The Kiss (18 page)

‘W
ait, Fatima. WAIT!’

I gallop through the double doors and wallop straight into Studs.

‘Watch where you’re going, bitch,’ says Studs, startled, arms up in a defensive position as I bounce him against the bins. I am pleased to see he has a nasty split lip that is only just beginning to heal. Offering a hasty finger in non-apology, I keep running.

‘For God’s sake WAIT FOR ME!’

Fatima stands on the road ahead, arms folded. I fall into step with her, my little legs pumping a bit harder than her great long ones as we negotiate the cracks and tilts in the pavement. A car squeals by, driven by a couple of lads looking way younger than seventeen. I imagine Studs at the wheel with Jem beside him, the crump of metal on man and dog, and shiver.

‘Shouldn’t you call Val?’ I ask as we trot. ‘Remind her you’re late because of the show that will make the Gaslight a fortune this weekend?’

‘She need me,’ Fatima says matter-of-factly. ‘I bring in the customers.’ She looks at me sideways. ‘Why do you do this with the zombies and the show? You don’t like these shows. There are things here that I don’t understand.’

I decide to be honest. ‘Because I’m up to my ears in love with Jem,’ I admit. ‘And I’ve realized it’s no good telling someone you love who thinks you’ve lied that you haven’t lied, because they think you’re lying.
Doing
is different. I have
done
something here. Something he can be a part of. It’s mental, but it appeals to my control freakery on pretty much every level.’

I’m hoping for Fatima’s approval. I don’t get it.

‘Don’t do this for him,’ she says.

‘What, like he’s any worse than all the other guys I’ve organized zombie shows for?’ I joke, feeling a prickle of unease.

‘He has a girlfriend,
chérie
. I see her in the kitchen at the Gaslight.’

I trip over a bit of pavement, banging my shin on the kerb. ‘W . . . what?’ I stammer, shocked almost beyond speech. ‘Who?’

‘I don’t see her face but she is tall, it is all that I know.’

Tall would be right, I think, feeling dazed. No cricked necks or bent knees required, unlike with little flea me. The pain is red-hot, and not just on my shin.

‘Men are simple,’ Fatima reminds me, and pats my hand.

Everything is blowing around me like dust. Smashed and irretrievable, a priceless vase in a food processor. I thought I had developed a girlfriend-o-meter after Dave, but the gauge has failed me just when I needed it most. Maybe Jem started dating this girl after we broke up, or maybe he’s been dating her all along. However you look at it, I am the stupidest girl in the universe.

I walk beside Fatima in silent hell, torturing myself as far as the High Street.

‘I won’t come to the Gaslight tonight.’ My voice sounds rusty when I finally use it again, the squeal of a key in a badly oiled lock. ‘I have a load of college work that won’t do itself.’

‘If I see this tall girlfriend in the bar I will pour beer on to her,’ Fatima promises. She kisses me on both cheeks and sways across the road towards the theatre. A lone car drifts sideways, a slack-jawed man at the wheel, then rights itself just before striking the traffic island in the middle.

It’s amazing how soothing it can be, learning Newton’s laws of motion by heart. And Lenz’s law, and Kirchoff’s. And every other law of physics ever proved. Their worlds are ordered and devoid of pain.

‘Did you know,’ I say, the minute Fatima comes through my bedroom door at ten past midnight, ‘that at any junction in a circuit, the sum of currents arriving at the junction is
exactly
the same as the sum of currents leaving the junction?’

‘She don’t come in the bar tonight,’ Fatima says.

I lift up a finger. ‘In other words,
charge is conserved
. If this didn’t happen, you’d either get a massive build-up of electrons at a junction in a circuit or you’d be creating charge from nowhere.
Nowhere
. Of course, it makes perfect sense. All science makes perfect sense.’

‘I said—’

I shut my Physics book with a bang. ‘I heard. Did the others reach the bar with their zombie faces on?’

Fatima kicks off her shoes. ‘They look so terrible that some girls do screams. Then it was like rock stars, you know? Everyone love them, talk to them. The old ladies too. Your friend Oz can sell all the tickets, maybe two times if he want to cheat.’

The word ‘cheat’ makes me think of Dave. I toy with calling him up, to check whether the shadowy beings behind his pathetic fraud attempt have done terrible things to him. Then I remember I don’t have his number any more.

‘I already buy your ticket before they all sell,’ Fatima adds. ‘I will be working but my tips tonight buy you a very good seat.’

‘Cheers,’ I say, trying to smile. ‘You’re back early, did you hitch a ride?’

‘With Val. They live not so far from here.’

‘And Jem was . . .?’

‘Somewhere else.’

Meeting the tall girl. Kissing the tall girl. Going somewhere private with the tall girl. I haul myself back from the edge of paralysis. ‘I hope Maria and Sam had a massive slanging match.’

‘Slanging, no. But Maria spend a long time in the bathroom tonight. I don’t think she like her green face
so much.’

‘And I hope Tab was chatting up Sam in Maria’s absence?’

‘If you are so interested to know everything, you must come next time,’ says Fatima, wagging her finger at me. ‘Sam and Tabitha, they are so
English
.’ She unclips her back, wriggles a bit and pulls a huge black lacy bra out of her sleeve like a transparent rabbit. ‘They skip around each other like lambs. I want to say to them, “Go and have the sex, little lambs.” But no. Instead it is “Do you want . . .” “Is it OK if . . .” This look super strange when they are zombies. So polite. “Could possibly I drain your blood and eat your brains?” “By all means. Be my gusset.”’

Fatima climbs out of the rest of her clothes and wanders in supremely unconcerned nakedness into the unlocked yet occupied bathroom.

‘Bloody hell!’ Dad yowls.

I speed to the bathroom with a blanket I’ve snatched off my bed. Dad is leaning against the wall behind the bog, shielding his eyes and hyperventilating as Fatima makes a vague attempt to cover herself with the blanket.

‘Sorry, Dad,’ I choke, tugging her back to my bedroom. ‘Sorry . . .’

‘
Desolée
,’ Fatima adds helpfully.

I slam the bedroom door behind us and wipe the tears from my eyes. ‘Fatima, you . . . Don’t you have a dressing gown or PJs or something?’

‘He look very surprised,’ Fatima says.

Which sets me off again. God it’s good to laugh, even in such heinous circumstances. For a while tonight, I wondered if I’d ever laugh again.

T
he
What an Ado About Zombies!
publicity campaign proves so successful that, come four o’clock on the Friday of the dress rehearsal, there is a queue up the Gaslight steps full of college kids celebrating the start of half-term, looking forward to the Gaslight’s zeitgeist brand of zombie
craic
and hoping to sneak a preview of the show. Several are wearing masks, fangs and flashing horns.

Oz has been quick to capitalize.

‘We’re using raffle tickets,’ he says, waving a fat book of blue ticket stubs as Tabby, Fatima and I mount the crowded steps for Tab’s make-up call. ‘A fiver for a sneak preview. Give the crowd what they want, I say. Checks out with the boss.’

He thumbs at the auditorium doors, where two hideous creatures in shredded security-guard uniforms are talking to an enthusiastic gaggle of early comers. I look more closely. The creatures are Patricia and Eunice, dressed as zombie Night Watchmen Dogberry and Verges. Patricia’s double-breasted jacket magnifies the size of her stomach to epic proportions, and she adjusts her hat as we approach.

‘We’ve got an audience already, isn’t that tremendous?’ she says with a ghastly, bloody grin. ‘We’ll be stopping and starting like old motorbikes as we and the band get used to each other, but no one seems to care. Ella’s just doing Gladys, as it were. You’re next on her list, Tabitha. I’m sorry, my darling,’ she adds to a girl in devil deelyboppers sidling up to the auditorium doors, ‘but no one’s going in until seven-fifteen. And if anyone tries, I’ll pull their throats out the way they taught me in zombie school.’

‘The band’s doing a warm-up in the auditorium,’ Eunice tells us as we hear the strain of familiar tunes wafting through the doors. She looks ludicrously chic in her uniform and face paint. ‘Go and have a listen. It’s super.’

Fatima wanders off to the bar to see if she can blag an extra hour’s work, trailing a few groupies behind her. Tab shoves me through the doors of the auditorium, talking at a hundred miles an hour.

‘It was such a good night last night, Lilah, seriously, I totally wish you’d been there, Maria was a total cow to Sam, I think even Sam was quite shocked at the way she was acting, and he was incredibly sweet to me and bought me a Coke and we even managed to laugh about the summer music thing we did when we first, you know, and it was fine, it was actually OK . . .’

Go and have the sex, little lambs
. I hear Fatima in my head, loud and clear.

‘Jem has a girlfriend,’ I say. ‘A tall one.’

The sound of a violin from the Slaughterhouse Seven soars about the auditorium roof with perfect timing.

‘No,’ Tabby says, aghast.

‘Fatima saw her in the kitchen on Wednesday night,’ I say sadly. ‘He’s supposed to realize I did this to give him his first proper gig, and then he’s supposed to apologize for being an arse, and THEN he’s supposed to kiss me to death in blind gratitude and love. But I’ve done it for nothing.’

‘Hardly that, babes,’ Tab protests. ‘Every single member of the cast owes you big time. Don’t you realize?’ She waves at the set, the green lighting scheme, the band percussionists in vampire masks. ‘What you’ve done is immense. Musical theatre history. You are a proper legend, Delilah. Not a Greek one this time; a real one. A modern one.’

I feel quite teary at the warmth in her voice. ‘But you aren’t with Sam,’ I say miserably. ‘I’m not with Jem. Nothing’s worked out like it’s supposed to.’

‘It’s gone way beyond that, Delilah,’ Tab tells me.

She pushes me past the Slaughterhouse Seven in their pit and through a rubber-sealed door marked ‘backstage’.
A sudden wall of chatter, laughter and music smashes into me.

The cast of
What an Ado About Zombies!
is getting ready for the dress rehearsal. We pass clothes rails of costumes, some of which I recognize for certain painful reasons. A skull-patterned rucksack spilling hairspray (Gladys, I suspect), old lady support shoes (Gladys again), Mr Metal loudly singing ‘Love Eternal’ as he applies a disfiguring latex scar to Sam’s cheek, an abandoned iPod beside a library book on wild flowers on a greasy make-up counter. I do a double-take at Warren, halfway through his make-over. With his green-blue zombie face on, he looks almost fanciable.

‘You’ve thrown me in a room with people born in the second world war,’
says Tab, raising her voice above the riot. ‘Looking hot, Gladys.’

Gladys waves from beneath Ella’s paintbrush.

‘You have made a death-metalhead embrace musical theatre,’ Tab goes on as Mr Metal sings a bit louder on the ‘Love Eternal’ chorus. ‘You have allowed a Monster Munch love story to unfold.’

‘Pickled onion flavour,’ says Henry, halfway into his outfit, and Rich smiles fondly.

‘You’ve introduced me to a scary girl who isn’t scary any more.’

‘I’m still scary,’ says Ella, offended. She looks wired and super-jumpy. ‘You’re done, Glad. Get your backside in my chair, Tabitha, or you’ll go from Hero to zero in less time than it takes me to blink.’

‘And that doesn’t even
touch
on how I will shortly be singing a lead role in a proper theatre covered in peeling flesh before the professional gaze and extensive note-taking of agency scouts, thanks entirely to you,’ Tab says, settling obediently into the seat Gladys has vacated. She sweeps her hands around the room, bringing my attention to every single thing and person in the chaotic but purposeful space. ‘Other things maybe didn’t work out like we thought. But tell me again that
it’s all been for nothing
.’

In a back corner of the room, Jem is finishing off the masterpiece that is Dorcas’s fleshless, putrid jaw bone. His black hair hangs in his eyes and he has a smear of green paint on one cheek. He hasn’t seen me come in. Or maybe he has, and is choosing to ignore me. I feel insanely jealous of Dorcas.

‘Don’t lose faith,’ Tab says, catching my hopeless glance in his direction. ‘You said that to me once, about Sam. Your words have got me this far. Try applying them to yourself.’

‘And remember what they say in undead musical theatre,’ Ella adds, wiping her brushes with trembling fingers. ‘It’s not over till the zombie lady’s head drops off. I badly need a smoke.’

I realize what’s missing back here: the heavy haze of hash. No wonder Ella is stressed.

‘How are we getting on, darlings?’ says Patricia, striding into the room. ‘Some big bouncer chap just turned up. Friend of Oz, summoned on red alert. I’ve put him on the auditorium doors. If I were twenty years younger . . .’

‘He’d be a foetus,’ says Eunice.

‘I wish I knew more about this girlfriend Jem’s got,’ I mutter as the rest of the room bellows with amusement. ‘You know, whether she’d been around for ages or just . . . since me.’

‘Jem hasn’t got a girlfriend,’ says Ella, applying bluish paint to Tabby’s face in swift, sure strokes.

‘Apparently he has,’ Tab says. ‘And she’s tall. Fatima saw him with her.’

Ella looks slyly amused. Her eyes flicker up and down my petite frame. ‘Got bored of doing it on a stepladder,
did he?’

‘Ella!’ Tab protests.

‘I’m just
saying
!’ Ella grins. ‘Stop moving. You’re going to look like something from the meat counter in Sainsbury’s, and not in a good way.’

Maybe Jem has taken the tall girl to our wardrobe. Perfect spot, perfect privacy. Comfy furs.

‘Break a leg or whatever,’ I say, getting up abruptly.

‘Delilah—’

‘Tabitha, I said
stay flipping still
!’ Ella hisses.

I climb over Gladys’s rucksack and through the rail of costumes that smell of memories, barge out of the stage door and back through the auditorium. The gentle waltzing sounds of the band working through ‘Love Eternal’ make me walk faster. Mum is on the stage, singing and dancing and waving two fingers at me. I have to get out of here before I break down like an old car on the sticky carpet.

‘Everything all right, Delilah?’

I hold up one hand wordlessly at Kev on the auditorium doors and keep walking through the lobby, through the glass doors and down the big steps outside. The cheerfully dressed queue has grown, and is almost winding back to the High Street itself. I want to tell them all that life is a goatskin of steaming camel urine and the sooner they take off their devil horns the happier everyone will be.

This is
all
Aphrodite’s fault.