Waiting in the Wings

An original short story written for Revision Library.

[1] The technical rehearsal for The Clockwork Garden had been running since half past three, and by five o'clock the whole cast of Barnhurst School's spring production was tired, hoarse and increasingly convinced that nothing backstage could possibly go wrong twice in one afternoon. Naomi Bassey-Clarke had spent the last six weeks understudying the lead role of Elodie without ever once expecting to need it, following Sasha Whitmore's every rehearsal from a plastic chair in the wings with a marked-up script balanced on her knees. It was on the narrow backstage staircase, halfway through the interval scene change, that Sasha's foot caught the middle step and folded beneath her with a sound Naomi would remember for a long time afterwards. For a moment nobody moved at all; the silence in the wings stretched out like an elastic band pulled almost to breaking point, and then everyone was talking at once.

[2] Naomi had not always been frightened of standing up in front of an audience. In Year 6, she had volunteered eagerly to recite a poem at the leavers' assembly, certain she knew every line by heart, only to reach the second verse and find that the words had simply gone, as completely as if someone had switched them off at the wall. She could not remember the words. Not one of them. She had stood there in front of the whole school for what felt like several minutes, though her mother later insisted it had only been eleven seconds, before sitting back down without finishing, her face burning, while a ripple of not-unkind laughter moved through the hall. She had not put her hand up for anything on a stage since, and had chosen the understudy role for The Clockwork Garden precisely because it had seemed, at the time, entirely safe.

[3] Mr Osei, the drama teacher, found her still sitting in the wings ten minutes later, the marked-up script now crushed rather than balanced in her lap. Sasha, he explained gently, had gone to hospital to have her ankle looked at properly, and although nobody yet knew exactly how serious it was, it would certainly keep her off the stage for weeks rather than days. That left, he said, only one person in the entire school who already knew every one of Elodie's lines, every entrance and every mark on the floor. Naomi felt a cold stone settle in her stomach as she understood what he meant, and for a horrible second she was eleven years old again, standing in front of the whole school with nothing at all coming out of her mouth.

[4] It was Priya, her best friend since primary school and the production's assistant stage manager, who found her twenty minutes before the doors opened, sitting very still on an upturned crate in the corner of the wings. Priya did not offer any grand speech. She simply took both of Naomi's hands and squeezed them three times, quickly, the way they always had done since Year 4, back when it had meant only good luck before a maths test rather than anything as enormous as this. 'Three squeezes,' Priya said. 'Same as always. You already know every word, Naomi. You've known them for six weeks. Tonight you just get to say them out loud instead of under your breath.' Naomi squeezed back, once for each word: I. Can. Do. This.

[5] When the curtain rose and the stage lights seemed to lean in, waiting, Naomi walked out into the painted garden set with her heart hammering so hard she was certain the front row could hear it. Her mouth opened. Nothing came out. For one endless second the eleven-year-old in the school hall and the thirteen-year-old on the stage seemed to occupy exactly the same silence, and Naomi felt the whole auditorium holding its breath along with her. Then, somewhere in the wings, she caught the smallest possible flash of Priya's hand, silently miming three quick squeezes in the darkness, and the first line of Elodie's opening speech arrived in Naomi's mouth as though it had simply been waiting there all along for permission to be spoken.

[6] By the final scene, Naomi no longer needed to search for the words at all; they came to her the way the garden in the play itself was supposed to come alive each night, quietly and almost without her noticing until it had already happened. When the lights finally came up for the curtain call and the applause rolled towards the stage like a wave meeting the shore, Naomi found herself laughing, genuinely and without any warning, somewhere between relief and disbelief. Afterwards, walking out to find her parents, she passed the narrow backstage staircase where Sasha had fallen only hours earlier, and thought, for the first time in two years, that the eleven-year-old who had once sat down mid-poem might finally be allowed to stop apologising for it.