My heart practically somersaulted out of my mouth, hit the ceiling and then plunged back in again.
‘What’s that?’
‘That you never turn up for classes in make-up.’
Oh. Was that possible? Three years with NO MAKE-UP?
I contemplated a future here in Liverpool, bumping into Greg and Our Joey at the Asda as they picked out matchpots to paint their spare room. That was the alternative. Oh, God. I straightened my back. Head up, eye on the prize, as Mrs Mendelson used to say.
‘Rupert, it’s a deal.’
The night before moving to London I went for drinks with Hayls and Debs at the Blue Lagoon. It was a sombre affair, mostly dominated by Hayls claiming she was worried she was going blind, but Debs reckoned it was just the subtle new lighting in the bar. Debs had heard a rumour that Our Joey had moved in with Greg to an apartment down by the docks, like the posh people used to do in Brookside, but I told her I wasn’t interested. Hayls said she’d heard Greg was making gay porno movies for the foreign market, and again I shrugged and shook it off. Admittedly they both said they’d also heard that Greg and Our Joey were no longer speaking, but it was enough for me to realize that they were a source of gossip and that therefore I was, too. If I’d been having any second thoughts about moving away, this was enough to confirm I was doing the right thing. We bid each other a low-key goodbye outside the chip shop, promising to phone and write every week. The girls said they were looking forward to coming and staying with me and painting ‘that London’ red. But as I hugged them goodbye I had a hideous, overwhelming desire to push them both away. They reminded me too much of that day, those months, those years. Unreasonable as it seemed, I wanted to discard them to the wastepaper basket of history, along with Greg and Our Joey, allowing me to make believe it had never really happened.
I returned to Sandalan and sat in the kitchen with the lights off. In the lounge my bags sat, packed, ready for the off the next day. As the moonlight hit them, on the mantelpiece behind them I could see a school photo of me and Our Joey. I looked away, sharply reminded that if I stayed here there would always be something to spoil the view.
The main feeling I had through my first year at L.A.D.S. was one of bewilderment. Rupert had been right, London was a big place, and if I got lost on that underground once, I got lost a million times. I was overwhelmed by the pace of life, the passive aggressiveness of strangers, the noise. And then there was the college itself. If I’d not understood the meaning of the phrase ‘fish out of water’ before, I soon did. Everyone seemed posher than me, more confident than me, more knowledgeable about everything that we were asked to do, or the things we discussed. What’s more, they all seemed more talented than me. It had been one thing being good in Mrs Mendelson’s classes, and shining gloriously in Say No to Date Rape (an improvised piece), but these guys commanded your attention like seasoned pros.
On my first day I found a girl crying in the girls toilets, her badly henna’d hair punctuated by an Alice band. I asked her what was wrong. She looked at me and attempted a smile, saying, ‘I miss my horse.’
‘Horse is . . . your boyfriend?’ Wow! I knew what that nickname implied. Lucky girl. But she looked at me like I was mad.
‘No he’s my . . . horse.’
At that point I realized I wasn’t in Liverpool any more. And that in itself was bewildering. She fell into my arms and sobbed on my shoulder as I stroked her hair.
‘I’m Moth,’ she sobbed.
‘You’re what?’
‘Moth.’
Oh well. I was used to strange names. I’d knocked about with a guy in a wheelchair called Lotan. I shrugged it off as a part of London life I could deal with and replied, ‘I’m Jodie.’
She stepped back, beaming: ‘Jodie?!’
I nodded.
‘I had an imaginary friend called Jodie!’
Oh God, she was a complete loon. Her face clouded over.
‘She was a bit of a bitch.’ Then she smiled again. ‘But you seem really nice.’
Ah! She might have been a complete loon, but she was a good judge of character. Result!
In one of our first acting lessons, Rupert made the group imagine a good taste or a bad taste. I chose rocky road pie. We then had to stand there as he walked around the room, watching us pretending to eat whatever the good or bad taste was. I caught Moth looking at me like this was plain weird, so I winked at her and mimed putting something in my mouth and then nodding as I enjoyed ‘eating’ it. She winked back and followed suit, rubbing her tummy for good measure. Some of the others were getting really into it. One girl, Amanda, started screaming, ‘Oh God I can’t eat it, it’s vile! It tastes so disgusting, I can’t! I’m sorry! Where’s the bin?’ And then she started dry retching all over the room, staggering round like she was drunk. What a drama queen.
I’d known the minute I clapped eyes on Amanda that I wouldn’t be able to stick her. She had a perfectly pretty heart-shaped face, but because she wore her precision-cut blonde hair in a ponytail that bobbed every time she moved, she put me in mind of a prancing pony. Oh well, maybe it might make Moth miss her beloved horse less with her in the group.
As Amanda bent over a bin in the corner of the room, daring some bile to shoot from her mouth, I saw several of the lads in our class craning their necks to get a look at her backside. One of them, Oliver, all angular cheekbones and gelled-back black hair, murmured something to the guy next to him and they shared a laugh. I decided I’d have to watch him. Amanda’s OTT performance triggered several other members of the group to crank up the volume of their performance in a never-ending Mexican wave of perforgasm. The whole thing, appropriately enough, left a bad taste in my mouth. I sat on the floor and quietly continued to pretend to eat rocky road pie, unsure what this was all about.
Amanda explained in the canteen at lunchbreak.
‘I think Rupert wants us to learn how to use our imaginations and stuff?’
Amanda seemed to end every sentence like it was a question.
‘To really play, use all our resources? Our past, our senses, so we can be truly alive on stage?’
Moth and I nodded eagerly, knowingly, as if this was old news. A bit of Moth’s strawberry yoghurt was dribbling down her chin. It endeared her to me even more. Amanda continued, ‘It’s Stanislavski and method acting, kind of all rolled into one?’
‘That’s what I thought,’ I said. Another complete bare-faced lie. I felt myself blush, not because of the lie, but because Amanda was really studying my face. I wondered if I, too, had strawberry yoghurt dribbling down my chin. Which would have been odd, as I was eating a pork pie. She saw my discomfort.
‘Sorry!’ she said, without even a hint of embarrassment. ‘I just think you have a great face.’
Oh well.
‘Really interesting. The camera will love it. Really kooky, really . . . characterful?’
Hmm, were the great beauties of world kooky? Characterful? I feared not.
‘It’s like . . . whatever the complete opposite of aristocratic is?’
I knew what the opposite of that was. Peasant-like. I was about to be offended when she added, ‘I think you stand a really good chance of getting work when we leave?’ Which placated me because, much as I’d enjoyed it at the time, I didn’t particularly want to go back to stacking shelves after three years of drama school.
‘You’re, like, the only truly working-class girl on our course and stuff?’ she continued.
I was rather taken aback by this. There seemed to be a received wisdom that everyone with a Liverpool accent, even a soft Liverpool accent, was working class. Everyone from Liverpool knows that wherever they go in the country they only have to open their mouths and judgements are made. Usually the sort that make women reach for their handbags and men check out of the window to make sure their car’s still there. Amanda’s assumption that I was working class didn’t exactly offend me. I probably was, but it did make me think of Mum. And how angry she would have bee
n on my behalf.
Yes, we lived in a tiny bungalow on a council estate. Yes, my dad was a postman and my mum worked in a cigarette factory. Yes, I got a full grant. But Mum, despite all this, had always insisted we were lower middle class. With her obsession with things being ‘becoming’ or not, or ‘common’ or not, she really did think she was a cut above everyone else on our street. I’d read a book when I was a kid called Twopence to Cross the Mersey. Mum had cried her eyes out reading it, as had her mate Maureen and every woman in our street, so I’d had a crack at it, believing it would make me look ladylike and grown up. It was set in the olden days and in it a posh family on the Wirral, who had staff and a drawing room, fell on hard times and had to move to a slum in Toxteth. Despite living in poverty and being surrounded by riff-raff, the mum in it never forgot where she came from, and always tried to behave like a lady – even if she was making one potato feed a family of eight for a fortnight. She kept her airs and graces, and her nose firmly in the air. Reading it – I sobbed, too. At one point Our Joey had to slap me round the face to sober me up from my heaving hysterics – I got it into my head that my mum was landed gentry fallen on hard times. Complete nonsense, of course, but it just seemed to fit her for some reason.
Looking at Amanda now as she tucked into the sashimi she’d brought in a Tupperware container, I thought that if Mum had been sat with us now, she would have dismissed Amanda’s assumptions – no matter how correct or incorrect they were – as irrefutably common.
It seemed Rupert was of that opinion, too. He informed me that as I’d probably have a long career playing ‘the maid’ or ‘the cheeky secretary’ – I was thrilled, a long career playing anything would do me just fine – then the job of drama school was to stretch me and make me take on roles that took me out of my comfort zone. Basically this meant that whenever we did scenes from plays, or put on productions, I would be cast as the lady of the house, whereas Moth would be the maid, forever doffing her cap to me and calling me ‘Ma’am’. When I told Mum on my thrice-weekly phone calls home from the phone box over the road from my lodgings, she was over the moon. She saw it as a personal affirmation that the McGee family had inherent class in everything they did. I didn’t want to spoil it by explaining the rationale behind Rupert’s casting.
Another reason the likes of Amanda had me down as the drama school equivalent of a free-school-dinners kid was that, because of my late admission to the course, I’d had less time to find somewhere to live in the Big Smoke than the others. And as such I was invited to board with one of the patrons of L.A.D.S., a septuagenarian semi-retired actor (usually, in his case, pronounced ac-TOR!) called Bernard Bennett (pronounced Bennay).
Bernard lived in a tiny flat a stone’s throw from L.A.D.S. One side of the flat looked over Kennington Park and the other was overshadowed by the stadium walls of the Oval cricket ground. Every time I went inside it was like stepping onto the set of one of those claustrophobic submarine movies. I felt I had to physically shrink to get in. Everything about the flat was long and narrow, from the galley-style kitchen to Bernard’s uber-aggressive cat Freckles, who looked like the feline equivalent of a sausage dog, and who I assumed had evolved in a very stretchy way to adapt to his surroundings. The flat had but one bedroom, which Bernard had kindly given over to me, while he slept on a sofa bed in the living room. This wasn’t as good an arrangement as it first sounded. My bedroom was predictably tight on space, featuring a single bunk bed with a desk underneath it. And because Bernard slept in the living room, through which I needed to walk to access the kitchen, if he wasn’t awake when I got up in the morning, I had to go to college without so much as a glass of water inside me. Eventually I got wise to this, moving a kettle and toaster into my bedroom, which was great for my general levels of health and hydration, but meant there was even less space for me to move about in.
Twice a week Bernard was up with the lark, practising star jumps in the living room. Who needed an alarm clock when you were juddered awake by a bouncing thespian? The reason he was up early these mornings was because he was a part-time voice coach at the college. We had to be trained in case we ever got a theatre job and needed to project our voices so everyone in the auditorium could hear, and to do it in such a way that we could keep on doing it every night for as many months as possible without getting a sore throat and sounding like Johnny Vegas after a night on the fags. Everyone else hated their lessons with Bernard, because instead of teaching us anything he would sit at the front of the class and regale us with anecdotes from his career, mostly invented. Like the time he told Dustin Hoffman to reign it in on Marathon Man, or how he cured Julie Andrews’ lisp on The Tamarind Seed. He became a bit of a laughing stock with the others, and they saw my defence of him as solely down to the fact that he was my landlord. But it wasn’t like that for me. I loved his stories; Moth did, too, and we sat chuckling throughout, lapping them up. People like Amanda complained about him to Rupert, saying he wasn’t value for money and that she was fearful her intended career at either the National Theatre or the RSC was in jeopardy because of his ineptitude. Rupert would just smile and say, cryptically, ‘Slowly slowly, catchy monkey.’
Which sounded even odder than you might think in a Yorkshire/Lancashire accent.
One day, towards the end of my first year, I came in to college to find a letter in my pigeon hole. I recognized the handwriting immediately, and it made my blood run cold. I saw the words shake before me and realized my hand was trembling.
‘Jodie? Are you OK?’ I heard Moth say beside me. I turned to her and smiled, nodding as I shoved the envelope into my bag.
‘Fine, Moth. Come on, we’ll be late for Rupert.’ And I hurried off down the corridor.
All morning I felt the letter burning a hole in the bottom of my bag. I couldn’t concentrate on my classes and stumbled through them as if sleep walking. Rupert mistook it for pure concentration and singled me out for praise. At lunchtime I had no appetite, so I slipped away while no one was looking, crossed the road and went and sat on a bench in the park. Every fibre of my being was telling me to read the letter, but the brave part of me was daring me to take the envelope out, rip it up and let it float away on the breeze. Except there was no breeze. And sometimes I was a coward. And too nosey for my own good. And besides, I missed him.
Deep breath, eye on the prize.
25 Marigold Court
17 Hancock Close
Rusholme
Manchester M14 5UW
1 June 2002
Dear Jodie,
First off, can I say please, please, please, keep reading. Don’t rip this up and chuck it in the bin. I know you’ll want to do that. I can’t say as I’d blame you if you did, but I really hope you won’t.
The first thing I want to say is I’m sorry. I’m sorry to have caused you so much pain and I’m sorry I ruined your wedding day, and your marriage. I know how happy you were with Greg and my behaviour was inexcusable. I know you don’t want to know the ins and outs of it, and I don’t want to hurt you any more than you are already.
I have had a lot of time to reflect on my actions and what I did and what I let happen, and I now feel so bad and so foolish and completely hate myself for the mess I created.
As well as doing a lot of thinking in the past year I have also done a lot of growing up, and I now understand that the shitty things I did to you were the shitty things a kid would do. And I don’t think I’m a kid any more.
I’d had a major crush on Greg ever since he stuck up for me at school when I was getting picked on. I never in a million years thought anything would happen coz I knew – well, I thought – he was 100 per cent straight. I tried it on with him, not the other way around. I was pissed and would never have dared do anything of the sort if I’d been sober. I’m not saying I’ve got a drink problem, but it was certainly a factor. So you could have blown me down with a feather when he reciprocated.
Then, of course, there was the next morning and the guilt and feeling an arl
arse about you. Greg said it would never happen again and that he loved you. He was always adamant about that. I know it’ll sound weird and nonsensical, but it’s true. But of course it did happen again, and then I just couldn’t stop worrying. I knew he wasn’t husband material. What husband goes round shagging their brother-in-law? But I just didn’t know how to tell you.
And then there was the wedding day. I was really pissed. He initiated it that day, even though I’d sworn to myself after our chat a week or so before that I wouldn’t ever go near him with a barge pole. Which of course I did, as you know only too well.
I just want you to know that I haven’t seen Greg since the wedding. Nor do I want to. We had a major row after you ran away from the do, which ended with him punching me coz I called him a c**t. But really, we were both c**ts, I guess. I just didn’t want you to think we were living together or something, happily ever after. I never want to see him again as long as I live. It’s too messy. It’s made too many people sad.
I might not want to see Greg again, Jodie, but I would give anything to see you. I really miss you and the laughs we always had together. Nobody on this planet understands me better than you, which is why my betrayal of you is all the worse.
Mum has told me all about your move to London and that you are going to acting school, and I really think that’s boss and I’m not surprised. I hope that if anything positive has come out of what happened, it is that you finally know what you want from life and that you can now go out and get it.
I have moved to Manchester, where I am living with a lovely guy called Pete. He has the nicest smile. I am working at Next in menswear, but I’m getting more and more DJing gigs. I spend every penny I can on records. It’s mostly weddings (sorry) and birthday parties and shit like that, but I’m getting my face known round the gay scene and starting to get the odd set in some of the skankier clubs, so you never know.
Jodie, I am so sorry I hurt you. Please find it somewhere in your heart to forgive me. I love you very much, and I’m sorry for being such a huge twat. I would really love to see you again and would be more than happy to come to London to say hello. Or I could come to Liverpool next time you’re home. I will leave the ball in your court, as they say.
All She Wants Page 17