by Aine Greaney
It’s funny how it all started, really.
They were living way out in Cripton, in that academy. Really getting on each other’s nerves in that tiny flat. And everyone getting on everyone’s nerves in the one-story building where all the workers lived for free and shared bathrooms and the big kitchen. They had been already living there for eight months on that evening when everything changed.
It was a nice sunny evening, so Cat had brought a chair out the back, set it on the strip of pebbles underneath their window, sat there with her new Kiss magazine and she’d just lit up a fag when the phone rang. Not her mobile, but the big pay phone in the corridor, which, like, only rang in the middle of the night, usually. It used to wake them up at all hours, her and Mum. Then one of their neighbors would answer it, a bloke with a foreign accent, standing out there in the corridor and shouting down the receiver like he was in a train station, not a staff residence hall.
So that evening, Cat let it just ring. But then, it just didn’t stop, so Cat went back around and in the front door. “Yeah,” she said, into the phone. “Who do you want?”
And there was this woman on the other end, with a poshed-up voice. “Hello. I’m looking for a Carmel Cawley, please.”
Cat said, “She’s at work. Can I take a message?”
“Are you Catherine?” asked the woman.
Cat felt dead nervous then, wondering why she didn’t recognize the voice, if it was a teacher’s voice, one of her teachers up at the academy, calling to complain about Cat again. “Yeah. What do you want?”
“Actually, I’m calling from the Pritchard School of Dance up here in London, Covent Gardens. We’ve had an inquiry on your behalf. We hear you’re quite good, that we should let you audit—”
“—If you’re taking the piss, this isn’t very funny.” Then Cat hung up, and she was just going back outside again, back to her Kiss magazine, when it started ringing again.
This time, the woman said, “Could we have a better contact number for your mum, please? I think that would be best.”
So Cat thought she shouldn’t but she did it anyway. She gave her mum’s mobile number.
“Good, good,” Mrs. Pritchard’s shouting at the stage again. “A little better this time. Now you! Gerda or Catherine . . .”
“It’s Cat, miss.”
“If you could just come up a little faster there on that last one. And you need to do that final curtsy toward your buttercup, but also try and turn a little more toward the audience. Toward me. Yeah. Look, we’ll come back to that one later. Okay. Where’s my hyacinth? Hyacinth? You should be already swaying. When our friend Gerda here finishes that last curtsy, you need to be ready.”
Mum came home from work and poured her usual wine and said that she really was going to swing for one of those boarding school bitches soon—all their questions and bloody food allergies and vegan shit.
Mum always drank the first glass fast. Then, Mum lit a fag and poured her second glass and said, “Oh, by the way, babes, some woman rang me this afternoon. Yeah. From some place, some dance school up in Covent Gardens.”
“Oh, yeah? What’d she want, then?” Cat turned from the telly, trying to keep her voice casual.
“Says they want you to audition. And I think you should, babes. Can’t do any harm to try, right?”
Across the living room, Mum had that secretive look, like she was thinking really hard about something, but it was something she wasn’t going to tell her daughter about. Something big.
“We can’t afford a dance school,” Cat said. But of course, she only said it because she really wanted Mum to contradict her, to say, “Of course we can. No bother.”
So Mum blew her cigarette smoke out and gave Cat that sly, secret look again. She said, “Hey, maybe we can babes. Maybe we really can.”
Mum rang in sick the following Friday, and they got the van to drive them to the Cripton train station. All the way up to London on the train, Mum kept telling Cat to sit still and for Christ’s sake, to stop biting her nails. “Once we get there,” said Mum. “Once we get there, I’m gonna find a Boots and get some nail-polish remover for you. That black shit looks like rubbish on your nails, what’s left of them.”
The Pritchard School of Dance had all these big windows and a pointy ceiling like a church or something. And just before the audition, Cat kept thinking, What about Miss Jarkowski? Won’t she be pissed off if I just leave?
But then, Cat forced herself to stop thinking about anything, ’cos she wasn’t going to get into Mrs. Pritchard’s anyways, and it was all just a joke, ’cos not in a million years could her and Mum afford a place like that.
There were three of them—three teachers just sitting there in the studio gawking up at her as she requested her song, then she started her best hip-hop number.
Afterward, Mum said she had to go in the office and talk to Mrs. Pritchard for a while, so why didn’t Cat just walk around a bit or go look in the shops and she’d just text her when it was time to go back to the train?
“A trust,” Mum said a week later, when the letter came saying they were accepting Catherine Cawley to the Pritchard School of Dance. “For once, we don’t have to worry about the money, babes. Not anymore. It’s all paid for by a trust.”
And then, just a week later, Mum announced they were going up to London again, this time to visit a friend. They got off at the Russell Square station. They walked along and turned down these streets and then they stopped in front of this old house with railings and steps and a big white door.
Cat asked, “Is there a party here?” Even though it was the middle of the day. Then this woman appeared in the open doorway, dressed in a blue suit. “Oh, there you are, Ms. Cawley,” said the woman, who was really gawking at Mum. The woman seemed surprised at something, like how Mum or both of the Cawleys looked. Then the woman looked like she was going to laugh as she said, “Well, do come inside. At least you’ll learn a little about the housing market in this area.”
The maisonette was really fab. It had these big windows and two bathrooms. As Mum followed the woman through the rooms, Cat kept thinking, No, Mum. Stop arsing about. We can’t buy this place. You’re just making yourself sad and stupid.
“We have no money, Mum,” Cat whispered to her, when she got her alone in the gorgeous kitchen and the estate agent woman was out of earshot.
Mum just had that secretive look again.
For over seven months now, they’ve been living in that place—a two-bedroom. Mum said they could’ve got a house, easily got a house, but she couldn’t be bothered with a garden.
And the maisonette is near Cat’s new school, Brantley Independent, where some of the guys are actually quite hot and one of them, Richard, seems to like Cat. But Cat hates him. But she doesn’t hate him as much as she hates Treacy Atchinson-Radcliffe, the fat hyacinth that can’t dance.
“Are we, like, rich now?” Cat asked Mum one day. Mum had just hung up the phone after calling the uni, the university, asking all about this course where you start learning how to be a nurse. Though Mum’s actually way too old to go to a uni or to learn anything new.
“So are we like, rich or something?” Cat asked Carmel again. They were sitting at the kitchen table having a coffee, and Mum had all this printed-up stuff on the table about her uni course and how she could enroll.
“No,” Mum said, “Well, no, not rich but . . .”
“But what, then?” Cat asked, trying not to sound too worried. Because all along, this little voice inside Cat kept saying, “Oh, no, not some other bloke again, some bloke who’s letting us stay in his maisonette, but then he’ll turn out to be a total wanker in the end.”
Mum leaned across toward Cat and went, “You know that time last year when we went to visit your gran?”
“Yeah, ’course. Gowna, Ireland. Where Uncle Tony and my friend Riona live.”
“Well, I once had this old friend there, babes. An old lady, you know, very old.”
“What she lo
ok like? Did I meet her?”
“No. No, you never met this woman. But anyway, she was really old and she died and left me . . .” Mum took another sip of her coffee, and for a minute, Cat thought her mum might start crying or something. But then she went, “Well, she died and she was such a good friend that she left me her money. For me and for you.”
“Wow! Wow! That’s a really good friend. So why didn’t I meet her?”
“Catherine, you don’t always have to know everything, do you?”
“Well, yeah, actually I do.”
Mum pushed Cat’s hair back off her forehead and said, “You know, before your opening night for the Snow Queen, you’ve really got to do something about that hair. There’s this stuff that will totally take dye out.”
Mrs. Pritchard is shouting again: “Gerda, darling. Keep that last movement a little tighter, please! Again. Start again. And concentrate this time. You’ve really got to concentrate.”
Mum said that for every dance practice, Cat should just look out into the theater and pretend that the rows of seats are already full, like, rows and rows of people all eating their chocolates and gawking up at the stage to watch Cat Cawley dance.