Wonder Women

by Fiore, Rosie

  Jo leaned over to yell in Harriet’s ear. ‘So, this Renaissance Man …?’ she asked.

  ‘DJ’ing.’ Harriet yelled back. ‘Everyone is desperate to get him to do the music for their parties.’

  The crowd parted for a second, and Jo caught a glimpse of a tall, gangly, mixed-race guy with a great cloud of hair, pressing his headphones to the side of his head as he deftly flipped a disc off one deck and replaced it with another, using just one hand. Renaissance Man? He looked more Lenny Kravitz than Shakespeare, but who was she to judge? He definitely knew how to keep a party going though. He played banging tune after banging tune, mixing dance tracks with eighties cheese and then raising the tempo with some great rock classics. Jo wasn’t much of a dancer, but she found herself on the floor jumping around with Harriet and Amelia, until they were all sweaty and red-faced. After about an hour, Renaissance Man took a break and someone took over whose taste ran to thrash metal played at full volume. The dance floor emptied like a stampede, and Jo and the others headed for the kitchen to grab a drink.

  She was standing by the open door, holding her hair off her neck and drinking a beer while Amelia chattered on about Renaissance Man and his brilliance, when she saw him come into the kitchen and fight his way through the crowd, straight towards them. Amelia saw Jo staring and turned to see what she was looking at. She went red, then white, whipped off her glasses and tried in vain to fix her hair. Jo was sure Renaissance Man was just heading for the door to get some air, but he stopped and said to her, ‘Do you sing?’

  ‘What?’ Jo said stupidly.

  ‘Do you sing?’ he said impatiently. ‘I know you’re not a music student, but do you sing?’ She opened her mouth to answer him but then she felt a claw-like grip on her arm.

  ‘I can’t believe you know him and you didn’t say,’ hissed Amelia venomously, her breath hot on Jo’s ear.

  ‘I don’t!’ she said involuntarily.

  ‘Oh,’ said Renaissance Man. ‘Pity.’ He began to turn away.

  ‘No!’ said Jo sharply. ‘I mean, I do sing. But I don’t know you. Him.’ She turned to Amelia to offer clarification, but Amelia had turned away, her jaw set and her arms folded. Well, there was nothing Jo could do to rescue that particular situation. She turned back to Renaissance Man and smiled. ‘I sing, insofar as I was in a choir and can read music and sing in tune. I’m not trained or anything.’

  ‘Perfect,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m doing a performance art project. You look right. If you could sing, it would be perfect. Can we meet at the Union for lunch on Monday to talk about it? Say … one?’

  ‘Um, okay,’ said Jo uncertainly. He gave her a big grin and walked off.

  She turned to Amelia. ‘See? I don’t know him. I’ve never spoken to him in my life before. And I don’t fancy him. It’s a work thing, okay?’

  ‘Oh, you don’t fancy him?’ said Amelia, her eyes filled with tears. ‘What are you? Blind? Or gay?’

  ‘Neither! He’s just not my type. Honest.’

  But Amelia was not to be appeased. Any possibility of a friendship between her and Jo died right there, in a grubby kitchen in New Cross. Luckily Amelia soon got over her entirely unrequited passion for Renaissance Man, when she met and fell in love with a conducting student called Henry, who enthusiastically reciprocated her feelings. She performed outstandingly in her studies and went on to win loads of prestigious music competitions and have a highly successful international career. Jo never spoke to her again after that night, but whenever she caught a glimpse on television of Amelia’s long white hands stroking the strings of her harp, she was reminded of the awfulness of their one encounter.

  On the Monday, she got to the Union early as she had no class just before lunch. She sat at a table organising her lecture notes and wondering whether Renaissance Man would show up at all. She felt ridiculous sitting there, and she was increasingly certain that he wasn’t coming, when he flopped down in the chair opposite her and handed her a sticky bun in a paper bag. It was in that moment that she realised she didn’t know his name.

  He seemed to sense her discomfort, and held out his hand formally. ‘Lee Hockley,’ he said.

  ‘Jo. Jo Morris. So what’s this performance-art project?’

  ‘Well, I saw you dancing at the party on Saturday, and I thought you looked American.’

  ‘American? I’m from Stevenage.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you look like one of those corn-fed American girls who roam the prairies.’

  ‘Roam the prairies! What? And corn-fed? Do you mean I’m fat? Or yellow?’

  Jo’s sole experience of anything corn-fed was the suspiciously saffron-coloured and overpriced chickens in the supermarket.

  ‘It’s a figure of speech,’ Lee said impatiently. ‘Anyway, you’re a drama student, right? You can do an American accent.’

  ‘Sure can!’ said Jo, in her best peppy, ponytail-swinging Grease imitation. Lee looked dubious.

  ‘We can work on that. The point is, I’ve worked out that you can sing pretty much any Emily Dickinson poem to “The Yellow Rose of Texas”.’ Helpfully he hummed a few bars. Jo continued to stare at him, flabbergasted into silence. In a raspy tenor voice with a Southern twang, he sang:

  ‘A door just opened on a street –

  I, lost, was passing by –

  An instant’s width of warmth disclosed

  And wealth, and company.’

  He nodded as if everything now made perfect sense.

  After a moment, Jo found her voice. ‘So – Emily Dickinson, famous, reclusive, morbid poet, and you’re going to set her poems to some little country and western ditty? Doesn’t that trivialise her work completely?’

  ‘Except that it isn’t a little country and western ditty! It’s a song with a rich history, the story of a mulatto woman who helped win the battle of San Jacinto, the decisive battle in the Texas Revolution!’

  ‘Okay …’ said Jo hesitantly. But Lee was on a roll.

  ‘It says something profound about American history, about our expectations of women and people of colour, about our European reading of what looks like a trivialisation of culture.’ He was clearly happy to go on about it pretty much ad infinitum so Jo jumped in to try to understand what exactly he expected from her.

  ‘So I sing Emily Dickinson poems to “The Yellow Rose of Texas” …?’

  ‘While I draw interpretations of political cartoons from the time,’ he said, as if that was self-evident.

  ‘And we do this – where?’

  ‘In the quadrangle. I’ve got permission from the college. I’ve found two music students – one who plays steel-string guitar and one who can play a snare drum. It’ll be awesome!’ He continued to enthuse about the project and describe how they would incorporate the singing with his real-time drawing. Jo stared at him. He was okay-looking, she supposed, a little skinny and tall, and his huge cloud of hair made her want to laugh. As she’d assured Amelia, not her type, but his crazy, creative grasshopper brain was so exciting, she knew she wanted to get to know him a lot better.

  The Emily Dickinson project was met with mass indifference by the student body and the staff of the university. Jo wore a red-checked gingham dress and sang her heart out, accompanied by the musicians, while Lee, his mad hair bobbing, drew furiously in charcoal on big sheets of paper spread on the ground. People strolling past mostly ignored them, or glanced at the pictures and shrugged. A few of the music students stood listening to Jo sing for a moment, then sniffed as if she smelled bad before walking away. But Lee was completely undeterred.

  Later, in the pub, he enthused about the ‘slow drip-drip of impinging on people’s consciousness’, and how their next project would move things on another tiny step. Jo didn’t understand everything he said, but she guessed what he was getting at was that people were affected and changed by what they had seen, even if they didn’t know it. She didn’t really believe it, but she was willing to go along with it and be involved
in whatever came next. Lee was a nice guy. And besides that, she was developing a serious crush on Adrian, the guy who played the guitar. He was shortish, muscular and moody with unruly blond hair, pronounced cheekbones and a long sweep of dark eyelashes that made Jo, a little tipsy after two pints of cider, want to kiss him and feel them flutter against her face.

  It was a Friday night and the cider was cheap and plentiful, so it was no big surprise that Jo found herself in Adrian’s bed that night, and for a lot of nights after that. It wasn’t every night though – Adrian was fanatical about his ‘space’. It took Jo until halfway through her second year to work out that the space he reserved away from her was regularly shared with at least three other women. At around the same time, Lee started going out with a petite dancer called Jean, who spelled her name Jeanne and annoyed Jo with her sulky demeanour and utter refusal to eat or talk to anyone who wasn’t Lee. After Adrian, Jo dated a drummer called Pete (it took her a few goes to get over her musician phase) and after Jeanne moved to Paris, Lee decided to embrace celibacy, a plan he stuck to for about four months. Then he was seduced by his thirty-five-year-old painting lecturer, causing a university-wide scandal and a disciplinary hearing.

  Through all these romantic shenanigans, Jo and Lee stayed friends. They did a number of performance-art pieces together and helped each other with other artistic projects. Lee designed and painted the set for Jo’s third-year directing assignment. She modelled for a series of charcoal drawings he did. They wrote a (terrible) play together.

  They were part of a large, ever-shifting group of friends. Sometimes they would do things alone together, and sometimes they would do them as part of a crowd. They could go weeks without speaking, and then spend a fortnight together every day. But however they interacted, Jo valued her friendship with Lee enormously. He was the cleverest, most widely read and multi-talented person she had ever met. The nickname Renaissance Man was totally apt: he craved knowledge and loved to enlighten and challenge people through whatever he did. He could draw and paint, play musical instruments, sing, act, DJ and dance. He could quote more poetry and Shakespeare from memory than anyone Jo had ever known, and he wrote prolifically and cleverly.

  Jo, in her time at university, surprised herself. She started her studies determined to be an actress, but as time went on, she found that just focusing on one character wasn’t enough for her. She was fascinated by all aspects of the process, from set design to lighting, and she worried about every detail of any play she was in. At the end of her second year, one of her lecturers gently suggested that her strength might lie more in direction than acting. Jo pondered the idea over the summer, and at the beginning of the new academic year, she put together a production of an absurdist play she liked: Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna. It was only a tiny show, with no budget at all, to be staged in a poky little venue over three midweek lunchtimes. She worked every hour of the day that she wasn’t actually in lectures on every aspect of it. She stayed awake at night poring over the text, spent early mornings painting set pieces and went out late in the evening to spend what little money she had on clothes for costumes from charity shops. Like the Emily Dickinson project in her first year, it was seen by few people and ignored by most of them. But it lit a fire in her, and she decided then and there that she was going to be a theatre director when she left university.

  However, like most arts graduates, the unsympathetic reality of life outside the halls of learning hit Jo hard. Trying to survive in London was almost impossible. Without a student grant, she had to take a succession of waitressing jobs to pay her meagre rent, and she found herself working fifty-hour weeks just to cover bills and a diet of Pot Noodles and almost-past-their-sell-by-date vegetables. There was no time to make theatre, and definitely no money. Then a friend of her dad’s offered her a job as a receptionist in the offices of a small but influential theatrical PR firm. Jo reasoned that it was in her chosen field, or thereabouts, and the hourly rate was twice what waitressing paid. The job was perfect. It gave her money to move to a slightly better flat, eat better and occasionally visit the launderette. As she worked conventional office hours, it also gave her time to direct a few staged readings with friends, although she still didn’t have an agent, or any way of graduating to bigger productions. Her day job just kept getting better though. She was a graduate, dynamic and hard-working, able to speak well and write clearly, and it was only a matter of months before she was doing a PR assistant’s job. That meant more money, but also more responsibility and longer hours. One day, Jo realised it had been six months since she had done any theatre. It brought about a small crisis of confidence. She felt she had lost her way, and the next day she went into the office and poured her heart out to Susie, her boss. Susie had had many an out-of-work actress working in her office, so she offered Jo a sabbatical and said she would keep a job open for her if and when she wanted to return.

  Jo knew she wouldn’t be able to afford rent and bills without her salary, so she moved back to Stevenage with her parents and booked a slot to do a play in a well-respected small venue in North London. She put out a call for scripts, and astonishingly her party-girl roommate from her first year, Helen, contacted her to say she had recently written a play. Rather hesitantly Jo asked to see the script. It was a tense thriller, with just two characters, set entirely in a bedsit, and it was really good. It was perfect.

  She contacted a list of people she knew and respected from university and asked them if they wanted to be involved. A few people were already doing well and were committed to theatre or television projects, and one or two were even in long runs in the West End. But she managed to gather a cast she could be proud of, and get Lee, who was working in a small design studio, to commit to doing the set.

  It was a hard, hard slog to get it all together. Jo sank every penny of her meagre savings into the show and her parents even invested a little. She used her experience at the PR company to drum up as much publicity as she could, and they received more press coverage than was usual for a small show at a fringe venue. The production was tight and professional, the set and music were good and the few reviews they got were very complimentary. One of the two actors in the piece invited an agent to see it, and got taken on as a result. But at the end of the run, Jo was left with a handful of good reviews, a set too big to store in her dad’s garage and a sizeable hole in her bank account. While she was immensely proud of what she had achieved, it hadn’t changed her life or brought any great career offers. She knew in the cold light of day that she would have to ring Susie on Monday and ask her for her job back. She prayed Susie would come through as promised and there would still be something for her there. With £140 between her and destitution, it was that or waitressing at the Harvester in Stevenage.

  Susie was as good as her word and took Jo back on, and the next time Jo wanted to do a show she worked around her daytime work commitments and then took a week’s holiday for the production week. It felt a little bit as if she was compromising some higher artistic principle, as if her job was her real life and theatre had become her hobby, but it was a compromise that meant she didn’t have to live with her parents and she could eat. She said as much to Lee when they met for dinner one night.

  ‘Life is about finding balance,’ he said.

  ‘That’s very profound, O Guru.’

  ‘You know what I mean. You have to live, and you have to find a way to make art. It so happens we live in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and now we’re in our late twenties a squat in Bethnal Green is not so attractive. But maybe we should give it all up and go and live in a converted warehouse in Berlin. I’ve heard it’s the most amazing city in the world. Cheap, vibrant cultural scene, amazing people …’

  Jo laughed, but she knew he wasn’t serious. Firstly because Lee had just put all his savings and a large chunk of the bank’s money into a tiny flat in North London, and was thrilled to be on the first rung of the property ladder, and secondly because the reason they were h
aving dinner was because Lee wanted to tell her all about Hannah.

  Hannah was an account manager at a big advertising agency. She had subcontracted some typographical work to Lee’s small design firm, and Lee said that the minute she had walked into the room, he had lost his heart. She was tall and slim, with sleek, dark, almost black hair and a calm, beautiful face. She seemed mysterious, composed, enigmatic. He went on and on about her, until Jo felt the urge to meet the amazing Hannah and punch her right in her enigmatic face. As a perfectly normal woman who’d never been even vaguely mysterious, she had an instinctive distrust of women who had that indefinable quality. She and Helen had decided one drunken evening that women of mystery were all either breathtakingly stupid or constipated.

  Still, Hannah was important enough for Lee to have requested a dinner just to talk about her, and like a good friend, Jo listened. Lee had asked Hannah out and they’d had one dinner where he had found her fascinating, well read and insightful (so maybe not stupid, thought Jo, it must be constipation after all). So far she had declined a second invitation, but Lee was keeping his hopes up. He quoted chunks of her last email to him from memory, and asked Jo what she thought about the hidden meaning behind the words – words that sounded to Jo both bland and totally devoid of subtext.

  ‘Oh my word!’ she teased. ‘You’re being such a girl! Listen to yourself!’

  ‘I know,’ said Lee ruefully, ‘but the way I feel about her is serious. This is huge, Jo.’

  He was right. It was. Hannah did eventually grant him a second date, and a third, and then suddenly they were completely in love and Lee disappeared off everyone’s radar for about four months. He resurfaced just before Christmas and begged Jo and all their uni friends to join him and Hannah for a big dinner in a restaurant, a combination apology-for-being-so-absent/Christmas/meet-Hannah celebration. Everyone was curious to see the woman who had got Lee so smitten, and they all gathered at the restaurant in Islington for pre-dinner drinks.