The Year of the Ladybird Read Free

now officially on the team. Come on. Coffee time.’
    Pinky excused himself and Tony whisked me to the coffee bar. There he charmed a couple of free and frothy espressos out of the girl behind the counter. He introduced me to her and said something
that made my face colour. When we sat down he proceeded to brief me.
    ‘Everything son, you do everything. It’s all in the programme. You get Saturday off every week, changeover day. Meet in the theatre each morning at 9.30 sharp. Check in, cover the
bases. Can you sing? Dance? Tell a funny story? Just kidding son, just kidding. You check the bingo tickets, get everyone in the theatre, give the kids a stick of rock every five minutes. Been to
college, haven’t you? You can write, can’t you? Write down the names of the winners of the Glamorous Grandmother comp and all that. A monkey could do it, no offence. If you’re
chasing skirt, make sure you share yourself round the ugly ones, because it’s only fair. Smile all the way until October. That’s all you have to do. A monkey could do it.’
    ‘What happened to the last monkey?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘The one I replaced.’
    Tony looked up and waved wildly at a family passing by our table. His face was like soft leather and it fell easily into a wreath of smiles, like it knew the lines into which it should flow. His
skin was super-smoothed by remnants of stage make-up. ‘Howdy kids!’
    ‘Shazam Shazam!’ the entire family shouted back at him. He looked pleased.
    When they’d gone I reminded him of my question.
    ‘Look, don’t worry about a thing.’ I don’t know why he said that because I wasn’t worried. ‘Any problems, see me, except when there’s a problem, see
someone else.’ Then he burst into song, crooner style, throwing his arms wide and turning to the campers seated at other tables.
The answer, my friend-a, is a-blowing in the wind-a, the
answer is a-blowing in the wind
. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose very loudly. Everyone laughed and I did, too, for reasons I didn’t quite understand.
    He drained his cup and stood up. ‘You’re back on duty in one hour. Bingo in the main hall. After that, theatre, front of house.’
    Then he was gone.

 
     
     
     
2
And the white knight is talking backwards
     
     
     
     
    I was an Alice in Wonderland. It was a world I knew nothing of, hyper-real, inflated, one where the colours seemed brighter, vivid, intense. I was excited to be working there,
being a part of it, but the truth is I felt anxious, too. It wasn’t just about being an outsider, it was the strangeness of it all. Many of the staff I met were odd fish. I had a crazy idea
that they all had large heads and small bodies, like caricature figures on an old-style cigarette card.
    Back in my tiny room on my first night I lay awake for hours. Of my room-mate there was still no sign and I was wondering what I’d done in signing up to this place. I was over-stimulated
by the day’s events and sleep didn’t come. I lay in the darkness with my eyes wide open.
    At some point I put the light on and got out of bed. The toilets and showers were at the end of the staff block. It was about 3 a.m. and I decided to take a shower to try to relax. When I got
back to my room I dried myself off and decided to take my clothes – still in my backpack – and hang them in the slim wardrobe.
    When I’d done that I sat down on the bed and took the photo from my leather wallet. It was a small black and white photo, maybe three inches square with a thin white margin. The
photo-chemicals were either unfixing or the picture was over-exposed. Either way the shot was of a seaside scene. The subject was slightly blurred but a muscular man, maybe in his twenties, wore
dark bathing trunks and smiled back at the camera. The wind whipped his hair across his eyes so you couldn’t fully see his face. He stood with arms akimbo and behind him the sea frothed and
foamed at the sand.
    The man in the