It was a chicken pox of the soul. The itch to phone or confront David drove me mad as the hours crawled past. I paced the house, then just a path from the sofa to the fridge. If an orgasm used up the calories of a boiled sweet, I figured misery was worth at least two chocolate éclairs and a tub of Ben and Jerry’s.
Six days before rehearsals, KT came round.
‘Bloody hell girl, you didn’t have that many chins on Friday.’
I looked in the mirror: there was barely space for my face in it.
‘I am not starting rehearsals with you looking like Jabba the Hut.’
It took a moment to sink in.
‘What do you mean, you are not starting rehearsals?’
He looked…well, smug wasn’t sufficient a word for the expression of mischievous satisfaction that spread across his face like melting butter.
‘You know Karl? Flossie? The choreographer? Well, he’s offered me dance captain.’ The Gauleiter of the Twirlies. No worse than diving with sharks, but not an easy job.
‘How come? I mean, you’re a bit long in the bum for twirling, aren’t you?,’ I said, as he opened the fridge and started throwing cakes into the bin.
‘Cheeky bitch. I’m in the first flush. Anyway, Flossie’s choreographing the non-salsa stuff and the salsa specialist doesn’t speak English. So I’m coming in. To translate.’
‘You don’t speak Spanish.’
‘God, you’re picky.’
He lobbed a full packet of chocolate HobNobs in the bin. I winced. What was I going to dunk in my hot chocolate? I needn’t have worried: that followed the biscuits less than a minute later. He beamed and held up a limp lettuce.
‘Listen girl, your body’s a temple. Pity it’s starting to look like the Taj Mahal. Get your coat. We is going shopping.’
It took self-control, a padlock on the fridge and a laxative enema to get me looking like a leading lady in time for the read-through. Corseted in jeans, and more nervous than a woman has a right to be of anything but childbirth, I left the dubious cocoon of David’s world…
•
I knew that the rehearsal room, in a part of London used by police for riot practice, was unlikely to be a glittering mirror-lined palace, but the grim gulag with its door sprayed Darren is a pedo was worse than I’d imagined.
Inside was a crumbling hall reminiscent of where I’d briefly been a Brownie. One session prancing round a toadstool had sent me home complaining of child abuse.
To the right was a suspiciously stained concrete staircase; on the left, the green room, a large kitchen area with foam-lined banquettes at one end. I knew they were foam-lined because their dingy nylon covers had rotted away in places, allowing the filling to protrude like a beer-gut through an inadequate shirt.
The hall was full of stage management making tea, dancers flexing their elastic limbs and musical theatre luvvies screeching. Conversations meant to be overheard.
‘Did you hear about the boy in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? Got his dick stuck in a shower head?’
‘No!’
‘Yeah… And it was nailed six feet up the wall.’
A woman with a red slash of a mouth and cheese-cutter cheek bones looked up from her mobile.
‘Oh, you must be Eleanor –’
‘Please – Ellie or Nellie.’
‘Oh aye, right. Anyway, I need to measure you.’ She paused, looking at my figure like a plumber considering a blocked U-bend. Finally, not trusting herself with any comment, she said, ‘Do you need to have gold earrings or can I give you any old crap?’
She was small, Scottish and spoke with a Marlboro Red clamped in one hand and a cardboard bucket of double espresso in the other. She saw me looking at them.
‘Well there’s no point in taking drugs unless you can feel them working, eh? I tried them low-tar Silk Cut once, gave myself a hernia sookin’ on them. Oh, sorry, I’m Morag – the designer, wardrobe supervisor, costume mistress… I tell you, I’ll be sticking a broom up me arse and sweeping the floor in a minute.’
The floor could certainly have benefited. You had to be grateful for dust mites – without them the place would have been knee deep in dead skin. As it was, bolls of hair and dust eddied across the floor, occasionally catching on the splintered surface. I was thinking about ringworm when a girl with café-au-lait skin and the hips of a racing snake introduced herself.
‘I am Glenda from Cuba.’ I tried not to look surprised. Maria, yes; Coromoto, possibly – but Glenda?
‘Glenda?’
‘Yeah, my mother went to Wales when she was pregnant.’
I didn’t get the connection for a moment. ‘Oh yes.’ The light dawned on me. ‘Owen Glendower.’
She looked casually contemptuous, as only exceptionally beautiful black women can. ‘No. It means valley.’
Now I was completely lost. ‘You mean Glen?’ I hazarded.
‘Si,’ she said pityingly.
‘That’s Scotland.’
She shrugged. ‘Whatever. Oh, and this is God.’
God?
‘Dios, my name is Dios.’ I didn’t ask where his mother had been but there was no question that this was a deity of some sort – six feet tall, perfection in body and face, with the casual assurance of the Latin lover. God and Glenda: proof that with the rest of us the Creator was just practising. He stared deep into my eyes. ‘I am going to make you dance salsa like you make love.’
Reluctantly, with a slab of cold pizza after?
Thankfully, at that moment the director came in. When I’d originally met the producer – pretending to David I was volunteering in an Oxfam shop – the director had been a flabby Californian in a headscarf. The Daily Telegraph obituary column would have described him as ‘a confirmed bachelor’. David would have had him shot. The producer, foaming with excitement, had done the introductions.
‘This is Ricky Ricky, our great director. Greatest director in Los Angeles. He has – how many awards you got Ricky?’
The pudding face dimpled. ‘Eight.’
‘Oh, for what?’ I enquired, unaware that LA was a centre of theatrical excellence.
‘Commercials. Yeah, I do…eggs, cola, pretzels. My latest was for running shoes, you may have seen it. It went mega in Europe. England is Europe, isn’t it? Look up my website, rickyricky.com.’
Luckily a couple of days later my agent rang to say Ricky had been offered a Pontiac ad and was suddenly unavailable. Heaven forbid the Pontiac should have run him over.
His replacement was British, the staggeringly beautiful director of a raft of plays and musicals, for whom a string of famous actresses had thrown themselves off bridges. He had broken hearts, wedding vows and hymens all over the country and, seeing him up close for the first time, I could see why.
Past his fabled best now, he looked like a fine building in need of some refurbishment. He was tall and slim, almost Asian in build, with the most extraordinary face. The perfection of its proportions, the angle of cheek bone to chin, the size and shape of the dark eyes, the delicacy of the flawless profile – were simply breathtaking. It was difficult to look at him without staring. Time had left its grubby fingerprints under his eyes and in the lines from nose to mouth, but they only made him more attractive. As did his soft, curved mouth, drawn carefully over butterfly teeth, which caused him to pout slightly unless he was smiling, which he was now.
At me.
Into me.
‘Eleanor, I’m Dan, Dan Cawdron. I’m so glad you’re doing the show. I’ve always wanted to work with you.’
Ah, the smell of bullshit in the morning.
KT came up behind me. ‘That’s a well-trodden path girl. Don’t you go blackberrying down it.’
I tried looking stern and superior. That Nellie was long gone, replaced by Nellie the wife and mother. KT tutted.
‘I know your fanny better than you do, and right now it’s twitching like a dog’s back leg.’
The memory of bonking Richard III in my dressing-room came back. The company manager walked in. We chatted. He went. Then I saw the used condom on the dressing-table between my false eyelashes. But that had been when I could still pull more than the curtains in David’s living room. Those days were gone.
The director’s slow smile made me wish for one last chance.
My fantasy was shattered by the door being thrown open by the producer and his wife, the writer. He nodded and gave a newsreel wave; she followed like a geisha as he strode across the middle of the hall, greeting the world.
‘Hi, everybody. Hi. Are we late? Pardon me. We didn’t mean to be late.’
To call them plain would be unfair. These two had fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. But they were in no way similar. Where he was extraordinary, she was dull. Built with the flexibility and angularity of an ironing board, she was in her uniform, as I came to know it, of polo neck tucked into belted chinos with catalogue plimsolls on her entirely flat feet. Her neck was disproportionately long, her jaw Hapsburgian and her eyes, of an indeterminate slurry colour, were hidden by vast glasses that covered a great deal, but not enough, of her face. Her hair, the same colour as her eyes, was clean. That was all you could say about it. She loped behind her husband with an apologetic droop.
He, on the other hand, was more than the sum of his physical ugliness. He was squat, wearing a square tweed jacket, anti-fit jeans on anti-fit legs and a baseball cap on what was obviously a bald head of around seventy years of age. His right hand, a short square appendage used for emphatic stabbing movements, held a ridiculously large, unlit cigar, the end of which was wet with saliva and fraying onto the floor around his feet.
But it was the face that fascinated. His wide, thin-lipped mouth opened in a tongue-filled slit, revealing no teeth up or down. The effect, added to his round, brown reptilian eyes, yellow skin and seemingly boneless face, was that of a frog – with no hope of transformation.
KT whispered: ‘That’s what happens when you let ugly people make love.’
Dan stood up to make the customary speech of welcome and intent, but before he could speak the producer approached and grabbed his shoulder, holding Dan at arm’s length.
‘Daniel, Dan, may I have some input here?’ He didn’t wait for the answer but went on in an American accent that could have scoured a sink. ‘I think most of you here will have heard of me. I’m Izzy Duck.’
He paused for applause which didn’t come.
‘And I’ve decided to put my forty years experience as a Broadway Producer behind this great script.’
He had an upward inflection at the end of each sentence which, along with talking as fast as a football rattle and waving a foot-long, unlit cigar around, discouraged interruption. There were looks of frank disbelief on almost every face.
‘And I’m proud to say, this great show was written by my wife, Viola. Say, Viola, stand up.’ He started clapping, sticking the cigar in his mouth.
‘He looks like a rottweiler having a shit,’ said KT, loud enough to be heard by the actor sitting next to him, who was just raising a mug to his lips. The coffee in his mouth shot out of his nose, to KT’s obvious delight. Izzy continued, oblivious.
‘Not only do we have the finest musical written since Oklahoma!, with a score to rival West Side Story by the great Ildefonso Campi…’ A tall, Antonio Banderas type, sitting at the director’s table, took a little bow while Izzy restoked his lungs. ‘…But also we have the greatest salsa players here in the shape of Jimmy Fuentes and Samson Quarenton.’ The musicians smiled, almost as if they knew where they were. ‘Now I wanna tell you Brits about the clave beat. The beat of salsa. Jimmy?’
The percussionist started to tap drums in front of him.
‘These are the cajones,’ declared Izzy. ‘That means boxes.’
‘Cojones,’ said KT. ‘That means balls.’
‘Say what?,’ barked Izzy at the innocent looking KT.
The beat Jimmy set up was odd, all off-beats. Izzy Duck, a senile uncle at a bar mitzvah, raised his hands above his head, clicking his fingers.
‘Hear it?,’ he shouted over the drums. ‘Five beats. Just like your iambic pentameter in Shakespeare.’ He shuffled in rhythmic ecstasy. Eyes were averted, but this was a man impervious to embarrassment. ‘My wife Viola loves Shakespeare. She’s named after one of the characters.’
‘Caliban,’ whispered KT. I snorted.
‘Bless you,’ continued Izzy, without taking breath. ‘She read his plays when she was a child, and this piece is Shakespearean in its breadth and brilliance.’
We waited for the under-cutting irony. There was none. The ego had landed in the Elephant and Castle. Izzy was on a roll.
‘I believe we have a genius here in our director, Dan Cawdron. I’ve been to his theatre in Edgware.’ He paused for effect. Those that knew where Edgware was looked impressed; most looked like stunned fish. ‘And can I say this?’ His question was, as we would come to learn all his questions were, rhetorical. ‘Dan Cawdron is the greatest story-teller in theatre today. He also won an Olivier Award for his own great musical Pope Paul and the Mou Mou.’
‘Pol Pot and the Mau Mau,’ said Dan.
‘And you know, Dan?’ He turned to him like the US President to the leader of an insignificant third-world country. ‘You know how we’re going to have a West End hit?’
Dan took a breath. Izzy went on, jealous of the oxygen.
‘I tell you how we’re going to have a West End hit, pal. You gotta get in touch with your inner perfection.’
The rest of his interminable and incomprehensible welcoming speech was lost after this. The suspicion that we were in the hands of a lunatic was forming in some minds. The minds that remained empty were those too blank or personally ambitious to contemplate independent thought.
When Izzy Duck finally sat down, he received loud applause. Like performing seals, actors clap anyone who feeds them. Dan stood up to do his speech before we lost the will to live. And I settled back to observe Viola Duck.
Her plain face was suffused with adoration as she watched Dan standing before his company, clad as always all in black, hands spread in general benediction. Briefly he turned his all-inclusive smile on her. She ducked her long pale face into her script, placing her nose almost on the page as she peered over her glasses. She must be almost blind, I thought. Shame. Bless her… Mind you, to sleep with Izzy Duck you’d have to be blind. I looked round at the company to take my mind from wickedness.
Next to KT sat Lee, the coffee drinker, a genetically modified truck driver in a too-tight T-shirt over a soft chest punctuated with nipples of abnormal prominence. No amount of exfoliation or depilation could feminise the basic package, which he’d tweezed, plucked, squeezed and perfumed. The hormones within remained resolutely masculine, to his obvious disgust. His long nails caressed his slight paunch and his lips pursed in impatience. He burned to perform, and I could see from the sweep his long-lashed eyes made of the room, he didn’t see any competition, though he’d smothered me in compliments, and his own humility.
Beside him the soubrette, neither leading lady nor juvenile, was being vivacious. Plump, over-dressed and defensively made-up, her mouth, in repose, was as tight as a cat’s sphincter. Tight with disappointment and the proximity of elusive stardom.
In a room full of novices, and old-timers who’d traded ambition for regular work, these were the most obvious West End Wendies: performers who bandied the word ‘unprofessional’ as if it was syphilis, but never applied their extreme intolerance to themselves. David would have dismissed them with a wordless sneer.
His entrance into my mind excluded all other thought for a moment: our first kiss, roses on Valentine’s Day…memories, now contaminated, of lust and duty.
Around me scripts were being opened. Jimmy and Samson played, at Izzy’s insistence, a salsa riff which was jarringly alien to my ears, clamped so long by David to Radio 3.
All roads led to David.
We clap. Jimmy shrugs and reconnects to his iPod. Izzy announces his masterwork.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the World’s Greatest Salsa Musical… The Merchant…of Venezuela!’
It didn’t take long to realise it wasn’t just the title that was a turkey.
I hadn’t bothered to read it, thinking I’d never do it, and by the time I said yes, money had become more important than the immortal prose. Now here I was, creating the role of Guadalupe Arias, a fabulously wealthy Venezuelan diamond-dealer. Played in an accent thick enough to grout tiles, I thought I might get away with it.
‘No! Please! Noh that sonn! Noh the sonn of the nightingales,’ I cried with convincing pain. Not so much a musical Arkardina as an Hispanic Madam Arcati. But the image of a comedic dragonfly emerging from its melodramatic carapace was quickly dismissed as I stumbled through speeches Bletchley Park would have been hard pushed to decipher. I looked round the room to see if anyone else was as baffled as I was.
Now, it’s not often the producer is reduced to tears by more than the weekly returns, but Izzy was sobbing into what seemed to be a duvet cover. Viola’s tale of latino greed and tragedy had moved him to a tsunami of tears.
The coffee drinker and the soubrette, encouraged by his sobs, sang their numbers with more passion than accuracy, and the read-through finished with another speech from Izzy, this time to tell us we were the greatest hand-picked cast ever assembled for a masterpiece. We applauded again and broke for lunch.
‘Oh, Eleanor.’ It was the soubrette. ‘I’m Susan. I saw you in that show at the Wyndhams. Wow! I just thought…um…well, I’ve got some fab salsa CDs, all the best singers, and a couple of DVDs as well. Would you like to borrow them? I mean it’s such a different discipline, isn’t it?’
‘Well, yes, thank you Susan. That’d be great. Very kind.’
‘Kind my arse,’ said KT as she waddled off, satisfied. ‘Anything to get in with you.’
‘Don’t be nasty, KT. She’s just trying to be friendly.’
KT sighed largely and, lighting a Superking, changed the subject. ‘Well, the script’s a load of bollocks, isn’t it? But Dan’s made many a Prada handbag out of worse sow’s ears…’
‘Oh, it’s not that bad.’ This was my only family now, so I was determined to err on the side of the angels. ‘Just needs a bit of work on the structure.’
‘So does Brighton Pier.’