Hating Alison Ashley Read online

  ‘Some kids’ parents aren’t coming. I don’t think Alison Ashley’s mother will. She has to work or something.’

  ‘That’s really terrible,’ said Mum. ‘I’d just hand in my notice if they expected me to work and miss out seeing you act. Why, Lennie was supposed to be doing the Portland run tomorrow, but he charged into the depot and created a din till they put some other bloke on instead.’

  ‘Did he?’ I asked hollowly.

  ‘You bet he did. He wouldn’t miss out on your concert for anything. He was going to order a big floral bouquet, too, and have it delivered to the camp by Interflora, just like they do on first nights in real theatres. But I told him it might make the other kids feel a bit left out. It’s not their fault they haven’t got your acting talent.’

  ‘Mum,’ I said desperately. ‘About tomorrow night . . .’

  ‘I’ve got to go, Erk. Norm’s just bailed up next door’s German Shepherd. See you tomorrow night, love.’

  I put the phone back and went out to the barbecue with no appetite. The campfire didn’t last long, anyhow. After we finished eating, Miss Belmont organised us into a circle to sing campfire songs, but it started raining. So she organised an evening of projected colour slides in the common room instead.

  While she was setting up the projector, I stared glumly out the window, thinking that there was nothing more depressing than rain. Unless it was Margeart Collins’ company.

  ‘It’s a disappointing thing about clouds,’ Margeart said. ‘When we were driving up to this camp, you could see the clouds sitting on top of the mountain, and they looked all white and fluffy. But they’re not a bit like that when they come down low and you’re in the middle of one. They’re just wet and grey like rain.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it too much, Margeart,’ I said, and moved to another window, but the view there was even more depressing. It looked out on the camp sewerage equipment.

  I moved to the last window, and the view there was the most depressing of all. Mrs Wentworth turned the lights on in the common room, and there was Alison Ashley’s dazzling reflection in the glass. She’d changed her clothes after the barbecue. She was wearing a white ruffled dress, and her hair was plaited and pinned round her head, like a coronet. Princess Alison Ashley. She looked as though she ought to be sitting at a spinning wheel in a castle tower, instead of helping Miss Belmont set up audio-visual gear.

  ‘Who left this bundle of scrap paper on the table?’ Miss Belmont said. ‘I need a clear space for the box of slides.’

  I went to retrieve the master copies of my two plays. Scrap paper was right. They’d been written on any paper that came to hand, mostly on the reverse sides of Mr Kennard’s eucalyptus identification test, which everybody flunked except Alison Ashley. My handwriting looked even more terrible than usual, because of all the crossing out and rewriting of dialogue. I wondered if Shakespeare’s rough copies had looked any better. Probably a whole lot worse because he had to write with a bird’s feather dipped in ink.

  There certainly wasn’t any point in keeping such a mess. Everyone had copied out their parts and learned them, and I no longer felt any creative pride. I was too depressed about Drama Night.

  The whole lot belonged in the wastepaper basket, which is where I put it.

  hile everyone was getting ready for Drama Night, I tried to find twenty cents to make one last desperate phone call home. I’d spent all my pocket money, so I sold Margeart Collins a couple of burnt sticks I’d hastily grabbed from the barbecue. I told her they were authentic Aboriginal fire sticks from the souvenir shop at the pioneer village. Margeart thought they were lovely, and I felt crooked and mean, but intended to buy them back from her when I was financial again.

  When I dialled our house, Valjoy answered in the special voice she always used in case it was a boy at the other end of the line. ‘Helloooooo,’ she purred into the phone.

  ‘It’s me. Erk.’

  ‘Oh, it’s only you, is it?’ she snapped in her normal bossy voice.

  ‘I want to speak to Mum.’

  ‘Well, you can’t. She and Lennie left early to see you act in that crummy little childish concert. And I don’t want to talk to you. I’ll be seeing you tomorrow, worse luck, when you get back from camp. Which reminds me, you little creep, tomorrow is when I’m going to murder you for sneaking off with my clothes! I thought I told you . . .’

  Her long detailed list of revenges did nothing to raise my spirits, and she hung up only when she ran out of breath.

  Some parents were already starting to arrive, so Miss Belmont set them to work arranging the chairs in the hall, to pay them back for coming early. Each time a car drove up, kids would squeal and hang out the window. Alison Ashley looked hopefully at each arriving car, too. Miss Lattimore’s boyfriend turned up in a Landrover plastered with Conservation stickers. She didn’t scream and rush across the carpark to meet him, the way Vicky and Karen did with their visitors, but Miss Lattimore did what I suppose was the adult version. She hurried into her bedroom and came out wearing fresh lipstick and a new weird top, one she hadn’t worn at all during the week, and her hair was combed up elegantly and fastened with a handcrafted leather slide. Then she went out to meet her boyfriend, though she said hello to him round the end of the building, which was hidden from the windows. Everyone was dislocating their necks trying to see what he looked like. I could have told them without even looking; he’d have a beard, long hair caught back with a rubber band, and a folk guitar.

  Mrs Wentworth told everyone to hurry up and finish getting into their play costumes and queue up in the common room for her to make up their faces. She tried to make Alison Ashley look severe by drawing frown lines on her forehead, but they just looked like the bloom on a butterfly’s wing. I thought gloomily that Alison would probably go right through life without any wrinkles, crows’ feet, middle-age spread, or even acne.

  The queue wasn’t very stable. Everyone kept charging about with brilliant last-minute ideas – such as, could they take down the curtains in the common room because they dreamed up this great way of making a hoop skirt if Mrs Wentworth had a bale of fencing wire and a sewing machine. Mrs Wentworth was being kind and patient, but even her voice was wearing thin. No matter what part they were playing, everyone wanted a scar running across their cheeks with stitches in it, because that’s what Barry Hollis painted on himself.

  Diane Harper didn’t look one bit like a nurse. She sneaked off and redid her make up after Mrs Wentworth finished. She outlined her eyes in black and gave herself a beauty spot, and looked more like Valjoy on Saturday nights than a hospital nurse.

  When Mrs Wentworth had sorted out the last face, she raised her voice above the hullabaloo. She said quite snappily that everyone had to sit down and play a nice quiet game such as Cluedo until it was time to go over to the hall to give the concert. She made herself a cup of strong black coffee and went into the teachers’ sitting room and shut the door firmly.

  I didn’t blame her. The kids were silly with excitement. They didn’t play Cluedo. They skylarked and giggled and jumped about and fought viciously for the space in front of the mirror so they could admire their faces in greasepaint. Jason and Wendy tried to keep their groups quiet. Wendy threatened that Miss Belmont would hear and ring up Mr Nicholson and he’d come up and drive us straight back to Barringa East.

  But it was Jason who had more success. ‘Shut up, you kids!’ he yelled. ‘Can’t you even keep quiet for twenty minutes? Practise your lines or something! It’s only twenty rotten little minutes to Drama Night.’

  As soon as he said that, everyone looked at the big clock over the common-room door and stopped clowning. In the silence, you could hear the people gathered in the dining-hall building. It was a combination of low murmuring and feet being shuffled and polite coughing. A sound of expectant waiting. Kangas and Dingoes stared up at the clock’s big hand moving towards Drama Night and suddenly went pale underneath their greasepaint.

  And that was whe
n things started to go wrong.

  Oscar decided that nobody was getting him up on a stage wearing a dress with two balloons stuffed down the front. He decided, in fact, that nobody was getting him up on a stage as a fairy godmother, and that nobody was getting him up on a stage full stop. He crawled under the table when Wendy Millson tried to pin on his wings. The balloons burst, and they’d been the only ones left in the whole camp.

  The Cinderella play revolved around Oscar, and there was no one else to take the part of the fairy godmother. I looked at him helplessly, wondering how directors and stage managers dealt with actors who clung to a table leg and refused to go onstage.

  ‘I won’t be in it, either,’ Shane said. ‘Not if he’s not in it. If he’s not in it, we might as well chuck the whole play.’

  Then Jason remembered that I’d forgotten to get any suitable meat for the operating scene in the hospital play, and Kangas started to panic. ‘We’ll have to leave that bit out!’ Diane wailed. ‘It was the best part! And you’ve got the nerve to call yourself a stage manager!’

  ‘We might as well ditch our play, too,’ Jason said bitterly. ‘Everything leads up to that operating theatre scene. Thought you said you’d fixed up all the props, Yurken? You said you’d have them all ready in the carton. Some Drama Night this one’s going to be!’

  ‘And where’s the pumpkin?’ Vicky demanded. ‘It’s certainly not here in the carton, either. Every rehearsal you said you were going to handle all that! You said you were the director and the producer and the stage manager and everything else!’

  ‘And the glass slippers!’ cried Wendy. ‘What am I going to use for glass slippers?’

  Alison Ashley was the only one who didn’t join in the roar of accusations.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re all panicking,’ I said haughtily. ‘All the props for this Drama Night have naturally been taken care of. I was just about to go out and collect them.’

  I slipped outside and had my own private, personal panic in the carpark.

  ‘How yer going, movie star?’ a big voice boomed over my head. ‘It’s been a quiet old week without you. Your mum’s gone ahead to grab some seats down the front, but she sent me over to give you this.’

  I opened the lid of the box Lennie gave me, and inside was a wonderful pair of glass slippers. Mum must have sat up all night making them. She’d sewn hundreds of little transparent sequins all over a pair of silver pull-on slippers. The effect was magical.

  I burst into tears.

  Lennie didn’t say anything. He put his arm around me and let me bawl all over his Gold Coast shirt with the hula girls on it. In between bawling I told him all about it; about being dead hopeless at acting, and writing two plays, which I’d thought were pretty good when I wrote them but now they seemed just plain dumb and no one wanted to act in them anyhow and the audience would all get up and go home after the first five minutes and it was all my fault. I told him about what a lousy stage manager I was and how I’d forgotten all about the pumpkin and about the balloons bursting and everything and how I’d led Mum to believe that I was going to be the star of Drama Night.

  Lennie pulled out his hanky and dried my eyes as gently as Mrs Wentworth would have done, and I was so surprised I stopped bawling.

  ‘She’ll be apples, love,’ he said calmly. ‘Let’s see now, a pumpkin, two balloons, some snags, and someone to go in there and sort out a kid called Oscar. No sweat. Let’s see if anything’s fallen off the back of my truck.’ He headed towards the hall, and I followed, but he didn’t go in the main door. He went round the back to the kitchen, apparently not even bothered by the sign on the door saying that no one was allowed in there except the camp manager. Lennie just went over to the freezer and opened the lid. He searched through the packages and pulled out a plastic bag full of sausages!

  ‘There,’ said Lennie. ‘There’s no kids’ camp in the whole country that wouldn’t have snags in the freezer. Now, where do they keep the vegies?’ He found the cupboard and pulled out a couple of grapefruit. ‘These do instead of balloons?’ he said. ‘There’s no pumpkin here, but never mind, there’s a watermelon. No rule says you can’t have a watermelon in Cinderella instead of a pumpkin.’

  He started to help me carry it back to the common room, but as we were passing the hall, Miss Belmont stuck her head out the door and said bossily, ‘Are you one of the parents? You’ll have to come into the hall at once and find a seat, Mr Er. The concert will start very soon.’

  Lennie didn’t slap her on the back and say, ‘G’day, love, how yer going?’ He just handed me the watermelon and went meekly into the hall. Luckily Miss Belmont didn’t notice me; she was too busy intimidating another lot of parents who had arrived late.

  I went back to the common room with my red eyes hidden behind Lennie’s driving sunglasses. Everyone calmed down when they saw the sausages and water­melon, even though it wasn’t a pumpkin. Wendy went into raptures over the glass slippers. But Oscar stayed put under the table and wouldn’t come out.

  Wendy and Jason tried out their leadership qualities. I tried flattery and bribery, but Oscar just stubbornly repeated that no one was getting him up on any stage to make a dill of himself. Everyone tried, even Barry Hollis, though that wasn’t out of sympathy for the rest of us; he just didn’t want to risk the concert being cancelled and miss out on the chance of showing off in front of a whole lot of people. But Oscar didn’t even take any notice of Barry Hollis. I thought desperately that I’d have to go over to the hall and somehow get past Miss Belmont and bring Lennie out to deal with Oscar. But the clock said I’d run out of time. There were only four minutes left to Drama Night.

  ‘Yuk, you’ll just have to be the fairy godmother,’ said Wendy Millson. ‘There’s nobody else. Hurry up and get those clothes off Oscar. You know all the lines and everything. Well, what are you waiting for?’

  I felt as though someone had just clobbered me with a sock full of sand.

  ‘Get a move on,’ Wendy said impatiently.

  I thought of the packed hall and felt my hands start to shake. I put them in my jeans pockets and hid my panic behind Lennie’s sunglasses.

  ‘Stop mucking around, Yuk,’ everyone said. ‘Miss Belmont will be over in a minute. Get a move on, Yurken.’

  ‘I . . . can’t,’ I said numbly, and felt my voice dry up in my throat and the shaking spread from my hidden hands down to my knees. Everyone stared at me curiously. The only one who didn’t was Alison Ashley. I looked at her carefully, and saw that she knew the reason, and had known it all along. I waited for her to blab it out to everyone, and jeer and scoff, but she didn’t do any of those things. Instead, she bent down and grabbed Oscar by the ankles and yanked viciously and at the same time she began yelling. I jumped, and so did everyone else. None of us recognised her voice.

  ‘You come on out of there, Oscar!’ she yelled. ‘Erica can’t possibly get dressed in time and have her face made up. A lot of work went into fixing these two plays. If you go mucking up Drama Night, you’ll look like a smear of strawberry jam once I get through with you! I’m going to count to three, and if you don’t come out of there by then, I’ll tear out your liver and use it for the hospital play!’

  It was so amazing to hear Alison Ashley brawling just as loudly and uncouthly as anyone else in Barringa East Primary, that Oscar was too startled to make a fuss. He crawled out from under the table and stood still while I crammed the two grapefruit down the front of his dress. It was just as well he did, because Miss Belmont came over.

  ‘Form two orderly, straight lines,’ she said. ‘Kangas are on first, so Dingoes may sit quietly down the back of the hall to watch until it’s their turn. No unseemly behaviour from anyone. Erica Yurken, where do you think you’re going?’

  ‘To my room,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a migraine headache.’ I needed to recover from the shock of having almost been on stage. I didn’t even want to watch those two plays.

  ‘Drama Night is not the time to have migraines,�
� Miss Belmont said. ‘That is not the proper camping spirit at all.’

  She frowned me into line and we all went over to the dining hall. Miss Belmont took the Dingoes through the back door, and the Kangas went through the side door behind the curtain Mr Kennard had rigged up out of blankets on a wire. Jason and the others began putting the hospital beds made out of chairs and sheets into position. I felt sick enough to crawl into one of them. Jason tucked the sausages up under his shirt for the operation scene, and everyone got into place on the stage. The hum of conversation from behind the curtain stopped as Mr Kennard pulled the wire and the blankets slid jerkily apart.

  Alison Ashley drew a deep breath and walked forward to make her entrance as the matron. And her dazzling debut as an actress.

  I couldn’t stand it. I slipped out of the side door and ran through the darkness to the dormitory block and into my room. Suddenly those two plays didn’t seem funny at all. They seemed embarrassing and terrible, and I knew nobody would laugh at the jokes, except maybe Lennie. I just wanted to die, thinking of everyone’s parents driving all the way up from Barringa East. Maybe they’d mob Miss Belmont afterwards and demand to be reimbursed for petrol. And after the whole humiliating business was over, I still had to face my mum.

  If ever there was a time I’d longed for a burst appendix and an ambulance dash to hospital, it was then. I lay down on my bed and tried to will it to happen. I concentrated for what seemed like hours. I kept my fingers on my ears so I wouldn’t have to listen to the booing. The only thing they’d find pleasing about the whole night would be Alison Ashley’s acting.

  It’s difficult, though, to concentrate on anything if you’re lying on a book. I became aware that someone had left a book on my bed. I turned on the light and looked at it. It was a handmade book, stapled into a white cover with the edges bound in gold masking tape. Inside the cover were my tatty old pages of scribbled scripts. Someone had trimmed the ragged edges and put them in order. I looked at the title on the cover for a long time. It was made from gold Letraset, sealed to the cover under a sheet of adhesive plastic so it would last for ever.