynis, who was just off-stage, for a prompt. Except that she was busy cleaning her glasses and hadn’t noticed that he needed one.

  Ben turned in the opposite direction and there was Thea, waiting with her fellow mice.

  ‘It’s an invitation,’ she mouthed at her father. ‘To the prince’s castle. For a ball to celebrate his twenty-fifth birthday.’

  Ben smiled at her gratefully.

  ‘It’s an invitation,’ he repeated. And somehow the rest came back easily after that.

  ‘You utter gits,’ Ben swore at the Giggle Twins as he finally came off stage and found them in the wings.

  ‘What?’ asked George.

  ‘You know,’ said Ben.

  ‘We don’t,’ said Andrew.

  ‘Yeah, right. I open my scroll and find this and you don’t know what I’m talking about?’

  He brandished the scroll in their direction.

  George and Andrew both took a step back as though Ben were showing them a gruesome photo taken at a murder scene.

  ‘Ewww,’ said George. ‘No wonder you forgot your lines.’

  ‘We didn’t do it,’ Andrew insisted. ‘I don’t know how you even find photographs like that.’

  They seemed so genuinely affronted by the picture that Ben began to doubt that he was right about the perpetrator of the prank after all.

  If it was the Giggle Twins, it didn’t really matter. The prank was harmless in the grand scheme of things. But that was because Ben had his part pretty much nailed down. He could make it through a prank like that without too much trouble. Vince was another matter.

  Though he had been on board with the production from the very beginning, Vince had only made it to half as many rehearsals as Ben, who’d joined at a much later stage. Vince had never really managed to learn his lines, and thus Elaine had gone to great lengths to make sure that Vince never really had to remember more than a few words at a time. She took every possible opportunity to provide Vince with a prompt. She wrote his lines on the back of all sorts of props. So long as Vince was standing where he was supposed to be and remembered to pick up the right item, he would find his next line written on the back. For example, he would pick up a bottle of wine from the kitchen table, while the step-mother and ugly sisters discussed the ball, and find his lines written on the label.

  He had whole paragraphs inserted into the copy of What Carriage magazine that he held for most of his big scene with Cinders. His big emotional speech at the end of the play, in which he apologised to Cinders for having failed to stand up for her against her stepmother’s cruelty was written in huge letters on the back of the song-sheet easel, which had to be placed in the wings so that it was exactly in Vince’s eye-line as he appeared to be gazing out of the kitchen window, full of emotion at the news that his daughter was to be a princess.

  It was inevitable that something should go wrong. Or rather, be made to go wrong.

  The prankster had been busy that night. There were lines written on the back of the song-sheet but they weren’t the right ones. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Someone had switched out Vince’s heartfelt speech for the lyrics to ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’. Which meant that Kirsty immediately suspected Jon.

  ‘I would not do that!’ Jon insisted when she tackled him. ‘You know I would not do that. During an actual performance? I’m trying to make my name as a director. Why on earth would I want any of my actors to screw up?’

  Kirsty understood and believed all that. ‘But “Feet’s Too Big”? That’s some coincidence.’

  ‘It is. Just a coincidence.’

  Meanwhile, Vince was raging.

  Despite Trevor Fernlea’s assurances that no one in the audience had noticed (Trevor was sitting in row five that night) or if they had noticed, they found it amusing, the whole cast was shaken by that night’s pranks. Everyone was suspicious of everyone else. The atmosphere in the dressing rooms as the cast changed back into their street clothes was tense.

  Vince would not talk to anybody. He tossed his cloak and hose in Angie’s general direction. She missed them and was horrified to see them fall onto the dusty floor.

  ‘Well, I never!’ she exclaimed. ‘Did you see how he did that? It’s not my fault. I’ve never experienced such rudeness.’

  Kirsty found that hard to imagine, since Angie the wardrobe witch was such an expert at dishing it out.

  Kirsty decided that she would go after Vince and try to reassure him that their big scene hadn’t really gone so badly. She also wanted to reassure him that she wasn’t responsible for the switch. He had glared at her as he left the stage, as though she had pulled the p
rank, when she had just as much to lose from their big emotional moment going awry.

  Kirsty tracked Vince down to the stairwell that led to the back of the stage but she couldn’t confront him immediately. He was talking into his phone, his voice urgent and low. He definitely didn’t want to be overheard. But Kirsty, to her shame, was all ears.

  ‘I’ve had enough,’ Vince said. ‘I need to see you right now. Where can you meet me? No, I don’t think I can hang on to the end of the run. I’m living a lie and I want to end it now. Bernie needs to know what’s been going on. They all do. They’ve all been laughing at my expense. I want them to know how it really is.’

  Vince fell silent as his correspondent talked back to him for a while. When they had finished, Vince said, ‘I don’t know what I would do without you. I don’t know what I did to deserve to have an angel like you come into my life. Seeing you is the only thing that keeps me going. I can’t keep waking up every morning to see the disappointment on Bernie’s face. I’ve got to break out of this. Promise you’ll be there for me when I do.’

  Kirsty was pretty sure she knew exactly to whom Vince was talking.

  As Vince came back down the stairs, Kirsty flattened herself against the wall, in the shadow of an old pair of tabs, and he didn’t seem to notice her at all. She decided not to bother following him. The last thing Vince deserved was for her to try to make him feel better about being such a bad actor when in real life he had been keeping up such a big pretence.

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  As Kirsty correctly remembered, 30th December was Vince and Bernie’s wedding anniversary and Bernie had asked the cast to join them in celebrating with a drink at the theatre bar after the performance. Though Vince wasn’t everybody’s favourite, they were all fond of Bernie and promised to be there to help eat the cake she had so lovingly made to celebrate almost twenty years with her husband.

  The performance, thank goodness, was free from the pranks that had made the previous night so traumatic. Everyone got changed quickly and made their way downstairs.

  ‘But where’s Vince?’ Jon asked.