Читать книгу When I Met You - Jemma Forte - Страница 11

This morning I woke up with bison breath and the dim recollection that I’d had a good night.

My head felt too heavy for my body, I was in pain and would have swapped my worldly goods for an aspirin. My bones ached and I had no idea how on earth I was going to get through the day. In short, I had a hangover. Still, if I heard from the wondrous Simon, it would have been worth it. So, I clambered out of bed and lurched towards the bathroom, comforting myself with the thought that this morning I’d be earning two hundred pounds for three hours’ work. Enough to buy me an entire week of travelling in South America, an incentive that propelled me into my clown costume.

Yes, clown costume. For when I’m not working at Roberto’s, despite the fact most of my peers are having children, I, Marianne Baker can be found on many a weekend dressed as Custard the Clown, entertaining them, complete with oversize shoes, red nose and curly blue wig. I also wear a stripy shirt, huge brown trousers held up with comedy braces and a green tailcoat, which has a big plastic gerbera in the buttonhole that can squirt water. Once I’m in full costume and have made up my face I’d love to tell you I start to embrace my role but, in all honesty, I never feel smaller or more stupid than I do when I’m in that ridiculous bloody outfit. I literally have to think of the money the entire time I’m in it.

Of course, when I made the decision to peddle myself as a children’s entertainer I could have taken the more attractive option of investing in a fairy or princess costume, but after a lot of research I realised this would limit my earning potential. Fairies are two a penny and no self-respecting boy would ever want a fairy anywhere near his party. So, investing in a unisex clown costume had seemed like the best option. Not taking into consideration my own ego.

Fully clowned up I sneaked through the house as quietly as I could in my silly shoes. They’re so big it’s like trying to walk in flippers. Mum and Martin had already warned me that they needed a lie in this morning as they were going out for Sheena and Dave’s wedding anniversary that night, so I knew they’d be annoyed if I woke them up.

Four-year-old Jack’s party was being held at his parents’ house – funnily enough he didn’t have his own pad yet – in posh Buckhurst Hill. It was due to start at eleven, so I was aiming to arrive at ten-fifteen for setting-up purposes. Thankfully, parents of small children always stipulate the time these parties have to end, which in today’s case was one o’clock. No one, it seems, is capable of dealing with armies of small children for more than a few hours at a time …

This last thought caused me to suffer a huge relapse during which I had to steady myself on the banister. ‘Armies of small children’ isn’t a prospect anyone should have to consider when suffering from a hangover. In that moment I decided the only way to cope with the day was to take each minute as it came. Bedtime was simply too far away.

As I tiptoed along the landing my brother, Pete, emerged stealthily from his bedroom.

My nerves were frayed from lack of sleep – and vodka – so I gasped loudly with a dramatic inhalation of breath, in the same heart-stopping way Mum does when I’m driving and she thinks I’m too close to another car. Only I never am.

‘You gave me a shock,’ I accused, when in fact the hysterical noise I’d made was far more shocking than anything.

Pete didn’t bat an eyelid. I don’t think his pulse works in the same way as other peoples. Neither did he react to the way I was dressed, which to be fair he’s seen many times before. Instead he merely skulked through to the bathroom, still in his pyjamas.

I haven’t really told you about Pete yet, have I? He’s my brother, well, my half-brother. My mum’s ‘precious prince’. I don’t mind Pete. He’s pretty easy company, made even more so by the fact that he hardly ever comes out of his room. He’s obsessed in a pretty unhealthy way with Elvis and spends the majority of his time listening to The King’s albums on full volume while playing Xbox. Pete’s a funny boy really. He lives in a world of his own. He’s nineteen and if I’m honest I don’t really know him very well at all.

After a life-saving cup of tea, piece of toast, couple of headache pills, pint of water and a Berocca I left the house. Fresh air was good and as I started piling bags of clowning equipment into mum’s Rover – or ‘Tina’ as she likes to call it, Mum has a habit of naming inanimate objects – I decided I might be OK today after all.

As I slammed the boot shut my phone beeped telling me I had a text. I had butterflies as I went to check it. Ridiculously I was hoping it might be from Simon, despite the fact it was far too early to expect to hear from him. Dating etiquette dictated that it would be at least a couple of days before I did. However, it was from him wishing me good luck with the shoot … He’d signed off with hope to see you soon sexy.

As I pulled away I grinned at myself in the mirror. A white face, black eyes and red nose beamed back at me. Thank Christ he couldn’t see me now.

The party was the usual version of hell on earth once it got going. I get paid a lot for being a clown, but I earn every penny of that money, let me tell you. Little Jack, who was actually exceedingly cute, was trembling with the excitement of it all when I arrived. He was four today and he and his merry band of twenty friends wanted to celebrate hard. It was down to me to show them how. Understandably, when a parent’s forked out so much money for an entertainer, they want their money’s worth. They want to be able to stand back, mainline white wine and let the person they’re paying deal with the hysteria.

Before the party began, while I was setting up in their conservatory style kitchen, Jack’s mum was busy cutting crusts off sandwiches so Jack’s dad took the opportunity to take lots of photographs of the birthday boy. At a certain point Jack grew bored of posing and his dad suddenly swung his excited son around in the air before giving him a giant bear hug. It was a touching scene and I experienced, not for the first time, a pang for the childhood I didn’t have. It wasn’t the party and fuss I yearned for when I felt like this. My mum certainly couldn’t have afforded to do big parties like this. Our treat was always to take a friend to McDonald’s for tea, which we loved. It was witnessing such a close family unit that made me sad, because for a few short years I know it’s what I had. I wish I could remember what it felt like to feel so complete. Growing up I missed my dad so much on special occasions, particularly on birthdays. I longed for him to be there. Always. And every year when I blew out my candles I wished he’d come back. I’d close my eyes and imagine him turning up, full of joy to see us and with an explanation that would make me understand why he’d left.

Still, it wasn’t to be, and gradually over the years I’d started to accept that I’d never know and that he obviously didn’t care.

Jack was a lucky boy.

Once the celebrations got going the noise was incredible. It always is. It’s like an inverse equation. The smaller the person, the more noise they create. My hangover was only made bearable by the fact that as I went through my clowning motions I kept remembering how gorgeous Simon was, and how into me he’d seemed. I couldn’t believe he’d already been in touch too. It was the boost I needed, so summoning up the energy from the bottom of my size fourteen clown shoes I supervised games, performed tricks and made lots of jokes about bottoms. This does the trick every time. Jack wet himself laughing. I mean actually wet himself laughing. Still, after a change of trousers, for Jack not me, just as I was beginning to run out of steam, the kids were sat down for twenty minutes on the floor, around a Spiderman plastic tablecloth where paper plates of sandwiches, sausages and carrot sticks were displayed. These were all largely ignored but, when the biscuits and cakes came out, it was like vultures descending as the children scrambled to consume their body weight in sugar. Once the white stuff had penetrated their veins, and they were one Haribo away from full-blown diabetes, the kids went crazy. With lunch over I knew I was on the home straight but that still didn’t stop me from praying hard for it all to be over soon. After they’ve eaten is always the point when the kids feel familiar enough with me to start climbing on me, kicking me and punching me in the face, all in the name of fun of course, while demanding complicated balloon puppets and more lavatorial humour. Today was no different.

Fortunately, the majority of kids at this particular party were pretty sweet and a couple even made me yearn to breed. A handful of others, however, had the opposite effect and made me want to perform an immediate hysterectomy on myself with no anaesthetic. The worst offender was a girl called Maisie. Maisie was, frankly, a little cow. This sounds strong I know, but I do not buy into the view that all children are delightful beings. They’re not. Some are, but others are most definitely hideous and will undoubtedly grow into mean-minded, horrid adults.

Anyway, the party was drawing to a close so I started to hand out treats and to squirt them with my plastic flower. Hilarious … But Maisie, the little charmer, kept wriggling round me so that she could delve into my bag herself and grab more sweets than she was really entitled to.

‘Can you put those back please, angel?’ I asked nicely between gritted teeth for about the twelfth time. By now I was really hanging in rags, my headache had returned and I was desperate to get into something more comfortable. This wouldn’t be hard. I was wearing a hot, heavy, itchy clown suit for goodness sake. I could have slipped into an eighteenth-century crinoline and it would have felt like leisure wear.

‘No,’ Maisie answered defiantly, looking deep into the bowels of my soul in the way that only the most brattish of children are capable of doing.

‘Please Maisie, otherwise there won’t be enough for all the other boys and girls.’

Unblinking, Maisie put her hand back into the bag and extracted yet another handful.

‘But I haven’t had any sweets yet,’ said another little girl, who’d been waiting patiently for ages and who was watching the scene in horror. This little girl was of the cherubic variety. She was small, cute and very polite.

‘I know. You’ve been waiting very nicely,’ I said. ‘So listen Maisie, you need to give some of those sweets to Georgia here, because she hasn’t had any and you’ve had loads.’

‘No,’ said Maisie.

‘Yes,’ I replied. My tone was icy. My patience was wearing thin and I was so weary that at this point I just needed her to do as I’d asked.

‘Please Maisie,’ begged Georgia rather pitifully, her blue eyes brimming with tears at the sheer injustice of the situation. At this rate I’d be crying with her soon. ‘Just let me have one.’

I looked at Maisie and nodded hard, indicating that she should do the right thing – though admittedly it’s hard to be taken seriously when dressed as a clown, unless someone suffers from a phobia of them, which a surprising amount of people do, then it’s easy – but Maisie ignored me and simply shoved nearly every single one of the stolen sweeties into her precocious gob. ‘Can’t have them now,’ she lisped meanly, syrupy dribble pouring out of the sides of her engorged cheeks.

At this point two things happened. Firstly Georgia burst into tears, and secondly I decided that I’d had enough. I was not going to let a four-year-old dictate to me, and I wasn’t going to let Georgia go home unhappy. So I tried to grapple the few sweets that were left in Maisie’s sticky mitts away from her, at which point she threw her head back and screamed so piercingly I honestly thought the conservatory-style kitchen we were standing in would shatter and that shards of glass would kill us all.

‘Blinking heck,’ said Jack’s mum, bounding over, looking all concerned. ‘Is she OK?’

‘Oh, she’s fine,’ I replied airily, but probably not that convincingly given that Maisie had turned a startling shade of purple and was punching me hard with her fists.

I tried to shake her off.

‘She can be a bit of a madam that one,’ admitted Jack’s mum. ‘Still, someone should be here to collect her soon. You’re doing a great job.’

‘Fantastic,’ I said, trying to sound jolly, which was difficult. Maisie’s punches were surprisingly painful. Lots of parents were starting to trickle in by this point though so the hostess left me to it and went to start helping match children up with their shoes, coats and parents.

‘You’re not a nice clown,’ spat Maisie. ‘You’re an evil clown.’

Looking around to make sure no one was in earshot I bent down so that I was at eye level with Maisie and said in as menacing a tone as I could summon up, in order to really exude a ‘clown gone psycho’ sort of vibe, ‘And you’re a horrid, mean little girl, aren’t you?’

Immature I know, but worth it to see the stunned look on her face before she burst into tears. This time the tears were genuine.

With mums and dads arriving the timing wasn’t great. When it comes to bookings I pretty much depend on word of mouth so a child standing next to me wailing in distress isn’t exactly the best advertisement for my skills in entertaining. Then things suddenly took a dramatic turn for the worse, at which point Maisie’s histrionics became the least of my worries. For headed my way was someone who looked scarily identical to Simon.

What the hell?

The world seemed to tip on its head as my scrambled brain searched desperately for an explanation of any kind that might explain his presence. Maybe he had a twin? Or a clone? Maybe I was so dehydrated I was hallucinating? Swiftly however, I came to the horrific realisation that none of these things were true at all and that, of course, it was definitely him. Shortly after this revelation it also dawned upon me that I was dressed as a clown, and that I’d told him I was working on a glamorous advert today. Him seeing me dressed as Custard the freaking Clown was never the plan and what the hell was he even doing here? Panic started bubbling upwards.

Mortification flooded through my system and if I’d been capable of running in my comedy shoes I would have seriously considered fleeing the building. As it was I was trapped, fenced in by a ring of small people, so I turned around, hoping to blend into the background as much as possible. Not easy in a tailcoat and blue curly wig. Plus Maisie was still bleating on, hell-bent on creating a scene, so in desperation I bent down and buried my red nose into my bag of tricks, hoping to look like a busy clown. One who was too busy to say goodbye to any of the children. A clown who just didn’t give a shit.

Then, confirming my worst fear, I heard someone who sounded identical to the Simon I’d been flirting with last night. ‘Maisie darling, what’s wrong sweetie?’

And she said back. ‘That clown said I was a nasty little girl.’

Mind racing, I wished sincerely that the ground would open up, or that a shovel would appear so I could at least start digging and give it a helping hand. Was Simon her uncle? Of all the flipping brats he could be related to.

‘That clown there?’ he said and at this point I felt a sort of calm, defeated acceptance of the situation. I also thought his question was stupid. How many other bloody clowns could he see?

‘Yes Daddy.’

Daddy?

Suddenly I was filled with a new, quite horrid, sense of enlightenment that superseded any of the embarrassment I was suffering from. That one word had changed everything. Slowly, I turned around and without making eye contact demanded to know, ‘Is she your daughter?’ As I asked, I surreptitiously pulled my wig down a bit to obscure my face. My red nose had started to pinch a while back, but now I was grateful for it.

‘Yes,’ replied an aggrieved-looking Simon, clutching the revolting Maisie to him protectively. Knowing that ‘Daddy’ couldn’t see, she stuck her tongue out at me. ‘And I think you owe her an apology,’ Simon continued, totally unaware that I was me. ‘She said you upset her.’

I was just about to make up some bullshit excuse before making my escape when my gaze was drawn to something else. Simon was wearing a gold band on his left hand, which he certainly hadn’t been wearing in the club. And that did it. Prior to seeing that ring I had still been grappling with explanations for everything. Simon was divorced but remained devoted to his hideous daughter. Simon had adopted Maisie as a single father because her natural parents had rejected her for being so vile – let’s face it, this was a possibility. And yet that band of gold told me that this was all utter rubbish and that I had been well and truly bullshitted. What was it with these men?

I was furious and simultaneously found myself actually wanting to be recognised, at which point I slowly slipped off my wig, pulled off my nose, stared hard and waited patiently for his pea brain to compute. Seconds later it started to happen. His face was a picture of horror as slowly the penny dropped.

‘… Marianne?’ he eventually stuttered, his face growing almost as pale as my white one.

‘Yes,’ I answered defiantly, painted face held high.

‘What are you … doing here?’

‘What does it look like I’m …’ I swallowed down the ‘f’ word. ‘What does it look like I’m doing here? Entertaining your daughter and her friends is what I’m doing here,’ I hissed, my voice livid.

‘Right, well nice to see you again,’ he lied, looking longingly towards the exit.

‘You utter pig,’ I muttered.

‘Come on Maisie,’ Simon pleaded. ‘We’re going darling, now.’

‘Where’s Mummy?’

‘Waiting in the car,’ he whispered urgently, as if whispering would cancel out the reference to the cuckolded mother of his child. ‘Go and get your party bag from Jack’s mum.’

‘So, Mummy’s in the car is she?’ I blustered, once Maisie had charged off in search of more treats she didn’t deserve. ‘Maybe I should come outside and introduce myself to Mummy?’

Simon looked terrified.

‘What, you don’t like the idea of that? Why’s that then?’

‘Just stay away from my family,’ he sneered icily, his face contorted in rage.

‘Maybe I’d be doing her a favour?’ I added, enjoying watching him squirm, though admittedly my enjoyment would have been even greater had I been wearing something more standard.

‘Look, you crazy bitch, just keep away all right?’ was his charming riposte, after which he gulped, looked around and then pegged it.

It was awful, and as I stood there trying not to cry, feeling hurt and stung, not only by Simon’s actions but by his venomous tone of voice, I felt truly gutted and absolutely humiliated.

Half an hour later and it was a rather pathetic clown that left that party, worn out, upset and mortified. As soon as I’d been paid, I left almost as hastily as Simon and Maisie had, and only once back in the safe environs of Tina did I let the true extent of my horror catch up with me. The shame of it all. Then I caught a glimpse of my clown face in the rear view mirror and despite everything had to swallow back a laugh that was in grave danger of turning into a sob.

It wasn’t meant to be like this.