Paige was in her mother’s car outside the Dylan Thomas Centre. Her grandma, Bena, and Auntie Hanna were in the car behind, while Josh, the twins, and Waffle were at home being looked after by Mrs. Keys from the village. The children were too young to come to a play like this, even though they’d been mad keen to see their sister perform.
“I expect you’re going to be famous after,” Flora told her so earnestly that her little glasses steamed up with the excitement of it, “and everyone will want your autograph. Can I have it now so I’ll be the first?”
Paige had dutifully signed the back of a drawing, the only piece of paper Flora had been able to find. Josh and Wills were next in line, with an old envelope in Josh’s case and a birthday card in Wills’s.
In truth, Paige still wasn’t sure she could go through with it. Though she’d been attending rehearsals for the past week, which had all gone well, it wasn’t the same as having to stand up in front of an audience that the recently expelled Kelly Durham or one of the Durmites might have snuck into.
On the other hand, she was determined not to let them win. She wanted to do this. She loved the play and knew how much it would mean to her mother to see her in the lead role. Oliver was coming, and that meant a lot to her, even if he didn’t want to go out with her. She’d feel a proper loser if she backed out now, and yet the truth was she desperately wanted to.
“Are you OK?” her mother asked gently.
Paige nodded. She was glad they were in the car park next to the river, well past the hotel she’d seen her dad coming out of with Martha the last time she was here. They’d obviously been in there screwing, which made her feel sick and angry with him all over again.
He probably wouldn’t come tonight after the way she’d spoken to him the last time she’d seen him.
Good. She didn’t want him here anyway. He wasn’t a part of their lives anymore.
Swallowing the tears that suddenly threatened, she said to her mother, “Did you know that Olivia was supposed to be performing Stravinsky’s memorial piece tonight?”
“You mean ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’?” her mother replied. “No, I didn’t know that.”
“She’s not now. Miss Kendrick confirmed today that she’d pulled out. I wonder if she and Owen might come to see the play anyway.”
“It’s probably more likely that they’ve already gone to Kent with their aunt,” Jenna reminded her.
Paige wasn’t entirely sure why, but it made her feel horribly sad to realize she might never see them again. “I keep thinking about her,” she admitted, “and wishing she’d had the courage to make friends in the proper way. We’d have made her feel a part of our family—and shown her what we’re really like.”
Smiling at the irony, Jenna said, “I’m afraid she wasn’t capable of connecting in a normal way, which is a great pity. She probably could have been a lovely friend.”
“When I think about all those vile things people said about me and Dad and then I think about her…She was really going through it, and he’s her real dad, for God’s sake. It’s so horrible, and her mum was a part of it. Can you imagine how bad it must have been? I hope they get sent to prison for the rest of their lives.”
“I don’t think the sentence is as long as that,” Jenna responded, “but it ought to be.” After smoothing Paige’s hair, she said, “Are you ready to go in now?”
“I guess so,” Paige replied, feeling another surge of nerves swamping her resolve.
When she didn’t move, Jenna said, “If you’ve changed your mind…”
“I haven’t. I just…” Spotting Auntie Hanna and Bena waiting out in the cold, she opened the car door. “I’m going in now,” she declared to her mother. “You don’t have to come with me.”
Since they’d brought Paige early for costume and makeup, Jenna said, “We’ll probably go across the road for a drink, but I’ll keep my phone turned on in case you need me.”
“OK. Thanks, but don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”
Famous last words.
An hour and a half later Paige was at the side of the stage with Captain Cat, Rosie Probert, and the five drowned sailors ready to begin at the beginning. Cullum and Charlotte, who were playing Mr. Edwards and Miss Price, were still hanging back, but they didn’t need to be ready for their cues yet. Paige’s opening speech was a long one, and though she knew it by heart, right now she couldn’t think of a single word.
“Breathe,” Miss Kendrick whispered in her ear. “Nice deep breaths.”
Doing as she was told, Paige felt the lines slowly reassembling, all the richly witty and outlandish adjectives, the strange and thrilling use of verbs, the poetic conjuring of the sleeping town of Llareggub. From the other side of the curtain she could hear the burble of voices, and she tried to picture where her mother was sitting, and Oliver, and Kelly Durham if she’d managed to sneak in. Once the lights went up she wouldn’t be able to see the audience, so she wouldn’t know where anyone was, which might be a good thing.
What was she going to do if everyone started catcalling and booing?
Die and never put herself in this position again.
“OK, make with the dry ice,” Miss Kendrick instructed Lloyd Brace, one of the stagehands.
As the predawn mist began to billow over the stage, Paige felt a sudden, desperate urge to flee. She might have done so, were she not frozen to the spot in panic.
Breathe. Just keep breathing.
Captain Cat—aka Tom Parsons the class clown—was going onstage to lie on his bunk.
As he disappeared in the mist Miss Kendrick’s hand touched Paige’s arm, gently easing her into position.
When the curtain went up she would be performing solo for a full three minutes. Everyone would be watching her, listening to her delivery of the world-famous lines, assessing her understanding of how they should be spoken, judging how worthy she was of this great honor. A female almost never took on the role of First Voice; it had been written for a man, and the Thomas diehards, the purists, would want to see and hear it performed by a man.
They were going to hate her, boo her, and shout her off.
From the corner of her eye she caught Miss Kendrick’s arm going down, Lloyd’s cue to raise the curtain, and hers to begin at the beginning.
She heard herself speaking the words: “To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town…” The audience could see her now, a girl, an impostor seeming to float in a groundswell of fog, an apparition in Llareggub. “…starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent…”
There wasn’t a murmur in the room; the only sound was her, speaking softly, lyrically, wryly, with Captain Cat, asleep on his bunk, being slowly revealed.
She wasn’t sure at which point she lost the sense of herself and became totally immersed in the bizarre and wonderful tragicomedy; she only knew on a level too distant to touch that there was nothing apart from the hilarious and intriguing oddities of the characters, their dreams, rivalries, disappointments, passions, and the day they were spending “Under waking Wood.”
Until finally Polly Garter met Mr. Waldo in the forest, and “the thin night darkens” and Llareggub was quiet again.
As the cast took the applause Paige could feel herself shaking so violently that it was hard to smile, even to move forward to take a bow. She’d landed back in reality with a crashing thud. She couldn’t believe that they were at the end of the play, that she’d got through it, that it was over and no one had howled, cackled, or done anything but laugh in all the right places and hang on to each and every word. A sea of faces was bobbing in front of her, one indistinguishable from another, as hands pounded together and whistles flew like cheers through the air.
She spotted her mother sitting with Richard, Auntie Hanna, and Bena, Grandma with Oliver just in front, and so much pride welled up in her that she was ready to burst. Then she saw two figures standing at the back, both blond and looking right at her. Her heart caught with surprise, but even as their eyes connected Olivia and Owen turned like ghosts and left.
It was time for her single bow. She stepped forward, smiling so hard it kept turning to sobs of laughter. Her eyes swept the audience again and again and stopped when they found her dad sitting alone, near the back. Now he was standing, hands held high as he clapped, pride oozing from every part of him.
He’d come, and though she’d felt sure he would, she hadn’t realized how happy that would make her too.
You were totally awesome. O.
She showed Charlotte the text in the dressing room, her heart thundering with excitement, adrenaline still pumping through her veins.
“Oliver? Olivia? Owen?” Paige cried above the din of the other actors. “I’ve no idea which one of them it might be.”
“Check the number,” Charlotte shouted. Paige did and felt a beat of surprise.
“So?” Charlotte prompted.
“It’s not Owen or Oliver,” Paige told her, “so it must be Olivia.”
Seeing how perplexed and uncertain she was, Charlotte hugged her. “It’s probably her way of trying to make up for things.”
Paige nodded as she wondered if she should text back or ignore it. She’d make up her mind tomorrow, she decided.
Charlotte pulled a teasing face. “So you’re not pissed off it wasn’t from Oliver?”
Paige’s eyes lit up. “Not a bit, because he’s coming to the Pitcher and Piano, so let’s grab our stuff and get the hell out of here.”
Six weeks later Jenna was in the dining room, surrounded by children’s clutter, with the French doors open to the garden and sunshine pouring in as frivolously and insistently as good spirits at a happy celebration. Her laptop was open in front of her, the screen filled with words she had written in a heady burst of inspiration that had lasted for most of the day. There were five entire pages of text, and having finished laying down this first chapter for now, she was very clear in her mind about where the book was going next.
What she wasn’t so sure about was what had freed her from the block, why words and ideas and characters had begun to stretch, yawn, limber up, and then to flow with a life force all their own, although she could hazard a few guesses. It would be a mix of things. There was emotional distress, which had a knack of transforming itself into creativity. She remembered her own words to Paige: You’re not a victim. That’s not who you are, so you mustn’t let her turn you into one. That, she realized, was what she’d allowed the author Natalie West to do to her with her cruel put-downs. Another thing—and this was the biggie—was the mind-blowing reception she’d received for the two children’s books she’d completed in less than a month.
To be fair, they were only twenty pages each, or would be once the illustrations were added, but according to her new publisher, Billy the Bully and Meanie Monica were exactly the kind of early-learning books they’d been looking for—and that the nation needed.
“This subject is constantly in the news,” Tina Nash, her enthusiastic young editor, had declared excitedly, “and what’s important is to catch kids when they’re very young to drum it into them that bullying isn’t where they want to go. No one would want to be Billy or Monica after reading these books, and if we can get schools to accept them for pre-kindergarten years…You know, this could be ripe for an animated TV adaptation. Actually, we could have a whole franchise on our hands here if you were able to come up with more.”
Jenna was still thinking about that. Writing for the very young wasn’t necessarily a field she wanted to get into; however, if part of the proceeds of her efforts could go to Kidscape, the anti-bullying charity she and Paige had recently become involved with, she might be tempted.
Until that was sorted out, she was keen to remain an adult-fiction writer, and could even start calling herself one again now that words were finally starting to flow in a very encouraging fashion. This was the third day running that she’d managed to sit at her computer and create five straight pages that truly felt like the start of something—well, something that would have a middle and end to add to the beginning, which was a definite improvement on where she’d been a month ago. Moreover, the funds she’d received for the film option on Poetry Emotion had enabled her to pay back her last advance, so she no longer had a deadline hanging over her like a sword of Damocles.
So it could be said that life was finally taking a turn for the better, at least on the financial and creative fronts. As far as family and personal matters were concerned, there were still days when she found being a single mum and deserted wife so difficult and dispiriting that it was a struggle to get through them. However, she managed it, mainly because she had to. A depressed mother was a burden her children really didn’t need, particularly when Paige’s recovery from her own experiences still had some way to go. Paige could seem very up one day, but the next it could become evident that her confidence, along with her ability to trust either herself or anyone else, was floundering.
The success of Under Milk Wood had been a perfect example of how fragile she still was—on the performance night, the praise for how well she’d handled the role had given her a tremendous boost. However, after the high had come the low, which had sent her crashing back to earth in a way that had lasted far longer than either of them had expected. Still, the one-on-one counseling was definitely helping, as were the group therapy sessions run by Kidscape that she’d attended in London over Easter while staying with Hanna. Hearing about other people’s experiences, as well as sharing her own, seemed to be making her feel much more positive about life, especially now she knew that such luminaries as Barack Obama, Rihanna, David and Victoria Beckham, and Will Young had all experienced some form of bullying—and look where they were now. Having such role models was driving Paige to help those who were still suffering; she was even planning to give a talk at school later in the term about what had happened to her, why she thought it had happened, how she’d felt during the worst of it—and how important it was to seek help as soon as it became obvious that the abuse was getting out of hand. “Don’t Be a Victim” was the title of the speech she was preparing.
“We can’t allow anyone to hold back because they’re afraid it’ll get worse if they tell,” she’d declared to her mother the last time they’d worked on her talk. “That’s what I did, and OK, it did get worse, but only because I didn’t make it clear to Miss Kendrick just how bad it was. If I had, the school would have put a stop to it there and then.”
Whether that was true they’d never know now, but what mattered was that Paige believed it, and though she could be a little evangelical at times in her determination to stamp out “this evil menace,” as she called it, Jenna would far rather see her like that than struggling to overcome it.
At the same time, Jenna had to concede that Paige was one of the lucky ones, for, having been blessed with a strong character—an attribute Jenna insisted was all her own, nothing to do with either parent—she was recovering far more quickly than others who’d been in her situation. As for Jack, his relationship with Paige might be slowly starting to improve (largely because Paige, in her words, was more tolerant of weakness now than she used to be), but the dynamic between them had definitely changed.
Though Jack continued on occasion to try to blame Jenna for the rift, saying she was turning Paige against him, Jenna had learned to stop rising to it. Nothing would come from such a futile argument when he already knew that he’d created the problem himself. So the furthest she would go to hit back was to remind him, in a very sweetly cutting way, that this was the price he was paying for choosing himself and his needs over his children’s. However, it apparently mattered greatly to him that he should remain a part of his stepdaughter’s life. If nothing else commended him, that certainly did.
Exactly how his relationship with Martha was going, Jenna had no idea, nor did she care—unless it was badly, in which case she wouldn’t mind knowing every last detail. However, when he was around, which wasn’t nearly as often as he’d promised the children he would be, no mention was ever made of his other life, nor had anyone yet been invited to take part in it. (Lucky them, she always thought.) Paige wouldn’t be interested anyway, but Josh and the twins might be if it meant spending more time with their father. However, Jack clearly wasn’t listening to the hints Jenna frequently dropped.
“Martha’s not interested in children,” her mother, whose own therapy had so far helped her to progress from a pat on the back to an occasional rub, would often comment. “She doesn’t want to spend her precious weekends at petting zoos, or swimmers’ club, or kiddie athletics, much less taking them for a haircut or to buy new shoes.” And the newly talkative Kay would sometimes continue, “He was a decent enough father for the time he was here, but that was because it suited him. Now it doesn’t, so he’s happy to do what he can when it doesn’t get in the way of anything else he wants to do. If it does, it’s down to you.”
Though the truth of that grated on Jenna, she had to admit that maybe she preferred it that way. Of course it had been easier when Jack was around doing whatever fatherly activities he did, which actually amounted to quite a lot, but these days it was definitely simpler to be in control of what the younger ones were doing and where they needed to be without having to rely on him. Relying on her mother, however, was a whole different story, since she certainly wouldn’t be able to manage without her, nor would she want to when it meant so much to Kay to feel needed. There was also the invaluable Bena, who was constantly offering her services as chauffeur, babysitter, or drinking companion on the evenings they could manage to fit in a glass or two.
Suddenly deciding she felt like celebrating her day’s work—and the sunshine, and the wonderful sense of freedom that was hers for about another half an hour—she went into the kitchen to put on the kettle. One of the best parts of being her these days, she was coming to realize, was not having to wonder where Jack was all the time, or show an interest in his new hobbies, or—more importantly—ask him for money. He still provided for the children, of course, but not regularly, and when his contribution did come it was often short of what it should have been. Since he’d never been mean, she could only conclude that he wasn’t earning as much as he’d like as a director of Gwynne and Associates.
Shame.
She was doing quite well herself. Well enough, in fact, to think about taking the children and her mother to Disney World next year. Charlotte too, if she wanted to come and keep Paige company.
“Hey, Mum! Did you remember to wash my black top?” Paige asked, appearing out of nowhere and catching a happy Waffle as he leapt at her.
Still getting over the shock of someone suddenly being there, Jenna said, “What are you doing home already?”
Paige went to the fridge. “Didn’t you get my text? Last lesson was canceled. Mrs. Brain fainted, so they decided to call it a day.”
“Fainted? What’s wrong with her?”
“I think she’s pregnant. Anyway, my black top?”
“Is on your bed.”
“Cool. Oh, by the way, what are you doing for your birthday next Friday?”
Jenna shrugged, as though she’d all but forgotten. “I haven’t given it much thought,” she replied. “Maybe we could all go to the King for something to eat. Do you fancy it? Would you come?”
Paige didn’t look thrilled. “So how about you come to where I’m going?” she suggested.
“Which is where?”
At that, Paige’s expression turned mischievous. “Well, since you ask, Oliver’s doing a gig at the Cross Keys and he’s offered me some tickets.”
Understanding that she ought to look suitably impressed, Jenna did her best. “That’s very kind of him,” she said, “but I’m sure you don’t want to take me.”
“Oh no, I definitely don’t,” Paige confirmed, “but Richard’s going to be there and we thought you two oldies might like to keep each other company.”
Laughing, Jenna went to give her a hug. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to do a little matchmaking,” she accused.
“And if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were interested.”
Jenna’s eyes narrowed.
“Oh come on, Mum, everyone knows you two fancy each other to hell and back.”
“Mm, wouldn’t it be better to be taken to heaven and back?”
“Too tame.”
Jenna had to laugh.
“Does that mean you’ll come?”
Jenna pretended to give it some thought. “I will,” she decided, “with the proviso that you don’t get in my face, invade my space, or cramp my style.”
Paige groaned desperately. “I know you’re trying to speak my language, but honestly, don’t.”
Laughing as she cupped her daughter’s face, Jenna said, “You know, I’m thinking I might turn you into a novel.”
Paige seemed to like the idea of that. “Cool,” she declared, her eyes widening with interest. “Can my name be Florence? And can I have a love interest who’s an awesome musician?”
“Yes to everything,” Jenna concurred, “just as long as we make sure it has a happy ending.”