Amy Bird - Yours Is Mine

“I left no ring with her. What means this lady?

Fortune forbid my outside have not charmed her!”

No, too keen, too concerned. She tried again. And again. She finally got through the speech, but the net result seemed only to be that Viola was now being played as a paranoid schizophrenic, veering between total selfish disinterest in all but carnal lust for the Duke on the one hand, and sudden deep emotional attachment to him and concern for Olivia on the other when Kate’s own instinctive interpretation got the better of her. And that Kate was now completely hoarse.

Sighing with frustration after her voice gave way on “It is too hard a knot for me t’untie”, she gave up and threw herself onto the sofa, and the book onto the floor. She reached for the television remote. There was always tomorrow morning before the class, right? And she could get up a bit earlier and start looking at the proofs then. She simply did not have the spirit to try and work out how Anna would feel about the more controversial aspects of punctuation this evening. The virtue of trashy television was that it was surely scientifically impossible for anyone’s brain to remain capable of active thought after about twenty minutes of watching it, and if she was effectively brainless for the rest the evening it wouldn’t matter if she was Kate or Anna.

Unfortunately for Kate’s plans for an efficient morning, she had forgotten another important element of trashy television – its strangely addictive quality. Reality television show had merged into comedy quiz show had merged into statistic-driven investigative journalism exposé. Even more addictive was imagining Neil there beside her, how he would laugh at the contestants, how they would fantasy cast their friends into the shows, how he would reduce her to tears of laughter with innuendo about what was going on behind the TV scenes. It was a square-eyed Kate that had finally pulled herself off the sofa and into bed the wrong side of midnight, and consequently rather a bleary-eyed one who finally emerged from bed the next day after spending the best part of two hours hitting snooze on the alarm clock on the bedside table.

Grabbing a flustered breakfast and a strong black coffee, Kate tried to make the best of what remained of the morning to start on the proofs that had come through to her. The publishing house seemed to be going through a sci-fi phase, Kate’s least favourite genre, and she laid out the three implausibly titled books in front of her, trying to decide which one to start with. In the end she opted for the one with the title that she actually understood, and had got through three chapters largely putting squiggly underlining beneath words that she was sure could not possibly be in the English language, or if they were must be some sort of private sub-set of language that she was not privy to.

After she had been driven to writing rude comments in the margin she began to realise that she might be approaching the task in the wrong way – someone had clearly decided it was worthwhile publishing this book, which presumably meant that they could understand it, and so presumably her role wasn’t to go through the book generally rubbishing it. She also remembered that Anna had in fact left her a guide from the publishing house about what she was actually required to do, and leafing through it confirmed that her role was limited to commenting on typos, punctuation, non-controversial grammar and type-setting. It appeared she was not supposed to query the plot or re-order paragraphs, and particularly not delete the ones she didn’t like. That was someone else’s job, and apparently the sub-plot concerning floating brains engaged in projecting active thought despite being in cauldrons full of so-called ‘space plasma’ was to be allowed to stay. She felt very glad she had started off in pencil and rubbed out her angry extraneous comments and went through the next two chapters restricting herself to more conventional intervention.

Given this set-back, and the pressing deadline of the middle of the following week (why were these books so long – how much was there really left to say about aliens?), she decided there wasn’t time to look over the speech for class again, and so it was a rather nervous and introverted Kate that showed up to the adult education centre after lunch, clutching a sandwich in the vague hope that she would be able to eat it surreptitiously at the back of the class. It felt like being a student again – endless time to do things in, but somehow always rushing from place to place with a feeling of guilt at not having done everything she had intended.

She finally found the room in which the class was being held, after navigating what seemed to be a never-ending network of corridors and passages, taking bites of her sandwich as she went. She was beginning to regret the garlic mayonnaise filling she had opted for – pausing to check her breath quickly she winced – and hoped there wouldn’t be any love scenes, or indeed anything that would require her to stand within three feet of anyone else. She dumped the rest of the sandwich in a bin, quickly checked her appearance in a compact mirror and was pleased to see the rather reconstituted chicken hadn’t managed to lodge itself between her teeth, took a deep breath and walked into the room.

It was smaller and stuffier than she had been expecting, with fraying orange carpets and grey windows which looked like they had been hermetically sealed lest heaven forbid any air should get in. There was a small fan whirring in a desultory fashion on a desk in one corner. The other desks had been pushed to the corner of the room and there were about a dozen chairs arranged in a semi-circle in front of a small white board. She assumed the small area in front of the chairs was supposed to be the acting area. She was unimpressed.

Her feelings were apparently evident to the other occupants of the room. Kate noticed a lady standing at the far side of the white board, regarding her with a raised eyebrow and an amused smile.

“Not exactly the Donmar, is it, but I do hope you will feel able to stay with us!”

Kate blushed and, not wanting to cause offence, began muttering an apology.

“Don’t worry, no offence taken. The college has clearly decided to spend their frankly pitiable drama budget on getting the best staff rather than the best carpets – of which I am hopefully a prime example. Hilary Barnet. How do you do – apart from clearly needing some work on your entrances?”

The woman extended her hand after delivering this speech. Perplexed, Kate just about managed to introduce herself with Anna’s name and slunk to a seat while the woman consulted a clipboard.

“Ah yes, Ms Roberts. You were in the indomitable Gregory’s class last year, weren’t you?”

Kate nodded her assent. If this woman said she had been taught by an indomitable person called Gregory and had recorded these facts in her efficient-looking clipboard, who was Kate to argue?

“Yes, well, I shall expect a lot from you then. I didn’t see you in action, but you’re the only one in the class that got moved up to the intermediate level. I imagine you were expecting to be in the studio like last year?” Kate nodded, happy to agree to the easy feed of questions. “Well, don’t worry, this is only temporary – my schedule says we’re moving to the studio in week three after they’ve finished a two-week short course in there. Who knows, perhaps by then you will have learned how to speak in sentences!” smirked the woman, before turning back round to the white board. Kate gasped. She couldn’t believe how rude this woman was being. She saw a couple of the students whispering to each other behind their hands and shooting her covert glances. Kate was beginning to wonder whether she had just stepped into an alternate universe where rudeness amongst adults was acceptable, or else some kind of time warp which had taken her back into school again but by mistake had put her in the life of someone who had done badly and had been bullied.