Not long after starting at the opera house, I made two important friends.
The first was Barry from Barry Island, a principal dancer with biceps like tiny rocks and the best Welsh accent I had ever heard. I didn’t work with him – I was opera, not ballet – but he was impossible to miss. One morning as I sat with a
pain au chocolat
in the canteen, gazing over Covent Garden market, I was joined by a very pale, very beautiful man with piercing sea-coloured eyes and a tub of grilled chicken.
‘Don’t,’ he said, as I looked sympathetically at his breakfast. ‘I can’t eat no pastries.’ He opened the tub with affected sadness, then grinned evilly at me. ‘If I did I’d end up with one of these’ – he gestured at my belly, which was poking through my dress – ‘and they’d sack me. Not being funny or nothin’.’
I told him that I was cool about being chubby if it meant I could eat delicious freshly cooked pastries whenever I wanted.
His face crumpled with desire. ‘Freshly cooked?’ he
said hoarsely, staring at my
pain au chocolat
. Without warning he grabbed it and took a large bite. ‘Aaah,’ he moaned. ‘Now that’s what I’m talking about.’
I burst out laughing. ‘My cousin does that,’ I said, ‘all the time. Do you know her? Fiona Lane?’
The man grinned and revealed perfectly white teeth. ‘Oh, yeah, Fiona. She’s a right little one, I’ll tell you that for nothing.’
God, his accent. It killed me. I loved it. I stared adoringly at him and told him it was the best accent I’d ever heard. ‘Well, thank you, Chicken,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I call you Chicken? It seems right, as I sit here on this lovely morning eating chicken.’ I nodded my assent (and became Chicken for ever more).
‘Great. Well, I’m Barry and I come from Barry Island in the great country of Wales, and I have to tell you that I’m in agony.’ He opened up the plastic tub and put a small, sad morsel into his mouth.
‘Why?’
He lowered his voice to a brave whisper: ‘It’s my dance belt, Chicken.’
I looked blankly at him. ‘Dance belt?’
‘The dance belt,’ he told me, in tones of deep Welsh tragedy, ‘is a terrible thing I have to wear every day and hate more than I can tell you. It’s a G-string and it covers my tiny penis with a great big mound of wadding. It spreads it all out into a … a soft bulge. Like a horse’s ball bag, you know.’
I shuddered.
Barry looked grateful. ‘Thank you for understanding,
Chicken,’ he said emotionally. ‘Thank you. You don’t know how lucky you are, being able to wear all those … those
bedsheets
around yourself.’
I fiddled with my voluminous linen skirt and felt like a bit of a tool. I knew I fitted in with the wardrobe lot now but I still wasn’t convinced that this look was very me.
The next day I bumped into Barry in the canteen, this time with Fiona, and we somehow arranged to go dog racing in Walthamstow the following Saturday. At the stadium Barry started playing Madonna on his phone and nearly got us into a punch-up. Fiona made the very uncharacteristic move of ordering chicken in a basket but then passed out drunk in it. And I managed to give my number to a minor-league gangster from Essex.
Drunk as lords, we ended up back at my flat and the next day I forced both ballet dancers to have a proper fry-up. As we ate our sausages and bacon we listened to the messages that my randy suitor had left on my answer-phone at three a.m. – a romantic little line about how he wanted to drink peach Bellinis off my ‘bangers’ – and laughed until we cried. And that was that.
The other firm friend I made was Bea. Bea was Italian and extremely rich. It was never clear to me why she was working, really, but she was incredibly good at her job. Beatriz Maria Stefanini was a supervisor in the makeup and wigs department and she was just about as fabulous as it was possible to be without being a handbag.
She was – in every sense – the toughest person I’d ever met. I had always seen myself as quietly strong but in truth that was only because the people in my life tended to
be weak or mad. But Bea was something else. She was a force. An opera in herself.
We became friends when she caught me standing in the wings, rooted to the spot, as I watched Brian the baritone bowling around the stage in
The Magic Flute
with a moustache somehow attached to the crotch of his cream trousers. It was the funniest and most dreadful merkin in history, and it was my fault.
‘Excellent,’ Bea remarked crisply, watching Brian. ‘I have been wondering where that moustache had gone. Did you pin it to his crotch on purpose?’
I was aghast. ‘Of course not! I don’t know how it got there. But I do know that this is a disaster.’
Bea let off a sharp bark of laughter. An assistant stage manager waved at her to be quiet and she ignored him. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Sally,’ I replied. ‘Sally the merkin girl. Perhaps you should offer me a job in the wigs department.’
Bea laughed again and clapped a strong, scented arm around my shoulders. ‘Welcome to the world of the stage,’ she said. ‘This happens all the time. And when it does, it is priceless. Come up to the wigs room after the show. You need a drink.’
I walked in an hour later and gasped. It was up in the eaves of the opera house and had a stunning view across the West End and right down to the far reaches of south London. The Crystal Palace radio mast blinked at me as I wandered through a bewildering sea of wig and makeup paraphernalia. Kirby-grips, prosthetic disfigurements, hairdryers, glues, brushes. Half-completed beards, makeup
charts, magnifying glasses, scissors and hairspray. A treasure chest of disguises.
‘Sit,’ Bea said, opening a mini fridge under one of the tables. I looked round and eventually sat on a stool, rubbing my hands together. They were always cold. ‘Oh, put your hands in an oven,’ she said breezily, gesturing at a little room full of metal stationery cupboards.
I frowned. ‘Oven?’
‘
Sì
. Those are wig ovens. We set the wigs in there overnight. Useful at this time of year,’ she added, pulling what looked like an incredibly expensive cashmere shawl around herself. She showed me an oven full of wigs on head blocks and then propped open the doors of another, which was empty. She pulled up two chairs next to it and handed me an impressive vodka and tonic, which even contained ice and lime wedges. We sat with our backs to the warm oven and looked out over London.
‘Sally the merkin girl,’ she said, chinking my glass. ‘
Eccellente
.’
I chuckled. ‘They’ll probably sack me.’
Bea snorted. ‘Darling, they’ll probably promote you.’
‘Hear hear!’ said a man’s voice. Brian Hurst, the lovely dad-like baritone, had just arrived in the wigs room with the errant moustache in his hand. ‘This is yours, I believe,’ he said pleasantly, handing the moustache to Bea. ‘Great work, Sally,’ he added.
‘You two both have very strange accents,’ Bea announced.
Brian laughed. ‘Ghetto kids, Sally and I. We keep it real.’ He smiled, then left.
Bea looked delighted. ‘Oh,
favoloso
!’ she exclaimed. ‘A ghetto child! Where are you from?’
‘Um, Stourbridge?’
She looked blank. Of course. Why would a rich Italian woman know where Stourbridge was?
‘It’s in the Midlands, near-ish to Birmingham,’ I explained. ‘Southernmost tip of the Black Country?’
Bea nodded vaguely. ‘Your accent is precious, darling.’ She smiled. ‘I like you.’
And with that I was taken on.
We saw each other almost every day for years. Right up until that fateful night in New York after which she disappeared to Glyndebourne and Fi refused to come home.
‘But … but you’re a BALLET DANCER!’ I exploded. Fiona glared guiltily at me and then at the line of cocaine that was racked up neatly in front of her. It was so large that it had a nasty, grainy shadow under the bare light bulbs round the mirror.
I was twenty-eight. I’d been working at the Royal Opera House for seven years and had become deputy wardrobe mistress; the second act of my own personal opera was coming to an end. I could sense Act Three on its way. Acts One and Two had been very gentle but this new era felt different. Smelt different. It was everywhere: a heady current that pulled me along and refused to say where it would deposit me.
That morning, Bea had summoned me upstairs to the wig-washing room and announced that she’d secured me a job on the Royal Ballet’s summer tour. ‘
The Rite of Spring
, six weeks touring the east coast of America,’ she purred. ‘Starting in New York at the Metropolitan Opera House.’
I gaped at her. ‘But … I don’t work on ballet,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m opera …’
Bea snorted, tossing her mane. ‘So was I, darling, but it’s time for a change. I’m flexible. So are you.’
I looked at her doubtfully. I was a creature of routine. I wasn’t sure I knew how to costume those lithe, muscled little creatures in the ballet department. And, more to the point, my job in the summer was to oversee the inventory and repair of several hundred operatic costumes at our store in Cardiff. I’d done this every summer for years and quite enjoyed the holiday romance I always had there with a friend of Barry’s who owned a coffee shop. He was genuinely called Jesus, in spite of being white and Welsh.
But Jesus was not part of Bea’s plan for me that summer. She had sorted everything out, in the way that only Bea could. After seven hot summers in the wardrobe stores, my boss, Tiff, had agreed that I deserved a break and had borrowed someone to stand in for me. And the deputy wardrobe mistress from the ballet department, who should have been going to America, was about to give birth to triplets.
I was in.
‘Barry will be dancing in the tour, as will Fiona,’ Bea concluded, applying a creamy red lipstick called FURY! in the mirror. ‘The four of us will take America by storm. I know people in every city we will visit. We will drink cocktails and eat lobster every night. It will be … how do you say? …
monumental
.’ She blotted her lips. ‘Yes. Monumental.’
If Bea said it was going to be monumental, it would be monumental.
Although the thought of being on tour with Fiona made my nerves prickle. Fiona had found out recently that she had been passed over once again as a first soloist, leaving her at the same rank she had held for the last seven years. She had decided that it was because she was too fat and last week had stopped drinking alcohol ‘to get
THIN
’. From what I could tell she had also pretty much stopped eating.
How will you cope with her abroad?
a small voice asked me.
I ignored it. I was going to NEW YORK. We’d muddle through; we always did.
‘Now, I’ve ordered you some proper luggage,’ Bea told me. ‘You will not tour with your nylon suitcase, Sally. We do this in style,
sì
?’
‘I …
Sì!
Thank you,’ I gasped. ‘Oh, my God!’ Bea kissed me on the cheek and dismissed me, as was her custom.
I bowled down the corridor to the lift, imagining myself eating pastrami sandwiches on an iron fire escape and maybe bumping into Carrie Bradshaw. There was a spiralling joy in my chest, an opening up of possibility.
A lone soprano was singing a jolly little bit from
I puritani
in the corridor and I felt so giddy with excitement I joined in under my breath. ‘ “
Son vergin vezzosa
”!’ we sang. ‘ “
Ah sì! Son vergin vezzosa in vesta di sposa
”! “Oh, yes! I’m a charming virgin in a wedding dress”!’ I giggled all the way back to the wardrobe department.
And then, a few hours later, I found myself standing in a dressing room with my cousin and a line of a class-A drug. Two cherry-red spots pricked her cheeks and her mood was deadly. Fi had always been completely insane
around food and quite dangerous around drink but this … This was new.
It was an hour before tonight’s performance of
La Bohème
and I’d just walked into the children’s dressing room looking for a missing pair of derby boots. Bracing myself for a tussle with eight mental stage-school kids, I’d been somewhat surprised to find that they’d been moved to a different room, and that there, in their place, was Fiona with a pile of white powder. I was dumbfounded.
‘And this is the CHILDREN’S DRESSING ROOM!’ I continued in a panicked hiss.
‘Oh, babes, stop being silly.’ Fiona, who was regaining her composure, dismissed me as if I’d caught her cheating at bridge. Without warning, she leaned down and snorted up half of the line. Her lovely freckled face looked pinched and nasty as she inhaled; it strangled my heart.
‘Stop, Freckle!’ I whispered desperately.
‘Sssh!’ she said, with a little laugh. A laugh that someone had scooped the insides out of. ‘It’s just coke! Coke isn’t serious, babe.’ She sniffed the last few bits of powder up into her nostril. ‘Everyone does it,’ she added conversationally. ‘You’re probably the only person I know who doesn’t.’
I baulked, uncertain. Really?
Fiona started tidying up the other half of the line ready for action, a delicate blush spreading over her bony shoulders. As a result of her recent diet she was gaunter than ever. From behind she looked like a child: skinny, underdeveloped, soft downy hair on the nape of her neck like gossamer threads.
I couldn’t stand it. ‘Freckle …’ I whimpered, tugging
on her ponytail like I’d done since we were tiny. ‘
Please
stop.’
She took the rest of the line. ‘You should live a little, Sally,’ she said lightly, ‘before you start judging everyone else.’ She licked her finger and ran it round the dressing-table, then rubbed the remaining powder into her gums. ‘Your twenties are for pushing boundaries,
enjoying
yourself.’ She turned round, now smiling brightly, although the smile was cruel. An accusation that
I
had comprehensively failed at being a twenty-something. ‘I’m just doing what
everyone else
does, silly Sally!’
Really? Was she?
I wasn’t sure. None of the other dancers were like Fiona. They seemed to have lots of fun but they also looked after themselves with such incredible care, wrapping their legs up until they went onstage and hanging out only in the heated parts of the building so they never got cold. They even
walked
in a special way. They ate tubs of chicken and had special massages and stretched all the time. Surely, when they went to such lengths to look after their bodies, they wouldn’t be taking drugs.
Fiona was forever freezing cold and stomping around. She drank a lot, she was noisy and sometimes she didn’t even bother to warm up properly. She was a beautiful dancer but I couldn’t help wondering if she’d failed to get promoted because she looked such a mess.
No! I didn’t believe her! There was no way the others were taking drugs. Fiona was on her own. I felt my hands tremble as if my blood were fizzing.
‘Look, I can take or leave this stuff,’ she told me, head cocked to one side. ‘Coke isn’t serious. If I was on crack
or scag or something, fair enough, but, Sally, this is just a bit of fun! No side-effects, no hangovers.’
‘But it’s still a drug,’ I whispered.
Fiona did that hollow laugh again and pulled her big dancer’s holdall over her shoulder. ‘You’re not dead yet, Sally. You and your middle-aged outfits could still have a good time. I’m off out. Laters, babes.’ Any warmth in her farewell was as synthetic as a Primark sock.
I watched the door close behind her and uneasy silence opened up around me.
You’re not dead yet
. I stared at the mirror. Did she think I looked middle-aged? Did other people think I looked middle-aged? But I’d just said yes to New York! I’d …
A ball of salt water wobbled uncertainly down my face and I realized I was crying.
In truth, I probably had failed on the wild front. Since moving to London seven years ago I had mostly just explored the gastropub scene; I’d travelled a bit but only really to European cities that had opera houses. I had not tried drugs, I had not dabbled in lesbianism or gone to a forest rave, and I’d had a succession of pleasant short-term boyfriends, who had been distinctly mild, not wild. And I dressed like I did because, well, it helped me feel I belonged. Was that failure? Was
I
a failure?
No!
I countered desperately.
Fiona isn’t allowed to write me off like that!
Taking big deep breaths, I made myself stop crying and patted my face dry. I got a wet wipe out of my wardrobe belt and cleaned the surface in case of residual cocaine.
I am not boring, I am not boring, I am not boring!
In the corridor, terrified someone might somehow
know, I bumped into Brian. As if sensing I was unhinged, he touched my shoulder and smiled kindly before walking on. He disappeared round the corner, softly singing something from
La Traviata
.
As I watched his very normal, very reassuring back retreat down the corridor, I finally began to come back to myself.
I’m fine
, I told myself, breathing deeply.
Fi was just lashing out because I caught her red-handed. And if she says coke isn’t serious, then she must be right
.
After all, what did I know about drugs? Everything would be OK.
That night Fiona apologized profusely, telling me she had just been ‘dicking around’ and that she wouldn’t take coke ever again if it was going to upset me. ‘I can take or leave that stuff,’ she reiterated. ‘But I can’t take or leave you, Sal.’ The next morning, as a sign of her contrition, she even went all the way down to Southwark to get my favourite breakfast from our long-lost Mr Pickles.
‘You’re not dull at all, Sal. You’re my idol. You and I are going to have DA BEST TIME in New York! BFFs, right?’
I smiled and got going with my egg muffin. I cared too much about Fiona to stay angry. And, apart from anything else, I wanted what she was saying to be true.