Stage Mum (32 page)

She was, in any case, busy looking forward to the parties: the backstage team one, which, she was driven to a fever pitch of excitement to report, would involve not only a chocolate fountain, but also strawberries! And
marshmallows
!!! Then there would be the big party at Emily Lane’s house and, on her last night, a pre-show dinner with me and all her friends in Mittens at Piccolino’s, which Jack’s mum Sally had organised. Meanwhile, I was busy. As well as shopping with Tracy that week, I had several meetings to attend, my first ever video edit to supervise and twenty novels to read and write about over the next four weeks. In the middle of a manic week, during which I was running around Tescos sweeping food into my trolley whilst simultaneously reading a novel about middle-class
women
trying to make sense of their lives whilst out shopping, a thought struck me rigid. End of run. Cards. Presents. What would we be expected to give and to whom? I rang Helen, my font of wisdom on such matters, and a couple of the others. Yes. There would be cards. And pressies. Yikes. That afternoon, I sat Dora down. Together we compiled a list of everyone she wanted to give cards and pressies to. We decided that, given the state of my bank account, which, after six months of
The Sound of Music
, was ailing like a wan Victorian maid, and the fact that I didn’t know most of the people concerned well enough to know what they’d really like, she would make the presents for the grown-ups, and we’d buy gifts for the children.

On Saturday, when I dropped Dora off at the Palladium, I felt sad. She wasn’t ready for it all to stop yet, and nor was I. My inner stage mother, I knew, would never be ready, but I had hoped that the rest of me would have had enough by now. Laurie certainly had. One or two of the other mums whose kids were finishing on the Monday were watching the show that night as well, but I resisted the temptation, travelled home on the tube, reading one of my work books, and turned my attention to cards and presents. This was my one and only shopping opportunity. I bought chocolates for the boys and jewellery and pretty little handbags for the girls on the two teams – Mittens and Kettles – that Dora had done all but a few of her shows and rehearsals with, and also for the other Gretls. I bought packs of cards for her to write – trying to make those as well would be more than we could manage.

What with the party on Sunday, and a Monday packed with work commitments, there was no way we could have all the grown-ups’ pressies ready for Dora’s final evening. But as we were planning to come and watch the other teams’ final nights, we could drop the gifts and cards off then, which took some of the pressure off. In the end, our creative activities session stretched over the following week, took up the whole of our front room and left both of us looking
preternaturally
pale due to excessive exposure to powdered plaster. I mixed water into the plaster and poured the resulting gloop into fridge-magnet and mirror-frame moulds, while Dora painted and glittered, got frustrated waiting for the plaster to dry and made an impressive amount of mess. In total we produced four hand-painted cups, to which we added chocolate Easter eggs; one hand-painted suncatcher; three hand-cast and hand-decorated mirrors and twelve bejewelled fridge magnets. It doesn’t sound that much when it’s all compressed into one sentence, but it felt like a cottage industry. I was exhausted and hoped the plaster dust wasn’t too carcinogenic.

Dora loved the chocolate fountain party. The children had decided weeks before that it was going to be a masquerade. At least the girls had. The boys weren’t quite so keen on the idea, but were outvoted four to two. One of Dora’s friends had given her a beautiful mask for her birthday – all black and gold glitter, with an entire mating display’s-worth of black, gold and brown feathers splayed on one side. She donned her fifties-style pink party frock and even pinker jacket, and clutched her mask so it hovered over her broad grin. I let her take my camera in to the theatre with her, and judging from the slightly out-of-focus photos, a great deal of chocolate was eaten. And smeared. I’ve no idea how the chaperones and dressers managed to get the six children clean enough to go back on stage for the evening performance. Anyway, Dora came out that night with an even bigger grin and a carrier bag of cards and small farewell gifts. Amongst these were a couple of little books for messages. Dora hadn’t been terribly organised about asking people to write goodbyes in her book: collecting autographs would have meant moving away from the chocolate fountain, and why would she want to do that? But the few messages she’d garnered were lovely, full of affection and generosity.

‘Was the party fun?’ I asked her in the car.

‘There was a chocolate fountain. And Jack was
sick
because he ate too much chocolate!’

‘What, really sick?’ I asked, finding it hard to imagine sensible, grown-up Jack making himself sick on chocolate.

‘Really!’ she said excitedly. ‘And Grace got chocolate
all round her face
!’

‘Did you eat lots of chocolate too?’

‘Some. I’m hungry. Where’s my chocolate croissant?’

‘I’ve got you this instead.’ I handed her a pain aux raisins. ‘I thought you might have had enough chocolate.’ This was a lie. The shop had sold out of pains au chocolat.

‘How were the shows?’ I asked.

‘Okay,’ she replied, concentrating on eating.

‘Only one more to go.’ As I hadn’t heard anything about the two following weekends, I assumed they’d managed to rejig the schedule without calling her back in. ‘Are you sad?’

‘I’ll be sad on Monday,’ she said, concentrating on her cake. ‘I don’t want any more. You eat it,’ and she thrust a paper bag full of crumbs and one small, curved crust through the gap in the seats. I ate it when we stopped at traffic lights. She closed her eyes. I’ll
be sad on Monday
, I thought.
I’m going to miss the show. I’m going to miss the people. I’m going to miss telling people that my daughter’s in the show. I’m going to have to deal with Dora missing being in the show
. I made myself think about the next day’s party. Must remember to buy the flatbread …

Sunday’s weather was pretty typical for mid-March in London. I walked round to our local twenty-four-hour supermarket to pick up the bread in the sunshine, then home again in the rain. While I was getting ready and chivvying the others along, Tracy rang to ask if we’d come earlier than we were intending. Dora decided not to wear a party dress this time, but to go ‘cool’, and put on a summer dress over jeans, finishing the outfit off with a denim jacket. I settled for black dress over black trousers that didn’t quite match, but knew that, happily, nobody would care enough about what I looked like to notice.

I shouted at everyone to get into the car. ‘Come on! We’ll be late! LAURIE! WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?’ Dora was ready by the door. Laurie wasn’t, and seemed, as usual, completely unconcerned that my stress levels were rising rapidly. There was no way, obviously, that we were going to be late. We were leaving very early. ‘THAT’S SO WE CAN HELP TRACY GET EVERYTHING READY!’ Why was that our job? ‘BECAUSE I OFFERED!’ Why did I offer? ‘BECAUSE I’M NICE?’ Why didn’t my niceness extend to him? ‘ARE YOU TRYING TO WIND ME UP?’ What made me think he needed to try?

‘Can I wait in the car?’ asked Dora helpfully.

We both went to wait in the car. I studied the route. I turned the engine on and then switched it off. I checked my make-up in the little mirror and wished I hadn’t: somehow, like my dress and trousers, the different parts of my face didn’t seem to quite match either. I turned the key again, and turned the car round to face the right way. ‘Are we going without Daddy?’ Dora asked.

‘Here he comes,’ I said.

Laurie double-locked the front door, walked slowly over to the car, opened the back door, slowly and carefully put a spare pair of shoes in the footwell and a precisely folded spare jumper on the back seat. Then he took off his jacket, folded it carefully, put it down next to the jumper and got into the passenger seat. ‘Hurry up,’ I hissed, scowling at him. ‘Do up your seatbelt.’ Then I realised that I’d forgotten to bring the bread, jumped out of the car, ran back to the house, opened the door, found it, then realised I’d forgotten a jacket, ran to the coat cupboard in the kitchen, dithered over which one to bring, grabbed one at random, double locked the front door, sprinted to the car and hung the jacket on the back of my seat, from where it fell crumpled on to the floor. I left it there and strapped myself in. Laurie, to his credit, said nothing and barely even smirked.

It was a quick and easy journey, and we arrived at Tracy’s house in plenty of time to help out. Tracy’s mum Janet, Pippa and Piers
were
already there, Pippa and Janet hard at work chopping things. Tracy set me to work preparing salad. There were four lasagnes – two meat, two veggie – already cooking and the same number of pizzas ready to go in once the lasagnes were cooked. Then there were drinks to prepare: we mixed massive jugs of something Christine’s mum, Wendy, suggested, called River Thames (Coke and orange juice), and a basic virgin colada – pineapple juice and coconut milk. Laurie got stuck in washing glasses and I started putting out crisps. ‘Keep the sweet things for later,’ said Tracy sensibly. The sweet things included twenty-four individual brown-paper-package-tied-up-with-string cakes, decorated with icing-sugar red roses, each with a delicately placed raindrop on it, that Connie had sent for the children.

The kids and their families started to arrive. Carol, Steve and Michael brought their karaoke machine. The younger children ran around shrieking, hugging each other and playing. The older kids helped themselves and each other to non-alcoholic cocktails, complete with paper umbrellas, hugged and chatted. The parents gossiped, drank, helped out in the kitchen and photographed and videoed the proceedings. All nineteen of the children, plus family members came – even those who’d originally thought they wouldn’t be able to make it. The karaoke machine proved a great hit. At the time, David Ian was working on the reality TV shows for
Grease
in both the US and UK. The soundtrack went on to the CD machine and all the kids who knew the songs sang, clustered around the microphone. Dora got the bug, and it wasn’t until Laurie and I took her to see
Hairspray
six months later and I downloaded the soundtrack that we were allowed to eject her
Grease
CD from the car stereo. I got slightly fed up of listening to it, but reflected that her
Grease
obsession had, at least, spared us the hell that is
High School Musical
… There was dancing. And a quick speech – David was away, but had left a letter for Tracy to read to the kids, talking about how hard they’d all worked and how well they’d done.

And then, suddenly, it was five o’clock and time to go home. After some tidying up and a lot of hugging, we left and drove home, and got there quickly enough for Dora to have an early night before her last show.

SO LONG, FAREWELL

BEFORE DORA WENT
to bed on Sunday night, we checked that she’d written all the cards for her friends performing the following evening and that we’d wrapped the presents. She was a bit uncertain about what to write, so we’d discussed a few alternatives:
I’ve loved working with you
,
good luck for the future
;
I’ll miss you
;
See you soon, I hope!
I had supervised closely. When she’d been doing the good luck cards, the spellings and sentiments had been completely straightforward. But goodbye messages felt more complex. And after the Mother’s Day card she’d given me the previous year, across which, in her best joined-up handwriting, she’d carefully formed the words ‘I Love you so much Mummy so I send you a speshil mesig. Your the beast,’ I thought with these cards I’d best keep an eye. We didn’t want to accidentally spoil any friendships or cause any unnecessary upset.

Laurie took her to school on Monday morning as I had to go to a meeting and interview some people on video. I dashed home later – via Marks and Spencer, where I bought a bunch of roses, bathed and changed and, having made sure that I had all the presents and cards for everyone performing that night, grabbed a suitably huge wodge of tissues, carefully dethorned the roses to ensure the flower-throwing experience didn’t go horribly wrong, and collected Dora from school slightly early. This was partly because it was a special night and I wanted her to have the chance to squeeze every last gram
of
enjoyment out of it, and partly because I wanted the chance to squeeze every last gram of enjoyment out of it. There was also a video edit to approve en route, supper to eat with all the other children performing that night and their families, and tickets for me, Laurie and my dad to collect from the box office.

We rushed home so Dora could change into other clothes and went straight into town. I asked her how she was feeling and she shrugged. I suspected that it didn’t feel like the end yet, that it wouldn’t until later that evening, when she was experiencing rather than anticipating it.

The editing took slightly longer than I had hoped, then we ran to the restaurant where we were meeting everyone else. A few of the others had already arrived and so we found places to sit – me at one end with some grown-ups, and Dora at the other end with her friends. We ordered quickly, as the kids didn’t have long before they had to be at the stage door. While we were waiting for the food, I decided to dash down and pick up the tickets. I could have waited until we took the children down to the stage door, but I was tense with worry. What if it was too late to pick them up and the box office thought I wasn’t coming and sold them to someone else? Anyway, there should be enough time between ordering and the food arriving to fit it in, and as Dora didn’t care whether I was there or not and there were plenty of responsible grown-ups around to keep an eye on her, off I went, dashing down Upper Regent Street, across Oxford Circus, into Argyll Street, into the box office, out of the box office, back across Oxford Circus, etc., back to my risotto, and a wave of embarrassment as it was Lynn’s birthday and almost everyone else had bought her a birthday present and I hadn’t (because I didn’t know it was her birthday) and because Adrianna was there (which I didn’t know she would be) and I hadn’t brought her present with me either.