Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by Harper 2015
Copyright © Angela Woolfe writing as Lucy Holliday 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover design and illustration by Jane Harwood
Lucy Holliday asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007582242
Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780007582259
Version: 2015-04-11
Contents
Copyright
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
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
June 1999
There’s no way on earth I’m going to get this part.
For starters, the show is called The Sound of ‘Music’, and I’m about as musical as a rusty tin opener. Seriously, I can barely hold a tune. If the director and casting agent suddenly have a drastic change of heart, and decide instead to start auditioning the hundred-odd kids gathered here this afternoon for a brand-new musical called The Sound of Rusty Tin Openers … well, then I’ll be a shoo-in. Until then, though, I’d estimate my chances of winning the role of Louisa Von Trapp at roughly zero.
Oh, and for another thing, all the other girls here at the New Wimbledon Theatre with the label ‘LOUISA’ stuck to their chests are petite, blonde, and cute-as-a-button pretty.
Whereas I’m a bit gangly, my hair is the colour of double espresso, and even though I don’t think I should be walking about with a paper bag on my head, cute-as-a-button prettiness isn’t really my thing.
In fact, surely the director and casting agent are going to seriously question why I’m here at all.
It’s a question with a pretty straightforward answer, though: my mother.
And here she is now, bustling back over towards me and my sister Cass, fresh from five minutes of wrangling with the casting director’s assistant.
‘Did it!’ Mum practically yells, with the sort of triumphant fist-clutch Tim Henman is always doing on Wimbledon’s Centre Court, just a mile down the road from here, shortly before he’s knocked out of the tournament for another year.
‘Mum! Can’t you be a bit quieter?’
I mean, it’s embarrassing enough that she forced me and Cass to come to the auditions in matching, egg-yolk yellow dirndls (though actually Cass, a cute eight-year-old, looks rather fetching in hers, whereas I, an awkward thirteen-year-old, look like a badly stuffed rag doll, in a much smaller rag doll’s dress, after eating an entire deep-pan pizza); but now she’s drawing even more attention to the three of us.
‘They’ve agreed to move your audition half an hour earlier, Cass,’ Mum is going on, ignoring me, ‘because of the family emergency we have to get to.’
‘What family emergency?’ asks Cass.
‘You know. The important one,’ Mum fibs. ‘Anyway,’ she adds, lowering her voice so that only Cass and I can hear her, ‘the point is that it’ll get you in to audition ahead of the youngest Walker girl, so I’d be perfectly happy to say your grandparents were on fire if it did the trick.’
‘The youngest Walker girl’ is Mum and Cass’s nemesis: a triple-threat nine-year-old (acting, singing and dancing) from an apparently unending line of showbiz Walkers. She has pipped Cass to the post for three big roles lately: Annie in the Aylesbury Waterside production of Annie, Cosette in a production of Les Mis at the Secombe Theatre in Sutton, and, most gallingly of all, Tevye’s youngest daughter Bielke in a nationwide-touring revival of Fiddler on the Roof. In fact, she’s over in the far corner of the lobby right now, practising some stunning-sounding arpeggios, and occasionally, for no terribly good reason at all, sinking into an impressive splits. (I don’t know if the splits are required in The Sound of Music, I don’t actually remember any in the Julie Andrews movie version, but it’s certainly doing a good job of psyching out all the other prospective Brigittas.) The last display of the splits caused three of them to burst into simultaneous tears and flee the auditions before their names were even called. Though it did earn the youngest Walker girl a pretty fierce telling-off from her older sister, another of the showbiz Walkers, who’s evidently here for the part of Louisa, and looking almost as unenthusiastic about it as I am.
‘They just need a chance to see you before they see her, darling,’ Mum is telling Cass, ‘and that part is yours. Now, do you need me to run through the words to the goatherd song again, or do you think you’ve got it now?’
‘I’ve got it, Mum!’ Cass may be a full five years younger than me, but she’s got roughly five times my chutzpah. ‘For God’s sake. Anyway, if I forget any of the main words, I’ll just skip as fast as possible to the Star Wars bit.’
Mum and I both stare at her, in confusion.
‘You