The Unfinished Symphony of You and Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

work with him – I was opera, not ballet – but he was impossible to miss. One morning as I sat with a
pain au chocolat
in the canteen, gazing over Covent Garden market, I was joined by a very pale, very beautiful man with piercing sea-coloured eyes and a tub of grilled chicken.
    ‘Don’t,’ he said, as I looked sympathetically at his breakfast. ‘I can’t eat no pastries.’ He opened the tub with affected sadness, then grinned evilly at me. ‘If I did I’d end up with one of these’ – he gestured at my belly, which was poking through my dress – ‘and they’d sack me. Not being funny or nothin’.’
    I told him that I was cool about being chubby if it meant I could eat delicious freshly cooked pastries whenever I wanted.
    His face crumpled with desire. ‘Freshly cooked?’ hesaid hoarsely, staring at my
pain au chocolat
. Without warning he grabbed it and took a large bite. ‘Aaah,’ he moaned. ‘Now that’s what I’m talking about.’
    I burst out laughing. ‘My cousin does that,’ I said, ‘all the time. Do you know her? Fiona Lane?’
    The man grinned and revealed perfectly white teeth. ‘Oh, yeah, Fiona. She’s a right little one, I’ll tell you that for nothing.’
    God, his accent. It killed me. I loved it. I stared adoringly at him and told him it was the best accent I’d ever heard. ‘Well, thank you, Chicken,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I call you Chicken? It seems right, as I sit here on this lovely morning eating chicken.’ I nodded my assent (and became Chicken for ever more).
    ‘Great. Well, I’m Barry and I come from Barry Island in the great country of Wales, and I have to tell you that I’m in agony.’ He opened up the plastic tub and put a small, sad morsel into his mouth.
    ‘Why?’
    He lowered his voice to a brave whisper: ‘It’s my dance belt, Chicken.’
    I looked blankly at him. ‘Dance belt?’
    ‘The dance belt,’ he told me, in tones of deep Welsh tragedy, ‘is a terrible thing I have to wear every day and hate more than I can tell you. It’s a G-string and it covers my tiny penis with a great big mound of wadding. It spreads it all out into a … a soft bulge. Like a horse’s ball bag, you know.’
    I shuddered.
    Barry looked grateful. ‘Thank you for understanding,Chicken,’ he said emotionally. ‘Thank you. You don’t know how lucky you are, being able to wear all those … those
bedsheets
around yourself.’
    I fiddled with my voluminous linen skirt and felt like a bit of a tool. I knew I fitted in with the wardrobe lot now but I still wasn’t convinced that this look was very me.
    The next day I bumped into Barry in the canteen, this time with Fiona, and we somehow arranged to go dog racing in Walthamstow the following Saturday. At the stadium Barry started playing Madonna on his phone and nearly got us into a punch-up. Fiona made the very uncharacteristic move of ordering chicken in a basket but then passed out drunk in it. And I managed to give my number to a minor-league gangster from Essex.
    Drunk as lords, we ended up back at my flat and the next day I forced both ballet dancers to have a proper fry-up. As we ate our sausages and bacon we listened to the messages that my randy suitor had left on my answer-phone at three a.m. – a romantic little line about how he wanted to drink peach Bellinis off my ‘bangers’ – and laughed until we cried. And that was that.
    The other firm friend I made was Bea. Bea was Italian and extremely rich. It was never clear to me why she was working, really, but she was incredibly good at her job. Beatriz Maria Stefanini was a supervisor in the makeup and wigs department and she was just about as fabulous as it was possible to be without being a handbag.
    She was – in every sense – the toughest person I’d ever met. I had always seen myself as quietly strong but in truth that was only because the people in my life tended tobe weak or mad. But Bea was something else. She was a force. An opera in