by Rhian Ivory
I scroll through my newsfeed. There’s lots of photos from the audition weekend and links to more photos and stories on Instagram. Their pages are full of comments about RADA and Dublin and jokes about being the next members of the RSC or the NT. There’s funny photo-shopped pictures on Callie’s timeline about her picking up a Bafta. Niall’s standing outside the Old Vic: his parents have taken him for the weekend to treat him and I skim through over twenty sickening pictures of the backstage tour he’s on. Aisha’s page is full of congratulatory messages – she must have got into LIPA. I really want to write something positive on her wall, ‘Well done’ or ‘Congrats!’ But I can’t make myself. I can’t even click the like button. My finger hovers over the angry face. I’m angry with all of them, and it feels right. I should be angry.
Aisha’s tagged me in on lots of photos from Dublin. I rub at the tension building in my temples, something surging underneath my skin. I know I shouldn’t look but I can’t stop myself. Most of them are rubbish, out of focus or too close up. I can see Callie, Aisha and me standing outside with hope all over our faces – utterly pathetic. Callie and I are together in another photo, holding hands in excitement, as Mr Davis talks in the background – totally embarrassing. Niall must have been behind the camera.
I study my face, clicking on the photo to make it bigger. I look like a phoney. I’ve got my fake smile on but I can see the truth in the corner of my eyes. I was nervous. I skip to the next photo: Niall and Aisha have their arms wrapped around one another in the bar on the ferry, Niall commiserating over her rejection by Dublin, Aisha taking full advantage of the situation. There’s a lot of photos of them later down The Boathouse with other friends sat on benches framed by outdoor heaters and fake palm trees that skirt the edges of the beer garden. Aisha’s sat on Niall’s lap and she looks like she’s won something. So many close-ups of them smiling, kissing one another, hugging and laughing. They look happy and so they should. They deserve it. There’s nothing wrong with them, textbook teenagers with their perfect smiles shining out from every carefully filtered selfie.
Callie’s posted on my page about the next gathering for this weekend and my head pulses. Too many ‘How did you get on?’ posts with smiley winking faces after them from friends who hadn’t heard but would have by now. I switch to Messenger. There’s loads of new posts in my inbox. As I read through them the pulsing in my head changes to fierce pounding.
Sarah-Dawn Nicholls Soz babes, just heard the news☹don’t worry there’ll be others ;)
DavinaJones Aisha’s just messaged me, cannot believe it. Bunch of idiots to say no to you.
Emma Delbridge You must be gutted. Chin up, chick. Something better will come along.
Kate Bartlett There’s loads of other drama schools out there. Try again.
Cassie Marsden Sorry you didn’t get in. I still remember you in Grease, you were fab;) You’ll get another place somewhere else.
Laura Horwood Just heard from Callie. Come out anyway, it’ll def make you feel better H!
Caroline Bates Bad luck. Keep the faith, don’t give up. You’ll get there.
Aisha Begum Hope Baldi! Get yo butt down The Boathouse now.
Claire- Lou MacAllister You know you are too good for them anyway. Somewhere else’ll snap you up.
And another one from Callie
Callie Morgan Otis Please come? Not the same without you Hope, I miss you :…(
C <3 <3 <3
And it
Is all
Too much.
Their kindness undoes me.
I delete all my messages. Posts about the audition, my nerves, how excited I am and the countdowns to how many days left before the big day are gone in seconds. Facebook asks me, ‘Do you really want to delete this post?’ Yes! I want to delete the whole fucking thing.
I
want
to
just
disappear.
Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are easier to get rid of. I can see the yellow envelope symbol and the number 3 next to it but I don’t click on it. I want all of it gone and with a few clicks of the keyboard it is. I am officially deactivated.
I feel
lighter,
lesser,
empty
no more holding heavy.
I google myself one last time. There are 4,060,000 results but only a few actually apply to me, mostly links to youth theatre productions, my face on the front of the Limelight Stage School prospectus and a few touring professional companies who list my name along with so many others. Just a musical footnote, a brief mention, nothing concrete or set in stone.
No
true traces
of
me.
I need to take something for my PMS pains. I reach to the back of my bottom drawer where I keep my song books and my tablets and scrape my arm on the broken wooden runner – Mum’s been promising to fix it but she never gets round to it even though I keep asking. I push and pull to dislodge it, but it won’t budge.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ I start to cry. I ram the drawer into the runners.
‘Why won’t it work? Why does nothing ever work in this stupid shitty little house?’ I scream. At first I feel the roar inside me rather than hear it. My blood pulses hot and hard as I start to shake, making a sound like an aeroplane about to crash land. The drawer shatters, splinters fly up into the air and shards of wood fall at scattered angles.
When my skin tears open, it happens as if it is distanced from me, in the background. Despite the ripping flesh, I keep on pushing the damaged drawer into a place it will never fit again.
The front door opens. Mum thuds up the stairs, past my room, walking into hers, calling out,‘Forgot my mobile. Knew I’d forget something! Hope?’ she says with laughter in her voice, pushing my door open.
My blood drips onto the beige carpet. I don’t move. My arm feels numb, buzzy but dead at the same time, like pins and needles. There’s something sticking out of it. I’m panting, out of breath.
‘I probably won’t need it but… Oh bloody hell!’ She gasps and drops to the floor. There’s a thin splinter of wood coming out of my wrist.
‘Hope! What happened?’ She doesn’t wait for a reply. ‘What have you done? I’m taking you to A&E.’ She sounds panicked. Mum doesn’t do panicked. I lean on her as she pulls me to my feet. We stagger down the stairs, knocking some of the photos of all the family off the wall. One of the frames smashes but I don’t look back to see which one.
‘Self-harming. That’s what it’s called, isn’t it?’ she asks in a stage whisper, as if she’s not sure if it is acceptable to say the word out loud in here. As if the scary-word police will come running and arrest her. Mum looks around the waiting room. Her hair is falling out of her hairband, bits of it hang around her face. She looks a mess.
‘Mum. I’m not self-harming. I promise you.’
She glances down at my bleeding arm. She’s wrapped it in a tea towel and the blood has seeped through, turning the green and white squares a strange shade of mahogany. It looks like the stuff Dad used to paint the fences with.
‘Is it…? Is this about Dad, Hope?’
I don’t say anything because I don’t want his name in this. I don’t want to blame him for something he has – had no control over.
‘It might shock you to hear this but not everything is to do with him.’
‘Don’t snap at me! I don’t know what’s going on with you. Unless you let me in I don’t know how to help.’ She sounds more desperate than angry now.
I don’t want to make life any harder for her but I can’t talk to her about this. I know she’s had the worst year of her life but I can’t think about her, because all I want to do is think about me. And this makes me hate myself all the more. I don’t want to put her feelings first. I don’t want to think about how hard it is for her to have lost her husband so young, because he was my dad. He was my dad. But I can’t say this to anyone, not even Callie. I am an evil and twisted
person.
Mum looks lost. I try and think of something to explain everything but I realise she isn’t going to let this go. The evidence is there on my arm and it’s too much, you can’t sweep blood under the carpet. Something has broken.
‘It was just an accident, honestly. I shoved the drawer in too hard and caught my arm. Look, it’s just a bad cut, that’s all.’ I take the tea towel off my arm and show her. My arm is a mess but it is just a cut, there are no neat lines, just a few manky bits of splintered wood and black-looking blood. I can see her taking this in; it really does look like an accident. It doesn’t look like I’ve cut myself on purpose. I don’t want her worrying about that as well as everything else.
‘But that’s not everything, is it? You’re not telling me something.’ Her whispered questions sound weary.
‘Are you kidding me? I failed my audition! You made me promise not to try again, not to apply anywhere else, and you wonder what’s wrong with me? Nothing’s right with me!’ I roar at her. ‘How can you not see that? I mean, are you blind or just stupid? Look at me! Just fucking look at me!’
I’m standing up, my arms are flying about and she’s shrinking away from me in her chair.
‘This is all your fault! How could you make me give it up? And now I don’t know what I’m going to do.’
My chair falls behind me. People are staring and someone in uniform is making their way towards us. There’s mud on the floor: a pot plant has smashed, splattering the tiles with soil and water.
The rage is kicking in so hard that I can’t see the filled chairs in the waiting room or hear the silence that has sunk every other conversation. I can only hear my voice getting louder and higher. ‘And you sit there in the house, night after night, watching stupid Jane Austen films about falling in love and you go on and on about your pointless work, but you don’t ASK me anything! We don’t talk about anything real because you can’t cope with the real world. You’ve left me in the middle of it without a map, without a clue where to go next or what to do with my life!’ I shout in her face as it crumples. ‘You want to help? Then tell me what to do! I’m a total failure and you take it all away from me. You keep taking it all away until there’s nothing left, there’s just you and me. I hate you,’ I whisper the last bit, then I have to concentrate on swallowing to stop myself from being sick.
I can’t see through my tears but I know she’s no longer here with me and I don’t blame her, not one bit.
‘I’m so, so, sorry for shouting,’ I tell her again, as the nurse pulls the curtain around the cubicle. She doesn’t say anything, she just sits there twiddling a hairband on her wrist. ‘Mum, I’m sorry. I mean, I’m really sorry.’ I put as much meaning as I can into my voice. ‘I didn’t mean what I said.’ What did I say?
‘Hope, I’m trying to get it right. I’m trying so hard to be there for you. It’s not easy on my own,’ she whispers.
I can’t remember what I said. I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true, I don’t think. I wish I could remember exactly what I said so I’d know what to apologise for. I switch tactics and try to explain it to her again.
‘I was trying to get some painkillers and I think the box fell down the back of the drawer and got stuck. Sounds stupid now, but things just got on top of me. I just lost my temper, that’s all.’ I say what I imagine a normal person would say. I can’t remember pulling the drawer out or how I got so many splinters in my arm. I only really remember walking down the stairs, leaning heavily on Mum and pictures falling, maybe even smashing.
‘But why didn’t you tell me how you felt? If you’d just let me in, Hope…’ She runs out of things to say.
‘I don’t know,’ I reply, which is the truth.
‘I noticed your light on again a lot this week. I miss your dad too,’ she says the word as if they might detonate in the room. We’re drifting too close to the danger zone, to an area neither of us know how to navigate. It isn’t about Dad. I know that’s not what’s wrong here.
My arm has been cleaned up and bandaged by a nurse with no sympathy for me or the scene I caused. I flex my arm, wondering if it should feel quite so tight. She moves her chair closer to the bed and carefully reaches out her hand to my good one. ‘We can work this out together, can’t we?’ As if all this mess needs is a plan or a nice list. ‘Let’s wait until you get your exam results then you can start making some real plans.’
‘Okay,’ I reply, adding, ‘I love you.’ How am I ever going to make this right? I’m looking at her now and can see the damage I’ve caused.
‘Hope, you might not realise this, but I am your biggest fan. Nothing you can say or do will ever change that,’ she tells me, but I wonder if it’s true. Surely there has to be a line, a moment when I’ll go too far and she’ll have had enough? ‘You’ve got no idea just how much I love you.’ She wraps her arms around me, pulling back to check if this is alright, if she’s safe to touch me now. I rest my head on her shoulder which feels like the safest place to be.
I’ve been here three weeks now and I have never seen him or her – the kid in the isolation room. Owen and Pryia go in and out, doctors and nurses, but I don’t see family or friends going in there. None of the other kids go in there, but there’s plenty of gossip which I can’t help but tune into as I pack up Nikhil’s instrument trolley.
‘I think it’s a two-headed monster and they just don’t want us to see cos we’d have nightmares,’ Marley stage-whispers, hoping I’ll join in. I pretend I’m far too busy tidying up.
‘Shut up! It so isn’t a monster, you donut. It might be a… oh I dunno. Don’t know, don’t care. Wanna play Speed?’ the boy next to her asks. Speed is this ward’s current card game obsession and they’re way too good at it.
I move away from them and find myself at the edge of Fatima’s bed. She’s asleep. She’s wearing an animal print hijab today, leopard or maybe cheetah spots. The gold sparkly bits in the edging catch the light. I sit down next to her bed and reach across to pick up her book. She’s only got a quarter left. I hadn’t realised we were getting through Spotlight on Sunny so quickly, unless someone else is reading to her. For a tiny second I feel jealous. I open the book, reminding myself what Sunny was up to. I look across at her and jump, making some kind of squashed noise. She’s wide awake and staring at me.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up. Hi.’
She doesn’t blink. I look around but there aren’t any nurses or doctors headed this way.
‘Will you read to me? Don’t tell the others but I prefer your reading to their singing,’ she tells me, smiling.
‘Thanks, I think,’ I laugh.
‘Not that I care, but why don’t you sing?’ she asks bluntly. ‘Aren’t you a Singing Medicine person?’ She points at my top.
‘Oh, um… this is just a summer job,’ I tell her, opening the book purposefully.
‘Yeah, but how come you don’t have to sing? The job is singing, isn’t it?’
‘I’m not really part of the team, I’m only a trainee, just for the summer.’
‘Right… and they’re paying you for what then? To be the only member of a singing team who doesn’t have to sing a note? Easiest summer job ever?’
‘Good point. Reading to you?’
‘You’re with the wrong team then, it’s Readathon you want.’
I’m fully aware I should be with the team wearing the orange t-shirt but I’m stuck with this singing team of smilers. But I’m not singing. I can’t sing.
‘If this is just a summer job where are you going when the holidays are over?’ Fatima asks the million-dollar question.
‘I don’t know. College, maybe?’ I answer.
‘I’m going to college too! And then university. Mariam, that’s my sister, she’s an engineer. I want to be an engineer too, so I’m doing my Maths GCSE early. I want to design a better organ-donation system. Mariam bought me a new notebook, it’s got squares and grids. I’m making notes and drawing diagrams so I can analyse all my ideas a
nd theories,’ she tells me, pointing at a book on her bedside table.
‘That’s impressive.’
She makes it sound so simple and straightforward. But what if it goes wrong? What if she fails her Maths or her diagrams don’t work? Bet she hasn’t thought of that and I don’t want her to, because reality bites. No one wants their dreams crushed with questions they can’t answer.
‘What job are you going to do after college?’ She returns to the question I thought I’d got away with.
‘Oh, something. I’ve got ages to sort all that out.’ I wave my hand around in the air. But what am I going to do? It feels hot on the ward, stuffy, and I am worn out because I can’t think of a decent answer. There’s nothing out there that I want to do other than acting. I’ve only got a few weeks to come up with a better plan – a plan B.
‘What did you do to your arm?’ she asks, changing the subject again.
‘Caught it on something. It’s just a scratch,’ I reassure her with a big smile. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ I add, feeling an odd sense of relief as another period pain flexes its muscles in the pit of my stomach. I almost don’t mind getting my period, because then I remember why I’ve been acting… the way I’ve been acting, and I feel less out of control.
‘I said that’s a big bandage for just a scratch.’ She points at my arm. When I don’t respond she launches into yet another new conversation. ‘Did they tell you they got a kidney transported from another centre last night? But I didn’t match the tissue, so I’m back to waiting.’