The Unfinished Symphony of You and Me Read Online Free PDF

than cheap bread for the first month, but that was fine).
    I became Sally Howlett the Rock. I knew what I was doing when it came to clothes and costumes. Things involving fabrics and scissors and measurements. Boxes of buttons, safety pins, hooks and eyes, spools of thread and ribbon and piping. Notions, those bits were called. I’d wander through the stores, piled high with boxes of scraps and swatches of material, and I’d wish desperately that Mum and Dad would one day agree to come and visit because they would bloody
love
this place.
    As a dresser I had what was called a plot for each opera performance: an important list of instructions that told me whose costume to change and when. The plots at first sounded mental – ‘
Take Marchesa Act III dress to SR quick change area; ***ORANGE BRA!!***, strike Café des Amis stuff
’ – but I learned quickly how to decipher them.
    Once again I became popular because of my unflappable nature and ability to problem-solve. I got on with everyone I met, massaged the egos of singers whose egos needed massaging and settled into a routine of unthreatening friendship with the rest. To my surprise, many of them were very normal. And even the grandiose ones who referred to ‘The Voice’ in the third person seemed to enjoy my Black Country accent and matter-of-fact world view. They liked that I had a bum as big as theirs, and thatI’d managed to call a singer named Regina Wheatley ‘Vagina Weekly’.
    There was a delightful baritone called Brian Hurst, whom I particularly loved. He was from Huddersfield so his accent was as out of place as mine. We ate chips from Rock & Soul in Covent Garden. Sometimes pies. He was heaven. He was quite a star, and sang in opera houses across the world, but he drank dandelion and burdock and never tantrumed, and often I’d find him smiling at me as I sprinted past with a bum patch for a singer who was tantruming because someone had just dared spray hairspray near The Voice.
    ‘You’re a good influence on us loonies,’ he told me.
    And there was the music. All day, every day, through the tannoy, on the stage, in the dressing rooms, in the rehearsal rooms. Scales, arpeggios, arias, recitatives. Big, booming choruses that made me want to punch the air and bellow through a theatrical beard. For the first time in my life, I felt I was at home.
    The wardrobe staff, who had originally seemed so alien to me, with their cool casual trousers and elegant crops, must have appreciated my hard work because they offered me a wardrobe assistant’s job after only nine months.
    The first day I hung up my coat amid the hanging rails and steamers I felt a thrill that was rivalled only by mastering a difficult aria in my own wardrobe.
    After two years in that job I got a further promotion and after another year I’d saved enough money to contribute a small deposit towards a tiny new-build flat by the canal in the southern reaches of Islington. Onmy twenty-sixth birthday I opened the door to my dream hidey-hole: extremely clean, orderly and carefully designed. Clever storage space. A car park with a gate. A pristine white bathroom and gentle, humming stillness.
    It was heaven after the cramped, paper-thin-walled house of my childhood, decorated with an impossible combination of austerity and tack. Or the squalid flats that Fiona and I had rented since moving in together.
    Fi, who had not saved so much as a penny in the last four years, moved her chaos to my little second bedroom and paid me a pathetic rent. Mum grumbled sporadically about me needing to separate myself from her: wasn’t it enough that we worked together?
    I ignored her and carried on being Fiona’s unofficial mother. It suited everyone perfectly and we had a lot of fun.

Scene Three
    Not long after starting at the opera house, I made two important friends.
    The first was Barry from Barry Island, a principal dancer with biceps like tiny rocks and the best Welsh accent I had ever heard. I didn’t