Half-Hour Call

The stage manager kept saying are you alright Theresa and I kept saying yes and we were both lying in our separate directions. The dressing room was Diana's. Her photographs, her good-luck card from the director, her particular brand of cold cream that the whole company associates with her like a perfume. I sat at her mirror and put on her part's face and I looked like a woman doing an impression of a job she used to apply for. Twenty years ago I would have wept with joy in that chair. Ten years ago I'd have been sick with nerves. Now I was just calm, horribly calm, the calm of a person who has discovered, far too late and in the worst possible room, that the thing she organised her whole life around has quietly stopped being the thing she wants. Beginners, said the tannoy. That means me, I thought. After nine years it actually, finally means me. And I went.