Flesh Wounds Read Free Page B

chancer looked more like Ned Untrusty. It provided the impetus to swap the standing-only stalls for a seat upstairs, and the chance to enjoy her favoured perspective of any proscenium-arch space.
    Her ticket was for down below, she and Monica having been planning to get sweaty in the mosh-pit, but the bouncers weren’t fussed. The circle wasn’t full, and venues were always more wary of letting you into the standing area if you were supposed to be upstairs.
    Jasmine loved just sitting inside these grand old auditoria. In her head she could hear Dot Prowis, her old lecturer at the Scottish Academy of Theatre and Dance, expounding with typical gusto on how ‘any space can be a theatre, and a theatre can be any space’, but Jasmine’s idea of what a theatre should look like had been hardwired in toddlerhood, and this was it. It wasn’t just the pros-arch (thrust optional) that defined a proper theatre, but the presence of at least one circle, and the more the better.
    The Alhambra’s stretched back from the balcony in row upon curving row of tip-up cushioned seats, saggy in the stuffing and infused with the fags and farts of close to a hundred years. Jasmine was in the fifth row, the steep rake affording almost as good a view over the rail as the first. She took in the painted plasterwork, the angels flanking the wings, and a part of her was transported to the place all such theatres took her: her mother’s side.
    It would have been her mum’s birthday tomorrow. This was another reason she felt apprehensive about being out here alone, exposed, and yet also a reason she knew she ought not to go home either, stuck in the flat with nothing to distract her.
    Someone had once told her that the pain and the sadness would come in waves. In the early stages, those waves would engulf her, crash against her so relentlessly that she might feel she could not possibly survive. However, as time went on the intervals would become longer, the waves a little smaller. Gradually it would get easier, but the waves would never stop coming.
    This had proven true, but there were no guarantees, no absolutes. Now and again one of those waves would be higher than her head, though she was getting better at anticipating when. The anniversary, Christmas and birthdays – her mum’s and her own – were always going to be difficult, but sometimes it was the unexpected trigger that was the worst: the element that came at her sideways when her gaze was fixed ahead. The lead-up to these painful dates had proven harder than the days themselves, but so far on this occasion she was holding it together; feeling quite robust, in fact.
    I’m okay, she told herself.
    A girl of about fourteen shuffled along the row in front, accompanied by a bearded bloke in a Big Country T-shirt, presumably her dad playing chaperone. Jasmine resisted a twinge of self-consciousness as she looked around, feeling conspicuously the only person sitting unaccompanied. For all anyone knew, her friend was away at the toilet, or getting drinks.
    More pertinently, nobody would be looking at her anyway, she reminded herself. It was an unfortunate side-effect of spying on people for a living that she could occasionally fall prey to an irrational paranoia about what unseen eyes might be trained upon her. Shaking this off, for a wee change she asked herself what anyone might see if they did happen to look at her right then, and decided to her surprise that she liked the answer.
    She recalled a line in
Shirley Valentine
, one of her mum’s favourite movies, which they used to watch together when the weather got them down, because it was like going on a ninety-minute holiday.
    ‘I think I’m all right,’ Shirley said. ‘I think if I saw myself, I’d say: “That woman’s okay.”’
    I’m
okay, Jasmine told herself.
    She’d had a good day at work.
    She’d had a lot of good days at work, in fact. Over the past year or so she had become a great deal more accepting that this was what