A Fairy Tale for Christmas

by Chrissie Manby

  ‘My daughter is in the panto,’ said Ben.

  ‘Really? Which one’s your little girl?’

  ‘She’s called Thea.’

  ‘Elaine says she’s doing really well,’ Kirsty told Ben. ‘She’s got all her dance steps learned. She’s one of the mice,’ she then explained to Jon.

  ‘Light-brown hair, thick glasses,’ said Ben. He didn’t want Kirsty to have to give a physical description.

  ‘I know the one,’ said Jon. ‘A diva in the making. Not that she’s a diva, of course.’

  ‘I should hope not,’ said Ben.

  ‘She’s far from being a diva,’ said Kirsty. ‘She so sweet and polite. Really a pleasure. Very well brought up.’

  Ben knew that she meant it and smiled.

  ‘How funny that you should end up here because of your kid,’ said Jon. ‘Have you thought about doing anything yourself? You used to love acting. You were in all the school productions.’

  ‘Yeah. But that was ten years ago. A lot has changed since then.’

  ‘Ha! Well, your voice has broken now. That’s a start.’

  ‘We were at an all-boys’ school. I played a lot of female roles,’ Ben said to Kirsty.

  ‘And you loved it,’ Jon persisted. ‘I mean the stagecraft. Not the dressing up as a woman per se. Though if you want to dress up as a woman, then the NEWTS is definitely the place to be. You did more drama stuff at uni too, didn’t you? The thing is, Ben, we’re in a bit of trouble, as you may have heard. Trevor Fernlea – remember him? He used to teach geography at St Edward’s. Retired in our first year – well, he’s a keen NEWT and he was supposed to be our Buttons but he took a bang to the head and there’s no way he’s going to be well enough to do the season. Which starts in just over a fortnight, as you know, obviously, since Thea is going to perform.’

  Ben said nothing.

  ‘Which means we need someone to step in really quickly. Someone who can learn lines fast. Who doesn’t need too much hand-holding. Someone with a bit of stage experience. Someone who looks right alongside Kirsty.’

  Kirsty put her hands together in mock prayer.

  ‘Someone, in fact, just like you.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ben. ‘I did a few plays as a school kid, Jon. I don’t think that counts as stage experience. I can barely remember—’

  Jon put his hand on Ben’s shoulder. ‘You see this man,’ he said to Kirsty. ‘When we were seventeen, he beat me to the part of the judge in our school’s production of Joan of Arc. I was furious at the time but when I saw him on the stage, I knew that the right decision had been made. The better man got the part. So, Ben Teesdale, don’t tell me that you don’t think you’ve got it in you to play Buttons. You’re the man who brought the house down with your Hamlet. You could do Buttons without a single rehearsal.’

  But for once Jon’s charm wasn’t working. Ben wasn’t budging.

  ‘It’s not my thing any more,’ said Ben. ‘I don’t think it ever really was.’

  The juniors came tumbling into the bar then, accompanied by the chaperones.

  ‘OK, mummies and daddies,’ chaperone Megan announced. ‘Here are your little darlings!’

  The chaperones looked exhausted and extremely glad to be handing their charges back to their parents. Ben, on the other hand, was thrilled to see his daughter. Not least because her arrival cut Jon’s schmooze-fest short. Thea handed him the carrier bag containing her costume and her floppy mouse hat.

  ‘We’ve got to go,’ said Ben. ‘Supper will be on the table. It was nice seeing you again.’ He directed that last comment to Kirsty.

  ‘Tell me you’ll think about it at least!’ Jon called to Ben’s retreating back.

  Ben gave a wave, which was meant to be dismissive. All the same, he couldn’t help being just a little bit pleased at the idea that he ‘looked right alongside Kirsty’.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  ‘Shit,’ said Jon. ‘I really thought he’d go for it. He would be perfect.’

  ‘So, you know Ben from school?’

  ‘Yeah. Can’t say I really liked him all that much. He took himself so seriously. Never arsed about with the rest of us at lunchtime. He was always in the library with his nose in some book.’

  ‘But he was into drama?’

  ‘The English teacher encouraged him. I think she thought it might break him out of his shell and help him make some new friends. It might have done, had he not been so bloody serious about acting too.’

  Jon took a sip of his beer.

  Kirsty didn’t point out that Jon was pretty serious about theatre himself.

  ‘He hasn’t changed,’ Jon continued. ‘He’s still completely up himself. Too grand to do anyone a favour.’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  Kirsty wondered if that was the whole story. Something had passed over Ben’s usually very friendly face when he first saw Jon. He’d not exactly looked pleased to see him. Rather he looked as though he would have liked to avoid having a conversation. There was something really awkward about that whole exchange, and not just because of the unhappy revelation about Ben’s marital status that came halfway through it. Poor man, thought Kirsty. No wonder he’d looked awkward when Thea showed Kirsty that drawing of the three of them in front of the house, while Kirsty was waiting for her printing. It was a dreadful thing to have to keep explaining your loss, she knew. But it was more than that. It was as though part of Ben – and part of Jon – was picking up where they had left off more than a decade earlier.

  Though, of course, Kirsty hadn’t known Jon during his school days, she thought she had a pretty good idea of what he might have been like back then. When they got together with his school friends, they were full of tales of pranks and hi-jinks and Jon was always at the centre of any story. He was the class clown.

  But when she heard about some of the ‘jokes’ Jon had played on his schoolmates, at times she asked herself if they didn’t actually border on bullying. While Jon and his friends howled with laughter at the recollection of putting a dead squirrel in someone’s desk, Kirsty thought of how awful it must have been for the recipient to find a deceased rodent squashed between his textbooks. She knew if it had happened to her, she would have been really upset. And where was the fun in setting light to someone’s school jacket while shouting, ‘It’s a blazer! Let it blaze!’

  What if it had been made of nylon? It didn’t bear thinking about. Many of Jon’s favourite schoolboy wheezes seemed to involve near-death experiences for his poor victims.

  ‘I was just a bit boisterous,’ Jon claimed.

  She imagined Ben, who seemed like a gentle sort of person, sitting in the library at lunchtimes, and wondered if he didn’t go there for some peace. Had Ben found himself the butt of Jon’s jokes? After that awful conversation in the bar, in which Jon had referred to Ben’s old girlfriend as a slapper, Kirsty could understand why Ben might assume Jon hadn’t changed. Why should he want to do Jon a favour now?

  ‘Maybe little Thea will be able to persuade him,’ Kirsty said.

  ‘The one with the bug eyes?’ said Jon.

  ‘The one with the glasses,’ Kirsty said. Why did Jon have to be so casually cruel? She’d been noticing it more and more frequently as they rehearsed.

  Kirsty heart squeezed as she thought of Thea, knowing now what they had in common beyond a love of ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’. Kirsty wouldn’t have wished losing a mum to cancer on anyone. Especially so young. It made her want to hug Thea – and Ben – close.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Ben wasn’t exactly overcome with joy and warmth at the sight of Jon Manley. Of course he remembered him. How could he possibly have forgotten? St Edward’s was not a big school, so although Jon and Ben were not in the same class, they had been aware of each other’s existence from the very first term of their secondary school career. At eleven years old, Jon Manley was already substantially the person he would grow up to be. Which, in Ben’s opinion, was a total arse.

  Co
ming from a tiny primary school with just a couple of hundred pupils, even St Edward’s, which had five hundred and fifty students in all, seemed enormous to eleven-year-old Ben. His first week there was awful. Ben – like poor Thea – had a hopeless sense of direction. If he didn’t gather himself quickly enough to follow the herd from class to class, he would get lost. He met Jon for the first time when he accidentally gate-crashed 1K’s geography lesson. The teacher was kind enough when he realised Ben’s mistake, telling Ben where he should be – the history room next door – but Jon, who had quickly established himself as class clown, made a crack about Ben needing a new pair of glasses. Ben blushed from tip to toe. His glasses – just like Thea’s – had extremely thick lenses. To make matters worse, they were NHS specs. They didn’t suit him. They accentuated the way his ears stuck out. They made him look like a mole. In fact, thanks to Jon, Moley soon became Ben’s nickname.

  ‘Moley Poley.’ An added reference to his puppy fat, Ben assumed.

  Jon never bullied Ben in any obvious way. There was nothing physical. None of the shoving and punching that some of the kids in Ben’s year had to put up with from older, bigger kids. Jon was more subtle than that. He disguised the name-calling as friendly banter. Ben knew that if he dared to object, then Jon would accuse him of lacking a sense of humour – a terrible insult in itself. So Ben tried to shrug the dull jokes off and pretend they didn’t affect him. And when he didn’t feel he could keep shrugging the jokes off, he hid in the library, which was the last place Jon and his gang would be likely to come looking for fun. He longed for the holidays when whole weeks went by without having to worry about Jon at all. And then, at long last, it was time for them to leave school for good and Ben hoped he would never have to see Jon Manley again.

  He was unlucky on that front. There were only a couple of decent pubs in Newbay – as in ones which weren’t popular with the tourists and thus hadn’t jacked up their prices to the sort of levels you expected in London. Jon and his crowd landed on the same one as Ben and his friends. They still called him Moley, though Ben had saved up and got himself contact lenses as soon as he could. He’d lost the puppy fat too.

  Then Jon had become really friendly for a while. He would include Ben in his round when he went to the bar. He asked Ben for tips on what sort of music he should be listening to. Who were the cool new bands, etcetera? After a while, Ben actually started to relax around his former nemesis. Maybe Jon had grown up and grown out of taking the mick. Maybe they were really becoming friends.

  Maybe they did. For a short time at least. But all that changed when Ben met Charlie Leyton. They worked together in Sainsbury’s during the uni holidays and started hanging out in the evenings too. Ben was quickly head over heels and it seemed that Charlie felt the same way. Ben had kissed a few girls before but Charlie was his first proper ‘girlfriend’. She was everything a teenage boy dreams of. She was funny and clever and into the same sort of music. It helped that she was also beautiful in a perfect, ethereal way. When she wasn’t in her Sainsbury’s uniform, she drifted around in charity shop maxi dresses like a proto-Florence Welch. She was so different from the rest of the girls Ben knew.

  As happens when you’re eighteen, Ben was convinced he had found the girl with whom he would spend the rest of his life. He wore a ratty piece of wool around his wrist – a friendship bracelet she had made for him – for months.

  Then Jon came back from uni too and gave Charlie the full force of his charm. Charlie and Ben were virgins. She said she didn’t want to ‘do it’ until they were both really sure their relationship was serious. They stuck to heavy petting. But while Ben still thought he and Charlie were an item, Jon took Charlie’s virginity in the back of his car. Jon went out with Charlie for two months – seeming to turn up with her wherever Ben went to drown his sorrows – before he dumped her and told Ben, in front of a great many people at the pub, ‘You can have her back now.’

  That really stung. Ben was so cut up about it that it knocked his confidence. He wouldn’t go out in Newbay again for years. He gave up acting with his uni drama group. Then he failed an important set of exams. He was lucky that the university let him resit the year.

  As an adult, Ben knew that he and Charlie would not have gone the distance. He was able to see how she turned out because she really had married his cousin. The ethereal beauty had grown into a very average woman. Her youthful drama was replaced by bitterness and cynicism. Perhaps it was just because she was married to Ben’s boring cousin, who made pomposity an art form, but he suspected it had been there all along.

  Jo – the real love of his life – didn’t have a cynical bone in her body. Ben felt sure she would not have grown harder with age.

  No, in retrospect, Jon Manley had done Ben a favour. If Ben had not been so cut up about Charlie, he’d have finished his degree in the usual three years. Had he not had that fourth year, he might not have met Jo, who was a year behind him. Having been kept back, he joined her tutor group. And without Charlie, he was free to fall in love with her. Every cloud has a silver lining. However, that did not mean that he could look back on that painful moment when Charlie and Jon waltzed off to lose their virginity in the back of his Ford Focus with complete unanimity. Jon had proved himself to be a bad friend. Someone not to be trusted.

  Ben was not thrilled that the NEWTS had brought Jon Manley back into his life but Thea was full of enthusiasm and news from the children’s rehearsals. She was enjoying herself so much. Ben was delighted to hear her talking about the other kids in such a positive way. His eyes prickled with tears of happy relief when Thea announced, ‘So, Georgie has invited me to her birthday party. We’re going to watch DVDS and have a sleepover.’ Thea had never been invited to a sleepover before. ‘And can I have Georgie and Thomas to tea at our house,’ she continued.

  Ben was pleased to hear her ask. ‘Of course.’

  Back at home, Ben cooked Thea’s favourite Saturday night supper – fish fingers and oven chips. Judy was working that night. They ate in the living room, sitting on the floor with their plates on the coffee table, while The X Factor played on the television. Thea gave her own running commentary, explaining to her father that the singers were probably wearing radio mics.

  ‘You don’t have to have a really loud voice to be on the stage,’ she said.

  While Ben washed up, Thea sat at the kitchen table and drew a poster for Cinderella. In Thea’s version, she had top billing alongside Kirsty. Her representation of herself in a mouse costume was impressive.

  ‘Daddy, I would like you to be Buttons,’ said Thea suddenly.

  ‘You would?’

  ‘Yes. The man who was going to be Buttons – Trevor – well, he was very nice but he was much too old. He kept forgetting his words and he was ever so stiff when they danced. And now he’s hit his head, he can’t dance at all. You would be much better.’

  ‘I’m no good at dancing,’ said Ben.

  ‘Yes you are. You were good at my first rehearsal. And I can help you practise,’ said Thea. ‘Come on.’

  She jumped to her feet and pulled Ben away from the sink and into the centre of the kitchen. Arranging her father’s arms into a classical ballroom hold, she gently stepped onto the tops of his feet. She was a little bigger now than she had been when Ben first danced her around the room this way, but he let her carry on.

  ‘Right foot forward,’ Thea instructed. ‘Left to the side. Right together.’

  Ben took his first steps gingerly. Mostly because he felt Thea was slipping off. She rearranged herself and they carried on.

  ‘Left foot forward. Right to the side. Left together. That’s no good. Come on. Concentrate.’

  They waltzed around the room. Ben soon forgot about the weight of Thea on his insteps as they danced. It took him back to when she was tiny and obsessed with Strictly Come Dancing. He remembered how Jo had laughed as she watched them from the sofa. When they finished, she held up an imaginary ‘ten’. How he wished that Jo could see the
m now.

  ‘Please, Daddy,’ Thea whispered. ‘It would be so nice if we were in the panto together. And I know that Kirsty wants you to be in it too.’

  ‘Does she?’ Ben asked.

  He was embarrassed to find he wanted to hear more.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I heard her talking to Elaine. She said they were desperate to find somebody. Elaine said she knew you could dance because she’d seen you at my rehearsals. She didn’t know if you could sing though. Kirsty said it didn’t matter. That can be …’ Thea hesitated as she searched for the word. ‘Fudged? Someone had to ask you. They both said that you were the best of a bad bunch.’

  Ben laughed. Mostly at his own vanity when he realised had been waiting, or rather hoping, to hear some fabulous compliment. But no. He was just the best of a bad bunch. ‘Well, in that case,’ he said.

  ‘Are you going to do it?’ Thea gazed up at him.

  Ben wasn’t sure he wanted to but there were plenty of reasons why it would make sense. He was going to have to be at the theatre for pretty much every night the show was on in any case. And it would be something for them to look back on – him and Thea. How long would it be before she didn’t want him to be around all the time? He’d heard that the teenage years started earlier and earlier these days. She’d probably find him too embarrassing to be seen with by the time she turned ten. He should make the most of this opportunity to spend time with her, making memories that would last for ever.

  And perhaps he was slightly motivated by wanting to get to know Kirsty better too.

  ‘If they haven’t already found someone else, then I will,’ he said.

  ‘Hooray!’ Thea cheered. She jumped backwards from his feet onto the floor, landing badly and catching Ben’s toe as she did so. She stumbled forward, butting his stomach with her head.

  ‘Ooof,’ said Ben. But he couldn’t think of a nicer way to end up winded.