Page 16

•••

Stuart Parkes

22:09

Why?

•••

Ada Highfield

22:16

Because I might tell you this time

FIVE

Days passed back in London as Ada and Mel found their rhythm together again. Ada woke up to Mel’s alarm through her wall and made her tea in her underwear. She left it outside Mel’s door and went back to bed, knowing Mel didn’t like to talk in the morning. She would hear Mel shower, dress, leave for work, and then sometimes she’d fall back asleep and sometimes she wouldn’t. Around midday, she would go walking, down to the canals, listening to podcasts about everything that was wrong with America except when she couldn’t bear that and then she listened to Australian indie bands from when she was fifteen. She walked and drank coffee in parks and sometimes took her book to a pub in the afternoon and tried not to think about money. More accurately, money didn’t occur to her in these moments because while her credit card worked, she didn’t need any.

Every so often over the last year Mel had tried to have The Money Talk with Ada, explaining that credit cards are only a good idea if you know how to pay them off which seemed backwards to Ada. Surely people who can pay them off don’t need them in the first place? And of course, if she got desperate she could pay them off, because she knew her parents wouldn’t let her suffer. She never asked them, though, in case she was wrong, and anyway, Gabby had always been enough for them to handle.

But she listened politely to Mel’s advice while pouring them both triples of gin and then she’d explain that she had a plan. ‘I’m going to marry rich!’ and Mel would laugh and roll her eyes and Ada would say, ‘I’m not joking. And if I get really desperate, I’ll just live with you in your increasingly fancy flats,’ and then they’d lie back on Mel’s bed and talk about the best book they were assigned at school and who got their period first in their grade and whether New Year’s Eve was fun still.

They hadn’t had one of their money chats since they’d got home from Edinburgh and Ada figured that was at least partly because she’d been cooking them dinner every night. She loved cooking but when she was doing a play or had more money to go out she tended to live off 2 a.m. falafel and heavy dark wine. But she wasn’t performing at the moment, apart from the cabaret open mic that she hosted for £40 and a burger every Tuesday night. She was a chatty but not particularly experienced host and she had only been given the gig because quiet Steven, who played the piano there every week and was, as far as Ada could tell, entirely asexual, hated to talk so he asked his loudest friend to split the job with him.

Steven hadn’t done the Fringe this year, so at Ada’s first week back at the show, he fell upon her gratefully when she arrived and said, ‘You can never leave the city again,’ and she said, ‘I couldn’t afford to anyway.’ Ada had arrived at the pub at seven for sound check and her weekly veggie burger. The bar itself was full, as it always was, of Camden goths and men in suits who had mistakenly picked this place for a Tinder date and were now having to yell over the music. The theatre upstairs was a sanctuary that didn’t fit with the atmosphere of the bar at all but the patrons of each cheerfully tolerated each other and they had enough different kinds of beer on tap to accommodate them all.

Steven went upstairs to plug things in – Ada refused to find out what and Steven indulged her ignorance, indulged her everything – so Ada climbed onto a bar stool and waited for the manager, Clem, to notice her. Clem was an expansively tattooed lesbian in her forties who made it clear the first time she met Ada that she no longer found girls like her cute. After they had agreed to this premise, Ada was free to flirt wildly with her, enjoying the stonewalling she got in response. Clem rode a motorbike, a real, actual, leather-and-screams motorbike, and Ada said to her, ‘Before I met you, I thought Dykes on Bikes was just a Mardi Gras float.’ And Clem had gruffly said, ‘You’re on thin ice, girl,’ and Ada had said, ‘I hear that a lot.’

Tonight, Clem leaned over and ruffled Ada’s hair in her usual aggressive show of platonic disdain and asked how the month had gone. Ada overplayed the victories and underplayed the lack of reviews and Clem said, ‘And you’re broke now, right? You all come back broke from that thing.’ Ada conceded that yes, she was broke, and Clem asked whether she’d be interested in picking up some shifts at the bar. Ada looked at the vinyl-clad clientele and said, ‘I’m not sure I fit the vibe,’ and Clem said fair enough. Then Ada sighed dramatically and said, ‘Can I come back to you if I get desperate?’ and Clem said, ‘Wow, I’m flattered, sure, I’ll be waiting by the phone.’ But later when Steven called Ada to the stage – ‘Introducing Camden’s own Sally Bowles, returned from the bitter north to the uh … bitter south, Ada Highfield!’ – and there was applause and the lights hit her eyes, Ada knew she wouldn’t take a job at the bar. Making money was something to do in private, not right downstairs from her job.

When Ada moved to London, she had hoped the plays would be plentiful but quickly learned that actors here often gigged to get by. Gigs didn’t come to her the way they did to other performers and she knew it was because she wasn’t the best of her type available. There were comedians with better punchlines and cabaret artists with deeper pain and maybe if she picked a genre she’d be more popular, more successful, but also maybe not. Ada figured that by refusing to be clearly categorised she seemed artistic and romantic when really she just didn’t know any other way of being. When people asked what she did she said she was a ‘performer’ but then undercut the horror they felt by saying, ‘but honestly I’m a better receptionist than anything else,’ and they’d laugh and think her self-deprecating but unfortunately it was probably true. She hadn’t called her temp agency to tell them she was back in London. Maybe she wouldn’t have to this time.

Ada was doing a lazy set to open the show that night, aware that the crowd was full of regulars who were already as warm to her as a London crowd could be. There were people there who would sometimes smile at her in the street and she’d smile back, maybe wave, assuming she knew them and only the next night when they reappeared in an audience would she realise ah, no, she didn’t, but they knew a kind of her. So she had done a few minutes of chatter up top about surviving the Fringe that Steven riffed underneath and then, spurred on by the Sally Bowles remark, she’d winkingly dedicated her next number to the people who got her through the month. And she launched into ‘Mein Herr’.

Ada had sung this so many times since her first misguided attempt at a school talent show at fifteen that her mind drifted as her voice rolled up and down. She turned her head slightly and a light caught her eye, bringing her back into herself as she realised she was about to hit the German verse. This was terrible timing as she would have been fine rushing through it on autopilot but her rearrival in the moment tripped her up and she was sure she messed up a couple of lines. But there was no recognition of that from the crowd so she finished with a hard stamp of her foot and introduced the first act over applause, then headed to the side of the stage to watch and drift off again.

The worst part about temping was definitely how easy she found it. Ada would show up at a new office knowing nothing about their business and within hours she would be conversant in, say, how Brexit was going to affect their sales in the Irish market and she’d ask smart questions about it when taking the boss his tea. And then she would gossip with the other receptionists or, the holy grail, the office manager, so by the end of the week they’d declare her a very naughty girl and make sure she was invited to the pub at 5 p.m. By week two she would always have a crush on someone in the office, pickings often being slim but never invisible, and she would fill the empty minutes fantasising about them or, if they seemed amenable, openly flirting.

She had a ‘good phone manner’ and she had been told by her temp agency that Australians were very in demand for reception jobs. Apparently British people brought a lot of classist preconceptions to every call and would change their view of the person on the other end based on what the person’s voice told them. As an Australian, she was a blank slate and what was unspoken was that it was Australians in particular who got away with this chameleon behaviour because the British assumed they were white. And in this case they were right.

Ada had a little section of her wardrobe devoted to fitted black and grey dresses and one purple pencil skirt for when she was feeling comfortable and she wore them with shiny lip gloss and one swipe of mascara and she knew she had reached the balance of professionalism and sex appeal that meant she intimidated no one but was admired by some. She had never excelled at maths but she could take good notes, manage an Excel spreadsheet and sometimes after months of being around other actors, of trying and striving every day to entertain, she welcomed the relief of tidy lists and a well-kept calendar. She preferred it to bar work and it paid better and yet she was vaguely embarrassed when she told other actors that this was her lean-times job. Bar work was much more the done thing so she avoided talking about her quiet, cheerful days in temperature-controlled comfort.