Murder Most Fab (2 page)

I
charmed my way through the audition, giving it my all with a hearty,
thigh-slapping rendition of ‘Michael Row the Boat Ashore’, thrusting my funky
groin at the panel during the alleluias.

I
couldn’t sing, but I had charm that made people smile and that translated,
somehow, into stage presence.

I was
offered a place on the year-long course and assumed that, in exactly twelve
months’ time, my name would be in lights above the door of some West End
theatre. My mother would have to come to terms with the fact that the fruit of
her loins was very probably the next Michael Crawford. Not an easy realization
for any woman.

I had a
rather rude awakening when I arrived in the big city and promptly found myself
a long way from the glitz and glamour of the West End. My bedsit was in a
dreary lodging-house on Brownhill Road, one of sunny Lewisham’s less salubrious
addresses. I began to wonder then if leaving the cosy little cottage I shared
with my mother in a beautiful corner of Kent had been the right decision. But
then I remembered all the reasons why I’d had to get away and determined to
make the best of it.

I
pretended that everything in my new life was perfect. ‘The bedsit is
beautiful,’ I told my mother on the phone. ‘It’s a nest of luxury.’

‘Oh,
good. Clever Grandma to find it for you.’

Grandma
had told me it wasn’t exactly the Dorchester but I hadn’t been expecting quite
so much in the way of peeling wood-chip wallpaper, damp, and electrical sockets
that buzzed.

‘Are
you looking forward to college?’

‘Oh,
yes. I can’t wait to learn how to do jazz hands properly.’

‘You’ll
have a fabulous time, my sweet.’

She
firmly believed it was now only eleven months and twenty-eight days before I
burst into the world of showbiz in a blaze of glory.

‘I’m
saving up for the trip to New York,’ she said gaily. ‘I expect you’ll be wanted
on Broadway, too, once they hear about you.’

To be
honest, I agreed with her.

My illusion that a life in
the public gaze awaited me after a year at drama school was rudely shattered on
my first day at the college when I met the other students. Every single one
believed that fame and fortune were the inevitable outcome of our course and, even
with my …
rural
grasp of mathematics, I could see that this was a
statistical impossibility. And so, almost at once, I started to lose faith. Which,
of course, was fatal.

In our
first class we were made to sit in a large circle, then took it in turns to say
a little about ourselves and why we were there. A large proportion of the other
students — particularly the women, I noticed — were suspiciously thin.

A very
slender girl with long auburn hair, which she flicked and stroked and twirled
round her fingers, said her name was Stephanie Dalton — ‘But my stage name is
Darryl Streep. I’ve been acting since I was three and my mother says I could
sing before I could talk and dance before I could walk.’

That
didn’t seem likely to me but I kept my thoughts to myself. By now she had taken
to sucking a strand of hair into a wet rat’s tail and stroking her cheek with
it playfully. ‘Just give me a songbook and a dance routine and I’m happy!’ she
exclaimed.

Everyone
clapped, and I joined in dutifully, wondering why this merited applause.

The
only black person in the group was next. He had an American accent, was tall
and leggy, dressed in jogging pants and a faded blue singlet with ‘POW!’ written
across it in jagged yellow lettering.

‘I’m
Larry, how you doin’?’ he said, then dissolved into self-conscious giggles. A
moment later he pulled himself together with a mock slap of his face. ‘Okay,
here goes …‘ He took a deep breath as if he were about to dive off the top
board. ‘I’m Larry, I’m from Phoenix, Arizona, come to London cos it’s the best
place on the planet for a hoofer like me to learn his trade, lovin’ it, lovin’
it, so excited.’ He spoke as if he was reading a list, intoning downwards at
the end of each item. It was difficult to know when he’d finished peaking. ‘I’m
seventeen, but ya gotta start young in this business, youngest of five, I’m gay
but it’s not an issue, missin’ my folks like mad, been here a week and seen
Cats
six times, er, er, oh! And I’m black! Surprise!’ He flung out his arms,
smiled a dazzling white smile and raised his eyebrows to signify he was done.
He got a much bigger round of applause than Darryl, who tried to smile but
looked more than a little put out.

My
heart sank. It was early days, but I knew I didn’t fit in with these people. I
didn’t have their weird enthusiasm for singing and dancing. But worse was to
come.

The boy
next to me identified himself. ‘My name is Sean,’ he said, in a posh Glasgow
accent. ‘I’m a Pisces and I’m Scottish, as you can probably tell, and I just
live to sing. I’d like to be playing a lead role in the West End in about five
years’ time.
Cabaret, Guys and Dolls, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
… I
don’t really mind in which order.’

I gave
him a sideways glance. He was painfully thin and his cheekbones were
accentuated by his constant pouting. He wore a tight red cap-sleeved T-shirt,
baggy jeans and the inevitable leg-warmers.

‘I’m
here in Lewisham to hone my craft and get my career on the road,’ he told us.

Now it
was my turn. ‘My name is Johnny Debonair and I come from a village near
Ashford. I’m here to see if I like it. It was my grandmother’s idea …’ I
trailed off to an embarrassed silence.

‘Well
done, Johnny,’ said Larry, giving me a reassuring pat on the arm.

A decidedly
restrained spatter of applause began, then stopped almost immediately. I wasn’t
bothered. I couldn’t bring myself to pretend I was one of the kids from
Fame,
as everyone else in the room seemed to want to do.

There
were fifteen of us in the class. When everybody had introduced themselves, our
tutor, Francis Grey, told us it would be a tough year, we were going to work
really hard, but it was a start of a new life, a life on the stage, the most
demanding but also the most rewarding life there is, and so on. I perked up
when he lowered his voice and added, ‘The sad news is that not all of you will
make it. Some of you will fall by the wayside …‘

There
was hope, then.

The
first class of the day was, as it would always be, a general warm-up for voice
and body. We began with an exercise of sticking out our tongues as far as they
would go. This we alternated with forcing air through our lips so we sounded a
bit like horses snorting. We chanted ‘ma, ma, mas’ and ‘moo, moo, moos’ and
then moved on to vowel sounds. Then we sang scales to the piano.

‘Who’s
not giving me that C sharp?’ asked Francis. We sang the scale again as he
walked up and down, cocking his ear at us. He stopped suddenly and looked
accusingly at me. ‘Quiet, everyone.’ He stared at me as if I’d stolen from the
poor. ‘Give me a C sharp, please, Johnny,’ he demanded.

There
was a hush of expectation. I made an intelligent guess and confidently sang the
note.

‘Oh, my
God!’ I heard Larry whisper. ‘That was a C!’

‘Hmm.
Well done, Johnny. Good effort. We’ll work on that in your individual class,’
said Francis. ‘It was completely wrong, of course, but you’re not to worry
about it now.’

Larry
looked at me as if I had herpes.

‘However,’
Francis continued gravely, ‘I have to tell you now that without C sharp you
can’t ever do
Oklahoma!.’

Maybe I
should top myself now, I thought — but I didn’t have the nerve to say it.

By the end of the first
week I knew for sure that I didn’t fit in. Everyone seemed neurotic, intense
and a trifle self-obsessed. I was a country boy, excited to be in London and
wanting to have fun. I didn’t yearn for a life on the stage as badly as the
others did. Some of the girls amused me, but even they insisted on humming
musical numbers mid-sentence as we scurried between classes and there was a
whiff of vomit about the more slender ones.

My
initial impressions of Sean had been correct. At first he appeared to take
quite a shine to me, and spent the first week fluttering his eyelashes and
being heavily flirtatious. He even sang ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ to me one day
while I was eating my lunch, and rather good it was too, although I would never
have admitted so to him. Someone who worshipped so devoutly at the shrine of
Rodgers and Hammerstein didn’t seem quite right to me, and it felt cruel to
encourage him. And as for the flirtation —well, my heart was well and truly
elsewhere and there was no way skeletal Scottish Sean could compete with the
man of my dreams.

Once
he’d got the message, Sean went on the turn. He began a laughable but vicious
whispering campaign about me, which all stemmed from a chat we’d had in the
college refectory one morning about his hopes and ambitions.

‘I just
pray I’ll be good enough, that this gift I’ve been given by God,
my voice,
will
fulfil its potential,’ he said, as if the alternative was global catastrophe.

‘I
think anyone can sing and dance,’ I said provocatively. He needed shutting up.

‘How
can you
say
that?’ Sean looked aghast. ‘How can you
disrespect
your
colleagues in that way?’ He had raised his voice and begun to gesticulate. ‘You
want to start
appreciating
the talent that surrounds you in this place,
for God’s sake. The blood, sweat and
tears
of your fellow performers!’ He
was wild-eyed and passionate. After that outburst (of which this was but a
short excerpt), he did a lot of neck stretching whenever I came into the room.
We never spoke again, but a conspiratorial atmosphere would descend upon any
group of fellow students I attempted to engage in social interaction. Eyes
would roll, lips would purse, and colleagues would suddenly remember they had
left their jazz pumps in the studio and scurry away from me. Sean had got to
them.

‘I hear
you and Sean are, like, handbags at dawn,’ said Larry, with glee. ‘I just love
all this bitchin’ — it’s so musical theatre!’

After
that it was a lonely life for me at drama school, as we went about the endless
rounds of singing lessons, play rehearsals, fencing classes, elocution, and so
on. I was beginning to regret the day I’d ever thought I might be able to spend
my adult years as a chorus member in
Les Mis
even if it was as good as a
job for life.

By the
end of the first term, I was disgruntled. For our first term ‘show case’ (which
was themed round the songs of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood), I sang ‘Elusive
Dreams’ with an anaemic Welsh waif, the only person still speaking to me. I
finished to a lukewarm response that, almost at once, petered out to nothing.
Sean sang ‘Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me’. Everyone clapped and
whooped. Sean shot me a look of terrible triumph as he took his fifth curtain
call. As far as he was concerned he had won a great victory. It seemed I would
never be among the people who truly believed that a well-honed musical could
save the world.

I
didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, a far more amusing lifestyle had
presented itself back at Brownhill Road.

I first encountered
Catherine on the landing at Brownhill Road when I had been living there for
about three weeks. We came out of our rooms simultaneously, she on her way to
work, me to the bathroom, and we almost bumped into each other.

‘Oh,
sorry,’ I said. ‘Didn’t see you there.’

It took
me a moment to register the vision in white. The woman I had almost knocked to
the ground in my desire to bag the bathroom was in her nurse’s uniform, the
small starched hat nestling in her lacquered blonde hair like a paper chalice.
A smouldering cigarette hung from her glossy lips as she stared at me for a
long moment. I had left music playing in my room and the sound drifted out into
the corridor.

‘Hi,
there,’ she said, in a clear Essex accent. ‘Like a spot of Dusty Springfield of
a morning, do we? I strongly suspect you’re a homosexual.’