The (Im)Perfect Girlfriend

by Lucy-Anne Holmes

  Generally, an actor’s CV is much more fictitious than a normal person’s CV though. We have whole sections that are fun to embellish. I would like to meet a person strong enough not to have a crack at creative writing when faced with the heading ‘Skills’. Personally, I am rendered dangerously weak in the face of a ‘Skills’ section. Here are a few of my skills:

  Skills

  Windsurfing (been once)

  Ice skating (used to go when I was seven)

  Flamenco (sure I could pick it up)

  Conversational German (Ja! Danke!)

  Yoga (Simon does it, so have watched it a lot)

  There are also two other horrible sections that we have on our CVs that beg equivocation:

  Weight

  It says on my CV that I weigh eight and a half stone. Now, six years ago when I weighed nine stone five, that wasn’t such a lie. But by the fifth of December last year when I’d reached ten and a half stone, it probably was.

  Singing

  Most actors can sing, so they must state what key they can sing in. My key is off-key. But you can’t write that, or ‘Tone deaf – only when drunk’, because having a sense of humour isn’t encouraged when writing CVs. So I wrote, ‘Alto’, which means ‘can’t do high notes’ and is what I thought actors wrote if they weren’t very good at singing.

  So I admit my CV harboured a few little fibs, but it hardly made me Bill Clinton. And it had been this way for years. When my agent called that day, I just was eating the fifth chocolate from my advent calendar. It was a star.

  ‘Sarah!’

  ‘Is that my lovely agent?’

  ‘It certainly is, Sarah.’

  My agent is indeed lovely. He is a jolly, posh man somewhere in the upper end of his forties. I’ve only met him twice in the flesh. Our relationship tends to consist of him telephoning to tell me I have a commercial audition and me calling him afterwards so that he can tell me that I didn’t get the commercial audition. I would like to see him more often though. He has a fine and generous portion of ginger hair. Many men would keep such ginger hair short. Not Geoff; he’s gone for the full Mick Hucknall. But he’s raised Mick . . . a beard. In case people don’t recognize his eccentricity, he also smokes a pipe.

  ‘I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘You do surprise me.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking of a role I’d be perfect for.’

  ‘Oh marvellous, Sarah.’

  ‘George Clooney’s masseuse.’

  ‘Wonderful, Sarah, I’ll let his people know right away. I wish all my clients were as focused as you. Now then, you’ve been offered a job.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A job.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is this a piss take?’

  ‘I hardly have time to call you up to take the Michael, Sarah.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘In a panto.’

  ‘A panto!’

  ‘The role of the Princess.’

  ‘Me? A princess!’

  I’d never done panto. But I had an image of hundreds of children, their faces beaming at me in a pretty dress with a tiara, as they experienced the magic of theatre for the first time. It was a lovely image. So was that of a figure under the ‘Money In’ column on my bank statement.

  ‘Do you want to take it? They’re desperate.’

  ‘Yes! So am I.’

  ‘Marvellous.’

  ‘Hang about. Why are they offering it to me?’

  ‘It’s Dominic, the director you worked with last summer. Apparently you wrote him a letter telling him you were out of work. Well, his leading lady dropped out. It’s all been a bit dramatic by the sound of it. Anyway, he said he doesn’t need you to audition. If you want it, it’s yours. You’re the same height and weight as the girl who pulled out, so the costume will fit. And they might even throw you in a flamenco solo if there’s time to choreograph it.’

  Now, perhaps I should have come clean at that point. But I opted to wing it instead. In hindsight that was a big mistake.

  four

  Dominic the Director was one disaster away from a nervous breakdown. And then I arrived at the theatre.

  He beamed when he saw me.

  ‘Nightmare doesn’t begin to describe it!’ he whispered with feeling in my ear.

  It certainly had been quite exciting in Pantoland. The twenty-two-year-old Hollyoaks star who had been playing the Princess had eloped with the married retired cricketer playing the King yesterday during the dress rehearsal. The rest of the cast had understandably gone out last night and got drunk, and unfortunately one of the dancers had been arrested for indecently exposing himself in the local KFC. The young man was currently being questioned, although he was expected to rejoin the company when he was released on police bail. In the meantime, Dominic was trying to field calls from local and national press and the actors’ respective families. No one knew where the lovebirds had flown to, although there were rumours circulating of a sighting in a Travelodge near the M5. It was better than an issue of Heat.

  ‘Now then, here’s your script,’ Dominic the Director said, handing me the jumbo script of Jack and the Beanstalk and steering me onto the stage.

  ‘We’re going to walk slowly through the whole show, incorporating you and Dennis in.’

  ‘Dennis?’

  ‘Dennis Waterman, he’s replacing our errant cricketer. He’s not in it until the second half. So let’s get going.’

  My mum will be pleased, I thought. She’s a huge fan of Dennis Waterman and Piers Morgan. Weird.

  ‘Dominic, let me just assure you that this Princess will be able to control herself around the King,’ I promised, in a stage whisper.

  ‘It’s good to have you, Sarah Sargeant.’

  ‘It’s very good to be here.’

  He smiled and for the first time that day started to look less like Gordon Ramsay before he had the surgical work done and more like the talented director in his early thirties that he was.

  The rehearsal started brilliantly. I’ve always loved the dress rehearsal period of a show. Not that I was dressed in costume at that point, although the costume lady was expected to come and see me at any second. Everybody else was arrayed for the show though. There was even some poor girl stuck inside a cardboard beanstalk with her face painted brown. Hoards of dancers appeared on stage one moment dressed as farmyard animals, did an exhausting number and then reappeared twenty seconds later dressed as snowflakes and did another. All the offstage drama had created a frenetic energy that made everyone fire on all cylinders.

  I quickly became very excited by my role as the Princess. I modelled her on Zara Phillips and Prince Harry. I played her über posh with a penchant for horses and late-night drinking. I even changed the line ‘I’ve been on a shopping spree,’ to ‘I’ve been clubbing at Boujis,’ and said it as though I had a hangover and couldn’t open one eye. It got a huge laugh and Dominic clapped. This was what it was all about. Simon had been right. I was being applauded in a huge theatre. I suddenly felt overwhelmingly grateful for the chaotic series of events that had led me to that experience. I loved my job. It didn’t matter whether I did it in Hollywood or Cricklewood. I loved acting and I would do it wherever and whenever I got the chance. Visualization rocked.

  But then I turned a page and I suddenly froze. My stomach lurched. My throat went instantly dry. My hands started bizarrely sweating and I stumbled as I tried to dry them on my combat trousers. I didn’t know what to do. But the script clearly stated:

  PRINCESS SINGS SOLO

  I closed my eyes, hoping it was an acid flashback from the one time I tried acid years ago. I reopened them. Bollocks. No such luck. The words were still there and, as if to highlight them with a fluorescent marker, a piano began playing some remarkably high notes and ten dancers dressed like pet chihuahuas crawled playfully onto the stage behind me.

  ‘Oh, this is your first song, Sarah,’ Dominic explained, climbing onto the stage next to m
e. FIRST!

  ‘Can we play it through once so Sarah can get a handle on the tune?’ I’VE NEVER HAD A HANDLE ON A TUNE IN MY LIFE!

  The pianist nodded. I concentrated fiercely as I listened. Perhaps it was the atmosphere or the chihuahuas or the fact that I really wanted this role, but I convinced myself that I could sing. I remembered Simon’s words about visualization. I imagined myself singing the high notes perfectly. I felt powerful and capable of anything. This was my moment. How I understood Martine McCutcheon then. When the pianist started playing the song again I took a deep breath. Then I opened my mouth.

  I have never heard the sound that a duck makes when it’s being attacked by a fox but I imagine it’s similar to the noise I made that day. It was definitely the sound of a bird in torment. Dominic, the chihuahuas and the pianist all laughed cheerfully.

  ‘Great, but go for it seriously, Sarah!’ Dominic told me merrily.

  ‘OK,’ I whispered as I weakly smiled back at him.

  The pianist commenced the song again. This time I produced the same sound, just MUCH louder. The pianist stopped playing. The chihuahuas stopped crawling and Dominic stopped smiling.

  The silence was terrifyingly loud. My ears rang as it yelled to me that I couldn’t sing and no amount of visualization would ever make me tuneful.

  ‘Um, I didn’t know I was going to sing, I, er, can’t sing,’ I mumbled to Dominic. He glared back, hungrily eating the inside of his lip, and then, after a long time, he said the word ‘fuck’.

  ‘Fuck’ is the word he repeated ten seconds later when a lady appeared. She was holding a tiny piece of white material that looked like a napkin, and she too glared at me when she painfully screeched, ‘YOU SAID SHE WAS THE SAME SIZE AS THE HOLLYOAKS SLAPPER!’

  five

  That was how I came to play the Beanstalk in Jack and the Beanstalk last Christmas. Two shows a day, six days a week, with only Christmas Day off, I stood on stage, sweating inside a cardboard tree, with my face painted brown and a fixed grin as I waited to say my fourteen lines.

  Simon, on the other hand, had a great December. His charity had been chosen along with five other London charities to be part of a huge fundraising concert at the Albert Hall in the New Year. I didn’t feel jealous of him. Far from it. But I had started to feel that perhaps I wasn’t good enough for him. It was a feeling that had taken root. Looking back on it now, that probably did have something to do with our first tiff.

  It was Christmas Eve. Simon was watching the evening show with my mum and dad, after which I was going to drive their car, with all of us in it, down to Eastbourne so that we could have Christmas Day there, with them.

  I’ve had small roles in theatre productions before. And I’ve always loved them. Mainly due to these benefits:

  1 A lot of time to read Heat, Grazia and books about star signs, and talk about boys and shopping in the dressing room

  2 A lot of time to borrow other actresses’ make-up so that you can go to the bar after the show looking like you work in Mac

  Playing the Beanstalk allowed me neither of these benefits. I was on stage for the duration of the show so got no chance to do any cast bonding. That was a shame because I could have used some bonding. I had no good friends in the cast. I don’t know whether that was because everyone considered me to be a freak after my squawk at the piano that day, or because I assumed they did and kept away. Also, the brown paint that covered my face each show was stubborn as a curry stain to remove. Every night, nearly a whole pack of facial cleansing wipes was needed to return me to skin colour. By which time my face look liked it had just been squeezed out of a vagina while everyone else was in the bar looking like Cheryl Cole.

  Hence, I wasn’t feeling hot when I joined them all in the bar after the Christmas Eve show. I just wanted to get in the car and leave. Sadly, that wasn’t to be.

  Now it was Christmas, and I realize that everyone likes a drink at Christmas. However, I was surprised to find that my partner and family had managed to get completely Bertie Bollocksed during live family entertainment where 70 per cent of the audience was under the age of eight.

  I emerged from the dressing room alone and scampered to the pub next door where we had agreed to meet. I immediately saw my father. My dad’s natural habitats are golf courses and pubs, so he looked very happily ensconced in the melee. He had befriended one of the gay male dancers from my show, who appeared to be teaching him a pirouette complete with jazz-hand finish. My father wasn’t built for jazz dance. He has a dodgy leg and dad girth and he would have managed the turn better had he put his pint glass down. My mother was next to him trying to take a photo with the lens cap on. I felt it best to leave them to it and round up Simon first. So, I left Michael Flatley and Annie Leibovitz and wandered about the crowded, low-ceilinged pub trying to find Si.

  ‘Oh my God!’ one of the female dancers shouted as she charged past me in the opposite direction. ‘Your boyfriend’s gorgeous!’

  She sounded so flabbergasted by this fact that it stopped me in my tracks for a moment. But then I smiled and nodded and headed towards the direction she had come from. When I eventually saw my Simon I didn’t rush immediately to him. I stood watching him instead. He did look gorgeous. He was wearing a hooded top that I’d bought him when I was doing my Hollywood shopping. It was the colour of theatre curtains. It suited him. He looked relaxed and he was smiling. But he was also talking to the pretty, petite nineteen-year-old who had taken over my role as the Princess. His hand was on her tiny fishnetted thigh and he was obviously saying something funny because she was giggling. I stood fixed to the ground like the tree I was. I didn’t want to go over to them. I knew I’d feel winch-me-out-of-the-window-fat next to the girl. I tried to think of something funny to say to approach them with but it’s hard when you’re holding your bottom in. With my wit clocked off for Christmas, I stood loon-like in this way for about a minute until Simon looked up and caught my eye. He jumped off the bar stool and ran to greet me. He hugged me.

  ‘I’m a tree hugger!’ he whooped loudly. The girl who was playing the Princess laughed. But I didn’t laugh. I felt embarrassed. I thought they were laughing at me because I was playing the Beanstalk.

  ‘Can we go, babe? I’m knackered and I’ve got to drive,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Oh, babe. Stay and have a drink!’ he said. But again it was fortissimo. Everyone looked at me. And I floated out of myself and I saw what they saw: the party pooper with the massive arse, the face that had suffered an extreme facial, who couldn’t sing or act but who had somehow managed to bag the good-looking funny bloke. I hated myself at that moment and I resented Simon for making me feel like that. I’m not proud to admit it. But that’s how I felt.

  ‘Babe, I’m driving!’ I snapped. I sounded premenstrual. I wasn’t.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he said without any oomph.

  He circled the group, shaking hands with the cast members he’d just met. Then with a lot of persuasion and more jazz hands than a middle-school musical we managed to lead Mum and Dad out of the pub and into the car, where they promptly fell asleep.

  We (I) drove in silence for ages. The only time words came out of mouths was when Radio 2 played that Will Young song, ‘Leave Right Now’. Simon turned it up and we sang along. For the rest of the journey the radio was turned down to protect us from Slade and Simon hummed tunes from the panto.

  The real weirdness of the night started when we were on the M25. Bloody awful road.

  ‘Sare?’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘Do you know what I fancy?’

  ‘Ah, babe. I’m not stopping,’ I said.

  He was a drunk man. I assumed he was referring to the purchase of fried chicken. I was wrong.

  ‘You don’t have to stop,’ he said, suggestively.

  ‘Si. No rude stuff while I’m driving!’

  I was understandably shocked. I’m not the safest driver at the best of times.

  ‘Babe, I’m not talking about that either.’
>
  ‘Well, what do you fancy, then?’

  ‘A baby.’

  ‘Weurgh!’

  ‘All those kids at the panto got me thinking . . .’

  I quickly pulled my eyes away from the road and fixed them momentarily on Simon. It was supposed to be a ‘you’re drunk, you freak’ type of look. But it turned into an ‘OH MY GOD! HE’S SERIOUS!’ expression of alarm when I captured his face and the soft look upon it. What was happening? His head was cocked to one side. There was a wet smile upon it. It was the sort of face that women get when they see men holding babies in Marks & Spencer. I didn’t mean to scrunch my face up in disgust. In fact I didn’t even know I had.

  ‘Sare! Why are you giving me your tax face?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You are.’

  Pause.

  ‘Shit, I’ll need to do my tax soon.’

  Pause.

  ‘Babe.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why did you change the subject?’

  ‘Because you’re drunk.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Ahhhh! It’s like being back in panto! He’s behind you! You are bloody drunk. You had your hands all over that girl. It was embarrassing. Now you’re being all . . . weird.’

  ‘Sare! What’s up with you?’

  ‘ME? Si, you’re the one who’s being a nightmare.’

  And that was how I started a repetitive argument about Simon’s drunkenness while all the time I was thinking, BABIES! HE’S BROODY! BOLLOCKS!

  You see, I’d never been big on babies before. Everyone always said, ‘Oh, isn’t he or she beautiful?’ and I was always stood there thinking, ‘No! It looks like it’s just been squeezed through a very small hole.’ And the thought of squeezing something that was the same size as a Highland Terrier through my very small hole, getting a fanny like a bucket and being given a crying thing that demanded constant attention never really appealed.

  I did want to have one with Si at some point. I admit that the thought of a little piece of us was appealing. But not then! Not for years. Not until I felt that I’d achieved something professionally. Or at least until I felt that I had the wisdom to raise a little person. Now was the time for practising. At some point I was sure I’d get broody and then I would grab him and say, ‘Bang me up, big boy!’ But not yet. I couldn’t believe he had even suggested it.