When The Devil Drives (2 page)

Her drawing efforts did not last beyond the gunshot that rang out at the beginning of the production. It gave her quite literally the fright of her life, calling her attention not only to the action on the stage, but the action all around her. Jolted away from the cosy little bubble of her sweets, her drink and the comfort of her mum’s legs, she suddenly noticed how the scenery and backdrops looked up close. She became aware of the platforms, ramps and stairways the actors were using to access different areas of the set, as well as the slides, pulleys and counterweights that were making elements zip in and out of place. And if the gunshot had initially summoned her attention, what held it thereafter was the actors themselves.

Prior to this, people she had watched on stage had seemed little different to the people she watched on TV. They inhabited this unreachable otherworld, barely more real or tangible than cartoon characters. That night, she saw not only that they were real people, brushing past in a waft of heat and smells, but she witnessed them each become something altogether different from themselves. They stood in the wings or behind the backdrop in their costumes, faces painted vividly with make-up so thick that close up they were like circus clowns. Some would chatter quietly to one another, some remained alone and withdrawn, but when they stepped on to the stage they instantly became other people. Their accents changed, their posture and manner changed; they even seemed taller or shorter than mere seconds before. Women in tears made their exits and then traded little smiles and jokes once they had cleared the sightlines. An actor stood alone: reflective, shy and even a little sullen, then stepped before the audience and was instantly a cheerfully drunken and voluble braggart.

Having been taken to all those pantomimes and other shows, six-year-old Jasmine was already familiar with spectacle. This, however, was magic. She knew that night that theatre was no longer something she merely wanted to watch. It was something she wanted to be part of.

When she played with her dolls thereafter, it wasn’t make-believe. Some of them were the cast, others the audience, and whatever the former were about – whether it be tea parties or hair dressing – it
was all part of a play. She recalled gluing together kitchen-roll tubes and panels cut from cardboard boxes, placing them either side of her doll’s house, its front hinged open where it sat on her bedroom floor. It was no longer a doll’s house. It was a stage set.

She took part in children’s drama clubs, youth theatre groups, school musicals; and with her mum being a drama teacher whose time and duties were divided between two separate secondaries, when Jasmine wasn’t acting she was helping sew costumes, paint backdrops and fashion props.

When it came to her vocation, there was no question of Jasmine having a Plan B.

She recalled her mum’s pride, delight and no little relief when Jasmine got accepted into the Scottish Academy of Theatre and Dance, even though it would involve her daughter flying the nest and taking up residence through in Glasgow. Any fears Mum might have for Jasmine being on her own away from her vigilant eyes in a different city (and one whose darker side Beth Sharp was warily familiar with) would prove unfounded. She certainly didn’t have to worry about her little girl being seduced by the temptations of her student lifestyle. Jasmine had been seduced by a jealous suitor way back at the Lyceum and remained monogamously single-minded to the point of anti-social where it came to the study of her chosen craft. She relaxed and began letting her hair down a bit more during her second year, but admittedly even that had a vocational element to it, as she began to appreciate how important it was to be making contacts and getting her face known in certain circles. Whatever it took, she was going to do it.

Then Mum got sick.

It was around the start of Jasmine’s final year that Mum was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given her unmerciful, unthinkable,
impossible
prognosis. Jasmine dropped out of college and moved back in with her in Corstorphine, to be with her as much as possible during the time they had left. Mum only had months, and Jasmine only had months left to spend with the person who had raised her, alone, the person she was closest to in the world, the person she could not possibly do without. But eventually, inescapably, Jasmine
would
have to do without.

People talk about picking up the pieces, getting back on with your life, but the pieces scattered around Jasmine looked like grains of sand on a beach, and she spent a lot of time in her mum’s empty house contemplating them, unable to assemble them into any pattern that made sense. She didn’t feel like she had a life to get back on with. She had no job, no career, no studies any more, and barely an echo of her previously consuming aspirations.

Eventually, she decided to move back to Glasgow and the little flat she still rented, as a means of forcing herself to push forward, of making some attempt to re-gather the threads of her ambitions. And they were ambitions now, at best, not dreams. Dreams were what little girls had as they squatted in the wings at their mother’s feet.

All she had left were pragmatic necessities, amid the rather unsettling realisation that she had, as the phrase goes, her whole life ahead of her. This sounded to her a daunting and arduous prospect rather than a rallying cry for the passions of youth. Suddenly it didn’t seem so visionary to have spent her whole life in pursuit of a profession with an unemployment rate comparable with dinosaur obedience trainers and banking-sector humility advisers. To make matters worse, in a game where visibility was the key to opportunity, she had completely fallen off the grid. Nobody knew who she was, and among her former peers, those who hadn’t forgotten about her completely seemed to have assumed that she hadn’t merely dropped out of her course, but abandoned acting altogether.

Auditions were a struggle to come by. Sure, there were occasionally parts you could turn up and read for, but there were auditions and there were auditions. There was a difference between being asked to try out for something because the director thought you might be what they were looking for, and simply making up the numbers because protocol dictated that the audition at least
appear
to be open.

The only real nibble she got was a call-back from Fire Curtain, a touring company founded by the prodigiously talented, formidably connected and more than a little capricious Charlotte Queen, who had been a year above Jasmine at the SATD. Charlotte claimed to have found the academy ‘a path too well-trodden’ in terms of a route
into theatre, and cited ‘itchy feet’ as a further spur to setting up her own company at the precocious age of twenty-two. (To talented and connected should also be added ‘a bit posh’, which in Jasmine’s eyes made Charlotte’s bold move somewhat less of a gamble, as well as that bit easier to fund.)

Jasmine didn’t get the part, but was nonetheless tantalised by Charlotte’s suggestion that she’d be great as Miranda in a planned production of
The Tempest
she had pencilled in as their Edinburgh Fringe project a year hence. In the meantime, with bills to pay, she reluctantly and very much half-heartedly accepted an offer of work from Uncle Jim, an ex-cop who ran his own private investigation firm. Jim sold it to her on the premise that in a business replete with ex-cops, he could really use someone whom his subjects wouldn’t recognise as such from a mile off, and further sugared the pill by claiming that it would require a degree of acting. Jasmine strongly suspected that Jim’s true motivation was a sense of familial duty towards his late cousin’s daughter, particularly given the patience he showed in the face of her serial incompetence.

Perhaps ironically, it was a reciprocal sense of duty towards Jim that made her stick it out, though admittedly it helped that it paid considerably better than bar work or a job in a call-centre. She didn’t feel entirely comfortable taking money for something she was rubbish at, but Jim seemed sincere in both his intentions and his faith that she would come good. Jasmine gradually began to dig in, despite the actor’s whispering angst that commitment to another job was a gentle way of letting go your dreams.

She was barely ready for the water wings to come off when she was hurled in at the deep end by Jim going missing, forcing her to play detective for real in attempting to track him down. She did so in the end, but Jim’s own end had preceded that, leaving her not only bereft once more, but technically unemployed.

Amazing what can change in a year; or nine months anyway. As she stood by Jim’s grave at the end of last summer, she’d never have thought that by the following spring she’d be acting in theatre. Unfortunately the theatre in question was one of seven in the surgical suite at St Mungo’s General Hospital, where Jasmine was currently
working as a clinical support worker, and the acting part was largely about concealing from the rest of the staff that, much as was the case in her fledgling PI days, she didn’t really know what she was doing.

Her present task was straightforward enough, at least now that she was beginning to get a handle on where various items of equipment were kept. She was wheeling in a stack for a laparoscopy. It looked very much like the kind of set-up they had at her secondary school for whenever the teacher wanted to show them a film or television programme: an aluminium trolley bearing a large monitor atop a short column of electronic equipment with cables spilling untidily out on all sides. The patient wasn’t even in the anaesthetic room yet, and once he or she was under it could still be ten or fifteen minutes before the surgeon showed up, so they were a long way off ‘knife to skin’.

There were two theatre nurses setting up as Jasmine entered: Sandra was unwrapping the sterile seals from a tray of surgical instruments, while Doreen was filling in some paperwork for an audit. They paid her little heed as she rolled the stack steadily through the double doors, but her arrival invited greater notice from Liam, the operating department assistant, who cast an interested eye over her as he chatted to a young and slightly nervy orderly named David.

Mr Assan was the surgeon performing the procedure, while Dr Hagan would be anaesthetising the patient. The power relationship there was as complex as it was delicate, but beneath that level there was less ambiguity. Among the theatre staff, Liam wanted everyone else to understand that he was the man in charge.

Liam was in his early forties, and had worked in the hospital for more than twenty years. Doreen and her three decades’ service could trump him in the ‘in with the bricks’ stakes, but he had arrogated a seniority in the pecking order that took little cognisance of rank and that he did not wear lightly. Even Geraldine, the theatre manager, seemed wary to the point of deference when she was addressing him.

With Jasmine being the new arrival, he had wasted little time in impressing upon her that he was the theatre suite’s alpha male, picking her up on every mis-step in what struck her as a rather transparent
bid to undermine her confidence, albeit it wasn’t her position to judge, and she was certainly ensuring he didn’t want for opportunities to criticise. However, this didn’t represent the full repertoire of his territorial pissing.

‘Here, have you seen that new bird they’ve got doing the weather on
Reporting Scotland
?’ he asked David.

Jasmine had caught the tail end of his last remarks, something about an ongoing dispute between two of the surgeons. It had been gossipy and guarded, a little snide but carefully circumspect. This was a sudden change in subject and register, and though she wasn’t the one being addressed she knew it was for her benefit.

‘Naw, I usually watch the news on Scotia,’ David replied uncertainly, clearly regretful that he couldn’t give the desired answer. He needn’t have worried. Liam wasn’t asking with a view to soliciting his thoughts. It was simply a pretext.

‘Aw, man, she looks pure filth. You can just tell. Serious, if I got hold of her, I’d leave her fanny like a ripped-oot fireplace. I’d be on her until the neighbours phoned the council aboot the smell.’

Jasmine knew this was for her ears, but though it was Liam who was talking, it was David who looked her way, a fleeting, uncomfortable glance.

Jasmine could feel her cheeks flush but she knew she mustn’t respond.

Sandra let out a tut followed by a disapproving sigh, while Doreen simply shook her head.

‘Whit?’ Liam snapped, looking round sharply at Sandra. It was hard to tell if he was more annoyed by her impertinence or by the fact that it wasn’t her response that was being sought. ‘Christ’s sake, just a wee bit of banter. Figure of speech, like.’

‘There’s ladies present,’ Doreen sallied in support, part complaint, part appeal.

‘It’s just youse old miseries that are making a fuss.’

Then, inevitably, he looked towards Jasmine, having found a way to return the focus to his original target. ‘You’re no’ bothered, are you, wee yin?’

There was laughter in his voice and a smile on his lips, but steel
in his gaze as he eyed her across the operating table. To disagree was to get her card well and truly marked, while to accede was to betray Doreen and Sandra while inviting further such remarks.

‘I’m sorry, I was in a bit of a dwam. I wasn’t paying attention,’ she lied, offering all parties a way out.

Liam wasn’t for taking it.

‘I’m just saying you’re open-minded. Lassies your age aren’t all buttoned-up and prudish about sex, not like the older generations. A healthier attitude. That’s why the young lassies these days take an interest in how they look down below. Go into Boots and it’s full of wax strips and depilatories and all sorts. See, this pair here won’t even know what I’m talking about. Women their age, it must look like Terry Waite’s garden inside their kickers.’

He was giggling to himself as though this was just some benign frivolity, but nobody else was laughing. The two nurses were simmering silently while poor David stared at the floor, afraid to meet anyone’s eyes, least of all Liam’s. Jasmine knew that this was precisely the type of situation he’d been trying to effect. An atmosphere of tension and poison was a result for him: if everyone else was feeling on edge he had nothing to fear from any of them.