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act of my own personal opera was coming to an end. I could sense Act Three on its way. Acts One and Two had been very gentle but this new era felt different. Smelt different. It was everywhere: a heady current that pulled me along and refused to say where it would deposit me.
    That morning, Bea had summoned me upstairs to the wig-washing room and announced that she’d secured me a job on the Royal Ballet’s summer tour. ‘
The Rite of Spring
, six weeks touring the east coast of America,’ she purred. ‘Starting in New York at the Metropolitan Opera House.’
    I gaped at her. ‘But … I don’t work on ballet,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m opera …’
    Bea snorted, tossing her mane. ‘So was I, darling, but it’s time for a change. I’m flexible. So are you.’
    I looked at her doubtfully. I was a creature of routine. I wasn’t sure I knew how to costume those lithe, muscled little creatures in the ballet department. And, more to the point, my job in the summer was to oversee the inventory and repair of several hundred operatic costumes at our store in Cardiff. I’d done this every summer for years and quite enjoyed the holiday romance I always had there with a friend of Barry’s who owned a coffee shop. He was genuinely called Jesus, in spite of being white and Welsh.
    But Jesus was not part of Bea’s plan for me that summer. She had sorted everything out, in the way that only Bea could. After seven hot summers in the wardrobe stores, my boss, Tiff, had agreed that I deserved a break and had borrowed someone to stand in for me. And the deputy wardrobe mistress from the ballet department, who should have been going to America, was about to give birth to triplets.
    I was in.
    ‘Barry will be dancing in the tour, as will Fiona,’ Bea concluded, applying a creamy red lipstick called FURY! in the mirror. ‘The four of us will take America by storm. I know people in every city we will visit. We will drink cocktails and eat lobster every night. It will be … how do you say? …
monumental
.’ She blotted her lips. ‘Yes. Monumental.’
    If Bea said it was going to be monumental, it would be monumental.
    Although the thought of being on tour with Fiona made my nerves prickle. Fiona had found out recently that she had been passed over once again as a first soloist, leaving her at the same rank she had held for the last seven years. She had decided that it was because she was too fat and last week had stopped drinking alcohol ‘to get
THIN
’. From what I could tell she had also pretty much stopped eating.
    How will you cope with her abroad?
a small voice asked me.
    I ignored it. I was going to NEW YORK. We’d muddle through; we always did.
    ‘Now, I’ve ordered you some proper luggage,’ Bea told me. ‘You will not tour with your nylon suitcase, Sally. We do this in style,
sì
?’
    ‘I …
Sì!
Thank you,’ I gasped. ‘Oh, my God!’ Bea kissed me on the cheek and dismissed me, as was her custom.
    I bowled down the corridor to the lift, imagining myself eating pastrami sandwiches on an iron fire escape and maybe bumping into Carrie Bradshaw. There was a spiralling joy in my chest, an opening up of possibility.
    A lone soprano was singing a jolly little bit from
I puritani
in the corridor and I felt so giddy with excitement I joined in under my breath. ‘ “
Son vergin vezzosa
”!’ we sang. ‘ “
Ah sì! Son vergin vezzosa in vesta di sposa
”! “Oh, yes! I’m a charming virgin in a wedding dress”!’ I giggled all the way back to the wardrobe department.
    And then, a few hours later, I found myself standing in a dressing room with my cousin and a line of a class-A drug. Two cherry-red spots pricked her cheeks and her mood was deadly. Fi had always been completely insanearound food and quite dangerous around drink but this … This was new.
    It was an hour before tonight’s performance of
La Bohème
and I’d just walked into the children’s dressing room looking for a missing pair of derby boots.