Emma ends the phone-call by pretending that the toaster is on fire then goes to see the patient, sweltering beneath the duvet in an attempt to ‘sweat it out’. Part of her is vaguely aware of failing as a girlfriend. It’s a new role for her, and she sometimes finds herself plagiarising ‘girlfriend behaviour’: holding hands, cuddling up in front of the television, that kind of thing. Ian loves her, he tells her so, if anything a little too often, and she thinks she may be able to love him back, but it will take some practice. Certainly she intends to try and now, in a self-conscious gesture of sympathy, she curls herself around him on the bed.
‘If you don’t think you can come to the show tonight—’
He sits up, alarmed. ‘No! No, no, no, I’m definitely coming—’
‘I’ll understand—’
‘—if I have to come by ambulance.’
‘It’s only a silly school play, it’s going to be so embarrassing.’
‘Emma!’ She lifts her head to look at him. ‘It’s your big night! I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
She smiles. ‘Good. I’m pleased.’ She leans and kisses him antiseptically with closed lips, then picks up her bag and pads out of the flat, ready for her big day.
The headline reads:
IS THIS THE MOST ODIOUS
MAN ON TELEVISION?
– and for a while Dexter thinks there must be a mistake, because beneath the headline they have accidentally printed his picture, and beneath that the single word ‘Smug’ as if Smug were his surname. Dexter Smug.
With the tiny espresso cup pinched tight between finger and thumb, he reads on.
Tonight’s TV
Is there a more smug, self-satisfied smart-arse than Dexter Mayhew on TV today? A subliminal burst of his cocky, pretty-boy face makes us want to kick the screen in. At school we had a phrase for it: here’s a man who clearly thinks he’s IT. Weirdly, someone out there in MediaLand must love him as much as he loves himself because after three years of largin’ it (dontcha hate that lower case? So 1990) he’s now presenting his own late-night music show, the Late-Night Lock-In. So
He should stop reading here, just close the paper and move on, but his peripheral vision has already glimpsed a word or two. ‘Inept’ was one. He reads on – So if you really want to see a public schoolboy trying to be a new lad, dropping his aitches and flirting with the ladeez, trying to stay hip with the kidz unaware that the kidz are laughing at him, then this one is for you. It’s live, so there might be some pleasure in watching his famously inept interviewing technique, or alternatively you could brand your face with a steam iron set to ‘linen’. Co-presenter is ‘bubbly’ Suki Meadows, music from Shed Seven, Echobelly and the Lemonheads. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Dexter has a clippings file, a Patrick Cox shoebox in the bottom of a wardrobe, but he decides to let this one go. With a great deal of clatter and mess he makes himself another espresso.
Tall poppy syndrome that’s what it is, the British Disease, he thinks. A little bit of success and they want to knock you down well I don’t care I like my job and I’m bloody good at it and it’s much much harder than people think balls of steel that’s what you need to be a TV presenter and a mind like a like a well quick-thinking anyway and besides you mustn’t take it personally critics who needs critics no-one ever woke up and decided they wanted to be a critic well I’d rather be out there doing it putting myself on the line rather than be some some eunuch being spiteful for twelve grand a year well no-one ever built a statue to a critic and I’ll show them I’ll show them all.
Variations of this monologue run through Dexter’s head throughout his big day; on his trip to the production office, during his chauffeured drive in the saloon car to the studio on the Isle of Dogs, throughout the afternoon’s dress rehearsal, the production meeting, the hair and make-up sessions, right up until the moment when he is alone in his dressing room and is finally able to open his bag, take out the bottle he placed there that morning, pour himself a large glass of vodka, top it up with warm orange juice and proceed to drink.
‘Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight—’
Forty-five minutes to go before curtain up, and the chanting can be heard the whole length of the English block.
‘Fight, fight, fight—’
Hurrying up the corridor, Emma sees Mrs Grainger stumble from the dressing room as if fleeing a fire. ‘I’ve tried to stop them, they won’t listen to me.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Grainger, I’m sure I can handle it.’
‘Should I get Mr Godalming?’
‘I’m sure it’ll be fine. You go and rehearse the band.’
‘I said this was a mistake.’ She hurries away, hand to her chest. ‘I said it would never work.’
Emma takes a deep breath, enters and sees the mob, thirty teenagers in top hats and hooped skirts and stick-on beards shouting and jeering as the Artful Dodger kneels on Oliver Twist’s arms and presses his face hard into the dusty floor.
‘WHAT is going on here, people?’
The Victorian mob turns. ‘Get her off me, Miss,’ mumbles Oliver into the lino.
‘They’re fighting, Miss,’ says Samir Chaudhari, twelve years old with mutton chop sideburns.
‘I can see that thank you, Samir,’ and she pushes through the crowd to pull them apart. Sonya Richards, the skinny black girl who plays The Dodger, still has her fingers tangled in the flicked blond bangs of Oliver’s hair, and Emma holds onto her shoulders and stares into her eyes. ‘Let go, Sonya. Let go now, okay? Okay?’ Eventually Sonya lets go and steps back, her eyes moistening now that the rage is leeching away, replaced by wounded pride.
Martin Dawson, the orphan Oliver, looks dazed. Five feet eleven and stocky, he is bigger even than Mr Bumble, but nevertheless the meaty waif looks close to tears. ‘She started it!’ he quavers between bass and treble, wiping his smudgy face with the heel of his hand.
‘That’s enough now, Martin.’
‘Yeah, shut your face, Dawson . . .’
‘I mean it, Sonya. Enough!’ Emma stands in the centre of the circle now, holding the adversaries by the elbows like a boxing referee, and she realises that if she is to save the show she is going to have to improvise a rousing speech, one of the many Henry V moments that make up her working life.
‘Look at you! Look at how great you all look in your costumes! Look at little Samir there with his massive sideburns!’ The crowd laugh, and Samir plays along, scratching at the stuck-on hair. ‘You’ve got friends and parents outside and they’re all going to see a great show, a real performance. Or at least I thought they were.’ She folds her arms, and sighs, ‘Because I think we’re going to have to cancel the show . . .’
She’s bluffing of course, but the effect is perfect, a great communal groan of protest.
‘But we didn’t do anything, Miss!’ protests Fagin.
‘So who was shouting fight, fight, fight, Rodney?’
‘But she just went completely ape-shit, Miss!’ warbles Martin Dawson, and now Sonya is straining to get at him.
‘Oi, Oliver, do you want some more?’
There’s laughter, and Emma pulls out the old triumph against the odds speech. ‘Enough! You lot are meant to be a company, not a mob! You know I don’t mind telling you there are people out there tonight who don’t think you can do this! They don’t think you’re capable, they think it’s too complicated for you. It’s Charles Dickens, Emma! they say, they’re not bright enough, they haven’t got the discipline to work together, they’re not up to Oliver!, give them something nice and easy.’
‘Who said that, Miss?’ says Samir, ready to key their car.
‘It doesn’t matter who said it, it’s what they think. And maybe they’re right! Maybe we should call the whole thing off!’ For a moment, she wonders if she’s over-egging it, but it’s hard to overestimate the teenage appetite for high drama, and there’s a great moan of protest from all of them in their bonnets and top hats. Even if they know she’s faking, they are relishing the jeopardy. She pauses for effect. ‘Now. Sonya and Martin and I are going to go and have a little talk, and I want you to continue to get ready, then sit quietly and think about your part, and then we’ll decide what to do next. Okay? I said okay?’
‘Yes, Miss!’
The dressing room is silent as she follows the adversaries out, bursting into noise again the moment she closes the door. She escorts Oliver and The Dodger down the corridor, past the sports hall where Mrs Grainger leads the band through a fiercely dissonant ‘Consider Yourself’ and she wonders once again what she is letting herself in for.
She talks to Sonya first. ‘So. What happened?’
Evening light slants in through the large reinforced windows of 4D, and Sonya stares out at the science block, affecting boredom. ‘We just had words, that’s all.’ She sits on the edge of a desk, her long legs swinging in old school trousers slashed into tatters, tin-foil buckles stuck onto black trainers. One hand picks at her BCG scar, her small, hard, pretty face bunched up tight as a fist as if to warn Emma off trying any of that seize-the-day crap. The other kids are frightened of Sonya Richards, and even Emma sometimes fears for her dinner money. It’s the level stare, the rage. ‘I’m not saying sorry,’ she snaps.
‘Why not? And please don’t say “he started it”.’
Her face opens with indignation. ‘But he did!’
‘Sonya!’
‘He said—’ She stops herself.
‘What did he say? Sonya?’
Sonya makes a calculation, weighing up the dishonour of telling tales against her sense of injustice. ‘He said the reason I could play the part was ’cause it wasn’t really acting because I was a peasant in real life too.’
‘A peasant.’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s what Martin said?’
‘S’what he said, so I hit him.’
‘Well.’ Emma sighs and looks at the floor. ‘The first thing to say is that it doesn’t matter what anyone says, ever, you can’t just hit people.’ Sonya Richards is her project. She knows she shouldn’t really have projects, but Sonya is so clearly smart, the smartest in her class by some way but aggressive too, a whip-thin figure of resentment and wounded pride.
‘But he’s such a little prick, Miss!’
‘Sonya, please, don’t!’ she says, though a little part of her thinks that Sonya has a valid point about Martin Dawson. He treats the kids, the teachers, the whole comprehensive system as if he were a missionary who has deigned to walk among them. Last night at the dress rehearsal he had cried real tears during ‘Where is Love?’, squeezing the high notes out like kidney stones, and Emma had found herself idly wondering what it would feel like to walk on stage, place one hand over his face and push him firmly backwards. The peasant remark is entirely in character, but even so – ‘If that is what he said—’
‘It is, Miss—’
‘I’ll talk to him and find out, but if it is what he said it just reveals how ignorant he is, and how daft you are too, for rising to it.’ She stumbles on ‘daft’, an Ilkley Moor word. Street, be more street, she tells herself. ‘But, hey, if we can’t settle this . . . beef, then we really can’t do the show.’
Sonya’s face tightens again, and Emma is startled to notice that she seems as if she might cry. ‘You wouldn’t do that.’
‘I might have to.’
‘Miss!’
‘We can’t do the show, Sonya.’
‘We can!’