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Critical Praise For Lucy’s Launderette By

Betsy Burke

“Burke’s debut is frothy fun and definitely worth a spin.”

—Booklist

“Pick up a copy of Lucy’s Launderette and give yourself time to enjoy it…you can’t help but fall in love with Lucy.”

—Writers Unlimited

“Burke’s story charms with a shower of witty and wry introspection. A tour de-light!”

—BookPage

BETSY BURKE

was born in London, England, and grew up on the west coast of Canada. She has a Bachelor of Music from the University of Victoria. Among the many jobs on her résumé, she includes opera singer, dishwasher, guitar teacher, nurses’ assistant, charwoman, mural painter, salesclerk, puppeteer, English teacher and most recently, freelance translator. She currently lives in Italy. Her interests include art, music, books, rejection-slip origami, turning the planet into a garden rather than a toxic waste dump and trying to convince her four-year-old daughter that chocolate is not a breakfast food. She is also the author of a murder mystery set in Florence.

Performance Anxiety
Betsy Burke

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Sara and Salva and music-makers everywhere.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Yule Heibel, Jean Grundy Fanelli, Katie, David and Susan Burke, my extended Canadian family, Helen Holubov and a very special thanks to Elizabeth Jennings and Kathryn Lye.

Contents

Vancouver

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

London

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Vancouver again.

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Vancouver

Chapter 1

The collision was all my fault.

It had happened on the day I was making my big move. I’d walked into the travel agency that gray Monday in early October and booked my ticket. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. Vancouver to London—Heathrow.

The woman at the agency is a big opera buff. She always asks me about my career progress and gives me special treatment. That day, she let me leave a deposit for one percent of the fare. There was no need to tell her that I still had to earn enough to pay for the rest of the ticket, because I knew I’d find the money somehow. How else could I justify all those menial jobs and forty-eight-hour workdays?

It felt so great when she printed out that little piece of paper, handed it to me and said, “Here’s your flight itinerary, Miranda. I sure do envy you. I love London at Christmas.”

I took a big breath and said to her, “This’ll be my first time there.”

Although it wouldn’t feel like it. I had Londontown.com on my browser. I could tell you what was going on in every concert hall and theater in the city. I could already imagine myself strolling through Covent Garden, or grabbing a bite to eat at Bad Bob’s or Café de Paris before the opera, maybe a Carmen, a Tosca, or a Nixon in China. I can even tell you what the weather is in London on any given day. That Monday, London had drizzle with the prospect of heavy rain.

“I’m going over for an important audition,” I said.

“Oh, wow. Really? Who’s it for?”

“The English National Opera. I got the letter a couple of days ago. I’ve got my time slot. It’s January the tenth at 3:30 p.m. In the theater itself. The brand-new beautiful renovated Coliseum.”

Peter Drake, the two-hundred-ton tenor who was singing Pinkerton in our current production of Madama Butterfly, was good buddies with everyone at the ENO, so I took advantage of his buddydom and asked him to get me an audition. And he did. Although Peter acts like a diva, he’s really a very nice man. His generosity is as vast as his costumes, which could probably double as pup tents in an emergency.

“How exciting,” said the travel agent, “and a little bit scary too, I’ll bet. What are you going to be singing?”

“Some Handel and some Mozart. And if they want to hear more, Rossini.”

“Oooo. Sounds good, Miranda.”

I pulled my pink cashmere scarf tighter around my throat. “Yeah. I’ll have my fingers crossed the whole way. Recycled airplane air can be hell on your high notes. And my pieces have a lot of high notes and runs. But I know it’s going to be fine. I have a great teacher and I’ve been doing a lot of performing lately to work up to it, and I even have a technique for handling the stage fright.”

“You do? What’s that?”

“Well, I learned it in my Centering Group. You see, you have to give the fear a shape. So mine’s a nag. An old, swayback, dirty black plug of a horse with a voice like Mr. Ed’s. And whenever it says, ‘Miranda Lyme, you untalented half-wit, what makes you think you can sing this piece? Who do you think you are anyway?’ I just try to push the old nag as far back in the theater as I can get it. Try to get it out through the exit doors. Although, sometimes, it’s right there on the stage with you, but as long as it still has its shape, and isn’t stepping on your toes or anything, the anxiety isn’t too bad.”

“That’s a new one on me.”

“It was on me, too. Four years ago.”

“Well, then…I really wish you luck, Miranda.”

I yelped, “No, you can’t say that. It’s bad luck to wish me luck.”

“Sorry.”

“In opera we say toi, toi. Or mille fois merde.”

“Toi, toi then. And mille fois merde.”

“Thanks. I’m so excited about being able to do the audition right there in that theater. There’s nothing like standing up on a real stage where the great stars have sung and letting it rip into that huge space. It’s the most incredible feeling. It’s electric. It’s better than sex.”

She opened her eyes wide. “Really? Maybe I should give it a try.”

We both laughed, then I said, “I’ll be back in a few weeks to get my ticket.”

I was tempted to stay and tell her about the other things that were taking me to London. Like my father, the baritone Sebastian Lyme. And Kurt Hancock, the conductor/composer who was suddenly cutting into my practice time.

Kurt hadn’t been part of my strategy, but when he’d strolled into the rehearsal hall two weeks earlier to conduct the Madama Butterfly, all the chorus women were immediately in heat.

To be honest, he wasn’t really my type. I prefer darker, heftier men. Kurt is slim, blond and blue-eyed. But there were women in that chorus ready to poison their families and run away with him, and I guess, in trying to figure out what it was about him that was making them all unhinge, I let myself be carried away by the Kurt Hancock psychosis, too.

After that Butterfly rehearsal, everybody went out to Mimi’s, a Gastown restaurant where opera singers often showcase their talent. The place is decorated in Chocolate Box Gothic with rich dark heavy drapes and tablecloths edged with a fatal amount of flounce. It’s a home away from home for the opera bunch. Sometimes the singing is really fantastic, the performances glow, and sometimes the singers leave you feeling that it might be more fun to be slapped in the face over and over with a fresh cod than to have to listen to their talent. But I guess it’s a question of how everybody’s feeling.

That night was a fresh-cod night at Mimi’s, my fellow chorus singers all trying too hard to impress Kurt.

My defective tights had been slipping down all evening and eventually were clinging to my knees. I wanted to yank them up again without doing a striptease in front of the entire opera company, so I went looking for a private place to sort out the matter. The tiny bathroom was occupied but I opened the door next to it, which was a big broom closet, and stumbled onto Kurt.

He froze like a startled deer caught in headlights. I’m not sure what he was doing in there all by himself before I came onto the scene, but I’d heard a series of rhythmic thuds just beforehand, and now I thought he might have been punching or hitting something or someone. So I said (I was a little drunk), “Don’t mind me, Mr. Hancock. This won’t take long. You can go back to whatever it was you were doing in a second. I just have to take care of something.” And then I hitched up my dress and tugged everything into place.

He stared at me the entire time and I stared back. Then I noticed that the wall near his foot was covered with little black crescent-shaped marks. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen this sort of thing. Music training had taught me early on that pianists never use their hands when they have to punch something.

But then Kurt started to smile. And appreciatively, too. He looked quite sweet, even a little forlorn, and I began to get a glimpse of his charm.

I smiled back. He smiled even more broadly, then sat down on a bucket and started asking me all about myself. I told him the basics, that my name was Miranda, that I was a lyric mezzo-soprano from the illustrious cow town of Cold Shanks, B.C., and that I’d done my voice degree in Vancouver but was going to London in December to do an ENO audition. And then I added that my father also lived in London, and was a well-known baritone.

“Oh, really?” asked Kurt. “What’s his name?”

“Sebastian Lyme.”

Kurt stood up. “Sebastian Lyme? I have a Don Giovanni recording with your father singing the Don. A fine voice. A very fine voice indeed. I’ve seen him perform. He had great charisma on stage.”

“Really?” My heart began to race.

“Yes. He did a stunning Figaro in the Barber. Apart from his technical ability, the man had wonderful presence. Quite exceptional acting. He had the audience in stitches. Not an easy feat.”

I was nodding vehemently. More. I wanted him to tell me more. I wanted to kidnap Kurt Hancock and make him tell me everything he knew about Sebastian Lyme.

Kurt went on, “And he did an impressive Rigoletto for the Royal Opera, but that must have been a good ten years ago. It’s a pity we haven’t crossed paths… Oh, Good Lord! You’re not about to cry, are you?”

I laughed, shook my head and wiped my damp eyes. “It’s just that hearing about my father like that…out of the blue…”

“Heavens. It usually takes me at least a week to make a woman cry.”

We both laughed and then he said softly, “So you’ve followed in his footsteps. Marvelous. May I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“May I kiss Sebastian Lyme’s daughter?”

I didn’t expect it but I let him because he’d really earned it. And it was a nice kiss—not too sloppy or dry, nor too deep or shallow. Maybe Kurt would never have taken notice of me if my father hadn’t exalted me like that. I was no longer a nameless chorus singer but Sebastian Lyme’s daughter. And I began to fall a little in love with Kurt that night because he’d said such nice things about my father. Something my mother rarely did.

We stayed in that broom closet for a very long time. He turned out to be an amazing kisser, and I started to imagine the possibilities, to think that maybe he could be my type after all. I guess he thought so too because every day for the next week there was such a huge delivery of flowers from “Admiring K to Beautiful M” that my roommate, Caroline, said our apartment was starting to remind her of a funeral parlor.

But I didn’t tell any of that to the travel agent. There wasn’t time. And Kurt didn’t want me to broadcast our relationship. If you could call it that. After two weeks, we still hadn’t made it past the intense talks and eager groping in the darker corners of the theater.

After the travel agent’s, I had to get to the supermarket to buy the fruit for the dinner party I was throwing on Tuesday night, and then to work. The unpaid ninety-nine percent of the plane ticket was now hanging over me.

I admit I was very hyper and distracted that Monday after buying my ticket. My mind had also been zooming around all the other executive decisions I still had to make. Such as: should I buy the out-of-season strawberries and out-of-country mangoes and risk having Caroline rant about the exploitation of Mexican field workers? Because there was no way I could avoid inviting Caroline to the party. She was my roommate. She was three years older than me, which made her twenty-nine and on the edge of Thirties Purgatory. Apart from her political zeal, she was an okay roommate, but she did tend to hold those three extra years over my head sometimes, to polemicize everything, especially when my opera friends were around.

Caroline has a degree in poli sci. She works as a Jacqueline of all trades at the Student Union Building, but sometimes, to hear the way she talks, you’d think she were an indispensable cog in the wheels of international relations.

And she loves parties. She can sniff them out the way a pig sniffs out truffles.

Was it better to leave the pretty and exorbitant fruits and have pale, sensible and boring local varieties? The party was going to be the next evening and it was really important, a celebration of sorts, if you took the Kurt factor into account. So the dessert had to be perfect. Well, it was a cake really, but a cake that didn’t look like a cake once you dressed it up with all that fruit.

The whole idea was that it had to drip with every possible tangy, sweet, sensuous decadence, the fruit literally tumbling over the whipped-creamy edges. The dessert had to look baroque and scream sex from its rum-and-cream-filled center. Because Kurt had told me he was definitely coming to the party. Definitely coming. And I’d decided it was worthwhile to impress him a little.

So I had to have those crazy-ass foreign fruits on that cake.

On the other hand, there’d been that dinner party six months back when Caroline had ruined everything because I’d bought a few freshly imported lychees and she didn’t approve; she’d gone on and on about the oppression of Chinese growers by the new wave of pseudocapitalists, which was nothing more than a devious form of superslavery to Western consumption. There in the supermarket I started to get so anxious just thinking of that evening. It was the same kind of feeling you get while watching circus acrobats performing without a net. It made my palms sweat to recall the way my guests had slunk away, whispering their lousy excuses while Caroline pontificated drunkenly in the center of the living room.

Caroline will probably become Canada’s next female prime minister. She has the hide of a rhinoceros and infinite staying power.

So as I hurried out of the travel agency and along Denman through the sidewalk mulch of falling leaves, that anxious feeling had started to grow. I passed the low green awnings of the West End Community Centre and the mute yellow deco squareness of Blenz Coffee, where the last hearty stragglers were sitting at outdoor tables trying to pretend it was still summer. They looked chilly.

Denman was getting trendier by the minute and it almost made me sorry to be leaving the city. All kinds of stores and restaurants offering empty but delicious calories were cropping up. I hurried past my favorites, Death by Chocolate, the faux-Brit Dover Arms Pub, and the rotund glass-and-brick facade of Miriam’s Ice Cream and Pies on the corner of Denman and Davey.

My West End neighborhood was a jumble of architectural styles. On tree-lined streets, vertigo-inducing glass-and-concrete high-rises stood next to stout, comfortable, early twentieth-century brick and stone three-story apartments and stores. Punctuating them like a calm breath were the remnants of the earlier residential neighborhoods of old wooden houses, some painted and fixed up for the here and now, others drab and surrendering to damp rot and termites. Bordering it all was Stanley Park, and beyond that, the ocean, which was steely gray and matched the sky.

As I hurried along Davey toward the Super Value, not only were the ticket, trip, seeing my father again, the dessert and Kurt’s coming to the party all whizzing through my mind, but so was my Davey Street Song. The storefront names always made me smile. I had an urge to set them to music.

Quiznos, Panago, T Bone Clothing,

Gigi’s Pizza and Steam (breathe)

Launderdog, Love’s Touch,

Falafel and Shawarma,

Towa Young Sushi,

Thai Away Home.

Thai Away Home. It was like a lullaby.

As I went through the Super Value doors, I was just as nervous and excited as if Kurt had asked me to marry him. He hadn’t. But he’d said only the day before—a mere two weeks into our relationship—that maybe, someday, later, when things had settled down in our lives a bit, we might get married. I hoped he didn’t mean when my breasts had settled down to my navel. Still, I thought this was very promising, considering the stature of the person it was coming from.

And such a combo wasn’t unheard of. My singing teacher, the renowned mezzo-soprano Elisa Klein, had, in the last century, enjoyed a brilliant artistic fusion with her husband, Oskar Klein. Madame Klein had been barely more than a teenager when she met Oskar in a DP village at the end of WWII. He’d been much older than her, and their time together as man and wife had been more of a student and teacher relationship. But eventually, she made her debut as a mezzo-soprano, was applauded all over Europe and took her place beside him as an equal. After he died, she never remarried. Oskar had been her ideal. She had known and sung with the greats. She’d had a significant career. The idea of a musical marriage was enticing. Or at least, my waking mind thought so.

The night before, I’d dreamed that Kurt and I were both standing in a big white hall, a cross between a church and a city hall registry, and we were getting married. I’d filled out my part of the forms properly and I was watching his long-fingered hands and the way they were holding the pen. I was getting all shivery and a little crazy thinking about the way those hands were going to slide along my skin later.

The spoken questions that you usually hear in the ceremony were actually written down. Do you take this woman, and all that jazz. I looked down again at his hand hovering above the thick black ink and saw that he’d written lines and lines of gibberish. He had this half smile that he has when he’s being clever. He’d written strings of nonsense words and was smirking as if he’d pulled one off.

Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife?

Instead of “I do,” he’d scribbled, “Spruckahaw broogie figgle foo ickle pickle beeky boo” in the provided space.

I’d woken up fast that morning, in a cold sweat, my heart thumping like a happy Labrador’s tail. The dream worried me a little. There were a lot of things about Kurt’s character that I still had to get acquainted with.

I was remembering all this as I grabbed a shopping cart and hurried along the aisles of Super Value. As my cart was picking up speed I was passing people casting me worried looks. I paid no attention as I wheeled around the end of an aisle and slammed into the side of another shopping cart.

Hence the collision.

The driver staggered toward the fresh-meat section and managed to catch his balance and avoid tumbling into the open freezer and flattening the chicken breasts.

He yowled with pain as his arm was mashed against the side of the meat display then he straightened up, rubbed his wrist and said, “Oh Jeeeeez.” He was staring at me, first bleakly, then his face lit up. It was like the sun coming out.

I moved in quickly to touch his arm but stopped myself. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “It’s all my fault.”

“Yeah, it is,” said the man, grinning, which I thought was odd under the circumstances.

“I’ve hurt you,” I said, although I meant it as a question.

“Just a few little fractures. Nothing major surgery can’t fix.”

I opened my mouth to say something witty but could only come up with, “I’m sorry,” again.

He was smiling crazily.

A long embarrassed silence hung between us.

Now I’d gone and done it. I’d probably slammed into my future downfall. The guy was smiling because he was going to try to sue me. But what about when he found out that I didn’t have any significant money? He’d get his revenge by creeping around in my shadow waiting for me outside my door.

Although, as potential stalkers go, he wasn’t bad looking.

He stopped grinning and said in a disappointed tone, “You don’t remember me, do you, Miranda?”

There was a little flutter in my stomach. I stared at him, his bulky height, the length of his crow-black hair tied in a ponytail, his scruffy jeans with the rips in the knees (boho fashion or pure poverty?), his perfect oval face, amused smile and slightly mocking eyes.

In the file cabinet of my mind, I started ransacking the faces drawer. Nothing appeared except the blank chaos of my lousy memory for faces.

There it was. The performer’s curse. All those people who remember you because you had a little solo role, and they were there in the back row, but you couldn’t possibly have a hope of remembering them because you were too busy concentrating on your performance. This guy had probably been in some production with me, carrying a spear, singing bass, wearing a periwig. Who could know?

He said, almost shyly, “Winston Churchill Senior High. Cold Shanks.”

“You’re joking,” I said. He’d caught me completely off guard. I started to giggle. Cold Shanks to Cold Shanksians was one of those places that got instant tittering recognition from its citizens. Like Moose Jaw (euphemistically known as Moose Groin) or Biggar, Saskatchewan (with its sign that read, New York Is Big But This Is Biggar). We Cold Shanksians were a race apart.

“You really don’t remember me,” he said again. His disappointment was almost tangible.

“I’m sorry, I’m so bad with faces…”

“A few years have passed. I’m Patrick Tibeau.”

The sound of his name went through me like a childhood taboo, like a decade of old schoolyard chants. There was always that weird kid at school who everyone treated as a pariah because he didn’t have the same ideas as the rest of the herd, was content to eat lunch by himself in a far corner of the playing field, and stand up in class and expound endlessly on theories that only the teacher could appreciate. That was Patrick Tibeau. I really should have been more discreet but I blurted out, “Oh my God. I can’t believe it. You’re Patrick Tibeau? You’ve changed so much.”

“You used to sing at assemblies. I thought you had a really fine voice. You still singing, Miranda?”

“Just a minute. Just let me get a handle on this. The Patrick Tibeau? You’re a legend.”

He was laughing now.

“The same Patrick Tibeau that set Winnie Churchill High on fire?”

He nodded. He was still laughing.

“And got sent to reform school?” I said too enthusiastically.

He stopped laughing and sighed. “It wasn’t a reform school. Reform schools don’t exist anymore.” He seemed so instantly disillusioned with me. Sometimes, I just have the biggest, stupidest mouth in the world and can’t stop myself.

He no longer resembled the geeky, spidery, scruffy-haired, beetle-browed adolescent who I remembered. This was a full-grown, credible-looking man standing in front of me.

Then I had to ask. It was irresistible. I was going to be late for work but I did it anyway. “Can I buy you a coffee?” The chance to chin-wag about Cold Shanks with the Patrick Tibeau and get his side of the story was too good to be true. Tina, my best friend, also from Cold Shanks, would be emerald with envy.

“I’m in a bit of a hurry,” explained Patrick.

I was frantic. He was like a prize trout about to slip off the hook. I couldn’t let it happen. “Listen, Patrick.” I dug my hand into my purse and pulled out a pen and an old phone-bill envelope. “I’m having a dinner party tomorrow night. It would be really great if you could come…and bring your wife…or girlfriend…or boyfriend…or whatever.” I handed him the scrap of paper with my address scribbled on it.

He took it and smiled again. I noticed he had very white teeth. “We’d like that. What time?”

He was a We.

I said, “Seven. There’s going to be lots of food, but bring something if you feel like it. Extra never hurts. And some wine.”

“Wine. Right. See you then, Miranda. Tomorrow, Tuesday. Seven.”

As I finished pushing my cart around the supermarket, I had a flash of memory. Me and Patrick Tibeau, circa age fifteen, meeting up by accident outside the tin-roof movie theater after a showing of Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête, walking home in the snow under a royal-blue sky full of stars and a bright disk of moon, and talking, talking, talking. Though, about what, I couldn’t even remember.

Still, I was elated to hook up with someone from Cold Shanks. I hated to admit that sometimes I got bouts of hometown nostalgia, but it was true, and Patrick had cheered me up. So I thought, to hell with Caroline, and bought every fruit I felt like buying.

Chapter 2

After the supermarket, I rushed back to my Bute Street apartment. Getting it had been a coup. In a street that was quickly giving way to modern monoliths, my classic building was an oasis in the futuristic desert. The place was a stately old redbrick three-story set among ornamental plums and evergreens. Ceramic tile, yellow with a black line of trim was featured in my kitchen, but in the bathroom stood the prize—the enormous, dangerously comfortable claw-foot bathtub.

I raced up the front steps and the other two flights, went in quietly so as not to wake Caroline, and put away my bags of fruit. Then I went into my bedroom to change my clothes, tossing off my old lounging-around jeans and pulling on my skinny black Levi’s bell-bottoms and a Calvin Klein men’s T-shirt I’d accidentally dyed coral but thought was nice. Miracle of miracles, the dye job had come out evenly. I shoved my feet back into my Adidas, and put my old Doc Martens into my black leather knapsack along with my rumpled work apron.

I ran out of the apartment and down the front steps. Patchy dubious sunlight had started to light up the dull morning. I hurried north to Robson. The neighborhood’s resident street people, who had shifted in their crannies as I jogged past earlier, had now gone, scared off by the working masses. I ran the whole length of Robson, past the restaurants and boutiques, right into Vancouver’s tall bright glassy business core, thinking I’d wait before telling everyone that I was leaving. Announce it when I’d paid off the whole ticket.

Mornings, I worked at Michelangelo’s. It was a spartan-chic coffee shop on Pender. Michelangelo or Mike—a big burly third-generation Italian—was always immaculate with a clean white shirt, polished shoes and a neat haircut.

That morning I could see him through the plate-glass window. He was checking the plain wooden tables, straightening the wrought-iron chairs, attacking imaginary dirt and grease spots wherever he thought he saw them. Then he turned his attention to polishing the big brass beast of an espresso machine, which was his pride and joy. I’m sure it was for the ninetieth time that morning. When I came through the door he waggled his hand at me.

“Thanks for letting me come in late, Mike,” I gasped.

“When have I ever not let you come late? Hey, Miranda. Got a story for you.”

“Shoot,” I said.

“See, this old guy, Italian guy, is lying on his deathbed, and while he’s lying there worrying about whether he’ll be allowed into heaven, he smells this great aroma of almond cookies. His favorite. So he hauls himself out of bed and with the last bit of strength left in his body, he crawls downstairs to the kitchen, and there on the tables are dozens of these almond cookies, still hot. My wife loves me, he thinks, she’s done this last wonderful thing for me. And he starts to get himself over to the table. He reaches out for a cookie with a trembling clawlike hand, and the hand gets smacked with a spatula by his wife. ‘Back off,’ she says. ‘They’re for the funeral.’”

I smiled.

“That’s my family all over. You want a capooch? A fast one? We’re gonna be slammed again in about two minutes.”

We were always slammed at Mike’s. The customers moved in like an evil storm cloud. A clot of professional suits were always first, then law books from the university, and finally, old bundles of rags looking for handouts and a warm corner. My shift normally started at seven. I liked to get there early to fix myself a latte on the house and drink it slowly before total panic set in. Mike knew how to create an environment that fostered returning customers: he was sanguine and shrewd, bellowing love and peace at everybody who came in as though they were his oldest and best friends in the world.

I always went into the back room before doing anything else. At a large steel table near the refrigerators sat Grace, the sandwich lady, buttering her way into heaven. She came into work an hour before the rest of us. Soft-spoken, devout and well past middle age, with rhinestone cat’s-eye glasses on a pearl-look chain and a complexion like wartime margarine, she arrived at dawn to slab together her creations and by the time the sun came out she had disappeared, making you wonder if she really existed.

She was constantly cold. Working in that dank room beside the kitchen with all that refrigeration humming away next to her meant she always wore an old pom-pom-covered rainbow sweater. It had once belonged to her mother. The pom-poms jiggled and bounced as she buttered.

Mike had unwittingly gotten a saint when he hired Grace.

Grace was still there when I entered. She’d waited for me. She slipped me a food gift in a brown paper bag and said, “Here, Miranda, honey, this is for later when you get hungry. Mike’s a nice guy but he’s sooo cheap. I know he pays you girls squirrel droppings.”

I took the gift and said, “Where did Mike find you, Grace?”

“It was the Lord’s doing, dear.” In Grace’s world, there was just the one, omniscient, celestial boss. “And Miranda…the opera was just lovely. I cried through the whole last act.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

“And I picked you out, too. You had a yellow kimono, didn’t you, dear?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, you looked just lovely. I’ve always said, and I’ll go on saying until they listen, you have a special quality.”

Grace was my biggest fan. Even if I was buried in the back of a hundred-voice chorus, she was there to witness my special quality. She got all my complimentary tickets. If I was singing anywhere, she was there in the audience beaming goodwill at me.

I stashed the paper bag in my knapsack, tied on my apron with its big print of Renaissance cherubs kissing, then went to take on the crush of customers.

My first cover was a group of men from the Vancouver Stock Exchange. Now, I should tell you, these are the kind of guys who are regularly held hostage by mirrors. They can’t pass one without getting frozen in front of it, momentarily sucked in by the vortex of their own fabulous reflections.

These men swaggered in like a bunch of action-movie stars and took up way more space than was necessary. You could see it all over them, like a kind of radioactive glow. Money. Money flowing like Niagara. They loved it. It was all-powerful, the perfect aphrodisiac.

I stood at their table impatiently tapping my pencil against my pad, waiting for them to make up their minds. The Donald Trump wannabe of the group grasped my wrist and said, “I was admiring your balcony and wondered if I could lean on it sometime?” He didn’t even bother with eye contact. He talked straight to my breasts as though they were two nice people who were about to make a big donation to his favorite charity. It was frustrating.

I was starting to develop a real love-hate relationship with my breasts. Lately, they’d been attracting a lot of attention. Kurt’s attention was just fine. It was the rest of it that got on my nerves. The Curse of the Mammary Glands. My breasts had been total dickhead magnets since I was fourteen.

My first impulse was to grab the poor guy by the shoulders and shake him till his eyeballs rattled around like dried peas in a tin cup, but while I was on duty at Mike’s, I ignored first impulses. If I played it right, those tips would get my plane as far as Alberta.

“Waitressing is my life,” I said, and flashed him a little smile. “I wouldn’t think of ruining my dream career by mixing business with pleasure. Sorry. Maybe in another incarnation.”

He looked a bit confused and let go of my hand. It was clear that slinging hash was not his idea of a dream career. But I believed that if I was going to get any enjoyment out of life at all, then I had to be Buddhist about it, and try to caress the difficult and boring bits of my day, give them a little respect, too.

I thought of that plane, taxiing down the runway, the roar just before takeoff, and I soared through the rest of the shift.

By eleven o’clock, the sun shone between billowing white clouds. I exchanged my Doc Martens for Adidas again and jogged off toward the Gastown studio where La Chanteuse and Matilde awaited me.

Lance Forrester, technician, artistic director and owner of the voice-over company Vox, was outside sitting on the doorstep. His forehead was furrowed and his eyes squeezed tightly shut. He was concentrating intensely on something.

This is a really profound mental process going on here, I thought.

Before I was near the step, he stated, “Miranda Lyme,” then opened his eyes.

“Wow. Lance. How did you do that? How did you know it was me?” I asked.

“Your smell. You have a great smell. Like a bunch of freesias that have been first rained on then lightly sprayed with fresh sweat.”

I was standing in front of him now. He shocked me by pulling me down onto his lap and shoving his dark curly beard into my neck, imitating a snuffling animal. “Great, great odor.”

“Lance. These are female pheromones you’re talking about.”

“I’m not particular.”

But I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t particular, and if he was, it was a shame. Lance was a very compelling man.

“What are you doing out here anyway? Why aren’t you inside working? You know, I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen you in the light of day?” I said.

“I’m pale. I’ve become a mushroom. Summer has come and gone and I’m a nice shade of silvery white,” he said.

He’d been concentrating on trying to get his marble-white skin to sop up some sun. That’s what all the profundity had been about.

I ruffled his messy silver and black curls with my fingers. “You spend all your time indoors, you silly workaholic. You need some fresh air and vitamin D.”

He said broadly, “Yes, it’s true. I’m doomed.” His voice was thick with pleasure, as though doom were something delicious, like a plate of chocolate éclairs or homemade ravioli. “How’s Matilde today?”

“Hot to trot,” I replied. “How else would she be?”

“Yes. I suppose she couldn’t be any other way. She’s the eighth wonder of the world, that Matilde,” said Lance, and he led the way inside.

We went into the first studio. I pulled the script for La Chanteuse out of my knapsack.

“It’s just the two of us this morning,” explained Lance. “I think we can get the biggest scene wrapped up if we really concentrate.”

La Chanteuse was an “art film” set in Paris. I’d done a little work for Lance in the past whenever there was a voice to be dubbed that had to sing, as well, but this was the first time I’d ever seen so much pork in one of our films. Or so much porking, for that matter.

The protagonist, Matilde, was an opera star who couldn’t perform unless she had sex first. A lot of sex. Megasex. Unfortunately, the man she was in love with was a married pig farmer and she was forever chasing him and his salami all over Paris and outskirts. They had sex everywhere; they rolled in the pigpen mud (when his homely wife wasn’t there), between the prosciutti and ham hocks, they had sex with a side of bacon watching them. Sometimes the pig farmer left his homely wife at home, dressed up and came into town to see Matilde. Then they had sex in the park, on and under the Eiffel Tower, in the corridors of the Louvre, under restaurant tables at the Plaza, on the bathroom floor and in the elevator of Matilde’s apartment. It was awesome. Every time Matilde came, her screaming orgasm would swell and rise and turn into warm-ups, scales and arpeggios. Then when all the heavy breathing had finally subsided, she was away to the Paris Opera for the evening, where she washed off the smell of swineherd and gave the performances of her life.

La Chanteuse goes along pretty much like that right up to the end, until the homely wife murders them both, makes them into sausages and sells them at the local market. A bit too moralistic for my tastes but I guess there had to be human bloodshed in order for there to be a decent denouement.

And I have to confess that although it was a truly silly film, there were moments when I could really relate to Matilde’s impossible obsession. I was no stranger to obsessions myself.

For a couple of hours, Lance and I stood across from each other going over and over the scenes, getting them right, wailing, adoring, whispering, grunting, panting and moaning on cue into the microphones. My arpeggios and vocal ornaments had been well rehearsed beforehand. Lance was a professional. In his dubs you never heard false notes. You never saw the mouths wagging on hours after the sound of speech had stopped. Ours was quality work. But it was a little unnerving that the actress playing Matilde looked a bit like me, with long blond hair and annoyingly large breasts, and the actor playing the pig farmer looked like Lance, a prematurely graying Greek god with iron-poor blood.

By one o’clock, I was getting hungry. My stomach was starting to rumble so loudly that the microphone picked it up. Lance looked up from the script and then at his watch.

“Nice work, Miranda. We’ll have to stop now. I have the kung fu kids in about twenty minutes. You’re doing a great job. Low-budget orgasms. They’re such a riot. We still have four and a half of them to go before we get hacked up and made into bratwurst.”

He shut off some of the equipment and came over to me, moving with the slow prowl of big jungle felines. “Just let me smell you again before you go.” He pulled me into him and pressed his face into my hair. “Mmmmm.”

“Lance, Lance.” I felt as though I was rousing a person from sleep.

“What?” He looked up and into my eyes. A CAT scan was less probing than Lance’s gaze.

“I’m a hoping-to-be-involved woman.”

“Hoping-to-be-involved? Just exactly what is that supposed to mean?”

“It hasn’t actually been…ah…consummated yet.”

His eyes drilled me. “You poor faux-virgin. May I ask who the lucky swine is?”

“No,” I said, still irritated that I wasn’t allowed to name Kurt Hancock as my possible significant-other-to-be.

“No? Ah, come on,” provoked Lance.

“He wants it to be our little secret. He’s a high-profile guy. He doesn’t want the gossip or the press.”

Lance smiled and kissed my hand. “I’m sure that whoever he is, Miranda, he’s a complete and utter bastard and not nearly good enough for you. I know men.”

“Yes, Mommy.”

“Let’s kill Matilde off once and for all, okay? Can you make it tomorrow?”

I nodded.

“Oh, and remind me to pay you tomorrow.”

“Pay me tomorrow, Lance. Please, pay me.” I could see that KLM jet edging eastward.

This time tomorrow I would be a different woman. Yes, Matilde would have her pig farmer, but I would have been had and had again by Kurt. Finally.

Chapter 3

Off with the Doc Martens and back into the Adidas. I thought I was so smart, running everywhere and talking all my employers into working around my schedule. I was like a jigsaw puzzle. Some of the pieces were connected but the outlines still visible, and other pieces were still missing. I was not a complete picture.

I ate one of Grace’s shrimp, rocket and lemon-pepper mayonnaise croissants as I power walked back in the direction of Davey Street. It was so delicious, and I was so hungry that for a moment I considered marrying Grace and forgetting all about Kurt Hancock.

I hurried through the door of Little Ladies Unlimited—a cleaning company housed in a big bleak one-story concrete block. Inside, there was just the barnlike unadorned storeroom where all the equipment was kept, and the tiny office, from which Cora, the owner, took all the client calls and kept everything running smoothly. At the end of the ranks of industrial vacuum cleaners, the other two women on my cleaning team were standing at the coffee machine. They were having a hot debate about whether drip or plunge was better.

“No contest. Plunge,” I joined in. “Now, whose husband are we talking about?”

“Coffeemakers not husbands,” said Fern, smoothing down her brassy scouring-pad hair with a tiny hand. She was smiling. “And on that subject, Miranda, when are you going to get yourself a husband?”

“I’m only twenty-six,” I said, “I’m not ready to be buried alive yet.”

“Hell, I was married at nineteen,” said Fern, “and I’ve had twenty-one great years.”

“You are so full of crap sometimes, Fern McGrew,” said Betty.

Betty was big and muscular, and always wore lumberjack shirts. There was something in her attitude that reminded me slightly of my roommate Caroline. Caroline was smaller, a size sixteen, so she could buy her clothes off most racks. Betty only bought hers off the racks at Mr. Big ’n Tall, but when it came to tough-assdom, they could have been mother and daughter. Betty had been a sled-dog trainer in the Yukon before she got sick of the snow and moved down to Vancouver.

Betty barged on, “‘Great years,’ says Fern. Miranda, get her to tell ya about the great time she had when her great husband goes and gets himself that stupid little slut on the side, and the great fights they has about it and the time he puts her in the hospital because he’s broke her cheekbone with his great big fat fist.”

“Every couple has its little ups and downs,” said Fern, but she was looking at the floor.

Betty leaned in to confide. “I gets the word about Fern here bein’ in hospital, gotta have surgery ’cause them little pieces of cheekbone is gonna get into her bloodstream otherwise and finish her off good-style once and fer all. So what does I do? I goes over to their place, and there’s old Cliff sittin’ on the couch swillin’ a beer and watchin’ football like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. I hauls him up onto his feet and drags him out into the street. He’s wearing just his socks, no shoes, huh, and lookin’ pathetic. Then I lets the whole street know what he’s done, as if they doesn’t know already, and then I whacks him one across his cheekbone an’ I sends him flyin’ into somebody’s recyclin’ bin. The neighbors wasn’t too happy about that but they wasn’t gonna take me on neither. He never done it again, I can tell ya. Am I right, Fern?”

Fern nodded and said, “He’s been a pussycat ever since.”

Wow. Betty and her two meaty fists. Kurt would have to stay in line.

Cora came out of her office. She was a petite woman with a mass of platinum, back-combed hair in a white hair band. That day she wore tight white pedal pushers and a white angora sweater. She was in her forties but so youthful you wouldn’t know it. She looked as if she’d stepped out of a Sandra Dee film. All she needed was a surfboard under her arm and she was complete.

She grinned and said in a singsong voice, “Better get going, girls. This one’s a Special.”

We all groaned.

Betty grabbed her loyal Hoover while Fern and I loaded up our multipocketed aprons with our sprays and cloths. Fern was on dusting, I was on bathrooms and kitchens, and Betty was vacuuming. We were like soldiers going into battle.

We hurried out to the company car, loaded the equipment into the back and climbed in. With Betty behind the wheel, we whizzed down to The Bachelor’s place on Burrard. He lived on the twenty-eighth floor of a twenty-nine-story steel-and-glass high-rise overlooking English Bay.

We cleaned his place every week but today was a Special. Specials were more than just the regular Little Ladies cleaning job. They were expensive and meant we had to do anything that needed to be done. Within reason. As soon as we stepped inside his apartment, we knew The Bachelor hadn’t been operating within the confines of “reason.” He’d been partying.

“So what would you say’s going on here?” I asked as we surveyed the scene.

“Lazy drunken slob,” announced Fern.

“Barnyard animal,” confirmed Betty.

To start with, The Bachelor had a round bed and not-too-clean moss-green sheets twisted this way and that. At the chest of drawers, I imagined him emptying the contents of his pockets every night, since it was covered with pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters, sticky half-sucked peppermints, condoms still in their foil wrap but well past their expiry date, and numerous crumpled bits of paper with girls’ names and telephone numbers. Similar goodies sprinkled the brown-stained wall-to-wall carpet as well. The mirror tiles above the bed had some interesting spots on them, as though they’d been spritzed by quite a few bottles of fizzy stuff.

Meanwhile, the fridge held about fifty bottles of beer and a block of mold. No doubt he ordered in whenever he didn’t eat out. Interesting encrustations covered most of the kitchen, detailing The Bachelor’s gastronomic history for the week.

Back in the living room, there were suspicious-looking marks on his black couch. And his one weeping fig was half-dead. His shoes and socks were all over the place: on top of radiators, on the dining-room table, under the couch. One sock was stuffed into the weeping fig’s pot.

In the bathroom, I figured he had a nightly struggle getting his willy to cooperate and aim into the toilet rather than all over the wall. It was probably the beer. I could be sympathetic and understanding though. Men and women have their own unique sets of problems. If I had the Curse of the Mammary Glands, why couldn’t The Bachelor have the Curse of the Maverick Member?

Fern, Betty and I put our backs into the cleaning for two and a half hours, wondering the whole time how The Bachelor’s ancestors had ever made it out of the cave and into civilization.

As we cleaned, the silence was broken every so often with Betty’s mutters of “Slob.”

Fern said, “The poor man just needs a woman in his life. Someone to clean him up and organize him. You should have seen the way Cliff was living before we got married. He makes The Bachelor look like Mr. Neat. Now, Miranda, how about if you just add your phone number to that little pile on his dresser?”

Betty barked, “Would ya quit with the lonely-hearts crap, Fern? Miranda’s doin’ fine. She’s gonna be an opera star and no man’s gonna get in her way.”

I hoped Betty was a prophet and that her words would come true. I said, “Thanks for caring, Fern. If things don’t shape up by the time I’m thirty-nine, I’ll get you to do a little matchmaking, okay?”

“Oh, you don’t want to wait that long, Miranda. Everybody needs a soul mate.”

Betty said, “A soul mate, Fern, not a middle-aged preschooler who leaves his crap all over the joint. This guy’s mother has a lot to answer for.”

Fern countered with, “Listen to you, Betty. You wouldn’t be talking like that if you’d just get a man by your side, yourself.”

“Don’t need a man. Got ma dogs. And they’re as good as any man ya could know.”

It was dangerous territory. We knew better than to touch on the subject of Betty’s dogs, or the rest of the canine kingdom, for that matter.

As I brought The Bachelor’s stainless-steel fixtures back up to their original gleaming state, my imagination wandered to the life I would lead once I got to London.

My father would probably put me up. I had an open invitation, after all. I pictured his house in South Kensington, solid and white, a small garden in the back, a nice garret room with a gas fire for me on the third floor. He’d coach me on my audition pieces, give me the kind of tips that only the big singers can give you. I’d be doing quite a bit of cleaning and redecorating at his house, too, because he’d been living like The Bachelor himself all these years. He’d told me so.

He’d need me. He’d need a woman’s touch around the place. When we’d spoken on the phone a few years back, he’d told me I was welcome anytime.

It had taken a lot of courage for me to make the call but he’d sounded so happy, really overjoyed to hear from me. And after speaking with him, I could have flown around the room, I felt so high. When I told my mother about his invitation, she said, “He was probably pissed. He’ll have forgotten all about it by tomorrow.”

And Lyle, my mother’s second husband, had chimed in, “If ya gotta go ’n see him, Miranda, ya gotta go. But hang on to your wallet. And just remember, we’re here for you, eh? If ya wanna talk about it afterward.”

I’d wanted to fly off to England as soon as the call had ended, but I was nineteen at the time and already at university. I had no extra money and no extra time. But I knew that the day would come when the reunion with my father would become a reality.

We finished the Special and hauled the equipment down to the company car. There, I took off my Adidas and put my Doc Martens on. I badly wished I could have had a shower first and rinsed off all The Bachelor’s dust. But I was on a tight schedule. Betty was nice enough to give me a lift down to the theater. She wasn’t supposed to take the company car anywhere except to cleaning jobs, but she didn’t care. Nobody, not even Cora, ever argued with Betty.

I ate the last of Grace’s sandwiches in the car. It was Brie, speck and pickled artichokes on seven-grain bread. I looked forward to the day when I became rich and famous and would either pay for Grace to come and cook for me, or I could adopt her.

Can you do that? Adopt special spinster angels? Grace’s sandwiches homed in on oral pleasure centers I never knew I had.

Betty dropped me off right at the stage door.

I checked off my name and descended into the beige bowels of the theater. Fatigue stopped me in the doorway to the women’s chorus dressing room.

And then I had one of those moments. One of those insightful moments that make you so happy your skin tingles. You’ve arrived in your world. The one they nearly didn’t let you into, the one where it’s a privilege to sweat under hot lights in a costume that already reeks of another soprano, have your toes stepped on by hefty mezzos and your eardrums split by tenors who refuse to stop singing directly into the side of your head.

At the mirror next to mine, Tina, who was a mezzo like me, was applying her geisha face. I sat down.

Tina said, “Miranda. Finally. I thought you were going to be late. That stage manager would make a good prison warden. She doesn’t bend an inch on check-ins.”

Three red circles around your name for being late and you risked being kicked out of the chorus.

“I had four minutes to go,” I said.

“That’s cutting it pretty fine,” said Tina.

“You going to stand in the wings tonight?” When a singer was fabulous, like our lead soprano, Ellie Watson, that’s what we did. Stood in the wings and studied her, hoping some of her magic would get into our bloodstreams.

Tina nodded. “Our Madame Butterball’s pretty amazing, eh? That Ellie’s got another one of your paint-peeling voices. Too bad she doesn’t have the look. How much do you think she weighs?”

“More than bathroom scales register,” I replied.

“Yeah, she doesn’t need a dresser, she needs an upholsterer. But I’m not just standing back there to listen to her. I’m going to gape at Kurt. I’m shoving myself under the maestro’s nose so he’ll notice me. I wouldn’t mind studying under him any day. Under him. Over him. Any position he wants. That man is quality grade-A prime cut. He can beat my time with his baton whenever he likes.”

Against all of Kurt’s warning, I whispered into Tina’s ear, “You’re too late. He’s mine.”

She whipped around to look straight at me. Her voice dropped about a thousand decibels. “Kurt Hancock? What do you mean, he’s yours?”

“I mean we’re good friends. More than friends.”

We were huddled over our makeup tables while having this whispered conversation. The dressing room was too quiet and letting the other gossip-starved dames in on the latest developments in my life would be like throwing fat juicy sailors into shark-infested waters—instant death.

“Get your face on, Miranda, and hurry up about it,” Tina ordered. “I gotta have a word with you.” She was as tall as me but she had an angular face and piercing, intimidating, black eyes. When she gave me orders, I obeyed.

I smeared on the white for my geisha face, then drew in the tiny pinched lips and the eyebrows. We always left our wigs until last. They were heavy and itchy. It had been a bit of a catfight when it came to the director giving out these geisha roles. There was a whale-size middle-aged singer who thought that she should get first pick of everything because of seniority. What did she think this was? An office job? This was showbiz. And showbiz, as everyone knows, is the biggest dictatorship in the world. In the end, the geisha parts went to the youngest, thinnest girls in the chorus. Tina and me and six others.

When I finally had my costume and makeup on, Tina dragged me down the hallway and upstairs into a quiet corner of the vast area backstage.

“Okay. So what’s this ‘friends’ stuff?”

“Like I said, Kurt and I are very good friends.”

“In the biblical sense, right? You mean you’re screwing him?”

“Sort of,” I mumbled.

“What do you mean, sort of?”

“We haven’t actually gotten down to exchanging bodily fluids.”

“You’re kidding. What does it take to get down to it?”

“The mood’s got to be right but maybe tonight. He’s coming over after. I’d really like it to happen before the party because if he comes to the party with other people, he probably won’t stay after. You know, appearances and all that.”

“Why?” asked Tina.

“He doesn’t want anybody to know about us because he’s not officially divorced yet.”

“First of all, I have to say, Miranda Lyme, are you out of your gourd? You’re fucking the conductor…and he’s married.”

“Separated.”

She said to the air, “Kurt Hancock, I don’t know what you’re up to with my friend Miranda, but you’ve disillusioned me. I am so disappointed. I thought you were better than that. Yet another married man screwing around.”