Selected Stories

In the late afternoon there was the funeral scene: the clergyman’s words ringing out, the mourners standing round a chalked rectangle on the floor, the old woman who was dead completing the Daily Telegraph crossword. When the burial was over the boy with the fuzzy hair was given the task of showing Bea and Mr Hance how to play marbles.

‘All right then, Bea?’ Andi asked a few times, and Bea said she was. It was probably not being tall, she thought, that gave Andi the heavy look she had heard her complaining about earlier. She was on a slimming course, she’d said, but it didn’t seem to be doing any good. Bea liked her best of all the people in the drill-hall.

‘From the top one more time,’ Roland called out when Bea thought the rehearsing must surely be over, and they went through the whole script again. She hadn’t shared her mother’s pleasure in the day. She hadn’t known what to expect, any more than she’d known what to expect at the audition. When the script had come in Iris said that the only disappointment was that Bea didn’t ever get to speak. She had remarked as much to Ann-Marie while the funeral scene was going on, mouthing it so as not to interrupt. And Ann-Marie, who was pussy-faced, Bea thought, but very pretty, waited until the funeral scene was over to say that Bea’s part was all the more telling for being silent. Bea had been glad she didn’t have to say anything, but she wondered now if it might perhaps be less boring if she had to say just a little.

‘How’s it going, Beasie?’

Dickie’s brown jacket needed a stitch at the pocket that was nearer to her, on a level with her eyes when she looked. It needed more of a stitch than it had two Sundays ago, which was the last time she’d seen it. He was incapable of attending to his clothes, Iris said.

‘OK,’ Bea said. Three weeks had passed since the first day in the drill-hall and the drill-hall had long ago been left behind. They’d moved into the set at the studios, and there’d been days of filming on location.

‘You tell Iris what I said that time, Beasie? You say I said well done?’

She nodded, cold on the street where they were walking even though it was August. She dug her hands into the pockets of the coat Iris had said to take in case it rained. The Sunday before last she’d said she’d told Iris.

‘I told her,’ she said again.

He hadn’t seen Iris today. He hadn’t seen her the last Sunday either. He’d rung the bell and Bea had called down on the intercom and he’d waited for her, the same both times.

‘All these years,’ he said on the street, ‘The Stage

’s been her Bible.’

‘Yes.’

And in the end it was The Stage that came up trumps. Dickie went on talking about that, and Bea imagined her mother inviting him in. One Sunday or another, she said to herself, sooner or later. ‘We must tell Dickie,’ Iris had kept saying during the three weeks that had passed – about Ann-Marie being half asleep in the early morning and letting the piles of newspapers she’d just opened fall off the counter, and how she put back the different sections any old how; about Mr Hance and the marbles; about the caged canary still singing when the old woman lay dead.

‘Doesn’t worry you, any of that stuff?’ Dickie had said in the Wild Park when she’d shown him in the script where the murder was. ‘If it worries you, you say, old girl.’

She never would. She didn’t tell Iris when she dreamed about the dog on the garbage tip, the microbes you could see moving through its entrails in the film sequence. In the viewing-room, with the red light showing outside, she had sat with the others, not knowing what it was the police were looking for on the tip, watching while the camera crept slowly over the entrails of the dog. She didn’t know why the old woman kept rapping with her stick on the window, why she kept sitting there and then rapping again. ‘She’s a peeper,’ was all Mr Hance said in the script, and in the long waits when Bea wasn’t involved the confusion made the boredom worse.

‘What’s that Hance like?’ Dickie asked.

‘All right.’ Bea didn’t say she didn’t like him. She said it was a joke that he was always called Mr Hance. Extra pages had gone into his script, yellow pages at first, the second batch pink. She hadn’t been given any herself, but she could see the colours showing at the edges when he sat beside her in the coach, on the way to the studios or the locations. He always sat beside her. Getting to know her, Iris said.

‘Iris think he’s good?’ Dickie asked.

‘Oh, yes.’