Page 76 of A Class Act

‘I can sign them here,’ I remember saying, not wanting to follow him into his office. ‘Or I can take them back to Jean and Brian’s with me to sign.’

‘They need to go off today.’ He smiled. ‘They’ve sent them over as a special favour to me, when I told them how good you were.’

‘Jean’ll be here to pick me up in a minute,’ I demurred.

‘It’ll onlytakea minute.’ He smiled persuasively. ‘Come on, what’s the matter? I thought you and I were mates? That I was going to help you become a star? Can’t do that if we don’t sign the forms.’

Reluctantly I followed Peter into his office, and he was right, it did take only a minute. Thirty seconds for me to sign the forms and thirty seconds for him to grasp my hand and shove it, with a guttural sigh of pleasure, down his trousers and onto his semi-hard flesh while, with the other hand, his fingers moved quickly under my ballet skirt towards my knickers.

I never went back to Peter Collinson’s Academy of Dance and Musical Theatre.

I spent the rest of that weekend, much to Jean and Brian’s consternation, crying but unable to tell them what I was actually crying about. They assumed it was because I was missing Mum and Jess, and fed me ice cream and let me watch an old VHS video ofBambithat had apparently been their son’s favourite when he was ill or upset.

Brian drove over to fetch Jess the following day to join us for a Sunday tea of tinned salmon, tomatoes and cucumber, followed by tinned peaches and condensed milk and a huge chocolate cake Jean had spent the morning making for us. They were truly a lovely couple. I still go and visit Jean in her care home, though she doesn’t remember who I am.

Mum came out of hospital a few days later and Jess and I went home.

I never told a soul about what Peter Collinson did to me until, one evening during lockdown when I was back at home sitting in the garden with Jess, and both of us had too much to drink, I confided in her. Surprisingly, she was fairly philosophical – I thought she’d have threatened to cut off Collinson’s balls with a rusty razor – though she did say that if anyone did the same to Lola, shewouldbe after him with a rusty razor. She was proud that I appeared psychologically undamaged by the experience: I hadn’t allowed myself to become a victim and hadn’t been put off musical theatre – or men.

She was almost right. Mum and Jayden couldn’t understand why I refused to go back to Collinson’s academy, eventually assuming I was exercising my adolescent right to be bloody-minded. A new young PE teacher at Beddingfield High started an after-school dance session and bit by bit I returned to my first love of dancing, but it was all contemporary stuff rather than classical ballet. Jayden paid for me to have singing lessons – with a woman – and when the Midhope Amateur Dramatics were looking for their Liesl in a production ofThe Sound of MusicI went for it and never looked back, taking part in all their major productions until I went off to uni in Manchester.

I might have thought I’d weathered the Peter Collinson incident unscathed and without recourse to counselling, but as I stood gazing across at the apartment Sorrel had just followed the bastard into, my blood was boiling, my pulse racing and I wanted nothing more than to kill him.

‘Robyn?’ Mason asked. ‘What on earth’s the matter?’

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‘Robyn, what is it?’ Mason had to put out an arm in order to physically stop me dashing across the road and into the path of a speeding car.

‘It’s Sorrel!’

‘What’sSorrel?’ With his hand still on my arm, Mason kept me back on the pavement while glancing round in some bewilderment. ‘There’s no one here.’

‘I’ve just seen her go into an apartment across the road.’

‘Are you sure? You don’t think, because you’re worried about her at the moment, you’ve manifested her. Thought it was her?’

‘It wasSorrel.’

‘Well, maybe she has friends in this part of town?’

‘Friends? Friends? She’s fifteen! You know as well as I do, Mason, that kids from St Mede’s don’t have friends in places like this. In one of the trendiest parts of town? All new apartments with Waitrose and Ottolenghi on tap?’ I could hardly get my words out. I took a deep breath, trying to calm down, trying to explain. ‘Mason, my fifteen-year-old sister went into that apartment across the road…’ I looked at my watch ‘…over fiveminutes ago with a man old enough to be her father… her grandfather, for heaven’s sake.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Mason,’ I hissed through gritted teeth, ‘I’m going across.’

‘Hang on, hang on, just think this thing through,’ Mason insisted, grabbing hold of my hand. ‘You can’t just bang on a stranger’s door because you think you’ve seen someone that looks like your sister going in there.’

‘I know it was Sorrel,’ I said angrily. ‘I know the man she was with.’

Five more precious minutes passed as Mason tried to persuade me to knock on the apartment door calmly, rather than with all guns blazing. But, finally breaking free from Mason’s grasp, I dashed across the road, Mason following closely behind, and was about to bang on the door I’d seen Sorrel entering, when he physically stopped me once more.

‘There’s an entryphone,’ he hissed. ‘You’ll have to say who you are. If Sorrel hears your voice and knows you’re there and after her, there’s no way she’ll come down.’

‘Ring the bell and say you’re the police,’ I urged Mason.

‘The police?’ Mason looked at me. ‘Isn’t it against the law to impersonate a police officer?’

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