The Four Marys by Jean Rafferty

Author:Jean Rafferty [Jean Rafferty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908643582
Publisher: Saraband
Published: 2014-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Who Dares Wins

THE DRESSING ROOM SMELT LIKE all dressing rooms. It was a strange smell, sweet smell, smell of sweat, smell of face powder and clothes worn the night before, smell of fear.

In Mercedes’ room were the types of thing you find in all dressing rooms. Her lucky champagne cork, a red feather fan with a postcard of a flamenco dancer pinned to the corner, huge long brushes for putting blusher on, half eaten tubes of cherry throat sweets. The little phial with its gluey liquid was hidden behind a pair of black lace evening gloves with no fingers.

The diva was pregnant. She knew she ought to throw the bottle away. Once the two little dots on the test paper had turned pink there was no more use for it. But it made her laugh inside to look at this portion of her urine. She felt as if the bottle itself contained the tiny embryo that would be her baby.

Carlos might not be so pleased as she was. The tenor’s wife had little use for him in person but she was attached to the place his surname gave her, not only in their home town of Buenos Aires but in international jet-set society. He was attached to his daughter. He adored her and could not conceive of life without her.

Mercedes was undaunted by the problems. She grinned into the cheery row of lightbulbs that ran along the top of the mirror. Usually she sighed as she put on her make-up. The lights showed up every hollow, drained away all colour. She didn’t like to see the shape of the skeleton beneath her skin so clearly. Tonight she didn’t care. She thought of the little shape forming beneath her skin and she exulted.

The first time she’d appeared at the Edinburgh Festival she had a makeshift dressing room beneath an old church. There were a dozen of them, men and women changing on opposite sides of a sheet down the middle of a very dusty basement room, which was usually used to store trestle tables for the church’s annual fete. The star of the show had the verger’s little office all to herself. Mercedes was in the chorus then, the only Scot in a production full of English people.

It was a very hot summer, hardly a breath of air in the city. Mercedes wandered through the wynds of the old town, wishing she could afford the embroidered T-shirts and purple crushed velvet loon pants on sale in the boutiques. As she inspected the astrological charts and cabbalistic jewellery she thought how useless the hippies’ bland white magic was. She needed some black magic, so that the star could dislocate her spine and have to stay in traction for a while, or perhaps be injured in a fire and so hideously disfigured she could never set foot on stage again.

In the end the star got chickenpox. Mercedes was surprised, but regretfully dismissed the idea that her thoughts could possibly have had any connection with the woman’s illness.

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