Fallout Read Online Free PDF Page B

stuck was the Frog.
    He was working as an assistant clerk in a paper mill and being called the Frog. He was going mad.

April – 1968
    London’s spring was wet and harsh. Bitter rain fell on the metal, the mud and building sites and the towers that broke the soft stone skyline. With cheery brutality, in hail and chasing sun, the Post Office Tower had risen sky-high. Beneath it and around it, bowler hats and suede hats and miniskirts, shop-fronts and hairdressers, tourists and tat, music in bars, rattled through the gentility, the fresh sharp concrete, the chipped plaster of the scrabbling city. Soho’s basements burst, revealed and revelling, into the cross-currents of the seedy raincoated old guard; the jazz, the up-yours sex and post-war boozing, fag-ash dusted filth pouring life and dirt into the new plastic streets. Kensington’s invaded little shopping parades jostled greengrocers with boutiques. The city strained against the rich belt of its suburbs. Housewives, old at twenty-five, hired nannies and faced their decline, and commuters, smudgy fingered on the train, read newspaper stories of debauch.
    Nina Jacobs, in her third year at LAMDA, was emerging into the world with the others. Groups of students would make forays into London like little herds of deer exploring the forest; the theatres of the West End, the boutiques of the King’s Road. Nina made friends with a girl called Chrissie Southey, who had a mane of amber hair and a crisp, knowing sexuality. Her parents lived in a house in Chelsea and Nina and Chrissie would go there and try on clothes in her bedroom, giggling over magazines, experimenting with their eye make-up and then setting forth for the delights of Carnaby Street.
    ‘I’m the little lamb who never gets caught!’ cried Chrissie as they both bolted one day along the pavement away from some stringy boys who told them they were photographers.
    ‘Leches!’ shouted Nina, careering into a postcard stand and they both fell into the shop, laughing, and bought French cigarettes with the last of their money.
    She dreamed of high success; the blessed release of approval. The dusty shell of the school had nourished her, brain and spirit, plumping her up. She had played there, worked hard like a child but now, she knew, she was for the market.
    ‘Chop chop,’ her mother would say every morning, hurrying her out of the door, and as the days flipped towards her final term she seemed to see an axe teetering above her. Equity card. Repertory. Auditions. Agents.
    The third-year productions turned the stage on which she had practised into a shop-front. Producers and agents sat in the cramped auction house of the dark auditorium, marking one-sheet cast-lists with biro hieroglyphs. Nina’s year group, who had studied together in honest brotherhood, now pretended it to cover their envy. The end of the race was too close for better feelings. National unemployment may have been at record lows, but for actors it still held its eternal majority. Proven friendships broke and reformed with sudden loyalty and unclear motivations. Students thrown into a character role where they felt themselves to be a lead or tossed a meagre two lines where a rival had speeches were bitter – bitter with fear of the oblivious world beyond their playpen. Nina had loved the exercise of self and psyche, the studying of texts, but the stage terrified her, and her mother, for all her personal dissembling, never once allowed the laziness of false praise to pass her lips.
    Nina, free your voice, you sound like Princess Margaret. Where is your voice?
    A guest director, Richard Weymouth, was announced to work with them. The students approached the auditions with affected professionalism, a guessed-at approximation of their future lives. Nina, nervous and proud, was given the youngest of Chekhov’s Three Sisters , Irina, to play.
    ‘Oh, Nina,’ said Marianne, and clutched her tightly. ‘Well done, well done.’ And she whispered into her