If It Wasn't For Sarah

by Lynne Roberts

  Chapter 5.

  Mr Murdoch needed the media suite for the rest of the week for the Seniors, so we had to put off the other rehearsals until later. Brian was a bit miffed that his arrangements would be disrupted but Sarah decided that it would give us a chance to sort out the costumes. We went to the Clothing room and asked Mrs Barrington, the Clothing teacher, who said she would help.

  ‘Why don’t you look through what is already there belonging to the Drama Department before I make anything new,’ Mrs Barrington suggested. ‘I’ll open the storage cupboard under the stage for you tomorrow at lunchtime, if you like.’

  ‘Great, thanks,’ answered Sarah enthusiastically.

  ‘My Mum can sew any new costumes we need,’ I volunteered.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Mrs Carrington. ‘Tell her to give me a call if she is stuck for ideas.’

  When I got home that night I told Mum politely what I’d done.

  ‘Mum, I told them all at school that you would make the costumes for the production.’

  ‘You did what?’ gasped Mum.

  ‘The costumes,’ I said slowly and clearly. ‘For the production,’ I added loudly.

  ‘You don’t have to shout at me Chelsea, I’m not deaf,’ Mum said irritably.

  ‘Don’t you think it would have been polite to ask me, before offering my services? Do you think I have nothing better to do all day than sit around sewing costumes?’

  ‘Oh, I knew you wouldn’t be busy,’ I said loftily. ‘You’re not like the other mothers who work. You don’t do anything all day anyway.’

  Mum promptly went ballistic.

  ‘Just because some people felt it is important to be a homemaker and do without rather than bringing in a second income, it doesn't mean they do nothing. Without people like me, there wouldn’t be anybody doing Meals-on Wheels, or helping to entertain the old people at the Home by taking them on outings or helping them with their shopping. Not to mention sewing the curtains for the town hall supper room or …’

  ‘Okay, okay, whatever! I’ll tell Sarah that you can’t do the costumes after all.’

  ‘I didn’t say that I wouldn’t do them,’ Mum yelled back, ‘I just would have appreciated being asked first instead of being taken for granted, as usual.’

  I left at this point, as this is usually when she starts going off about how we all forgot her birthday one year and obviously nobody cares about her. Well I was four years old, for heaven’s sake, and Billy hadn’t even been born. My Dad only got it wrong by one day. He’d had a meal booked at a fancy restaurant for the next night and even got a babysitter booked for Malcolm and me but he was a day too late and Mum never got over it.

  Some of us girls went to get the costume boxes from under the stage in the hall and we took them into one of the dressing rooms to see what we could use. The Seniors used to put on a major drama production at the end of the second term each year until Mrs Frank, the drama teacher, left. All the costumes they had ever used were there. We’ve still got drama teachers for the Seniors but none of them have been very keen lately so there hasn’t been a show for two years.

  ‘There’s masses of stuff here,’ I said in satisfaction.

  ‘Look at this’ squealed Bethany, pulling a tiger’s head out of a box. ‘This is so sweet. It’s all furry and soft. Can’t you write a tiger into the production, Chelsea?’

  ‘No,’ I answered firmly. I knew who’d end up wearing it, and it wouldn’t be Bethany!

  ‘There are heaps of striped shirts and sashes here,’ remarked Sarah. ‘They might be good for the fairies to weave around in a sort of floaty, dreamlike way.’

  ‘I think the colours are a bit bright,’ said Sally critically.

  ‘The fabric is too shiny, really,’ agreed Angela. ‘I think they used them for pirates. Gemma wouldn’t use anything like that.’

  ‘Okay, we’ll give that idea up,’ said Sarah with a shrug. ‘I’ll ask Phoebe to find something they can use.’

  ‘There are piles of uniforms here,’ called Janice, whom was rummaging through another box.

  ‘They are from War and Peace,’ Grace informed her. ‘They wouldn’t be much use for Shakespeare.’

  ‘I’ll bet the boys would like wearing them though,’ sniffed Janice.

  ‘Yes, and then they’d insist on carrying machine guns or something else totally stupid,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s bad enough that they want swords. They’ll go all Rambo on us and start a war if you give them the slightest encouragement.’

  Janice looked at the uniforms critically.

  ‘They’re a bit manky anyway and they smell musty. I’ll put them back, shall I?’

  ‘Yes,’ we all yelled and Janice grinned at us as she put the uniforms back in their box.

  ‘Look, shoes,’ I said in delight as I opened another box.

  ‘Awesome. Look at those neat red ones with the high spiky heels.’ Bethany slipped them on and tottered around the room. ‘They are really hard to walk in,’ she squeaked as she narrowly avoided tripping over onto her face.

  ‘We can’t have shoes like that,’ said Sarah rather regretfully. ‘Ms Cutter wouldn’t let us wear them.’

  ‘She is so mean,’ agreed Janice.

  ‘Not as mean as my parents,’ I said moodily. ‘They won’t even buy me another pair of shoes when I need them.’

  ‘Sounds like my parents,’ said Grace feelingly. ‘Whenever I want a new pair of shoes my Dad starts the big lecture. You know the one – you are lucky to have shoes at all. When I was your age I had to walk to school barefoot through the snow.’

  ‘My Dad says exactly the same thing,’ I agreed. ‘For goodness sake! Have you noticed it is always snow? They never had to go barefoot on nice sunny days when you like to have cool feet. Oh no. It has to be snowing.’

  Grace nodded. ‘Yeah, and that is after they’ve gone down the coal mine and hacked out three tons of coal with their fingernails to stoke the coal range before breakfast.’

  ‘I’ve seen photos of my Dad when he was a kid, when we went to Nana and Pop’s house,’ I told her. ‘In the photos it is always sunny, never snowing, and Dad always has shoes on. I asked Nana once if they hired shoes for him to wear for the photos, so that people wouldn’t know how poor they were.’

  The girls shrieked with laughter. ‘Chelsea! You didn’t! What did she say?’ Grace asked incredulously.

  ‘Well, my Nana is a bit deaf so she didn’t hear what I said but started telling me what a lovely little boy my dad was. Pass me the paper bag!’

  ‘I’ll bet your Dad wasn’t pleased.’

  ‘No. He gave me ‘the look’,’ I said gloomily. We all knew what that meant. That’s the look that says, ‘you are going to be in big trouble when I get you home, my girl!’

  ‘We could go totally Space Age,’ suggested Angela who had pulled out a bag of costumes from the Futuristic show and was prancing around in a glittery silver cloak, tossing her hair and making what she fondly imagined to be robotic noises.

  ‘Hey that cloak might be good for when I’m the fairy queen,’ said Sarah excitedly, and promptly pulled it off her.

  ‘It’s not fair, you’re getting all the decent costumes,’ grumbled Angela, looking discontented.

  ‘There are a couple of boxes of fabric here,’ I said soothingly. ‘They are mainly old curtains and shop remnants, but some of them are gorgeous. Maybe we can use some of them. What do you think?’

  The others fell on the boxes with cries of delight and draped them around themselves to see what inspiration they could get.

  ‘That one looks like a dead polar bear,’ snorted Sally, as Angela swathed herself in white fur.

  ‘Well you look like something our dog has dug up,’ snapped Angela, after a quick look at Sally who had found a length of grey vinyl with rather suspicious mildewed splotches on it. ‘Quite frankly, I think this is a complete waste of time. There is nothing here remotely suitable for our production’

  ‘There’s whole heap of peasant skir
ts here, Sarah,’ cried Bethany, who was methodically going through all the cartons and had just reached the last one. ‘I’m sure we can use these.’ She held a couple of them up and Sarah got quite excited.

  ‘I’m sure we can. Sally, why don’t you go and ask Mrs Barrington if she can come and give us some advice?’

  Sally scowled at Angela and went off to the staffroom, while we put all the things we thought we could use in one pile and re-stacked the other stuff in the boxes.

  ‘It’s funny how things never fit when you repack them,’ remarked Bethany, as we crammed clothing into cartons that looked perilously close to bursting. ‘I mean, we took all this stuff out so it should go back again.’

  ‘That’s because Janice isn’t folding things properly,’ said Angela accusingly. ‘She’s just stuffing them in.’

  ‘Am not,’ denied Janice with an air of injured innocence.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Angela sniffed and Janice glared at her.

  Mrs Barrington said she had a free period and sent Sarah to tell our Maths teacher that we girls were all excused class because we were helping her. She is so much nicer than Ms Cutter. We spent the next hour happily planning all the costumes.

  ‘The ghosts should be easy,’ Sarah said breathlessly as she came back into the room. ‘They only needed a white sheet and a bit of chain to clank.’

  Mrs Barrington looked a bit doubtful about the chain but we knew the boys would love it.

  ‘I have some fluorescent fabric paint we can use to mark skeletons on,’ she volunteered.

  ‘‘Terrific,’ Bethany beamed. ‘They are going to be so cool.’

  ‘Gemma reckoned the fairies all have tutus they can use,’ offered Janice.

  ‘Yes, well they would, wouldn’t they?’ muttered Grace. She didn’t like the ballet girls either.

  Janice and Angela were playing witches and were a bit disgruntled at being asked to try on the ragged old peasant skirts and shawls.

  ‘They don’t look very nice,’ grumbled Janice, as Mrs Barrington bustled around with a mouthful of pins, marking where all the adjustments needed to be.

  ‘Well, witches aren’t supposed to be nice,’ I pointed out helpfully.

  ‘They’re too brightly coloured. They don’t even look very witch like,’ Angela complained.

  Mrs Barrington said, ‘Don’t look so worried, girls. They will look a lot better when Chelsea’s mother has altered them all to fit and I have dyed them black. Now, if you go to the Art Department you’ll find they have a pattern for a witch hat there that you can make out of card and then decorate. It will have to be sprayed black first but then you can add stars and magic signs and glitter to them in whatever patterns you want.

  ‘Cool,’ said Angela happily. ‘We’ll go and see if Miss Shaw will let us do it now. Come on.’

  She and Janice and the others all trooped off to have a go at making hats and Sarah was left to try her costumes.

  She could have just worn one, and put a cloak over it for some of the scenes, but oh no. Sarah had to have a new costume for every scene. I tried to talk her out of it.

  ‘You won’t have time, Sarah. You’re on the stage practically the whole time and there isn’t any spare time between scenes so how are you going to change?’

  ‘Well, I have to have a different costume for each new character. You’ll have to re-write the production to give me time to change.’

  ‘I am not rewriting it. Do you have any idea of how much time I have spent on this damned, er, sorry Mrs Barrington, darned thing already?’

  ‘I know exactly how much time you’ve spent on it. I can tell you to the minute how much time you’ve spent on it. You tell me every single day how much time you’ve spent on it.’

  ‘All right, all right, but it’s taken me ages. I don’t want to rewrite it. Why can’t you just wear one costume like everyone else?’

  ‘Because I need a new costume for each character. I’ve already explained that.’

  ‘But that’s seven costumes!’

  Mrs Barrington stepped in before actual blood was shed and made a suggestion.

  ‘Now listen girls. How about this for an idea? It’s actually something I saw a singer do in a nightclub act, but it was very effective. You start off by dressing in the final costume. Over that you put the next to last one, and so on. Then all you have to do is quickly pull one layer off and you’re ready for the next scene. You can quickly step backstage or behind a screen or some scenery to do that.’

  ‘Sounds like a good idea,’ Sarah nodded.

  ‘Won’t she look like an elephant in all those clothes?’ I protested.

  ‘Not necessarily. Because Sarah is only seated or facing the audience for most of her performances, we can make costumes that tie at the back and go on a bit like an apron. That way they won’t be so bulky. There will only be a couple that will need to be full costumes.’

  Sarah was delighted with the idea and I have to admit it was a good one. Anyway, Sarah is the sort who would look good in a potato sack. I was a bit sorry not to be getting a costume but I wasn’t going to be seen on stage so I didn’t need one.

  We left Mrs Barrington with Sarah’s measurements and a copy of the characters so she could do the costumes for her over the next couple of weeks. Sarah bought me an ice block from the Canteen, as a way of saying sorry, so that was okay. I was just thankful not to do any re-writing. I already knew the whole thing by heart.