point of thinking that if someone didn’t mention the show it meant they hated it, although she had trained herself to resist asking, because they always said yes, they loved it, and then she just thought they were being two-faced.
Sometimes in the cold light of a hangover, she wondered whether she really wanted to get married at all, but it didn’t matter how feminist, rich or successful you were, if you weren’t married, or at least living with someone, or divorced by your midthirties, there was no getting away from the fact that everyone thought you were a failure.
Annie took two large white towels from the airing cupboard, wound one round her head and wrapped the other round her body. At a time like this she wished she had one of those white cotton robes you got in expensive hotels. She had owned several but had found that they were never quite as luxurious when you were the person responsible for getting them clean and dry. One had broken the spin mechanism in her washing machine, another had gone mouldy in the corner of her bedroom where she had casually flung it on the last occasion she had had sex on the floor.
It was light outside, but the sun was not yet warm. Annie sat down at her desk and opened her laptop computer. First she checked her e-mail box, which was empty, and then she opened the file named iloveanniexmas, which was also empty, apart from the header, which she had spent some ours customizing with holly and snowflakes. With a sudden flash of inspiration, she typed a title in capital letters. frankly, my dear...
* * *
Even in her most detailed fantasies, Annie had never imagined that she would become the eponymous star of a sitcom that she also wrote. She had wanted to act ever since going to her first pantomime at the age of five and volunteering herself from the cheap seats at the back for the role of a helpful elf. At school she was always a man because of her height, and at Oxford she was always one of the chorus whether the production was Cabaret or the Lysistrata, except for the time when she had gone for the role of Juliet in a garden production, and been cast as the nurse.
After Oxford, she had spent several years appearing in meaningful fringe productions financed by meagre Arts Council grants to audiences of five or six, but her nearest brush with earning any money from her craft was getting into the last three for the girls in the Philadelphia advert. She made her living as a serving wench in one of London’s Tudor theme restaurants catering solely to Japanese and American tourists, where she handed out whole spit-roasted chickens on wooden platters and poured ale from earthenware jugs. The hours enabled her to go for auditions during the day. One morning a week, she went into the BBC to write gags for radio shows.
By the time she was thirty, she had just enough income to rent a dark little ground-floor flat in Shepherd’s Bush, on her own instead of sharing co-ops with other struggling actors. Seeing some of her peers making millions in the City, she was not entirely ecstatic about the hand life had dealt her, but was satisfied at least that she had not sold out as so many people seemed to have done in the Eighties. She would probably have continued like that if she hadn’t one Saturday night, in the days when comedy was still called alternative, agreed to stand in for a gag-writing friend of hers who had flu and didn’t want to lose his regular stand-up spot in a pub in Islington.
Annie was neither booed off the stage, nor greeted with any reaction other than a couple of misogyn-istic comments about her bra size which she thought she handled quite well. Afterwards, in the loo, she bumped into a fretful woman who had lost three consecutive pound coins in the tampon machine. Annie offered her a new-shaped Lil-let from the box, like a fellow smoker offering a clandestine cigarette in a smoke-free office. The woman had nipped gratefully into a cubicle and started talking to her
Sometimes in the cold light of a hangover, she wondered whether she really wanted to get married at all, but it didn’t matter how feminist, rich or successful you were, if you weren’t married, or at least living with someone, or divorced by your midthirties, there was no getting away from the fact that everyone thought you were a failure.
Annie took two large white towels from the airing cupboard, wound one round her head and wrapped the other round her body. At a time like this she wished she had one of those white cotton robes you got in expensive hotels. She had owned several but had found that they were never quite as luxurious when you were the person responsible for getting them clean and dry. One had broken the spin mechanism in her washing machine, another had gone mouldy in the corner of her bedroom where she had casually flung it on the last occasion she had had sex on the floor.
It was light outside, but the sun was not yet warm. Annie sat down at her desk and opened her laptop computer. First she checked her e-mail box, which was empty, and then she opened the file named iloveanniexmas, which was also empty, apart from the header, which she had spent some ours customizing with holly and snowflakes. With a sudden flash of inspiration, she typed a title in capital letters. frankly, my dear...
* * *
Even in her most detailed fantasies, Annie had never imagined that she would become the eponymous star of a sitcom that she also wrote. She had wanted to act ever since going to her first pantomime at the age of five and volunteering herself from the cheap seats at the back for the role of a helpful elf. At school she was always a man because of her height, and at Oxford she was always one of the chorus whether the production was Cabaret or the Lysistrata, except for the time when she had gone for the role of Juliet in a garden production, and been cast as the nurse.
After Oxford, she had spent several years appearing in meaningful fringe productions financed by meagre Arts Council grants to audiences of five or six, but her nearest brush with earning any money from her craft was getting into the last three for the girls in the Philadelphia advert. She made her living as a serving wench in one of London’s Tudor theme restaurants catering solely to Japanese and American tourists, where she handed out whole spit-roasted chickens on wooden platters and poured ale from earthenware jugs. The hours enabled her to go for auditions during the day. One morning a week, she went into the BBC to write gags for radio shows.
By the time she was thirty, she had just enough income to rent a dark little ground-floor flat in Shepherd’s Bush, on her own instead of sharing co-ops with other struggling actors. Seeing some of her peers making millions in the City, she was not entirely ecstatic about the hand life had dealt her, but was satisfied at least that she had not sold out as so many people seemed to have done in the Eighties. She would probably have continued like that if she hadn’t one Saturday night, in the days when comedy was still called alternative, agreed to stand in for a gag-writing friend of hers who had flu and didn’t want to lose his regular stand-up spot in a pub in Islington.
Annie was neither booed off the stage, nor greeted with any reaction other than a couple of misogyn-istic comments about her bra size which she thought she handled quite well. Afterwards, in the loo, she bumped into a fretful woman who had lost three consecutive pound coins in the tampon machine. Annie offered her a new-shaped Lil-let from the box, like a fellow smoker offering a clandestine cigarette in a smoke-free office. The woman had nipped gratefully into a cubicle and started talking to her
Similar Books
![Jaguars' Reward [Impulse 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting)](https://fs.dianahicksbooks.com/511469/thumbs/152x264/jaguars-reward-impulse-3-siren-publishing-menage-everlasting.png)
