Wonder Women (3 page)

The Emily Dickinson project was met with mass indifference by the student body and the staff of the university. Jo wore a red-checked gingham dress and sang her heart out, accompanied by the musicians, while Lee, his mad hair
bobbing, drew furiously in charcoal on big sheets of paper spread on the ground. People strolling past mostly ignored them, or glanced at the pictures and shrugged. A few of the music students stood listening to Jo sing for a moment, then sniffed as if she smelled bad before walking away. But Lee was completely undeterred.

Later, in the pub, he enthused about the ‘slow drip-drip of impinging on people's consciousness', and how their next project would move things on another tiny step. Jo didn't understand everything he said, but she guessed what he was getting at was that people were affected and changed by what they had seen, even if they didn't know it. She didn't really believe it, but she was willing to go along with it and be involved in whatever came next. Lee was a nice guy. And besides that, she was developing a serious crush on Adrian, the guy who played the guitar. He was shortish, muscular and moody with unruly blond hair, pronounced cheekbones and a long sweep of dark eyelashes that made Jo, a little tipsy after two pints of cider, want to kiss him and feel them flutter against her face.

It was a Friday night and the cider was cheap and plentiful, so it was no big surprise that Jo found herself in Adrian's bed that night, and for a lot of nights after that. It wasn't every night though – Adrian was fanatical about his ‘space'. It took Jo until halfway through her second year to work out that the space he reserved away from her was regularly shared with at least three other women. At around the same time, Lee started going out with a petite dancer called Jean, who spelled her name Jeanne and annoyed Jo with her sulky demeanour and utter refusal to eat or talk
to anyone who wasn't Lee. After Adrian, Jo dated a drummer called Pete (it took her a few goes to get over her musician phase) and after Jeanne moved to Paris, Lee decided to embrace celibacy, a plan he stuck to for about four months. Then he was seduced by his thirty-five-year-old painting lecturer, causing a university-wide scandal and a disciplinary hearing.

Through all these romantic shenanigans, Jo and Lee stayed friends. They did a number of performance-art pieces together and helped each other with other artistic projects. Lee designed and painted the set for Jo's third-year directing assignment. She modelled for a series of charcoal drawings he did. They wrote a (terrible) play together.

They were part of a large, ever-shifting group of friends. Sometimes they would do things alone together, and sometimes they would do them as part of a crowd. They could go weeks without speaking, and then spend a fortnight together every day. But however they interacted, Jo valued her friendship with Lee enormously. He was the cleverest, most widely read and multi-talented person she had ever met. The nickname Renaissance Man was totally apt: he craved knowledge and loved to enlighten and challenge people through whatever he did. He could draw and paint, play musical instruments, sing, act, DJ and dance. He could quote more poetry and Shakespeare from memory than anyone Jo had ever known, and he wrote prolifically and cleverly.

Jo, in her time at university, surprised herself. She started her studies determined to be an actress, but as time went on, she found that just focusing on one character wasn't enough for her. She was fascinated by all aspects of the
process, from set design to lighting, and she worried about every detail of any play she was in. At the end of her second year, one of her lecturers gently suggested that her strength might lie more in direction than acting. Jo pondered the idea over the summer, and at the beginning of the new academic year, she put together a production of an absurdist play she liked: Ionesco's
The Bald Prima Donna
. It was only a tiny show, with no budget at all, to be staged in a poky little venue over three midweek lunchtimes. She worked every hour of the day that she wasn't actually in lectures on every aspect of it. She stayed awake at night poring over the text, spent early mornings painting set pieces and went out late in the evening to spend what little money she had on clothes for costumes from charity shops. Like the Emily Dickinson project in her first year, it was seen by few people and ignored by most of them. But it lit a fire in her, and she decided then and there that she was going to be a theatre director when she left university.

However, like most arts graduates, the unsympathetic reality of life outside the halls of learning hit Jo hard. Trying to survive in London was almost impossible. Without a student grant, she had to take a succession of waitressing jobs to pay her meagre rent, and she found herself working fifty-hour weeks just to cover bills and a diet of Pot Noodles and almost-past-their-sell-by-date vegetables. There was no time to make theatre, and definitely no money. Then a friend of her dad's offered her a job as a receptionist in the offices of a small but influential theatrical PR firm. Jo reasoned that it was in her chosen field, or thereabouts, and the hourly rate was twice what waitressing paid. The
job was perfect. It gave her money to move to a slightly better flat, eat better and occasionally visit the launderette. As she worked conventional office hours, it also gave her time to direct a few staged readings with friends, although she still didn't have an agent, or any way of graduating to bigger productions. Her day job just kept getting better though. She was a graduate, dynamic and hard-working, able to speak well and write clearly, and it was only a matter of months before she was doing a PR assistant's job. That meant more money, but also more responsibility and longer hours. One day, Jo realised it had been six months since she had done any theatre. It brought about a small crisis of confidence. She felt she had lost her way, and the next day she went into the office and poured her heart out to Susie, her boss. Susie had had many an out-of-work actress working in her office, so she offered Jo a sabbatical and said she would keep a job open for her if and when she wanted to return.

Jo knew she wouldn't be able to afford rent and bills without her salary, so she moved back to Stevenage with her parents and booked a slot to do a play in a well-respected small venue in North London. She put out a call for scripts, and astonishingly her party-girl roommate from her first year, Helen, contacted her to say she had recently written a play. Rather hesitantly Jo asked to see the script. It was a tense thriller, with just two characters, set entirely in a bedsit, and it was really good. It was perfect.

She contacted a list of people she knew and respected from university and asked them if they wanted to be involved. A few people were already doing well and were committed
to theatre or television projects, and one or two were even in long runs in the West End. But she managed to gather a cast she could be proud of, and get Lee, who was working in a small design studio, to commit to doing the set.

It was a hard, hard slog to get it all together. Jo sank every penny of her meagre savings into the show and her parents even invested a little. She used her experience at the PR company to drum up as much publicity as she could, and they received more press coverage than was usual for a small show at a fringe venue. The production was tight and professional, the set and music were good and the few reviews they got were very complimentary. One of the two actors in the piece invited an agent to see it, and got taken on as a result. But at the end of the run, Jo was left with a handful of good reviews, a set too big to store in her dad's garage and a sizeable hole in her bank account. While she was immensely proud of what she had achieved, it hadn't changed her life or brought any great career offers. She knew in the cold light of day that she would have to ring Susie on Monday and ask her for her job back. She prayed Susie would come through as promised and there would still be something for her there. With £140 between her and destitution, it was that or waitressing at the Harvester in Stevenage.

Susie was as good as her word and took Jo back on, and the next time Jo wanted to do a show she worked around her daytime work commitments and then took a week's holiday for the production week. It felt a little bit as if she was compromising some higher artistic principle, as if her job was her real life and theatre had become her hobby, but
it was a compromise that meant she didn't have to live with her parents and she could eat. She said as much to Lee when they met for dinner one night.

‘Life is about finding balance,' he said.

‘That's very profound, O Guru.'

‘You know what I mean. You have to live, and you have to find a way to make art. It so happens we live in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and now we're in our late twenties a squat in Bethnal Green is not so attractive. But maybe we should give it all up and go and live in a converted warehouse in Berlin. I've heard it's the most amazing city in the world. Cheap, vibrant cultural scene, amazing people …'

Jo laughed, but she knew he wasn't serious. Firstly because Lee had just put all his savings and a large chunk of the bank's money into a tiny flat in North London, and was thrilled to be on the first rung of the property ladder, and secondly because the reason they were having dinner was because Lee wanted to tell her all about Hannah.

Hannah was an account manager at a big advertising agency. She had subcontracted some typographical work to Lee's small design firm, and Lee said that the minute she had walked into the room, he had lost his heart. She was tall and slim, with sleek, dark, almost black hair and a calm, beautiful face. She seemed mysterious, composed, enigmatic. He went on and on about her, until Jo felt the urge to meet the amazing Hannah and punch her right in her enigmatic face. As a perfectly normal woman who'd never been even vaguely mysterious, she had an instinctive distrust of women who had that indefinable quality. She and Helen had decided
one drunken evening that women of mystery were all either breathtakingly stupid or constipated.

Still, Hannah was important enough for Lee to have requested a dinner just to talk about her, and like a good friend, Jo listened. Lee had asked Hannah out and they'd had one dinner where he had found her fascinating, well read and insightful (so maybe not stupid, thought Jo, it must be constipation after all). So far she had declined a second invitation, but Lee was keeping his hopes up. He quoted chunks of her last email to him from memory, and asked Jo what she thought about the hidden meaning behind the words – words that sounded to Jo both bland and totally devoid of subtext.

‘Oh my word!' she teased. ‘You're being such a girl! Listen to yourself!'

‘I know,' said Lee ruefully, ‘but the way I feel about her is serious. This is huge, Jo.'

He was right. It was. Hannah did eventually grant him a second date, and a third, and then suddenly they were completely in love and Lee disappeared off everyone's radar for about four months. He resurfaced just before Christmas and begged Jo and all their uni friends to join him and Hannah for a big dinner in a restaurant, a combination apology-for-being-so-absent/Christmas/meet-Hannah celebration. Everyone was curious to see the woman who had got Lee so smitten, and they all gathered at the restaurant in Islington for pre-dinner drinks.

Jo enjoyed seeing everyone: she'd been busy with work and with looking for a new script to direct, so she had also been a little out of circulation. They were all seated at a long
table, with Lee at the head and Hannah to his right. Because Jo had arrived late, she was right down the other end, and waved and blew a kiss to Lee when she sat down. She'd have to wait for people to shift around once they'd eaten so she could get a chance to talk to him. Her position did give her a good view of the famous Hannah though, who was, as Lee had described, a serene, dark beauty. She sat very still, listening to people talk and nodding, but didn't seem to say much herself. She was wearing what looked like an elegant fawn jersey dress (it was hard to tell, she was sitting down), and her hair was immaculate. Jo wished she could say that her face was hard or unkind, but every time Hannah looked at Lee, her expression softened and she seemed to glow. She was clearly as smitten with him and he was with her.

Jo turned to Helen, who was sitting beside her. ‘So this Hannah – have you talked to her? What's she like?'

‘I haven't had a chance, but I spoke to Adrian and a couple of the other guys and they all said she's lovely.'

‘Well, they would. I mean, look at her!'

‘Lee loves her. She can't be all bad, can she?' said Helen sensibly. ‘Anyway, anyone has to be an improvement on the awful French girlfriend.'

‘Oh, Jeannnne?' said Jo. ‘She wasn't even French. She was from Chelmsford. Well, how Hannah turns out remains to be seen.' She sat back and folded her arms.

Helen looked at her. ‘You look like you're determined to hate her.'

‘I'm not! I'm just always suspicious of someone who swoops in and wins the heart of someone I care about. Especially when they look like that.'

As it happened, she didn't get a chance to talk to Lee all evening. Everyone seemed to grab a chance to slip into the chair next to his for a chat, and every time Jo made a move to get close to him, someone else got in ahead of her. Hannah stayed in her chair, so there was no hope of getting in on the other side either. After everyone had had dessert and coffee, Jo got up to go to the loo. She was standing at the sinks tidying her hair and putting on some lipstick when Hannah came into the bathroom.

‘You must be Jo,' she said. Her voice was low and quiet.

‘Yes, and you're Hannah, of course. Nice to meet you properly.'

‘And you. I've heard all about you.' Somehow, the way Hannah said this seemed quite loaded. There was no way to ask what she meant without sounding aggressive though, so Jo smiled and said, ‘I hope you're having a nice time.'

‘I am. All Lee's friends seem lovely.'