reading

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Fifteen minutes.

That’s only…what, nine hundred seconds – right?

Nine hundred seconds late feels so much better than quarter of an hour late. Doesn’t it?

Okay, so no. I’m fifteen minutes late.

And what that makes me is screwed.

My umbrella turns itself inside out thanks to the March mini-hurricane blowing round the corner of the building. Funnelled between the long, low warehouses of the industrial estate, the gusts are even stronger here than they were on the main road. At least back there the rain just fell downwards; now it’s going every possible kind of sideways…and I swear some of it’s actually coming back up at me. I ditch the umbrella. It’s blatantly not helping.

Unit thirty-two, unit thirty-two…

Come on, come on, come on…

Unit eighty-seven.

And a dead end.

You have got to be kidding me.

I turn around and swim back up the road to the sign that lists all the businesses and companies on the estate with their unit numbers, looking for anything that even remotely resembles Earl’s Theatre Rehearsal Room. Or Theatre. Or even Room.

Basically, at this point I’ll take anything that’s legible.

Five minutes later, I shove open a battered metal door in a red, two-storey unit – the mythical unit thirty-two, which turned out to be on a completely different road and in between unit number forty-one and unit number ninety-three (although perhaps that’s only on Thursdays – maybe on Wednesdays and alternate Sundays it’s next to unit thirty-three, just for fun). I peel off my soaked coat. Inside is…not quite what I was expecting. The front section of the unit has been divided off to make an entrance space; there’s an empty clothes rack nailed to the side wall, so I hang my coat on one of the pegs, where it drips gently. The reception area is deserted, and the only furniture is a sagging, slightly grubby sofa and a little glass table next to it, piled with crumpled back-issues of The Stage and an old dog-eared copy of the Spotlight Contacts book.

This is not even close to how I imagined the entrance to the rehearsal room of a theatre like the Earl’s would look. I think I’d pictured…I don’t know, maybe something a little cleaner? A plush velvet sofa, maybe. Gleaming floor-to-ceiling windows with natural light streaming in and a waxed wooden floor.

Wrong on all counts.

“Umm…hello?”

My voice bounces off the dingy grey walls, coming straight back to me. This is how horror films start, says a small voice that belongs to a bit of me I almost certainly don’t want to listen to. It really is.

Beyond the sofa is another door – a blue one this time, with a small, neatly-printed card taped to it.

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I wonder whether whoever typed it meant to make it as passive-aggressive as they have by adding the full stops. Who adds punctuation to a sign like that?

I squeeze as much rainwater out of my hair as I can, and I knock. Full stops or not.

The room on the other side is much, much larger – it’s actually kind of like my school’s gym hall. It even has the same floor tiles, but with dozens of little black-and-yellow taped crosses and Ls stuck to them. The main difference, though, is the back wall – the whole thing here is taken up by a huge pinboard, where hundreds of sketches, colour printouts and pages of notes flutter in a draught. And in front of it all, smack in the middle of the hall, is a table where three men and one woman are sitting – looking incredibly bored and not a little annoyed.

“Uh, hi?” I raise a hand, hoping they didn’t spot the water that just dripped off my elbow. “Hope Parker. I’m here for the internship interview? I’m really sorry, I got…”

“Drowned?” says one of the line-up, barely glancing up from the book he’s reading. He smirks at his own joke, then arches an eyebrow at me and drops the paperback – the novel about magicians that everyone seems to be reading lately, dog-eared and thick with Post-it notes poking out – on the floor with a bang. I recognize him almost immediately and want to curl myself into a ball in the middle of the floor and never speak or move or do anything again. Because it’s Rick Hillier. I finally get to meet Rick Hillier, my favourite actor, my favourite director, my favourite everything…and I’m late and approximately ninety-seven per cent rain. Excellent.

“Is it still raining?” The woman – she must be Amy, the Earl’s Theatre deputy stage manager who rang me about this interview – looks up at the ceiling as though she’s worried the water will start pouring through any second.

I push my hair back behind my ear again. I’ve had showers that have left me drier than this. One of my trainers sprang a leak outside unit fifteen and I can still feel the water swooshing around my toes.

“A bit.”

“That explains why you’re late, I suppose. We’d almost given up on you,” says another of the men. Sitting at the end of the table, he’s older than the others – even older than my dad, I’d guess – and he’s got a folder open in front of him, which he keeps tapping with the end of a pen. I decide that it’s probably not the best idea to say that I’m actually late because I was practising – rehearsing – for this so hard that I completely forgot to check the time. I should have checked the time. But if they want to go with the rain story, let’s run with that.

“Yes. The rain, and the bus…” I shrug and a drop of water very slowly trickles down between my shoulder blades.

“Well, now you’re here you’d better sit down.” He points to the cushioned chair in front of the table – then looks straight over my shoulder. “Or perhaps one of those would be more practical…?”

I follow his gaze to the stack of hard plastic chairs beside the door. I drip back across the floor to the door, drip a chair out of the stack and drip all the way back to the table, sitting down across from the four of them. As one, they stare back at me. This is brutal.

“Here.” Amy has been rummaging in the rucksack at her feet and pulls out a towel, holding it out to me across the table.

I shake my head. “I’m fine, really. Thanks.”

I sneeze.

“On second thoughts…” I take the towel and sit there with it in my lap like I’ve somehow forgotten what towels are for.

This is going well.

“So. Hope. You’re seventeen, and you’re from Marshfield School – is that right?” Folder Man looks down at his papers, then carries on without waiting for an answer. “You’ve applied for the stage management placement with us, haven’t you?”

“Umm…yes?”

“We’ve got your form, but we’d like you to tell us a little about yourself – starting with why you want to work in a role like this.”

I practised this. I did. I’ve got a whole spiel about close readings of a script and bringing a theatre company together as a family, looking after them and making sure they have what they need. I can talk about a theatre as a living, breathing machine where everyone is a cog and it’s only when the cogs are all turning together that the whole thing comes to life. I have stuff about finding props, about tech week; about schedules and supporting the director and problem-solving and everything. I’ve practised it in front of my mirror every night this week. I wrote it on cue cards, just to be sure.

The ones I realized on the way over that I’d left under my bed. And now I can’t remember any of it.

Superb.

Four pairs of eyes look at me expectantly.

I’ve got nothing. Nothing but wet hair and wet shoes and wet jeans.

It’s Amy who takes pity on me. “Wow, Charlie. Big question to hit her with when she’s only just sat down!” She looks along the table at him. “Maybe we could start with something a bit gentler?”

He shrugs, and she takes this as an okay, turning to smile at me. “You said on your form that you’ve got some experience of backstage work. Talk to us about that a bit, Hope.”

“Umm…”

I know this is the bit where, according to the form, I’m supposed to have the chance to demonstrate a passion for practical theatre.

For two years, I’ve volunteered at the Square Globe Community Theatre in my free time as an assistant stage manager – aka the dogsbody, errand-runner, gluer-and-stapler of broken scenery, and the wielder of the safety pin and iron-on webbing that sticks anything to anything (trust me, I’ve tried). Two years of first-night applause and last-minute adrenalin rushes, end-of-run parties and those in-jokes that are only funny if you were in the room when something happened – which I usually was. Two years in which I’ve helped actors learn their lines, hissed their lines from the side of the stage when they forgot them, and listened to them complaining when lines they had learned got cut before they had the chance to forget them. I’ve learned how to get mic tape off someone’s neck without making them cry, and I have even carried a pantomime cow costume to the dry-cleaner’s in an unseasonal heatwave. (Tip: it’s not too difficult if you actually wear the back half to walk in, but you do get some funny looks.)

And I’ve loved every minute of it.

Being in a theatre – any theatre – is like walking into an enormous hug. To me, standing at the back of an auditorium and looking at the stage feels like a pair of velvet-covered arms are wrapping around me and pulling me close. It’s where I’m meant to be. Give me a headset and I’m happy – even one of the crappy old ones at the Square Globe which were fished out of a skip behind the Earl’s. The first time I put one on, I realized it still had the red-and-gold Earl’s logo stamped on it, and I promised myself that one day I’d be putting a headset on in the Earl’s itself. Preferably one that hadn’t come out of a skip.

This is my only chance to talk about all that, really. Not just because if I don’t I can forget the placement, but because even though my mum loves the theatre, she belongs to another part of it. She’s confident and so sure that she knows what she’s talking about, and when she’s working she can always say what she means and it makes sense. She just does it. She could talk about costumes all day (and people literally pay her to do that sometimes) but the stuff she cares about is always meant to be seen. It’s the swooshing silks and swirling capes, beads and glitter and things shining in the light. And that’s the opposite of what I am. The opposite of where I think I’m meant to be. And she’ll never get that: how can she? People see her work and they know it’s hers – she’s famous for it. As for Dad and my sisters, well, they’ve had so many years of Mum’s theatre-related dramas that the thought of me bringing even more of them home wouldn’t go down well. The community theatre stuff’s one thing, but as far as they’re concerned, one theatre professional in the family’s quite enough.

Which is why nobody knows I’m here.

This is my dream, that I need to make happen. On my own.

At least, that’s partly why, anyway…

Four pairs of eyes are still looking at me expectantly, and everything I have to say – everything I want to say – turns to dust in my mouth and my voice evaporates. All the passion, all the enthusiasm, all the…whatever else I’m supposed to show them I have? Dust, smoke and ashes.

I have, to borrow a phrase from the actors, dried.

Amy rescues me again, clearing her throat and pointedly looking at my form on the table in front of her.

“Just one thing before we go any further. Would you be willing to sign an NDA for us?” She pulls a printed sheet of paper out of one of her folders, holding it out to me.

“A non-disclosure agreement?” My fingers close around the form.

“We can see that you’ve got good experience of script reading, prop management and rehearsal notes, which is great. We’re hoping to bring our intern in on our next…well, our current production. It’s finishing out its rehearsal-room time and moving into the theatre for technical rehearsals. We’ve got some stage magic designed by Katie Khan we’ll need to be on-site to really get working and that might be a bit of a challenge…but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I have to say, though, that looking at your background, I think this show would be a good fit for you.”

I nod. Enthusiastically. I can’t actually make any sound, but nodding I can manage.

Current production.

Amy is still talking.

“…And between protecting the magic and the fact we’re expecting it to be a high-profile show, the NDA is standard. It’s not just you, I promise,” she adds.

I know this. I know I know it.

I know what they’re rehearsing now, but suddenly my mind’s gone blank and all I can do is nod like an idiot. My whole brain is blacked-out by panic.

So I nod some more. What have I got to lose?

“Obviously, we’re aware of your school commitments, but if we were to offer you the place, we would like to have you with us for the next few weeks. So that’s next week, and then into the Easter break for the end of rehearsal, tech, and – of course – opening night. Can you confirm you’d be available for the whole period? Your school will have to be on board, and sign off your absence.”

I keep nodding. This seems to be enough.

“Okay. Great. The internship is focused on the deputy stage manager role – from your application I imagine you know a lot of this already – and you would be required to work across all the different aspects of stage management. At the end, we can provide you with a reference should you wish to apply for a formal stage qualification.” She pauses, checks something written in her notebook. “The pro-rata pay isn’t particularly good, I’m afraid – but at least it’s something. Nobody goes into theatre to get rich, do they? What else? The actors have just about got their lines down and are largely off-book, but they’ll need the odd bit of prompting. You’ll be supporting Rick here –” she nods at Rick, who nods back even though he now looks like he actually hates me – “with rehearsal notes and blocking out the actors’ movements across the stage ready for when we move into the theatre.” She flips through her notebook again. “You say you’ve done a little of that?”

It finally hits me.

Piecekeepers.

That’s the show. The stage adaptation of Piecekeepers – the magic book with all the spells trapped in paintings; the one Rick was reading. It gets a six-week run at the Earl’s before it transfers out to the West End.

And the lead?

The lead is Tommy Knight.

Actual movie star Tommy Knight.

Oh god.

This show is a huge deal. And they’re saying I might get to work on it.

“A bit.” My voice comes out wobblier than I’d like. I sound exactly as nervous as I feel, and that’s not good.

“Great. Mostly you’d be shadowing me, especially through the technical rehearsals, as well as looking after the props. Oh, and we would also need you to work with our wardrobe intern…” She glances at my form. “But you don’t need me to tell you about wardrobe, do you?”

No. Please no.

I wait for someone to say it. They always do.

“Parker? You don’t mean…not as in Miriam Parker? You don’t happen to be related, do you?”

Hope Parker-as-in-Miriam-Parker. Yes, that Miriam Parker: legendary theatrical costume designer Miriam Parker. When I get talking to anyone in theatre, it always comes back to my mum eventually.

“How many Olivier Awards does she have now? Is it five or seven?” (It’s eight, actually, and thanks for asking.)

“And what about the Craft BAFTAs?” (One – and a near-miss three years ago. We still don’t mention that one.)

“Oh, and didn’t she make the dress that What’s-Her-Name wore to that premiere…?” (Probably.)

But not this time. I keep waiting, and it simply doesn’t come. Nobody says the M-word. Instead, Rick makes a sound halfway between a grunt and a sigh…and that’s it. I’m in the clear.

I could have put her name down on my form, of course; nothing would have made her happier than if she thought I wanted to follow in her footsteps. She’d probably have exploded with joy, collapsing into one last pile of spangles and bugle beads… But then I’d be the girl who got an internship at the Earl’s because of her mum, which is the last thing I want after everything I’ve done to get here. Everything I’ve done by myself – without dropping my mother’s name to do it.

I want to do this on my own, not to follow someone else. To know I got it because I worked for it, and because I earned it.

Amy looks at me for a long, long time and jots something down on my form, and Rick folds his arms across his chest, stretching his feet out underneath the table. “So you’ve done two years at the Square Globe. What does that mean – weekends?” He fixes me with a look that makes me feel like a bug pinned to a board in a museum.

“Whenever I could get over there. Weekends, holidays, evenings after school…”

“And they won’t miss you?”

“Umm…” I fidget with the edge of my damp sleeve, squeezing out a drop of water. “I’ve…” What is it people say? “I’ve stepped back from the Square Globe a bit.”

Something that looks almost like a smirk flits across his face. “Stepped back?” He studies me carefully, searching for more. Well, he’s not going to find it – not here, not now. Not Rick Hillier.

After a silence long enough to stage an opera, he nods and moves on. “What about theatre you’ve seen? Can you tell us about something you watched recently?”

“Oh…I went to the Royal Court. The Almeida, and the Old Vic.”

“London or Bristol?”

“Both.”

“Did you indeed?”

“I saw you. You were really good. Really good.” I hear it from somewhere outside my body. I can’t stop it – it just comes out of me – and now I definitely, definitely want to curl up in a ball and die. Or possibly have the ground open up and swallow me and then this will be over.

“Well, thank you. That’s very kind.”

The lines at the corners of his eyes crinkle slightly, and…he’s almost smiling. Rick Hillier. Actual actor/director/general-all-round-theatre-rock-star Rick Hillier, sitting in front of me and smiling. At me. Or at least smiling near me.

When I saw him onstage at the London Old Vic six months ago, he’d shaved off all his hair for the role and – from where I was sitting, at least – he looked like he was three metres tall and made of nothing but solid muscle. Now he’s just a guy who’s…what, almost forty…with a grey-speckled, trimmed beard, close-cropped dark hair and a slightly tatty jumper with holes near the ends of the sleeves. Holes which he’s hooked his thumbs through.

And despite that and the (almost) smile, he’s still terrifying.

“I, umm…I don’t get to see that much live theatre. School. Trains. The show times and the cost, you know? But sometimes I get cheap tickets…” (By which I mean I haul myself on an early train on a Saturday and schlep to the West End and queue for day seats and returns and those weird sort-of-standing tickets right at the back…) “And I go to loads of the cinema theatre screenings.” (Like I could forget the time I was going into the screen showing Richard III live from the Barbican with all the little old ladies on their social outing, while everyone from my year in school was going into the next screen to see…I don’t know, Exploding Monkeys With Shotguns IV or something. It was weird. Maybe I’m just weird.)

A thick, heavy silence has fallen around me.

Did I say all of that out loud?

Amy is nodding and Rick is still half-smiling and sort of narrowing his eyes, and Folder Man – Charlie? – is looking at me thoughtfully, and I wish I knew how to make myself sound calm, collected and competent; maybe sound a bit like a seventeen-year-old interviewing for an internship at a real theatre and less like…well, me?

“Do you have any particular deputy stage managers whose style you would hope to emulate?” Charlie Folder Man comes back with a low blow, and honestly, I preferred his first question. Particularly seeing as this one’s a trick. I shuffle in my seat. My jeans squelch.

Is it a trick?

The seconds crawl by like weeks.

No, it’s a trick. It’s definitely a trick.

I think.

“I read something – ages ago – that said the best DSMs are like ninjas. Kind of invisible. They hold everything together – but unless you actually know what they do, you never see them. You wouldn’t even know they exist, never mind realizing they were running around behind the stage and the set the entire time you were watching a show. They’re like…” Another drip runs down between my shoulder blades, making me completely lose the thread of my thought.

“I…the, um…sorry – what was I saying?”

“Stage managers are ninjas, I think it was?”

“Oh. Yes. Well, kind of. Maybe they’re more like wizards? Either way, that’s the kind of DSM I’d like to be. A wizard ninja. Wizinja. Winja. Yes.”

I make myself stop.

It was better when I couldn’t actually talk. Anything would be better than this. I just compared the deputy stage manager of an actual theatre to a wizard ninja.

I did that.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Amy smile – a real smile – although at a stern look from Charlie, her face almost immediately blanks and she shuffles the papers in front of her.

“Okay, let’s go back to the original question,” she says, looking right at me. “Why stage management, specifically? It’s not the easiest job in the theatre. You’re involved in every aspect of a production, right from pre-production and rehearsals all the way to get-out when the show closes. The hours are long and they’re unsociable. It’s not the most straightforward career to balance a life with.”

And this time I don’t need cue cards.

“When I was little, my mum…” I stop myself. I start again. “I got to go backstage at the Earl’s when I was a kid. There was an opera company in.” I remember it so clearly. Back then, Mum was working in theatre full-time – it was right before she started doing freelance TV and the odd wedding, before she properly started her own business.

The last interviewer – the third man, who’s been fiddling with his phone since I walked in and hasn’t said a word – suddenly sits straight up and looks at me. His eyes are very small and a very bright shade of green. It’s a little like being watched by a cat. “At the Earl’s, you say? You must have been quite young – there hasn’t been an opera company through the theatre in ten years.”

“Nine.” I probably shouldn’t have corrected him – especially seeing as I’m not entirely sure who he is. “It was nine years ago. It was my eighth birthday – that’s why I remember it, I guess. The chorus sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me.”

Like anyone could forget that. Ever.

“And that was what made you want to work in theatre? Why?” Amy asks.

“I was waiting in the corner of the production office. I think the stage team were having a meeting, and it was just…the way they talked. How they knew everything about what was going on in the theatre and everyone in it…like it was part of them and they were part of it and you couldn’t separate them. Like they belonged there. And listening to them, I suddenly couldn’t imagine wanting to do anything else or be anywhere else, and I haven’t, ever since. Walking around all the little corridors backstage, the corners the audience can’t see – even at the Square Globe – it’s like you’re being let into a secret. Like everything that happens on the stage is just a reflection – or the tip of an iceberg, the tiny bit that most people see. The only bit most people ever see. Backstage – that’s the rest of it.”

I can’t stop it. The words, the ideas, come fizzing out of me like fireworks.

“People come to the theatre to be shown things. To experience things. They want to be taken somewhere else, somewhere they can never really go. They want a journey – and you, everybody backstage…you’re their passport.”

Charlie scribbles something on the page in front of him – probably a huge NO across my name, if the expression on his face is anything to go by – and closes the file.

At least I tried.

I tried.

“Well,” he says, “thanks for coming in, Hope. We’re running short of time so we’ll have to leave it there – but we’ll be in touch.”

So that’s that.

I look at the clock, and it’s exactly fifteen minutes since I walked in.

This has been the longest nine hundred seconds of my life.

“How was…what on earth happened to you?” Mum stops halfway across the tiles of the hall floor, her teacup midway to her lips.

“It’s raining.” I kick the front door shut behind me.

“Is it?” She actually walks to the window, puts the cup and saucer down on the sill and peers out. Like I’ve somehow made the whole thing up and I’m soaking wet because pneumonia is fun. “It is, isn’t it?” She turns around, and she’s already forgotten that I’m behind her: I see her jump. “Well, don’t just stand there. You’re dripping all over the floor!”

With that warm welcome, she heads back into the kitchen and I can hear her rummaging around in a cupboard for a cloth. If it was, say, Faith who’d come in soaking wet, she might get offered a towel to dry her perfect, perfect self off – but I get a cloth to clear up the mess I’ve made. The joy of being the youngest sister of three, right there. Mind you, it goes both ways: if it’s a choice between being overlooked or in the centre of the full, blinding glare of maternal attention, give me Mum’s benign neglect any day. At least I get to stay a lot further under her radar than Faith and Grace do on the (thankfully) rare occasions they come home for the weekend. Then it’s all, “Grace has done this marvellous thing…” and, “Did I tell you? Faith has single-handedly cured the common cold and brought about world peace, and she didn’t even chip her perfectly-manicured nails in the process.”

I think that kind of attention would make me shrivel up on the spot. Just as well I don’t get it.

Mum comes padding back down the hall on bare feet, balancing her cup and saucer in one hand, her phone jammed in between her shoulder and ear as she hands me a floor cloth with the other.

“Sorry, darling. I have to talk to my supplier about that silk they sent me last week – it was completely the wrong… Yes, I’m still here,” she adds into the phone, then back to me: “You can tell me all about your day over dinner.”

She gives me an apologetic smile as she nudges her studio door shut behind her, disappearing between brightly coloured bolts of cloth and boxes of pins – and the first thing I feel (other than wet, because there’s really no escaping it) is relief. I’m in the clear – she still thinks I was at the Square Globe. And I guess from her point of view, that’s a pretty safe assumption… But even if I had told her where I was really going, I wouldn’t want to go over the interview right now. Not when the wound is still fresh.

Wizard ninjas. Good job, Hope. There was so much I wanted to say; so much I could have – should have – said about why I’d be good…and what did I end up sounding passionate about? Eavesdropping on a conversation when I was a kid. Stupid Hope. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

But at least I don’t have to talk about the mess I made of the interview…because she doesn’t know anything about it.

I could have told her everything – right from the minute I saw the piece about the internships in the paper…but I didn’t.

I didn’t because, actually, I couldn’t. I don’t want Mum stroking my hair and telling me I should be louder and brighter – like I can somehow wrap myself in the patterned fabric she buys by the metre and be someone else. I don’t want her to tell me I should make more noise about myself. What I want is to not have to talk about me.

And that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Not talk about myself, or the internship at the Earl’s. Not at all. Let everyone think it’s just another normal day in HopeWorld.

Like talking to Rick Hillier about theatre is a normal day.

I was just in a room with Rick Hillier, talking to him.

Talking at him. Like an idiot.

“You were really good…”

Yeah, well done. Like he cares what you think, Hope.

In the safety of my room, I rummage under my bed for my cue cards – which are right where I left them, along with the letter inviting me to the interview which asks me to please be prompt. Ha. I open it out and reread it four times – and every time I find some new way I’ve managed to cock the whole thing up. Like how Charlie Folder Man was the Earl’s front-of-house manager, and the other guy – the one I corrected – was none other than Franklin Hamilton, the owner of the Earl’s, and the one responsible for setting up the new internships and outreach programme I was applying for. So I totally just told him he was wrong about his own theatre.

Brilliant.

I screw the letter into a perfect ball and throw both it and my useless cue cards at the bin by my desk. They miss. Of course they do. The cards scatter around it like giant confetti, and the letter bounces into the middle of the black-box model I made of the Old Vic’s stage last month, which sits alongside my bookcase. The paper ball knocks over the tiny scale figure of a man with a shaved head standing in the centre of the stage. I pick him up and straighten him out, putting him back on the little black X that marks the centre of the spotlight, and then I scoop up the cue cards and the letter and drop them into the rubbish.

Layer by layer, I peel off my wet clothes and let them fall on the floor, trying to ignore the creeping halo of damp that spreads out from underneath the pile, turning the pink of my rug to crimson. (It looks like a bloodstain. Here lies the body of Hope Parker’s dreams. RIP.) I pull on my pyjamas and my favourite old jumper and wrap a towel around my hair, and with every piece of clothing I play back another question in my head. Of course I have the perfect answers now.

I kick the theatre model across the room.

It skids across the carpet and glides to a halt in front of my wardrobe, and we eye each other resentfully.

And then I give in and go pick it up, straightening the now-dented proscenium arch and putting it back on the floor by my shelves…and all the while, the miniature model of Rick Hillier watches me from his cardboard stage.

Somewhere under my soggy clothes, my phone rings.

My phone never rings.

It can only be Priya. I had to tell her about the interview, especially as she was going to cover for me if I needed it, and now I haven’t messaged her the second I got out, she wants to know how it went. Is it okay to answer with “Not well” and hang up?

She’ll give up in a minute. I’ll message her later.

My phone keeps ringing.

And then it stops.

And starts up again almost immediately.

That’s not Priya. She knows that if she calls and I don’t answer, I don’t want to talk.

So who’s calling me?

I scrabble through the damp pile and yank my phone out of what are quite possibly the wettest jeans that have ever existed. The screen’s a bit…misty, showing a mobile number I don’t recognize.

“Hello?”

“Hello! Hope?” A woman’s voice, familiar but barely audible over a loud clattering sound. “Sorry about the noise – can you hear me? It’s Amy. From the Earl’s. You came to the rehearsal room earlier and I wanted to say…”

You wanted to say thanks for your time, but we’ve decided to give it to someone else. Someone who didn’t make a complete arse of themselves; who looks like they’re half-together. Who turned up on time.

“…I wanted to say thanks for coming in. It was great to meet you…”

Mmm-hmmm.

“…And I’ve had a chat with my colleagues, and I thought I’d call and confirm we’d like you to come in and start on Monday if you’re able to?”

I…what?

“Hope? Are you there? Sorry – can you hear me all right?”

“You’re giving me the placement? You’re sure?” The words come from someone else – whoever it is they’re giving the place to. They aren’t mine. It isn’t me. It can’t be.

“That’s what I said. We’re giving you the place, if you still want it?”

“Of course I want it! Yes! But…but why me?”

Why me? Why am I even asking? Why am I giving them a chance to realize they’ve made a mistake and change their minds?

She laughs, and it’s a nice sound. “You had it the minute I read your application, Hope. I just wanted to meet you in person first to make sure you knew what you were getting into. You’re perfect for it – you’re passionate and ambitious and you’ve got more experience than anyone else who applied, but more than that, you understand the job. Anyone can learn the skills but you understand what theatre is, and you understand what it needs to be.”

“I do?”

“You do. I guessed that much from your form, but I wanted to be sure. And I could hear it in the way you talked.”

“Right.”

I’m not even sure I understand what it is I’m supposed to have understood.

“Do you need any kind of confirmation letter from us for the time off school? I know the break covers most of it, but if we can help…?”

“The drama teacher already spoke to the head for me, and I’ve given them a reference letter from the Square Globe, but I’ll ask if they need something from you too.”

“Great. Let me know on Monday – and please bring that NDA with you. We’ll see you then, ten o’clock at the Earl’s rehearsal rooms.”

It’s really happening. She means it.

I have the place. I’m going to work at the Earl’s Theatre.

Me.

An actual theatre.

A professional theatre.

“Wear something comfortable. I don’t need to tell you how much movement there can be in stage management, so nothing restrictive.”

“Okay. Yes. Absolutely.” And then, before I can stop it… “And I promise I won’t be late this time.”

There’s the shortest of silences at the other end of the phone line, and then: “See you Monday.”