Lucky Break (37 page)

Charlie rushed to the kitchen, her cheeks burning, her hands suddenly cold. She filled a basin with water, threw in a cloth, stuck a roll of kitchen towel under one arm. ‘I'll do it,' her father insisted, and for a moment they wrestled dangerously over the plastic bowl. Charlie gave in. She sat back on her chair and took a bitter sip of tea.

‘It shouldn't stain,' her father said a few minutes later, paws planted, for all the world like a large, grizzled dog. ‘Now you two, surely it's time to sleep. Go on up. Please. I'll finish off down here.'

 

Mortified, in her single bed, Charlie looked round at the shapes of the old furniture, at the bedraggled posters of actors and pop stars that had comforted her so much when she came home in the holidays from school. It surprised her that her parents, usually so pristine, had never got around to taking them down. Maybe for them, in their late sixties, time went so fast now, it was as if she'd just moved out.

She was tempted to ring Bram and admonish him for what had happened, but she didn't relish the sound of her voice, audible in the silent house as she recounted the story of her mother's mishap. She wanted to tell him too about the extraordinary feeling that had surged through her. Ask if it was appropriate. Allowed. The sensation of joy before it all went wrong.

The next morning Charlie slept late, and when she finally came downstairs her mother was in the kitchen, wrapped like a parcel in her pinstriped apron. ‘Darling,' she drew a plate of bacon from the oven, her hair perfectly arranged, her make-up on, ‘it's the oddest thing, but I do feel rather better today.'

‘Really?' Charlie doubted it was anything to do with her, but she moved towards her mother and held her perfumed, toast and bacon-smelling body in her arms. Later, she decided, she'd go out and buy flowers, and she smiled to think how easy it was going to be to surprise her.

Nightfall

‘No thanks,' Dan told Lenny, when he was offered theatre, ‘I can't afford it. Are you crazy? I'm still recovering from last year's extended holiday in LA.' But that was before he was sent
Nightfall. Nightfall
was different. It was a new play, by a young Geordie writer, and when Dan read it, adrenalin coursed through his body, and the only reason he could see to turn it down was fear.

‘What do you think?' He stood before Jemma, outlining for her the hours and the paltry fee, but before she could make any comment, he reminded her it was a short run, only eight weeks, and more importantly, it was the most exciting play he'd read in years.

‘Really?' She looked worried. ‘It will be hard, you being out every night, but at least it's in London, and you'll be home during the day. You could take Honey to school sometimes, now she's finally settled back in, and maybe on Fridays you could take the twins to that new music class up by the hospital. It's hysterical, there's this big silk parachute and they all throw their teddies into the middle and we fling them up . . .'

‘I don't know how I'll do it, though,' Dan was too anxious to listen. ‘I'm in every scene, and we've only got four weeks' rehearsal, it doesn't start for two weeks, but even so, my character's from Newcastle, and the accent, fuck, Geordie is well known for being virtually impossible. You should read it, it's brilliant. Very dark, the guy I play is a total maniac, and he's never off stage, literally, not for a minute.'

‘But that's good, isn't it? I mean, what you hated so much about being at the Bush was waiting backstage, bored sick, with not enough to do.'

‘True.' Dan could feel his heart thumping. If he said yes, he'd have to start work on the accent, now, today.

‘And presumably you get previews. You wouldn't have to open straight into a press night?'

The words ‘press night' left a sheen of sweat over Dan's entire body. ‘I haven't felt like this about anything for ages.'

Jemma took hold of both his hands. ‘Then you'll have to do it,' she told him. ‘We'll manage. You'll see.'

The rehearsals were agonising. The lines refused to stick. There were just too many of them, and the accent was even more impossible than he'd feared. But the hardest thing to grapple with was the play itself. What had seemed electrifying on first reading, once investigated, broken down and dissected, appeared to be a dark and unremitting rant. The playwright sat silent at the back of the rehearsal room, refusing to allow them to alter a word, not even capitulating when Dan, in a fit of frustration, kicked over a chair. In desperation Dan went back to his old drama college notes, flicking through the scrawl of Silvio's equations, imagining the old, disappointed man, squatting frog-like in his lair. Nothing comes from Nothing, he could hear him now, his mouth turned down, his body drooping. Close. Flexible. Adrift. What character type was this man Gary? And he experimented with slashes and punches, dabs and flicks until he made even himself laugh. In an attempt to regain calm he sat up half the night and wrote out his back story, inspired in part by the writer's haunted presence, and something he'd let slip in one unguarded moment – the fact that all his stories had something personal at their core. The rest Dan invented. Gary's childhood, the cruelty inflicted on him by his mother, his father's absence, the discovery of his half-brother, also named Gary, who'd spent his life in care.

The director, on the other hand, was a jovial man. He regaled them with anecdotes of past theatrical successes, interspersed with stories of his own suffering at a minor public school, and often left it to Dan and his fellow actors – a nervous man called Brian, and a sweet young girl from Newcastle, who winced occasionally when his accent went awry – to call a halt to the informal chatting and get on with rehearsals. The first thing they did was break the play into sections, mark out the light and shade, form an arc to hold the rhythm of the drama, but the harder they worked, the clearer it seemed to Dan that the whole piece was nothing more than a bleak series of sermons – on fear, death, family dysfunction, abuse, cruelty and revenge. A two-hour ordeal that no one, surely, would want to pay good money to sit through. Sometimes he'd drift into a bleak fantasy, imagining the reviews, the critics mourning the loss of two precious hours of their lives, or, if by some miracle they liked the play, railing against the fact that a southerner like Dan Linden had been let loose on such an important northern role. ‘Why
did
they cast me?' he asked the dialect coach, as they grappled with glottal stops and vowels, and he cursed himself for being vain enough to be swayed by his agent's insistence on his versatility. In future, he promised himself, when his heart started pounding he would recognise it for what it was – terror, not excitement. A signal to say no.

The night of the first preview Jemma sent him flowers. From the size of the bouquet, Dan worried she'd used up half his weekly wage.
You'll be brilliant
, the card said,
as you always are. Big Love, from your biggest fan
. But that morning she'd joked that if he thought he was nervous, he should think of her. She'd be the one hyperventilating in the middle row, and as he kissed her goodbye he felt her heart flutter against his, and he'd pulled away, anxious that she'd make him even more afraid.

‘Now,' the director gathered them around him just before the half, ‘this is a preview, no one expects it to be perfect. So use tonight to test the play, to find your levels, and don't forget to listen to each other, listen to the audience, find your pace.' He paused and they all watched his face, like prisoners awaiting sentence. ‘You're all doing fabulously. Now go out there and amaze them.'

The actors hugged. Dan and Brian, clasping each other in a manly, stiff-upper-lipped embrace. ‘My turn,' Michelle pressed herself against Dan, her skin goosebumps in her flimsy clothes. ‘Tell me I'll be all right?'

Dan looked at her, surprised. She had everything for nothing. Youth, beauty, a genuine Geordie accent, and anyway, she only appeared in three scenes. ‘You'll be great,' he told her. ‘You are great. Really.' And she smiled at him with such gratitude that for a moment he forgot his own fear.

Dan was the first one on. He could hear the audience chatting, and he imaged Jemma sitting in the seat he'd booked for her, four rows back, a little left of centre. He'd made sure she wasn't sitting next to Brian's wife, he didn't want the two of them swapping tales of night sweats and despair. Thankfully there was no one else in that he knew, at least he hoped there wasn't, except for the dialect coach who'd promised to come and give her verdict on his accent. Dan ran over the first lines, telling himself he just had to get through to the interval, five scenes, the first one, the one he knew the best, and then four more, then three . . . He felt his courage slipping. Did he have time for one last trip to the toilet? No. The music had stopped. He hadn't known there was music until then, and the lights must have dimmed, because the noise of chatter subsided and then stopped altogether. Right. It was all up to him to make the first move, although he imagined if he didn't, a stage manager might appear from somewhere and push him on to the stage.

 

Dan laughed now, three weeks later, to think of himself, unrecognisable, as he sauntered towards the best part of his day. A week after that first preview,
Nighfall
had officially opened, and the next morning the first reviews came out. ‘It's a rave,' Lenny boomed from voicemail when he finally switched on his phone, and not long after Jemma ran upstairs with a pile of newspapers and they went through them together while Grace and Lola bounced maddeningly on the bed between them, trampling the noisy sheets of paper, flinging the loose pages into the air.

‘One brilliant one,' Jemma smoothed them out. ‘One pretty bloody good, and one that loves you but doesn't like the play. So still good as far as we're concerned.' She laughed, victorious, and kissed him, and Dan lay back, relief washing over him as she read the best passages aloud. Later, he took a bath, ate a large late breakfast and went into the theatre for notes. The atmosphere was jubilant. Bookings were already up. He had friends in almost every night, people from college, actors he'd worked with, his mother, Jemma's parents, his great-aunt Anne.

That weekend there were more good reviews, which meant they were assured of an audience for the first month at least – London's theatre lovers who made it their mission to see all the successful shows – and others from across the country, some even from America and Japan. The most enthusiastic among them would wait afterwards by the stage door to congratulate all three members of the cast and have them sign their programmes. Dan's own personal followers, loyal since
Rainstorm
, hung back patiently, waiting for him to be free. They were an odd assortment, these fans – lone men, the occasional bobble-hatted woman, with digital cameras and photographs downloaded from the Internet, and never once did any of them mention coming to see the play.

‘You'd think they'd want to see it,' Jemma said, ‘gaze at you for two whole hours,' but Dan explained it wasn't the theatre they were interested in, not even really the shows he'd done on TV, it was collecting that stimulated them, one more autograph, another photograph, it had nothing really to do with him. He took Jemma's arm and whisked her into the bar, and he knew whatever she said, however irritable she might be that he'd not once managed to get up in time for breakfast, let alone that music class with parachutes, nothing could bring him down from the soaring, scissoring heights that he inhabited every night after the show. He knew that from then on he would be flying, his fears behind him, the knowledge he had lived through so much tragedy and survived, making him omnipotent. In the space of two hours he had laughed and fought, retched and wept. He'd attacked his cousin, the one member of his family he loved, and as a result of his subsequent remorse he'd inadvertently let slip his most guarded secret, releasing himself as he did so, making amends, and unexpectedly gaining as reward the beautiful Carina, who'd leapt, in her satin crop top, into his arms. ‘Good show tonight,' he winked across at Michelle, and she raised her glass, luminous, the trembling of a few hours before absorbed into her blood.

 

They were a month into the run now, and he never wanted it to end. He felt lean and vital, had no need of the gym after the two-hour workout of the show and the adrenalin that took away his appetite, so that he existed on a late breakfast and a sandwich at five, and felt no need for anything more than that but drink. Most days he got up late, went into town for voiceovers, interviews or meetings, and when he was free he dropped in on Lenny, who always made time for a coffee, using his visit as an excuse to stand out on the fire escape and smoke. From there he would go straight to the theatre, find a café nearby to eat, mindful that from mid-afternoon onwards nothing would jeopardise the escalating intensity of his character's mood. Sometimes he played cards with Michelle, who came in early too, and he'd listen to her lovely grating voice as she told him about her boyfriend back in Newcastle, the fights he got into, the prison sentence he was serving, suspended for six months. There was no mobile reception in the dungeon of the dressing rooms, and only one high window on to the street, and once he'd climbed the stairs to make his obligatory call to Jemma, who was always busy right then with the kids, he'd settle in for the night. There was a green room, with several battered sofas, tea and coffee provided by the theatre, a microwave, a kettle. Occasionally stage management would file in and make a cup of soup. ‘Who's winning?' they'd ask and it was always Michelle. ‘I'm the champion,' she'd flex her pale arm, and she laughed so widely that her pink gums were revealed.