Lucky Break (32 page)

‘Nell?'

‘It's nothing. Look, I shouldn't have said anything. Really. Assume I'm coming, on my own, gagging for turkey, and I'll let you know if anything changes.'

‘OK, my love.' Nell felt her mother smile. And she thought not for the first time how much they both needed her to succeed.

Nell sat with the phone in her lap. How did she know she wouldn't be happier with a woman if she never tried it? She felt again the swirling, melting lick of fire, as Charlie's narrow tongue pushed into her mouth. But she'd never wanted to be kissed by any other girl. And not really even by Charlie after that. In her dreams it was a man she longed for. Someone without the inquisitive chatter, the endless intricate memory for who did what and when. A stranger was what she wanted, mysterious, unknown. She dreamt quite regularly about this stranger. How he'd lay his body over hers, draping himself across her feet. I love you, I love every part of you, he'd repeat through her sleep, and Nell would wake, filled up to the brim. Once she'd dreamt about Sita, the two of them, their bodies entwined, their fingers tracing patterns on each other's skin, but that was only after the stage manager had asked if they'd ever had an affair. ‘No!' she'd laughed, and she'd attempted to explain how deeply, passionately, girls could love their friends.

The next time the phone rang it was Charlie. ‘Right.' She was matter of fact. ‘I've spoken to Maisie and what she says is this. There are two actresses in the running and they're both unknowns. The execs in LA will watch their tapes, and then they'll decide.'

‘Really?' Nell glanced at herself in the mirror. ‘The money men. Is it really up to them?'

‘Not always, but sometimes. Or occasionally the director likes to make them feel they've made the decision. But usually he'll push forward his favourite.'

‘By when, did Maisie say? I mean, when will they decide?'

‘Soon, I imagine. Maybe today.'

‘Oh my God.' Nell gasped to catch her breath. ‘I wish I knew who she was. The other girl.'

‘There's always another girl,' Charlie said wistfully. ‘Although, occasionally, the other girl is you.'

 

Nell sat for a while in the chilly flat, and then, pulling on her thickest coat, she slipped her mobile phone into the pocket and went out for a walk. The street outside was quiet and grey. A car sped by, racing over puddles, sending out an arc of filthy spray. Nell kept close to the cropped hedges, releasing a shower of chandelier droplets each time her shoulder nudged against the hidden twigs. At the roundabout she ran across the open plains of tarmac, trudged up and down the humpbacked bridge, thinking as she always did of Billy Goat Gruff heading for the meadow, and as if she really had evaded the ogre, there ahead of her was the green oval of Queens Park. It was bordered by large houses with bright painted doors, curlicues of white wooden detail on their eaves. There was a playground in the park, which must have always been there, but which Nell had only noticed as her thirtieth birthday loomed. There was a café too, from which she bought a take­away cup of tea. She wrapped her hands around the cardboard cup, and ambled on under the great bare trees, glancing across the road as the houses grew even larger, imagining their warm wood interiors, the mess of Wellington boots and toys, the smell of fish fingers, cakes cooling on a tray. In one doorway a woman was haranguing two small girls, buttoned up in woollen coats, their faces tilted in mute bewilderment. ‘I don't want to say it again,' she scolded. Nell turned away, unwilling to have her fantasy interrupted, and walked on round the perimeter path. There was her favourite house, a dolls' Regency villa in one window and in another a stained-glass nativity scene made from tissue and black card. Light from a lamp illuminated the colours, the gold of the star, the red flames of the fire flickering between brown twigs. That's what I'll do, she decided, I'll decorate the window of our flat, and stopping at the newsagent at the end of her road, she used her Saturday night waitressing tips to buy a stack of tissue paper and some card. As she left the shop she checked her phone. There was one missed call, how could that be possible? But when she pressed on it she saw it was only her sister, acting, she imagined, as their mother's envoy for more news.

Nell laid out the card on the kitchen table, and carefully sketched a palm tree, a camel and a star. She attempted a baby in a manger, but it looked like a banana, so instead she drew three kings with crowns like castle turrets, their bodies draped in capes. Slowly she began to cut, and as she sliced into the card she dreamt up her new life. She'd move from here. Leave behind the draughty bedroom, the condemned boiler in the bathroom, whose words of warning she'd read so often they'd lost all sense of threat. She smiled to think of her landlord's surprise when finally, after all these years, she'd tell him she was going. Would he apologise for not making the promised repairs, never replacing the mouldy carpet or mending the leak in the roof? Maybe he'd offer to reward her in some way for the floorboards she and Sita had spent a weekend painting after they'd pulled the carpet up themselves. More likely than not he'd insist that they replace it. Nell glanced up at the pale-blue kitchen, the cloud effects they'd sponged on to the ceiling, the stencils of fruit and vegetables they'd sprayed on to the cupboard doors. But maybe Sita wouldn't want to move? Maybe she'd want to keep the flat on, split the rent with Raj?

Her mobile rang and she nicked her finger in her rush to answer. ‘Hi,' she said, and she tensed her whole body for her agent's news.

‘Right.' He sounded neither exuberant nor mournful. ‘You're in the running. That's the good news. But there are two other girls.'

‘Two?' Nell mouthed hopelessly.

‘It's ultimately up to the director to make his choice, but the money men have to agree it. They don't need the girl to be well known, they've got a big Australian soap star, Wayne Hull, playing the male lead, and a grand Dame of the theatre – Judi possibly – doing a cameo.'

Nell pressed the phone against her ear. ‘So . . . will . . . when do they have to decide by? I mean, do they want me to go back in, read again or anything?'

‘Maybe. But not for the moment. Let's just sit tight.'

‘OK.' Nell was too stunned to ask him anything else.

‘We'll talk later, all right?'

‘OK.' Nell took up her knife again and sliced out the first king, giving a jagged ridge to his crown, leaving a sliver of light the length of his staff. She tore off a corner of tissue and pasted it over the star, and deciding it was insufficient, she glued on two more layers. She held it against the window to admire her work, and realised with a shock that it was dark. She was due to start her shift at half past five. Hastily she piled everything up at one end of the table, changed into her uniform of black skirt and red T-shirt, the material of which she'd come to hate.
No news yet
. She scrawled a note for Sita, and she ran out of the door.

It was only when she reached the Tube that she found she'd forgotten her phone. Alarm coursed through her, and she had to reach out and steady herself as if the phone was as integral a part of her as the joints in her knees. Should she go back? She could do it in ten minutes if she ran, but she was late already, and the thought of being reprimanded by the manager Sadiq – until last week a waiter himself – made her baulk. I'll call when I'm there, she decided, and she stepped on to the escalator.

Sadiq eyed her dispassionately as she rushed in. ‘We've got a party of twenty booked for six fifteen,' he said. ‘I've put them in your station, so you better get going.' The tables were empty. No knives and forks or napkins, just sprigs of flowers in thumbnail vases. Honestly, she thought. It was already five to six. She'd lay up and then ask if she could use the phone, say it was an emergency, her mother was ill. No, she couldn't risk her mother's health. She didn't even feel willing to hex Lewis, much as she despised him. She clattered down the cutlery, and flew round with a pile of napkins. Her grandmother then, who was already dead. She was setting out water glasses when the group of twenty appeared at the door, coats and hats and umbrellas dripping, laughing and talking, released from the office early. Nell approached the manager. ‘Can I . . .' but without waiting to hear her he thrust a pile of menus into her arms. ‘Get their orders fast as possible, this table needs to be free again by 7.45.'

Nell turned away. There was probably no news anyway. What did it matter? She'd be working here for the rest of her life, she might as well accept it, and smiling the length of the long table she handed the menus round.

The worst thing about large groups was that no one could remember what they wanted to eat. ‘Calzone,' they'd linger over the menu, ‘or salad Niçoise? But twenty minutes later, although they'd opted for the calzone, there was not a single nod of recognition when the food arrived. ‘Calzone!' Nell would shout, the plates hot and heavy in her hand. But there was only a babble of talk and a bank of flushed and blinking faces. Occasionally a meal had to be taken back to the kitchen, unclaimed, and it was only when everyone had been served and one customer sat forlornly at an empty place, that they'd finally remember – the word dawning on them like a brand-new thought: calzone.

Nell didn't get a break till nearly ten. She took her salad and a glass of diet Coke to the steel table at the back of the kitchen. ‘How you?' Dragan, the Croatian washer-upper, asked. Politeness dictated that she respond with a question of her own, but it always seemed cruel to torment him. His English, even after all this time, was almost non-existent, and when he did finally manage to make a sentence, the news he had to impart was usually sad. ‘My girlfriend, she gone home,' he managed. ‘My baby. She not well.' Nell scrunched her face in sorrow and crunched a lettuce leaf with Thousand Island dressing. What if she never did come to work here again? She looked round at the white tiled walls, the tall tin prep tables, the towering piles of crockery. At the open kitchen, their faces to the diners, the chefs performed in their pirate-striped T-shirts, spinning dough and sprinkling cheeses, arranging olives, sliding pizzas in and out of the furnace of their ship.

It was after twelve before the last customer was ushered out, the tables cleared and wiped, the tips divided. Nell pulled on her coat, and as she was about to step out into the night she turned and ran through to the kitchen where Dragan was loading coffee cups into the machine. ‘Goodbye,' she said, and seeing his surprise at this unnecessary exchange, she wrote her mobile number on a napkin. ‘Just in case you ever need advice or anything . . . to talk to someone . . . you know . . .'

Dragan didn't attempt to reach for the well of words that usually evaded him. Instead he smiled, and with a solemn dip of his head, he tucked the napkin into his pocket and turned back to his work.

Outside, the temperature had dropped. Nell took in a deep cold breath of air and lifted her face into the night as one white, star-shaped flake floated down towards her. ‘It's snowing,' she said to two men heaving drunkenly by, and for a moment they took hold of her arms and the three of them swung along together down the street. Nell laughed and disentangled herself. There were more flakes now, soft as feathers, melting as they neared the ground. She wrapped her coat around her and hurried towards the Tube. Outside, she bought an
Evening Standard
, her attention caught by the photograph on the front page – a gaunt, bearded Saddam Hussein, looking up at the uniformed legs of American soldiers from a hole in the ground. Everywhere she looked people were staring at the image. A tyrant brought low. How long had he been hiding in that hole? she wondered, and she had to fight off the impulse to feel sorry for him.

When Nell got out at her stop the snow had thickened to a blizzard. Fat flakes swirled and settled, picking up again, gusting on to rooftops, lying still. The grey streets were transformed. Roof tiles made beautiful with icing, window ledges sweet as gingerbread. Nell kicked her way along the road, smiling at anyone who passed her, assuming a temporary truce in the malevolence that was usually brewing at this hour of the night. Her footsteps fell silent, her face tingled, and occasionally she caught a wafer-thin offering of snow on her tongue.

At home the lights were out, all except the one lamp Sita left on for her if she'd gone to bed, but even from the foot of the stairs she could see her phone on the hall table, blinking out the news of a missed call. She laid her hand on it, and fumbling with her gloved finger, she pressed the message. ‘Must have missed you.' It was her agent, breezy, cheerful. ‘Call me back. Soon as you can.'

Her heart pounded. Her face scalded, red, and then the cold that had been collecting froze her blood. She listened to the message again, straining for meaning in every inflection. Was that actually excitement there? Or was it simply his professional determination to continue now that they knew the worst? Nell tiptoed along the corridor to Sita's room. The light was off, but even so, she stood hopefully outside her door. Just as she was about to turn away, she heard Sita's sleepy voice. ‘Nellie, is that you?'

Nell inched her door open and crept into the gloom. She sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘What do you think?' Sita held the phone to her ear.

Sita sat up. ‘Must have missed you.' Her agent's voice vibrated between them. ‘Call me back. Soon as you can.'