Emma takes a deep breath, enters and sees the mob, thirty teenagers in top hats and hooped skirts and stick-on beards shouting and jeering as the Artful Dodger kneels on Oliver Twist’s arms and presses his face hard into the dusty floor.
‘WHAT is going on here, people?’
The Victorian mob turns. ‘Get her off me, Miss,’ mumbles Oliver into the lino.
‘They’re fighting, Miss,’ says Samir Chaudhari, twelve years old with mutton chop sideburns.
‘I can see that thank you, Samir,’ and she pushes through the crowd to pull them apart. Sonya Richards, the skinny black girl who plays The Dodger, still has her fingers tangled in the flicked blond bangs of Oliver’s hair, and Emma holds onto her shoulders and stares into her eyes. ‘Let go, Sonya. Let go now, okay? Okay?’ Eventually Sonya lets go and steps back, her eyes moistening now that the rage is leeching away, replaced by wounded pride.
Martin Dawson, the orphan Oliver, looks dazed. Five feet eleven and stocky, he is bigger even than Mr Bumble, but nevertheless the meaty waif looks close to tears. ‘She started it!’ he quavers between bass and treble, wiping his smudgy face with the heel of his hand.
‘That’s enough now, Martin.’
‘Yeah, shut your face, Dawson. .’
‘I mean it, Sonya. Enough!’ Emma stands in the centre of the circle now, holding the adversaries by the elbows like a boxing referee, and she realises that if she is to save the show she is going to have to improvise a rousing speech, one of the many Henry V moments that make up her working life.
‘Look at you! Look at how great you all look in your costumes! Look at little Samir there with his massive sideburns!’ The crowd laugh, and Samir plays along, scratching at the stuck-on hair. ‘You’ve got friends and parents outside and they’re all going to see a great show, a real performance. Or at least I thought they were.’ She folds her arms, and sighs, ‘Because I think we’re going to have to cancel the show. .’
She’s bluffing of course, but the effect is perfect, a great communal groan of protest.
‘But we didn’t do anything, Miss!’ protests Fagin.
‘So who was shouting fight, fight, fight, Rodney?’
‘But she just went completely ape-shit, Miss!’ warbles Martin Dawson, and now Sonya is straining to get at him.
‘Oi, Oliver, do you want some
There’s laughter, and Emma pulls out the old triumph against the odds speech. ‘Enough! You lot are meant to be a company, not a mob! You know I don’t mind telling you there are people out there tonight who don’t think you can do this! They don’t think you’re capable, they think it’s too complicated for you. It’s Charles Dickens, Emma! they say, they’re not bright enough, they haven’t got the discipline to work together, they’re not up to
‘Who said that, Miss?’ says Samir, ready to key their car.
‘It doesn’t matter who said it, it’s what they think. And maybe they’re right! Maybe we should call the whole thing off!’ For a moment, she wonders if she’s over-egging it, but it’s hard to overestimate the teenage appetite for high drama, and there’s a great moan of protest from all of them in their bonnets and top hats. Even if they know she’s faking, they are relishing the jeopardy. She pauses for effect. ‘Now. Sonya and Martin and I are going to go and have a little talk, and I want you to continue to get ready, then sit quietly and think about your part, and then we’ll decide what to do next. Okay? I said okay?’
‘Yes, Miss!’
The dressing room is silent as she follows the adversaries out, bursting into noise again the moment she closes the door. She escorts Oliver and The Dodger down the corridor, past the sports hall where Mrs Grainger leads the band through a fiercely dissonant ‘Consider Yourself’ and she wonders once again what she is letting herself in for.
She talks to Sonya first. ‘So. What happened?’
Evening light slants in through the large reinforced windows of 4D, and Sonya stares out at the science block, affecting boredom. ‘We just had words, that’s all.’ She sits on the edge of a desk, her long legs swinging in old school trousers slashed into tatters, tin-foil buckles stuck onto black trainers. One hand picks at her BCG scar, her small, hard, pretty face bunched up tight as a fist as if to warn Emma off trying any of that seize-the-day crap. The other kids are frightened of Sonya Richards, and even Emma sometimes fears for her dinner money. It’s the level stare, the rage. ‘I’m not saying sorry,’ she snaps.
‘Why not? And please don’t say “he started it”.’
Her face opens with indignation. ‘But he did!’
‘Sonya!’
‘He said—’ She stops herself.
‘What did he say? Sonya?’
Sonya makes a calculation, weighing up the dishonour of telling tales against her sense of injustice. ‘He said the reason I could play the part was ’cause it wasn’t really acting because I was a peasant in real life too.’
‘A peasant.’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s what Martin said?’
‘S’what he said, so I hit him.’
‘Well.’ Emma sighs and looks at the floor. ‘The first thing to say is that it doesn’t matter what anyone says, ever, you can’t just hit people.’ Sonya Richards is her project. She knows she shouldn’t really have projects, but Sonya is so clearly smart, the smartest in her class by some way but aggressive too, a whip-thin figure of resentment and wounded pride.
‘But he’s such a little prick, Miss!’
‘Sonya, please, don’t!’ she says, though a little part of her thinks that Sonya has a valid point about Martin Dawson. He treats the kids, the teachers, the whole comprehensive system as if he were a missionary who has deigned to walk among them. Last night at the dress rehearsal he had cried real tears during ‘Where is Love?’, squeezing the high notes out like kidney stones, and Emma had found herself idly wondering what it would feel like to walk on stage, place one hand over his face and push him firmly backwards. The peasant remark is entirely in character, but even so —‘If that is what he said—’
‘It is, Miss—’
‘I’ll talk to him and find out, but if it is what he said it just reveals how ignorant he is, and how daft you are too, for rising to it.’ She stumbles on ‘daft’, an Ilkley Moor word. Street, be more street, she tells herself. ‘But, hey, if we can’t settle this. .
Sonya’s face tightens again, and Emma is startled to notice that she seems as if she might cry. ‘You wouldn’t do that.’
‘I might have to.’
‘Miss!’
‘We can’t do the show, Sonya.’
‘We can!’
‘What, with you bitch-slapping Martin during “Who Will Buy”?’ Sonya smiles despite herself. ‘You are smart, Sonya, so so smart, but people set these traps for you and you walk right into them.’ Sonya sighs, sets her face and looks out at the small rectangle of parched grass outside the science block. ‘You could do so well, not just in the play but in class too. Your work this term’s been really intelligent and sensitive and thoughtful.’ Unsure how to deal with praise, Sonya sniffs and scowls. ‘Next term you could do even better, but you’ve got to control your temper, Sonya, you’ve got to show people you’re better than that.’ It’s another speech, and Emma sometimes thinks she expends too much energy making speeches like this. She had hoped that it might have some kind of inspirational effect, but Sonya’s gaze has drifted over Emma’s shoulder now, towards the classroom door. ‘Sonya, are you listening to me?’
‘Beard’s here.’
Emma glances round and sees a dark-haired face at the door’s glass panel, two eyes peering through like a curious bear. ‘Don’t call him Beard. He’s the headmaster,’ she tells Sonya, then beckons him in. But it’s true, the first, and second words that enter her head whenever she sees Mr Godalming are ‘beard’. It’s one of those startling full-face affairs: not straggly, cut very close and neat but very, very black, a Conquistador, his blue eyes peeping out like holes cut in carpet. So he is The Beard. As he enters Sonya starts to scratch at her chin and Emma widens her
