by Jean Ure
“Why?” said the girl.
“Why not?” said Saffy.
Angrily, the girl said, “It doesn’t play any part in the storyline!”
“How do you know?” said Saffy.
Well, of course, she didn’t. She subsided, muttering. I felt quite proud of Saffy! She is not a person who will let herself be pushed around.
“What about you?” said the girl, looking at me like I was a drip on the end of someone’s nose.
I said that I was going to be an old person. Mrs Ambrose cried, “Good! That’s good! Someone brave enough to do a bit of real acting.”
The girl gave me this look. I could tell already that she didn’t like me. As a rule I am such a creepy crawly that it really upsets me if I feel I am not liked. I want to be liked by everyone! But you can’t be; not if you have any sort of personality, which I think I do have. When I can get it sorted out! When I stop trying to be all these other things. But anyway, for once in my life it didn’t really bother me. I was having too good a time being this old person! I made up a name for myself, Mrs Fuzzle, and I went round complaining about pop music being just a horrible noise, and not like it was when when I was young.
I based it on one of my grans! Dad’s mum, who is nearly seventy and says that nothing is the same as it used to be. (Mum’s mum is younger and more with it.) Dad’s mum doesn’t grouch; she isn’t one of those nasty cross old people. But my one was! Mrs Fuzzle. She spoke all the time in this whiny kind of voice.
“You kids today… no manners! No consideration for the old folk. It wasn’t like this when I was young. When I was young we had respect. We had proper music, too! Not all this head-banging muck.”
I found myself wandering into every scene, doing my complaining. I even managed to get into the recording studio! It wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind. I wasn’t acting scenes of mad passion with a gorgeous guy, and people going ooh and aah and being gobsmacked. But everyone laughed, and the boy playing the record producer couldn’t speak for corpsing!
“You were showing off,” said Saffy, when we met up next day.
I didn’t mean to show off. I am not a showing-off kind of person! I’d never realised before that I could make people laugh. Even Saffy agreed that it had been funny.
“But not very glam,” she said.
She pointed out that next term, when we were going to record Sob Story on video, I would have to dress up as an old woman and paint wrinkles on my face. I hadn’t thought of that!
“It’s all right,” said Saffy. “It just means you’re a character actress.”
But I didn’t want to be a character actress! I wanted to be beautiful and attract boys! For a while I was crestfallen, thinking that I had made a big mistake. Everyone else was going to be cool and funky, and I was going to be an aged old hag with wrinkles! And then I had this bright idea.
“I know!” I said. “I’ll do a transformation scene!”
Saffy blinked and said, “What?”
“At the end… like in pantomime! I’ll have this mask and I’ll tear it off, and I’ll jump out of my coat and I’ll be the good fairy with a magic wand that makes everyone’s wishes come true!”
Saffy looked at me with what I felt was new respect.
“That,” she said, “is just brilliant!”
I thought it was, too. I thought, I’ve got what it takes! It is very important to have what it takes. You can’t get anywhere if you haven’t got it. But I had! I was going places. I had discovered my vocation!
“You’ve got to admit,” said Saffy, “that it was a good idea of mine, wasn’t it?”
“It was my idea!” I said.
“No, you twonk!” She gave me a companionable biff on the arm. “Going to drama school.”
“Oh! That,” I said. “Yes.” I beamed at her. “It was one of the best ideas you’ve ever had!”
IT WAS JUST SO good to have found something I could do, other than drawing pictures of the rabbit’s reproductive system (which now seemed rather gross). I could act! I could make people laugh! I had a good strong voice! I had good breath control! It made me feel all bubbly and enthusiastic, so much so that I actually started doing voice exercises every evening in my bedroom.
Ay ee oo ah oo ee ay
Mummy mummy mummy mummy
MmmmmAH! MmmmmmAY! MmmmmmEE!
Then there were the little stories, about Witty Kitty McQuitty, and Carlotta’s Past, and Cook with her pudding basins. They were all for different vowel sounds, and I practised them like crazy.
Witty Kitty McQuitty was a natty secretary to Sir Willy Gatty mmmmmAH! MmmmmmAY! MmmmmmEE!
One day I opened my bedroom door to find Pip crouching there with his ear to the keyhole. Well, it obviously had been to the keyhole. You could tell.
“What do you want?” I said.
Pip said, “Who were you talking to?”
I said, “What business is it of yours? Can’t a person have a private conversation in this house?”
Pip said it hadn’t sounded like a conversation. “Sounded more like a cow farting.”
Greatly annoyed, I said, “When did you ever hear a cow fart?”
“Just now,” said Pip. “In your bedroom!”
“You shouldn’t have been listening!” I screeched.
“Couldn’t help it,” said Pip, “the racket you were making.”
He then galloped off downstairs going “Moo! Moo! Fart!” and making silly waggling motions with his fingers.
“Moron!” I shouted; but he just stuck out his tongue and fled along the hall.
I thought to myself that considering he was supposed to be some kind of genius, his behaviour could be quite extraordinarily childish. But then, of course, he was only ten years old. I think sometimes we tended to forget that. It is probably quite normal, at ten years old, to be stupid and annoying. I just didn’t want him being stupid and annoying about my voice exercises!
I was really determined to take this thing seriously. The acting, I mean. At the back of my mind I was already thinking that maybe, when I left school, I could go to a proper drama academy. One of the big ones, up in London! They’d just had the film awards on television and I’d seen myself, in a few years’ time, stepping on stage to collect my Oscar for Best Actress.
The self that I saw was tall and willowy, verree sexy, wearing this slinky designer dress. Black with silver sequins, and a slit down the side. The dress would not only show a lot of leg, but a lot of everything else, as well, because by then I would have a figure worth flaunting, ie, thin. This was my daydream! But it was precious, and it was fragile, and I didn’t need my little genius brother shattering it for me.
I hugged my daydream all to myself. I didn’t even tell Saffy! I knew she wouldn’t laugh, as we are never unkind to each other; but I had this feeling that beneath the polite exterior she would probably be going, “Yeah yeah yeah!” just as I do when she starts on about Brad. I do it to humour her. But that is different. Saffy must know, deep down inside herself, that her feelings for Brad are just fantasy. This was my whole future!
I remembered how Saffy herself had said this, when she was instructing me what to say to Mum. “Tell her your entire future is at stake.” A premonition! I thought that when I was famous I would have a lot to thank Saffy for, and I immediately added an extra bit to my Best Actress scene.
In the new, extended version I didn’t just waft on to stage in my slinky black dress to collect my award, I actually gave an acceptance speech in which I graciously referred to “My best friend, Saffy.” Saffy would be there, in the audience. She would blush and clasp her hands to her cheeks as the camera zoomed in on her. She would be looking very chic but not too beautiful. Afterwards, I would invite her to join my party for a celebratory dinner in a posh restaurant, one where all the stars went. Maybe Brad would be there! He would walk past our table and catch sight of me and do this huge double-take and go, “Jen! Baby! Congratulations!” Then he would give me a big kiss on my cheek. And I wo
uld be very cool and laid back and say, “Brad, I’d like you to meet my friend Saffy. Saffy, I’m sure you recognise Brad Pitt?” And he would take her hand and say, “Hi there, Saffy!” and she would just nearly die.
Oh, it was such a beautiful dream! Far more exciting than any of my others. I simply couldn’t imagine what had ever made me think I would like to be a car mechanic! It is without doubt an extremely useful occupation but I don’t think anyone could call it glamorous and I have never heard of any Best Car Mechanic Awards, though of course there may be, there may even be Oscars, only it is not done on television and you would probably not get many of the mechanics wearing slinky black dresses and showing their legs. But it is a nice thought!
Not many of the boys at the Academy looked like they would ever become car mechanics. I don’t think I am being unfair to car mechanics when I say that on the whole you don’t expect them to be especially sensitive and creative sort of people. Then again, of course, I could be wrong. Just because a person likes to lie upside down beneath cars and stick his head into their engines, and get covered all over in oily black gunge, doesn’t necessarily mean they are not sensitive. Or creative. I am sure you can be very creative inside a car engine. It is just a different sort of creative. That is all.
One thing Saffy was right about, we didn’t have any boys like Nathan Corrie. Thank goodness! They weren’t all gorgeous, but at least they all came from this planet. One or two of them were actually quite geeky, not to mention goofy, and even what I would call plain. But they weren’t boring! What I mean is, they had personality. Plus they could talk about stuff other than football or computers. You could have real proper conversations with them, like discussing what you had just done in class or a new scene you’d worked out for Sob Story. I really enjoyed doing that! I’d never thought of boys as being people you had conversations with.
Some of them were quite funny. The boys, I mean. There was this one boy, Robert Phillips, who couldn’t pronounce his Rs and had to keep reciting Round the ragged rocks the ragged rascal ran. It always came out as “Wound the wagged wocks,” which drove Mrs Ambrose to despair. On the other hand, she said there was quite a demand, these days, for “upper class English twits” in Hollywood movies, so maybe he could turn his speech impediment to good use.
I personally found it quite difficult to picture Robert as a movie star, but Saffy, in her wise way, said that stranger things had happened. I was just glad that I didn’t have any kind of speech impediment. Mrs Ambrose said the only sound I had to work on was the “oo” sound and she told me to practise “the moon in June” and mmmmmOO. I made sure only to do it when Pip was downstairs and safely out of earshot!
Another boy who was a bit geeky was Ben Azariah. He had a head like a turnip! His hair grew upwards, to a point. He did this thing of twizzling it with his finger which made us all laugh! In spite of being geeky, he was totally brilliant as a mimic. He could take off Ant and Dec really well. He could also do this famous footballer that I won’t name in case it might count as libel, plus loads others, who I also won’t name, because I mean you just never know. Celebs can be really touchy. Mum says they will sue you at the drop of a hat. I wouldn’t want that!
Another person Ben could do was Mrs Ambrose. He had us all in stitches being her.
“Robert, my deah boy! You really must learn to pronounce your Rs!”
I certainly couldn’t imagine Ben being a big Hollywood star, but I could easily see him having his own TV show. Saffy agreed. She added that when people were a bit odd-looking, they often turned to humour. She said, “It’s a defence mechanism.”
I found this rather worrying and immediately rushed home to examine myself in the mirror and see if I was funny-looking, and if that was why I had chosen to play an old person in Sob Story, so that I could make people laugh and they would stop noticing how weird I was.
But I thought on the whole I was OK. I didn’t have a head like a turnip, my hair didn’t grow to a point. I even thought, secretly – I mean, trying to pretend to myself that I wasn’t thinking it, as it seemed rather vain – that I had nice eyes. They are bright blue, like Petal’s. Dani Morris once asked me if I wore coloured contact lenses, because she said you couldn’t have eyes that were as blue as that, it wasn’t natural. Well, it is, and I do! So sucks to Dani Morris.
All the same, I was glad that I’d hit on the transformation scene. Under my baggy old lady coat I intended to wear something really sensational. I hadn’t yet decided what, since it was still a long way off, but even when I had I was going to keep it a secret so that everyone would be taken by surprise and go “Ooooh!”
There were two people I specially wanted to go “Ooooh”. Both of them were boys. Surprise, surprise! There was Gareth Hartley, who was the one that had corpsed when I wandered into the recording studio doing my complaining, and there was Mark Nelson, who played the DJ. Both were truly cool! Everything that Saffy had promised. Creative and sensitive and seriously gorgeous.
Mark was like the big star. He had once been in a movie and had had real lines to say! Everyone fancied him like crazy. Even Saffy said that he was “lip-smacking” (what kind of disgusting expression is that?). She said that she would actually be prepared to accept him as a substitute while she was waiting for Brad to get divorced. But “Some hopes!” she added.
I told her that she could always dream, though as she was already dreaming about Brad I thought perhaps I could be the one to dream about Mark. I knew it was a dream that couldn’t ever really come true. Gorgeous guys, especially when they are nearly seventeen, don’t very often fall for plump twelve year olds, even if the plump twelve year olds do have bright blue eyes. Maybe when I’d taken the world by storm doing my transformation scene… Well, anyway. We would see!
In the mean time, there was always Gareth. He wasn’t quite as gorgeous as Mark, but on the other hand he was only fourteen, so I thought perhaps I might stand a bit more of a chance. Saffy said he wasn’t really mature enough for her, but that he would do “if all else failed.” She had some nerve!
One thing she’d been wrong about, and that was the girls. She’d promised me they wouldn’t all be gorgeous, and it was true they weren’t all, but lots of them were! Even the ones that weren’t were just so-o-o cool. And guess what? They were all thin! Thin as pins. All except for Connie Foster, who was little and bouncy and could walk on her hands and do the splits and pick up her leg and pull it straight up into the air, as far as her head. I would love to be able to do that! If I could do that I would be doing it all the time, just to show off. The only reason I don’t show off is that I have nothing to show off about. What I mean is, it is not a virtue.
Connie was the same age as me and Saffy and really nice. I’m not just saying that because she was the only person who wasn’t thin, but because she was sweet and giggly, and she didn’t show off, either. Not like some of them! Angie Moon, for example. She was the most horrible show-off. She had this habit of twinkling, by which I mean she would suddenly open her eyes very wide and stretch her lips into this great mindless grimace with her top teeth showing. I think it was supposed to be a smile. She did it whenever a boy happened to look at her, and especially Mark or Gareth. Me and Saffy thought it was pathetic. Saffy started calling her Little Miss Twinkle, which soon got shortened to just Twinkle, or Twink. She never understood why we called her that! She probably thought it was a compliment, as she had a very high opinion of herself.
Another girl who thought she was the cat’s whiskers was Zoë Davidson. She was the one I crashed into when I got my left muddled up with my right and turned the wrong way. She had an even higher opinion of herself than Twinkle. This wasn’t because she was specially gorgeous, it was because she’d been on television and had recently done a commercial for something-or-other, I have forgotten what as thankfully I never saw it. Saffy did. She said it was nauseating.
“Vomit-making! Pukey! Yuck!”
Even though Zoë wasn’t one of the gorgeous ones, I suppo
se she was sort of cheeky-looking. She had what Mrs Ambrose called “a televisual face”. The sort of face that can be filmed from almost any angle.
“Either the camera likes you or it doesn’t.”
That was what she said. Zoë. Talk about loving yourself! She really reckoned she was some kind of star. Not that she was the only one who’d been on the telly or appeared in commercials. Several of the kids had. Mark had even been in the West End! But he didn’t boast about it. Zoë just really fancied herself. Everyone said she was going to go places; even Saffy. Saffy said, “She’s the sort that does.”
She said that you had to be a bit big-headed and pushy and think a lot of yourself, because if you didn’t think a lot of yourself then who else would?
I wondered if this was true. If so, I found it rather depressing. More than anything else in the world I wanted to have loads of confidence; but I didn’t want to be big-headed and pushy! Did this mean I wouldn’t ever get anywhere? I asked Saffy and she said it depended where I wanted to get. She said, “I expect you could probably get somewhere if you just wanted to do something ordinary, like working in a shop. But not if you wanted to be a big movie star.”
My face must have fallen, because she then added comfortingly that that was all right because I didn’t want to be a big movie star, did I?
“It’s not what we came for,” she said. “You know what we came for!” And she pulled a face and jerked her head and rolled her eyes in the direction of a group of boys on the opposite side of the street. (We were on our way to Friday classes at the time.) “That’s what we came for… right?”
I said, “Right. But I wouldn’t actually mind being a movie star!”
It just, like, blurted out before I could stop it. I thought for a dreadful moment that Saffy was going to laugh, but she is my friend and we always take each other seriously. After all, I had taken her seriously when she once confided in me that she thought she would like to be a missionary and go round converting people. Which was really quite funny considering she was the one who was sent out of an RE class for having an unseemly fit of the giggles at what Miss Cooper called “a totally inappropriate moment”. (She has now decided that it is wrong to try and convert people as she feels they are probably quite happy left as they are. And, in any case, she is an atheist.)