Free Alys, Always by Harriet Lane Page B

I say. ‘I’m here for you. I’m not interested in Mr Letters.’
    She looks at me, and sees the expression on my face, and then she starts to giggle, and I smile back at her, relieved, and suddenly I’m laughing too, really laughing.
    ‘Mr Letters!’ I say, in bursts. ‘Mr Letters! Where did that come from?’
    Snorting, Polly presses her hand against her stomach. ‘Oh God,’ she says, eventually, when she’s back in control. ‘Stop. Please. I’m out of practice. It hurts.’
    ‘OK,’ I say, pulling a poker face. ‘That’s fine. Cross my heart and hope to die, that’s the last time I’ll ever refer to Mr Letters.’
    And then she’s off again.
    The waitress comes back with the order, and Polly composes herself.
    ‘I’m sorry if I seemed kind of grumpy,’ she says, as our coffee is poured. ‘It’s just that it’s all a bit horrid at home at the moment. And I wanted to talk to someone about it, but someone who isn’t part of it, if you know what I mean.’
    ‘Sure,’ I say neutrally, stirring some honey into the muesli.
    ‘Sometimes I feel like they’re all his spies,’ says Polly. ‘Yeah, I know. It’s stupid. But it’s how I feel. Teddy. My friends. My friends’ parents. Charlotte. My tutors. They’re all on his side.’
    ‘Have you fallen out with your dad?’ I ask.
    Polly wrinkles her nose. ‘Not exactly,’ she says. ‘But we are currently having a, um … a
disagreement
.’ She likes this word, I can tell. She thinks it sounds grown up, as if it dignifies the thing it describes.
    ‘Thing is,’ she says, twiddling her spoon in her dish. ‘Thing is, Daddy has never really understood me. That was always Mum’s thing. Mum understood. He used to leave us – me and Teddy – to her.’
    She looks at me.
    ‘Oh, Polly,’ I say, reaching out to touch her sleeve. ‘Oh, you poor thing. I am so sorry.’
    For a moment, we sit there, quite still. Then she looks down, sniffs and moves her hand away, so she can press her napkin under her eyes. I can see she’s taking care not to smudge her make-up. When she raises her face again, all evidence of tears has disappeared.
    ‘Anyway,’ she says, in quite a different sort of voice. ‘It’s not going very well. I think I’m going to leave drama school.’
    ‘Drop out?’ I say.
    ‘I’ve got some mates, they’re brilliant people, incredibly talented, and the plan is, we take a play – Shakespeare, maybe a couple of Shakespeares – on tour around thecountry. We’d just rock up and do
Love’s Labour’s Lost
or whatever in scout huts and school gyms and stuff. Really taking it right into communities which ordinarily wouldn’t be exposed to proper, you know, art.’
    They’ve got an old decommissioned ambulance which they plan to drive from village to village, parking it outside church halls and sleeping in it overnight. Only there are ten people involved, maybe more, so they might have to take a tent or two. The weather will be getting better soon anyway so that side of things wouldn’t be a problem. They’d cook on campfires or barbecues and wash in municipal toilets.
    ‘It’s going to be amazing,’ she says, licking her spoon. ‘Honestly, I know it sounds a bit ropy, but if you met them, you’d know it was a good idea.’
    ‘Has your dad met them all?’ I ask.
    She makes a face. ‘Well, he knows Sam and Gabe and Pandora from when I was at school. But I don’t think he has given them a chance, really. He has just made up his mind, he thinks it’s a rubbish idea, and that’s that. Basically he just doesn’t have any faith in me. He doesn’t believe we can make it work! He’s just so fucking negative.’
    ‘And what about drama school? Have you told your tutors? What do they think about it?’
    ‘Oh no, I haven’t mentioned it to
them
,’ she says, contemptuously. ‘And I’m hardly in their good books at the moment anyway. I had that meeting with my tutor, do you remember? Tony Bamber. He was all sympathetic at