A Very Nice Girl Read online

  She tipped her head over to one side and pulled it with her hand. I heard her neck crack.

  So, how are you finding Manon? – she asked.

  Every time she spoke, she seemed to gesture outwards, as if everyone wanted to hear her and that was fine by her.

  Yeah, it’s going well – I said.

  This was the first set of opera scenes since I’d started, and I hadn’t been given my own part, only the cover. It was hard not to be disappointed.

  You’re a soubrette though, aren’t you? – Sophie said. – I mean, I thought you were? Aren’t you finding Manon a bit big? It’s so unhelpful the way they do that here. Give people roles they wouldn’t in a million years sing in big Houses. It’s as good as useless for your CV, isn’t it?

  It’s not really big for me. I’ve learned the arias before.

  At the last place you were at?

  Yeah.

  You know, lots of the girls in my year were saying it was amazing you got in here. When we saw the list I mean, not that you’re not good – she said quickly. – Of course, I don’t mean that. But that place you were at before was barely even a conservatoire, was it? Everyone was saying you must be exceptional. Before you arrived, I mean.

  Well, thanks – I said, although it wasn’t quite a compliment.

  Over the past month at the Conservatory, I’d learned that getting my place wasn’t a guarantee of success, as I’d stupidly thought. It just meant I was now in the running, as opposed to being nowhere. We had to audition for everything, even internally, and there weren’t enough roles for us all. Everything was a competition, and I wasn’t winning. Going into class when it was my turn to sing, I often had to visualise that moment in my audition, Angela smiling and saying brava, because I felt nothing like these singers. They spoke another language, talking about people I didn’t know, companies I’d never heard of, external auditions that had been and gone without me getting the memo.

  Sophie had lost interest in me. She’d gone back to massaging her jaw.

  The voice isn’t particularly happy today – she said.

  I didn’t yet talk about my voice as if it were a separate entity. I made a mental note to start.

  Larynx is tight – she said.

  She let her tongue flop out of her mouth, and began to chew on it.

  I waited for him for what felt like a very long time.

  Long enough to hang around outside for a bit, hoping he’d show up. To get too cold to stay there. Long enough to humiliate myself on the door, having to deal with the woman who’d watched me waiting.

  What’s the reservation under?

  Max, I think.

  Nothing in that name. What’s the surname?

  Um—

  Having to find his card in my book, where I’d used it to mark my place, to check. Long enough, then, for her to fully assess the situation, to change the way she smiled at me. To glance down at the ripped lining of my coat when I held it out to her, and take it with an expression of polite distaste, like a doctor attempting to seem neutral about her patient’s pot of bloody urine. Long enough to wonder what I was meant to drink, to pick a glass of wine at random from the middle of the list and drink it – too quickly – and then to think – it’ll look bad if he turns up and I’m sitting with an empty glass – and order another. Long enough to become angry. To wonder where the fuck he was and why he hadn’t told me he’d been held up. To think about leaving and then to remember that, if I did, they’d expect me to pay for the wine.

  He was twenty minutes late in the end, but he walked in like someone who was right on time, giving his overcoat to the woman, having a joke with her, both of them laughing, no rush to get to the table.

  When I didn’t stand up, he squeezed my shoulder and sat.

  Sorry I’m late – he said. – I was on a call with a client in New York. He’s needy. I couldn’t get away.

  It’s fine.

  Then, remembering I’d meant to be arch – but didn’t you say you’re kind of important?

  Did I? – he said. – That doesn’t sound like something I’d say.

  I think that was the subtext.

  A slightly bemused smile, and there was a pause. It went on a bit too long, and I drank my wine to hide my face.

  So – he said. – I take it you’ve been here a while?

  I went to a Catholic school. Inbuilt sense of guilt. I’m incapable of being late.

  What the hell was I talking about? He was looking at me like I was a bizarre performance art piece, strangely entertaining, but hard to say what it was meant to be about.

  It’s a rehearsal ethic thing as well – I said, trying to add something that made a bit more sense. – If you’re not there when the director wants to start, you won’t get hired again.

  So you were being serious?

  Serious? About what?

  About the opera. You said you were an opera singer.

  Of course I was being serious. What, you thought I was lying?

  No, not lying – he said. – It surprised me, that’s all. You don’t look much like an opera singer to me.

  What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?

  Everything I said was coming out wrong, every intonation flat and off, like an automated message. He laughed.

  Wow – he said. – I don’t know. Just that you look quite young, I guess.

  I’m twenty-four.

  Well, yeah. Isn’t that young to be a singer? I knew someone who sang opera for a bit, till she had kids. She trained for years, I think. But maybe she wasn’t very good.

  I’m still training too. I’m a student.

  Oh, I see – he said. – So you didn’t mean professionally.

  My body tensed with defensiveness, as though he’d pushed me.

  Well, I guess it all depends on what you mean by professionally – I said. – I sing in front of audiences. Sometimes I get paid, sometimes I don’t, because what artist doesn’t love working for free for exposure, after all. So yeah, maybe I don’t fit your exacting definition.

  I was trying to match the sort of person I remembered him being, trying to be cold, dry in the way Laurie could be, but he just looked confused. He wasn’t that person anymore, and it threw me, like when you think there’ll be another step at the top of the stairs in the dark. You stumble. You feel the world lurch.

  I don’t remember you being this aggressive – he said. – Last time, I mean. Maybe I caught you on a good day. But anyway, you’re right. I have no imagination.

  I couldn’t think of anything clever to say to that, and then the waiter came over to take our order. He was flirty with Max, teasing him about keeping me waiting, and Max was going along with it in that indulgent, we-both-know-I’m-humouring-you sort of way. I dug the spike of my heel into the fleshy bit on the top of my other foot. Get a hold of yourself. Stop being a bitch. He doesn’t like it.

  When the waiter had gone, Max, casually, as though we’d only just sat down, asked if I’d been to New York. No, I said, I’d never really been anywhere. He told me he used to live there, still went quite a bit for work.

  It’s a bizarre place – he said. – You really can do whatever you want. Whenever you want to, I mean. It’s a bit like what you think being grown up will be like when you’re a kid, and then you grow up. Find it’s much more boring. There was this one time, February—

  The waiter brought a bottle of wine, a fresh glass for me, topped us both up. I stayed quiet and listened, because that seemed safest.

  A group of us were out after work – he said – and talk turned to summer. Everyone got nostalgic, and this one guy there, he said he knew of a rooftop bar. Heaters. The grill on all year round. So it was 2 a.m., but we all got a cab there, and suddenly it was summer. Exactly like a summer night, the smell of meat in the air and the heat on your face.

  It’s funny – he said. – You can always tell who’s from New York and who’s visiting, because the visitors all shuffle round looking upwards. They’re like kids trying to
find their parents in a crowd. I was always a bit like that. Never got over them, the buildings, even though I was there for years.

  Would you live there again?

  I don’t think so. I had the chance to quite recently, actually. Turned it down. I grew up in the country. I don’t want to be in a city forever.

  He started telling me a story – when he’d first moved to London, days pre-Google Maps, how he’d tried to walk from Edgware Road to Edgware, thinking they must be close – and I began to relax. I realised this wasn’t some sort of test. He wasn’t trying to catch me out, trip me up. He was trying to entertain me. He was even, I thought, trying to impress me, and then the waiter brought our food and topped up our glasses, and I felt very happy suddenly. I allowed this new version of him to be superimposed on the last, so that this became all he was.

  When did you move to London? – he asked.

  Not long ago. Summer. I started at the Conservatory in September.

  How are you finding it here?

  Yeah, it’s ok.

  Ok? Where are you living?

  With this couple, the Ps. They rent out the rooms in their attic. Laurie’s there too. You remember Laurie? You met her last time.

  The waitress?

  She’s a writer, actually. Mainly theatre, she’s had a couple of short plays put on, and she’s writing a novel now. But, yeah, that’s how we know each other. We met at the Ps’. She broke up with this guy she’d been living with for years. Just before summer. So she moved there same time as me.

  So you girls live in a literal artist’s garret? – he said. – How romantic.

  He was smiling and, without knowing why, I found myself describing the house to him. All the details I’d thought would repel him.

  Well – I said. – Romantic’s one word for it. So, they have this old cat with sticky fur who keeps peeing in my shoes. And all the cupboards are full of old cards. You know, like birthday cards, Christmas cards, congratulations-on-your-new-baby cards, dating all the way back to the seventies. And me and Laurie’s rooms were storage before we arrived. They didn’t really bother to clear them, just moved the stuff onto the landing, so it’s full of boxes. Abandoned kitchen utensils. Ripped bedding. Rolled-up rugs. A rocking horse. We tried to move them once, kept tripping over them in the dark, but underneath the first box we picked up was a pile of writhing moths. I mean, a literal pile. You could pick them up in fistfuls.

  He laughed, and that made me feel good.

  What are they like? – he asked. – The Ps.

  What are they like? Well, they sleep on a mattress on the floor. I went into their room once when they were out. It’s like a crack den – stained sheets, bottles of rum on the floor – but she’s got a wardrobe full of beautiful clothes, Mrs P. Silk dresses, cardigans from agnès b. I don’t know when she ever would have worn them, but I guess they must have money. The house is pretty big too, but we’re not allowed in most of it. They don’t exactly go out of their way to make us feel at home. Don’t like us using the kitchen much. And they’ve told us not to fill the bath higher than a certain point. After we’ve used it, Mr P creeps in there and checks where we filled it to, and if he thinks it’s too high, he comes up and shouts at us when we’re still in our towels. Oh, and they keep all the windows shut all the time. They’re sealed round the sides with masking tape. I think they believe in poisonous spores or something.

  Another bottle of wine appeared. I hadn’t noticed him ordering it. He’d stopped laughing now, and he looked at me, suddenly serious.

  But how do you feel about it? – he said.

  What do you mean?

  Well, it sounds awful. I mean, how do you feel about having to live like that?

  And he seemed to expect so completely the truth that, barely stopping to think, I found myself handing it over. I told him about Mrs P. How she would talk at me for hours, worrying away at disparate strands of conversation – her children, her bank’s reduced opening hours, the school up the road and how rough it was these days, her health problems, and how the schedule on Radio 4 kept changing for the worse. How I’d stand there, watching the minutes tick by, feeling like she was collecting up time, pouring it into a hole she’d dug in the garden. I told him about the evenings with Laurie. The hours spent Googling, scrolling through endless images of rooms to rent, but how nowhere we could ever find was even close to as cheap as the Ps’. I told him about the Mitcham Road. How every time I breathed, I imagined it all layering up in my lungs like sand at the bottom of a test tube. How all the streets off it were the same as ours, the houses going on and on as far as you could see, all exactly the same. You walked down them, and you could see in through windows, and there were beds everywhere. Beds in the front rooms. Beds by windows which opened right out onto the street, so that you could look in and see people lying there in their pants. Beds barely concealed by grubby net curtains. Beds in basements with bars across the glass. How I hated it. I told him how I hated it. All those beds. All those people. Thinking how little space a person could take up. It made me want to scream.

  So what is it you want then? – he said.

  What is it I want?

  Yes. Why are you doing it? What’s the game plan?

  Oh, I don’t know – I said. – I guess I’d like to cobble together some sort of little career eventually.

  I don’t believe you – he said.

  What do you mean, you don’t believe me?

  I mean, I think you’re being disingenuous. Do you know what I think?

  No. Please. Enlighten me.

  I don’t think you’d settle for a little career, Anna. You don’t strike me as that sort of person. You’ve got drive, I can tell. You shouldn’t do it down.

  Then he started asking me questions and, while I talked, he sat, unmoving, and listened to my answers. He wasn’t the sort of man who needed to nod to show he understood. His energy was narrow, focused on me, like he was shining a light in my eyes, and I felt that same intense concentration of performance – only this space matters now and nothing else.

  He asked me how I’d got into opera, and I said that, well, singing was natural, wasn’t it? Everyone sings. All children sing, before they get self-conscious. I used to sing to myself after the lights had gone out at night, try to remember the words of songs I knew. I was quite old before I started learning properly, before I thought what I’d do with it, but once I did it seemed obvious. Because a vocation is a fact. It’s something you know to be true about yourself, like your name or the colour of your hair, even when you’re sure of nothing else. He asked how I was paying for it all, all the training, it must be expensive, and I said that it was, but my fees were paid – scholarship – and rent was cheap. I did things here and there for cash, some choir work, the jazz – Laurie’d found me the job, she’d been waitressing at the hotel bar for years – that paid ok. I muddled along. But it could be lonely, I said. It could be lonely. No one was here to make friends. The other singers, they were assessing you all the time. Is she better than me or worse than me? Threat or not threat?

  And what about money? – he said.

  What about it?

  Do you ever earn any, I mean? This all sounds like quite some process to go through to never get paid.

  Oh, but an artist doesn’t do it for money – I said. – She does it for love.

  That sounds sustainable.

  The waiter had taken our plates away, though I don’t think I’d eaten much. I got up to find the bathroom. The restaurant floor was vast, a maze of tables and chairs, dark panelled walls, soft lighting.

  The bathroom, madam? – a waiter intercepted.

  He pointed to a door of dark wood, unmarked.

  Through there.

  I felt dizzy, but it wasn’t unpleasant. The world seemed softer, more welcoming. The dizziness smoothed the sharp edges, and I had that feeling you always get after a few glasses of wine – like nothing else matters, it doesn’t matter about tomorrow, there’s always tonight. I washe
d my hands and looked at myself in the mirror and I thought my face looked softer too, and my eyes were black and bottomless.

  When I got back to the restaurant, I found he’d paid the bill. I said thanks, and he said thanks for coming, and we were helped into our coats.

  Out on the street, we stood close together and he looked down at me and smiled. This had all been an elaborate anecdote and he was about to tell me the punchline. It was a predictable one, I already knew how it would end, but I’d pretend to be surprised, because I knew he’d like that better.

  But he just said – are you heading to the Tube? It’s quite a nice night. I can show you a more scenic route if you like.

  Sure – I said.

  We turned down a backstreet. It was quiet out and empty. The street was narrow and, when you looked up, the buildings seemed to go on forever, all glass and concrete, and when you looked down the road there were more and more of them, bisecting the sky at odd angles, like a pop-up book not fully opened, so that all the bits of cardboard overlapped. He walked a little bit away from me, his hands in his pockets. He was treating me suddenly like I was a distant relative visiting London, pointing out street names, saying they were like a fossil record, what it used to be like round there.

  Angel Court – he said. – That was the sign of the stationers. There’s still an angel on a building somewhere.

  He couldn’t find it, though, and I was half listening to him, half feeling like I’d just auditioned with my most difficult aria – not a note-perfect performance, perhaps, but it had been emotionally true – and the panel had smiled and said – no thanks. Who’s next?

  I said – so do you live round here then?

  About five minutes that way.

  What sort of building is it? One of the new ones?

  A few years old. One of the towers.

  I didn’t know anyone actually lived here. I thought they were all owned by Russian oligarchs.

  Well, they mainly are. When you look up at my building at night, most of the lights are off.