Birdy (11 page)

The auditions were two weeks later, on Valentine’s Day. I’d been so preoccupied by the thought of them that I’d forgotten that first we’d have to get through the awful annual Valentine’s card ritual.

Every year at school, for the first two weeks of February, there’d be a makeshift postbox stationed in reception – an old cardboard box covered in pink tissue paper and printouts of heart shapes. The idea was that people label their cards with the name and tutor group of the object of their affection and leave it for the ‘postman’ to deliver on the day, in order to ensure absolute anonymity.

The postman was actually Mr Parker, head of Year Eight, and every year he’d get all dolled up in a ridiculous cupid costume, complete with fluffy wings, golden bow and a white smock-like dress which I was pretty sure must be his wife’s nighty. Mr Parker would come around in morning registration with his sack of cards and there’d be loads of silly shrieking and giggling as he delivered them.

At some point, I reckon one of the parents must’ve complained that the system wasn’t fair on ugly, unpopular ducklings like me who never got a single card, because for the last couple of years there’d been some cards that were clearly faked, sympathy-vote ones. I’d get one myself sometimes. They were always thin, cheap-looking things, the type you get from the bargain bin in Smith’s. There would always be some cheeky, chirpy message inside – the type of thing that looked like it’d been copied from a packet of Love Hearts – ‘be mine’, ‘cutie pie’, ‘groovy chick’. You’d only need to take a look at the cards received by some of the other class sad sacks to spot that the handwriting was the same in all of them. They probably got Mrs Warboise, the school secretary, to write them in bulk the day before.

But, as I say, this year, the upcoming auditions had been such a distraction I’d barely given Valentine’s Day a second thought. That was until the morning of the fourteenth itself, when I bumped into Jac Dubois standing next to my locker and the whole thing was catapulted to the forefront of my mind.

I thought he looked shifty the second I saw him – the way he was loitering in the shadows like that, looking around him, all furtive and on edge.

‘All right?’ I said to him as I opened my locker.

‘Oh, hi, Frances,’ he said, coming to stand at my shoulder.

‘Hi, Jac.’

‘How are you?’ He looked up and down the corridor again, like he was expecting someone.

‘Uh, fine, thanks,’ I said.

‘Cool,’ he said, still looking around him. He was sort of shifting from one foot to the other and fiddling with the rat’s tail at the back of his head.

‘You?’ I said, having to continue the conversation because, although he didn’t show any signs of saying anything else, he didn’t seem to be moving on either.

‘Uh … yeah,’ he said. Then with another quick look down the corridor he suddenly reached up the front of his jumper and whipped out a bright red envelope.

I remembered what day it was at once, and for one moment I thought Jac was actually going to present me with a Valentine’s card. I was surprised of course, but pleased too. I mean, I wasn’t really interested in Jac, but I was looking forward to telling Bert about my admirer. Especially as he’d once been
her
admirer. I hoped she might be jealous, just a little bit.

But he didn’t hand me the card. Instead he said, ‘Would you do me a favour?’

He lifted the flap of the envelope and pulled out a card. It had an unfussy design – a simple sketch of a red heart on thick, cream parchment.

‘Would you look at this and tell me … tell me … what you think?’

He opened the card and held it under my nose. I took hold of it to keep it steady while I read.

Dear Alberta,

I’m not much good at clever poems or rhymes, so I’ll just say:

I think you’re lovely.

From

I had to read it over a couple of times before I made sense of it. It was for Bert. Jac had written a card for Bert. He was still hung up on her. It seems silly now but I really hadn’t seen it coming. I’d assumed he’d moved on to someone else ages ago.

I just looked at him as he stood in front of me chewing on his thumb nervously, waiting for my verdict.

‘What?’ he said. ‘Is it awful? I mean, you know Alberta pretty well … Is it OK, do you think?’

He always pronounced ‘think’ as ‘sink’. I guess that’s what happens when you learn to speak English from people with French accents.

I blinked and turned away from him, pretending to rummage in my locker. ‘Uh, no … it’s just …’

‘Ah, bollocks. It’s terrible isn’t it?’ He looked down at the card, a pained look on his face. ‘Maybe I should just forget the whole thing.’

I didn’t reply. I just closed my locker with a bang and clicked the lock into place.

Jac looked down at the card again, opening and closing it.

‘Fuck it, I’m going to send it,’ he said, sounding determined. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. I’m just going to put it out there. I won’t put my name on it though. I’ll just put it in the postbox.’

Then he took a pen out of his pocket, rested the card against the wall to lean on and drew a careful question mark at the bottom. Then he slipped the card into the envelope and sealed it up. He did it all quickly, like he wanted to complete the whole action before he could change his mind.

He looked at his watch. ‘I better get a move on …’

He tucked the card back up his jumper and headed off towards reception but not before Gary Chester caught sight of him.

‘What you got there, frog boy?’ he shouted from the other end of the corridor. ‘A love letter for a laaaayddeeee?’

‘Fuck off,’ Jac said, but he was laughing. He didn’t hang around for Gary to question him any further.

Gary came over to me. ‘Was that a card for Alberta?’ he asked, still smirking.

‘Uh …’

‘I knew it!’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘What a muppet.’

Gary sauntered away, chuckling to himself, and I walked to registration feeling a bit miserable. I suppose I wondered if this was it – this was where Bert and Jac got together and started walking hand in hand across the field every day, me trailing a few paces behind, excluded. Forgotten.

I sulked through the whole of registration. Not only did I get my usual embarrassing fake card – ‘Forever yours, from ????’
–
but I had to put up with Bert’s squealing and giggling while she opened
four
separate cards. Most of them were full of exactly the kind of cheesy, sexist rubbish you’d expect from your average fifteen-year-old boy, but Jac’s seemed to have an effect on her.

‘Oh,’ she whispered to me. ‘Look at this one.’

She pushed the card under my nose and I had to read Jac’s neat handwritten message for the second time that morning.

‘Mmmm,’ I said. ‘Great.’

I passed the card back to her and made a show of tearing up my own card and dropping it into the bin.

‘It’s so sweet, don’t you think? I love the way it’s so simple. Completely unpretentious. Oh I wish I knew who sent it …’ She looked around the room as if hoping to spot a clue.

‘Why?’ I said, screwing my nose up. ‘What would you do about it anyway?’

Bert shrugged and pushed the card into her bag. ‘I’d just like to know, that’s all,’ she said quietly.

I was glad that we had the afternoon’s auditions to focus on so I was spared listening to Bert puzzle about who her secret admirer might be all day. The auditions were held in the hall, in groups of four, organised alphabetically. That meant that Bert and I were auditioning together, which was good. It also meant that Pippa would be there too, which was less good.

‘I’m hoping for Dorothea, of course,’ she told us, referring to the granddaughter of two of the elderly people and leading lady of the show. ‘I mean, you’ve got to aim for the top, haven’t you?’

Still, I was pleased to see that she was at least having to audition like the rest of us. I’d half-suspected that with all her busy-bodying and organising she’d be assured a lead role without having to do anything.

When we got to the hall, I was annoyed to find Mr Allenby there.

Mr Allenby was the school music teacher and although he seemed to be quite popular with lots of the other students at Whistle Down, I thought he was an idiot. He was young, as teachers go – only in his third year of teaching – and that was a fact he liked to remind us of all the time: ‘It was only yesterday I was sitting where you guys are,’ he’d say, at every available opportunity.

‘Guys.’ He was always calling us that. It drove me crazy. ‘Hey, guys, are we feeling the vibe today?’ ‘Guys guys guys, what’s with the beef? Calm it down, yeah?’

He was sitting at the piano as we traipsed in for our audition, playing a kind of relaxed jazz tune, his eyes closed as if he was lost in the music.

He pretended not to see us at first, but then he looked up and made a big show of standing up and pretending to be embarrassed. ‘Oh, hey there, guys!’ he called cheerily. ‘Just caught me having a tinkle on the old ivories.’

This was typical of him. No doubt he’d been keeping an eye out for us for the last ten minutes, just waiting for us to walk in so he could get into position and have us ‘catch’ him showing off how talented he was.

‘You’re so good!’ Bert said. I glared at her for taking his bait like this, but I don’t think she noticed.

Mr Allenby shrugged. ‘Bit rusty now, I’m afraid. Been concentrating on the woodwind too much lately …’

‘Oh, what do you play?’ Bert asked.

‘Just getting into oboe,’ Allenby said, his hands in his pockets. ‘You know it’s really –’

‘How long’s this going to take, Mr Allenby?’ I interrupted, trying not to sound too grumpy. ‘Only we shouldn’t really be out of lessons too long.’

Allenby nodded and hopped back behind the piano. ‘Sure,’ he said, shooting me a little glare. ‘Won’t take long. We’ll start with a read-through. Do you want to take a script each?’

He pointed to a pile of papers on top of the piano and we took one each. The scene was about the three elderly protagonists trying to complete part of their journey to Oz by bus, only to find that the forgetful one had mislaid their money. Luckily though the day was saved when a punky teenage boy the old people had earlier crossed the road to avoid stepped forward to pay their fare. It was just like I thought it would be – the ‘Be nice, folks!’
moral message was about as subtle as a punch in the stomach.

The read-through was pretty straightforward really. The fourth member of our group was Michael Boon, a big fat boy from our art class. He’d always seemed a bit backwards to me – the type who might’ve been dropped on his head at some point. Poor old Michael struggled with a few of the longer words in the script, meaning that he read all of his lines quite slowly, normally taking a couple of attempts and a prompt from Mr Allenby before he got the pronunciation right.

When that was out of the way, we had to move onto the singing. Truth be told, I hadn’t given much thought to this bit. I’d never been especially known for my singing voice, but then as I saw it, when you go down to the nuts and bolts, singing was nothing more than talking in tune. I thought I could give it a good shot, at least. The song we had to sing was a version of ‘We’re Off to See the Wizard’ and the words were on our sheets. I felt myself getting a bit pink when it got to my solo bit, so I just stared down at my song sheet, trying to block the others out. My memory of the song was a bit hazy, so there were a couple of lines where I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure of the pitch but I managed to find my way eventually.

When I finished, Mr Allenby thanked me for my ‘interesting interpretation’. I glared at him and Pippa sniggered. I glared at her too.

When the audition was finished, Mr Allenby told us that the casting list would be on the hall board tomorrow. I thought I’d probably done OK. I mean, I wasn’t deluded, I knew I was never going to be good enough for a lead part, but that didn’t matter to me. I wasn’t in it for the glory. As long as I got a part – any part, even a tiny one – then I could go to rehearsals and hang out with Bert and actually join in with something for once.

As promised, at lunchtime the next day, the list of parts was posted on the notice board outside the hall. People approached nonchalantly at first, pretending to have only a passing interest, but then as more people saw what was going on, the crowds began to jostle, everyone trying to get a look, hoping they’d been given the starring role of Dorothea, or failing that, one of the old folks.

‘Alberta,’ I heard someone say. Then a few seconds later, someone else, ‘Alberta. Alberta got it.’

Bert looked at me. ‘Was that my name? Do you think I got a part?’

I shrugged and craned my neck but I couldn’t read the list from our position at the back of the crowd. When we eventually got near enough to the board to be able to see, I spotted Bert’s name straight away. It was right at the top.

Dorothea – Alberta Fitzroy-Black

‘Birdy!’ Bert said, spinning around. ‘I got Dorothea! I’m going to be Dorothea!’

‘Yeah!’ I said, making a real effort to sound pleased. ‘Brilliant! Well done. The star!’

People were patting Alberta on the back and congratulating her, and she was nodding and thanking them.

‘What did you get?’ she called to me. I looked down the list, searching for my name.

I saw that Pippa had got the woman who was scared of everything – which was a bit of a joke I thought, as I’d never met anyone with a confidence like Pippa’s – little Harry Derbyshire had got the part of the forgetful old man and Laura Cox the old woman looking for love. I scanned further and further down the list, watching the parts get smaller and smaller – ‘Bus Driver’, ‘Teenage Punk’, ‘Angry Builder’, ‘Man with Umbrella’. But I wasn’t there. My name wasn’t on the list at all.

There was even a ‘backstage crew’ section. Mr Allenby was ‘Musical Coordinator/Director’ – trust Allenby to feel the need to put his own name on the list – Jac Dubois was on lighting and mousey Ana Mendez on sets. Just as I was about to step away from the board I caught sight of one name that made me do a double take – Michael Boon from our audition group. Special needs Michael Boon, who could barely read and who had once wet his pants in the middle of a cross-country run, had got a part. It was only ‘Man at Bus Stop #3’, but still, it was one better than me. I honestly think I must’ve been the only person to audition to not get any part at all. I stuck my chin out and shoved my way through the crowd.

Fine, I thought. I didn’t want to be in your stupid play anyway.

I looked around for Bert and saw her standing in the middle of a little group made up of Pippa, Harry and a couple of other people who’d been given decent parts. The key cast members, congratulating each other. She saw me looking over.

‘Birdy!’ she called. ‘What did you get?’

I didn’t really want to call it out, publicly announcing my shame, but I didn’t exactly have much choice. It was either that or turn around and ignore her and have everyone making stupid, ‘Oooh moo
dy
,’ noises. I skulked over and joined them. Luckily Pippa and Harry and the others were too caught up in their own conversation to pay me much attention.

‘Nothing,’ I shrugged. ‘But it’s OK. I wasn’t really that into it anyway.’

‘Oh,’ Bert said, sounding disappointed. ‘Well, you tried your best. That’s the main thing.’

Her patronising tone annoyed me so I just nodded and picked at a bit of loose paint on the wall.

‘We’ve got to go, Alberta,’ Pippa called over. ‘But see you at rehearsals tonight?’

‘Yep, see you later,’ Bert called back.

‘Oh, is there a rehearsal tonight?’ I asked, looking up. ‘Maybe I could come and help out? I could test you on your lines and stuff?’

‘Sorry, Frances,’ Mr Allenby called, coming from nowhere. ‘Cast members only in rehearsals. I can’t have all the hangers-on drifting around or it’ll be bedlam in there.’

‘Sorry,’ Bert said, looking a bit uncomfortable.

‘Fine,’ I said, looking down. ‘It’s fine. I hope you and Pippa and Mr Allenby all have a great time together.’

I knew how stupid I sounded straight away. Like a petulant child. I just felt so disappointed. I’d wanted it to be
me
and Bert, not Pippa and Bert, leading the show together. And I felt silly too. Stupid for even auditioning. I must’ve been really terrible if even Michael Boon was better than me. I blinked hard, forcing the tears back.

Suddenly, Bert laughed. ‘Oh, Birdy, please don’t look so glum! It’s not the end of the world! I mean, drama’s not really your thing anyway, is it? You know you didn’t get all the notes in the audition. Singing’s just not for you obviously, but there’s no need to get cranky about it. And there’s no need to take it out on Mr Allenby. Or on Pippa for that matter.’

I couldn’t fight the tears away then. They pricked my eyes, hot and sharp. I turned away from her and strode off towards the canteen.