The Kiss Page 7

  ‘I don’t do that.’

  ‘Have you said it or felt it before? About kissing?’

  ‘Can we stop this conversation?’ he inquires. ‘It’s a bit too weird for me.’

  I am blushing a fiery red all over now. ‘Ready for work if you are.’

  The rest of the evening goes smoothly enough, considering. I fetch and carry, get through three rolls of paper towels, develop a blister on my heel, unblock a sink, try not to admire Jem’s shoulders too often and generally earn my wages. At midnight, Val rings the till and I tuck my earnings into my purse with beer-scented fingers.

  This time Jem crosses the road with me and props himself up against the bus shelter, hands in his pockets

  and ankles crossed like he isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

  ‘You don’t have to wait,’ I say after a couple of minutes. I pull my parka more tightly around myself. ‘I told you yesterday, the bus’ll be along in five minutes.’

  ‘You did, didn’t you?’ he says, like he’s just remembered. ‘Oh well, five minutes can feel like a long time when you don’t have someone to talk to. It can feel like, oh, hours.’

  He smiles at me blandly.

  ‘Were you watching me last night?’ I say, rising from my plastic bench.

  ‘I have better things to do at midnight than watch bus stops,’ he assures me. ‘But I happened to see the timetable when I came in today. Buses on this route stop at eleven-thirty.’

  I sink down on the bench again.

  ‘Why did you lie about there being a bus?’ He sounds curious rather than annoyed.

  ‘I . . . didn’t know.’

  ‘You know now. And yet here you are again.’ He gazes at the litter blown into one corner of the bus shelter and the spatter of something orange and nameless on the kerb. ‘Can’t see the appeal myself. I can ask Val to give you a lift home if you want.’ He looks down the road. ‘I’m guessing you live in the same direction as us, unless your actual bus stop is somewhere completely different and this is just another scheme to get rid of me.’

  I know about the buses. Of course I do.

  ‘You make me uncomfortable,’ I say, blushing furiously as I wish him a hundred miles away.

  ‘Aha!’ He clicks his fingers. ‘She speaks the truth. You make me uncomfortable too.’

  ‘Please go away.’

  ‘Going,’ he says obligingly. He heads back across the road towards the theatre. ‘Watch out for the wolf,’ he calls over his shoulder as Val comes out through the theatre’s double doors and clicks open a small green car parked close by.

  ‘What?’ I shout after him. He’s talking in code now?

  ‘It’s a shame if no one listens the one time you scream for real.’

  My embarrassment keeps me warm for almost an hour. Just as well, as it takes about that long to walk home through the cold and dark. Up in the night sky the moon is on the wane.

  What business is it of his, if I choose to fib about the small stuff? I think as I pound along, my blood surging self-righteously through me.

  So blinking what?

  Tabby calls me on Sunday.

  ‘Auditions on Tuesday only gives me two days to prepare,’ she says, sounding panicky. ‘I don’t know any songs from What an Ado! If I download the film, will you come over and watch it this afternoon with me?’

  I loathed Much Ado About Nothing most of the way through GCSE. Beatrice and Benedick were OK, snapping and snarling while trying not to fancy each other, but Hero? What was with the shame spiral? She drew the short straw with the whole better-off-dead thing. Oh, and don’t get me started on all the lurking behind trees and comic turns by uncomic night’s watchmen. It wasn’t a show Mum ever did, so I don’t know the songs. However, I can pretty much guarantee that turning it into a musical won’t have improved it. I arrive at two with a heavy heart and a bag of popcorn I bought on the way over.

  ‘Oz is here,’ Tabby informs me as she opens the door. ‘I bumped into him earlier. Apparently he’s mad about musicals so I invited him to join us. Go on up. I’ll get us some drinks.’

  I go upstairs and push open Tabby’s bedroom door. Oz jumps up from the bed, looking guilty.

  ‘Were you just sniffing Tab’s pillow?’ I ask.

  ‘Uh,’ he says, ‘if I said no, would you believe me?’

  I check him out, up and down. ‘Looking good today, Osgood. New shirt? Is that aftershave I can smell?’

  Oz wafts his hand around his head a little anxiously. ‘Too much?’

  ‘I didn’t have you down as a musicals kind of guy,’ I say.

  ‘Never watched one in my life. Don’t tell Tabby.’

  Tab comes in, her arms full of Coke and packets of crisps. ‘Don’t tell me what?’

  ‘Don’t tell you what a massive fan of What an Ado! Oz is,’ I say blithely, as Oz makes horrified faces at me behind Tabby’s back. ‘He’s quite embarrassed about it. He knows all the words, to all the songs.’

  ‘Really?’ Tabby looks excited. ‘Which are the best ones?’

  Oz flaps about like a dog in a swamp. ‘Uh, the, uh, love duet is great. And . . . and . . . so’s the one when they, uh . . .?’

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ I say, enjoying myself. ‘I’ve never seen the musical, I’ve only read the play. Which part do you think Tab should go for, Oz?’

  Tabby chucks us both a can of Coke as the titles start up, saving Oz from any more floundering. He gives me a Chinese burn as she slides the curtains closed. I kick him back.

  It’s an old film, dating to when movies of musicals lured the crowds from their radio sets and knitting and showed them a glossy vision of Hollywood in full song. The musical numbers are pretty good, and on one or two of the really fast ones, I wind Oz up by asking why he isn’t singing along. But the storyline is still a shocker.

  ‘Brilliant,’ squeals Tab as a Hollywood orchestra brings the whole thing to a whopping snog-fest of a conclusion. ‘Right?’

  ‘The best,’ Oz agrees, looking relieved that it’s over.

  ‘It was a bit . . . retro for me,’ I say. Hero was as pathetic as ever, trilling away like a dappy blond canary. I’ll never get past her pretending to be dead because she didn’t have sex. I’m sorry, but there it is.

  ‘The show was written over sixty years ago,’ Tabby points out, catching the look on my face. ‘But the songs are amazing. I love how it’s about two people who love each other while pretending to hate each other.’

  ‘I liked that bit too,’ says Oz.

  ‘She’s never going to kiss you,’ I tell him when Tab has hugged us both and shooed us into the street with promises of meeting up at college the next day. ‘However many bad musicals you commit to memory.’

  ‘I know,’ Oz sighs. ‘But what am I, if all the life I have is made of cold reality, not dreams?’

  I look at him in alarm. ‘A scientist last time I looked.’

  ‘If scientists didn’t have dreams,’ he points out, ‘Isaac Newton would still be sitting under that apple tree rubbing his head and vowing to dig up his orchard on Health and Safety grounds.’

  Audition day hits in an all-singing, all-dancing supernova. I come with Tabby to give her courage, although there are a hundred other places I would rather be. Oz is supposed to join us, but after a massive party on Monday night is fit for nothing but a beanbag-and-PS4 combo in the comfort of his own bedroom.

  ‘Whose party?’ I ask with interest when he calls me.

  ‘I have no idea,’ he croaks before hanging up.

  The Gaslight is organized chaos. Or maybe disorganized chaos. I’m not sure how you tell the difference. The big foyer is loud and bursting at the seams with actors and singers blasting death-laser eyes at each other as they line up outside the auditorium for their chance to perform and bag a role in the
show. We join them. I don’t look at Jem shooting soda into a line of glasses for a gaggle of scared-looking auditionees, but Tab does. He is, after all, the main reason that she’s here. I’m still not sure how I feel about this.

  ‘He really is hot,’ she sighs. Her hand goes to push her glasses up the bridge of her nose, then falls away again as her fingers discover for the tenth time that she is wearing contacts. ‘I know kissing him last week ruined my life but then I look at his shoulders and think it was maybe worth it. Don’t you just want to chew them?’

  ‘He’s not a dog toy,’ I say. ‘Move up.’

  The line of hopefuls moves towards the auditorium doors. We can both hear faint warbling already going

  on inside.

  ‘That’s good,’ Tabby says, listening. ‘What’s she singing?’

  ‘“Bad Baby Bea”,’ announces a spotty lad of around eighteen just behind us. I remember the song from the film and can’t help a shudder. Beatrice – the best character in the entire show – has annoyed everyone by being brainy and female, so her cousin the hideous Hero rewards her by singing about what a naughty wittle girl she was when they were kids.

  Tabby looks crestfallen. ‘Oh! I’m doing that one too, only my version doesn’t sound anything like as good.’ She lowers her voice. ‘Lilah, wouldn’t it be easier just to kiss Jem now and run?’

  I propel her closer to the doors. ‘You can do this. You have a gorgeous voice, fat and fluffy like a warm bread roll. The waiting is the hardest part.’

  The spotty lad busies himself warbling like a nightingale as if he isn’t eavesdropping.

  ‘You love singing, dancing and acting,’ I remind her as we shuffle along. ‘You always got the main parts in our school shows.’

  ‘Apart from the year I broke my nose and hid in the school toilets for two weeks till the bruising went down,’ Tabby says, biting her lip.

  ‘Apart from then. Even someone like me who doesn’t know one end of a piano from another can see that you’re in with a chance,’ I say persuasively. ‘And you’ll have loads of fun doing it. Apparently this place turns into Social Central when the am-drams are in.’

  Mum starts singing something from Les Misérables in my head. I push her firmly out.

  ‘Voice?’

  ‘Yes, I have one,’ says Tabby, eyes on Jem’s shoulders again.

  The red-haired woman with the clipboard looks over her glasses. ‘What voice are you?’ she repeats.

  ‘Oh!’ Tabby adjusts her top nervously. ‘Sorry. Mezzo.’

  ‘Do you have a top B-flat?’

  ‘F’s my best,’ Tabby says. ‘G if someone treads on my toe.’

  ‘It’s a different language,’ I say, bemused.

  We shuffle on. I think about cows being herded into an abattoir and consider the merits of vegetarianism. I can’t imagine how Tabby is feeling.

  ‘I don’t think I’m going to get a part,’ Tab moans.

  ‘You won’t know until you try, will you?’ I tell her as calmly as I can.

  ‘Did you know actual proper agents come to this show, looking for singers to represent?’ Tabby tells me, teeth chattering. ‘Imagine if I get spotted.’

  She shoots one more anticipatory glance at Jem before we pass through to the velvet darkness of the auditorium.

  A frightened lad is on the stage, blinking in the bright spotlights. I’m guessing we just missed his singing.

  ‘Maybe he couldn’t do it,’ Tabby mutters. Her confidence is draining away like bath water. ‘Maybe he just opened his mouth and quacked like a terrified duck. That’s what I’m going to do. I know it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says an old man with military hair sitting in the gloom. He looks like a cross between Simon Cowell and one of those round papery seed-heads you get on autumn roadsides. ‘Next!’

  The lad lollops off with relief written all over his face. He is replaced by a big woman the wrong side of forty who starts belting into ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ before she’s been asked to begin. Tabby winces.

  ‘Next!’

  Shuffle, shuffle. Bolster Tabby’s courage, shuffle some more. I’m exhausted already. It’s a relief to sit down as Tab finally climbs on to the stage.

  As soon as the song starts, the Tabby I know melts away and someone new takes her place, someone soppy and pathetic, and even though I wish she was trying out for any other part but the virginal viper, I swell with pride as she sings.

  ‘Bad Baby Bea, burned down a tree when she was three . . .’

  I wonder what the tree did to annoy Beatrice. Her uncle, Hero’s dad, probably never let her climb it.

  ‘Bad Baby Bea, always scraped her knee and then blamed me, When Daddy came a-calling, Bea was quite appalling,

  oh-so-loudly bawLING . . . Bad Baby Bea!’

  ‘Very nice,’ says the director after a ripple of applause spreads through the theatre, led by me. He makes a couple of notes. ‘Can you read for us now?’

  Tab reads the bit of script she’s been given, breathy and Marilyn Monroe-ish. ‘I’ll do what I can, if it means helping my cousin to find a husband. Whether she’ll keep him or not is out of our hands!’

  I remember the scene from the film. It was one of the first lines to set my teeth on edge, and made me want to shout at the screen: ‘Burn your petticoats and run!’

  ‘We’ll be in touch,’ the director says. ‘Next!’

  Flushed with success, Tabby trips off the stage. Literally. Leaping to my feet, I rush down the nearest aisle to help her up. For someone who just smashed an audition, she looks as white as paper.

  ‘It’s OK, no one noticed,’ I lie as I pull her upright, tugging her clothes back together as subtly as I can. ‘They were too wowed by your voice. You were amazeballs up there, babe. Really incredible.’

  ‘No,’ she stutters.

  ‘You’re so ready for this. Trust—’

  ‘Behind you,’ she whispers.

  Sam and Maria are standing by the doors of the auditorium, sheets of music in their hands. Maria is glaring. Sam’s eyes are glued to his ex-girlfriend like a pair of hypnotized ping-pong balls.

  ‘Oh fish farts,’ I say in horror.

  This is SO not part of the plan.

  Tabby sits at a table with her head between her knees. I wait as Jem fills a large glass with orange juice, tapping my fingers grimly on the bar top and trying not to think about moonlight or bodypainting or wolves.

  He pushes the drink across the bar top, flicking his eyes at Tabby. ‘Bad audition?’

  ‘Good audition; bad timing,’ I say fretfully. ‘The angry boyfriend and his new girlfriend were auditioning too.’

  Behind me, Tab moans.

  ‘Val told me how popular this show was with college music students but I didn’t think it through to this level,’ I say, gnawing my lip.

  ‘Why is it up to you to do the thinking?’

  I wish he would leave this to me.

  ‘I told you before,’ I say a little sharply. ‘This situation is my fault.’

  He nods. ‘Oh yes, I forgot. You were there, pushing her lips towards mine at the college party. Funny how I didn’t notice you at the time.’

  His words make me feel uncomfortable. ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘I understand very well, Mother Duck. At what point are you going to encourage your duckling into the pond to swim for herself?’

  I am getting annoyed now. ‘I came to the bar for a drink, not psychoanalysis.’ I’m pleased with how this sounds as it comes out of my mouth. ‘In the truth according to Delilah Jones,’ I continue, ‘Sam and Maria in Tabby’s show constitute a problem. Is that OK with you, Dr Sigmund Freud?’

  ‘Nice use of the third person,’ he says. ‘Would Delilah Jones like anything else to go with Delilah Jones’s drink?’

&
nbsp; ‘Delilah Jones would like your head on a cocktail stick,’ I respond sweetly.

  ‘It would have to be a very big cocktail stick.’

  I can’t help it. ‘To fit a very big head.’

  He leans his elbows on the bar, bringing his face way too close to my own. ‘You know what you are?’ he says in a whisper. ‘A control freak.’

  I gape at him. ‘You can’t say that. That’s just . . . rude.’

  ‘It’s the truth,’ he answers, rocking back on his heels again. ‘And you know how I feel about the truth.’

  What the . . . That’s just . . . I can’t even finish a sentence inside my own head to describe what he’s . . .

  ‘Are you saying you’ve never lied about anything?’ I say furiously.

  ‘Of course I have.’ He takes his time counting the money I’ve given him into the till. ‘I might even tell you what, one day.’

  The doors to the auditorium swing open. I spin around to see Sam and Maria step jubilantly on to the crusty carpet. They are mid-kiss. It’s a miracle they don’t fall over each other’s feet. Luckily Tabby is still gazing at the carpet, her head now in her hands.

  ‘Angry boyfriend’s looking this way,’ Jem observes.

  Over Maria’s head, Sam’s eyes flit away from Tabby via a simmering glare at Jem. I feel a flash of hope that improves my mood. Maybe not all is lost.

  ‘You think he was looking at Tab?’ I say, hardly daring to hope.

  ‘Was he pleased to see her in the auditorium?’

  ‘He couldn’t take his eyes off her. But that was mainly because she fell off the stage. Does that count?’

  ‘Totally. Your friend is looking hot today. Then again,’ he adds, checking Maria out, ‘the replacement’s hot too. Dude’s in a tough position.’

  I’m annoyed with him again. ‘Thank you for your understanding approach to the problem,’ I say a

  little sourly.

  ‘Any time.’

  I take Tab her drink. She knocks back two-thirds in one go.

  ‘What now?’ she asks in a trembly voice.

  ‘Stick with the plan.’ It seems the best approach. ‘You know, Sam was scoping you out just now, straight after he and Maria . . .’ I pause and rephrase – ‘He was checking you out big time, plus incinerating Jem with his gaze. He’s not over you yet. You just have to regroup.’