The night my father told his stories, the wind blew strongly. I can hear it whistling and moaning in the background of the tape. It got through the walls, stirred the air, raised dust and ash from my father’s spent cigarettes and made him cough. Today in my attic the wind is blowing strongly too. All kinds of eerie, whining noises float up through the floor. The sheets of my history, which cover the skylight, flutter in the breeze, like outsized moths. It took me two nights to transcribe my father’s story. I worked for hours without pause. Sitting at my desk, headphones over my ears, listening, copying, stopping the tape, rewinding, watching the numbers tick on the counter, noting where the relevant details lay, going over them again, pausing, copying, beginning again – such happiness I have not known in years! As soon as I finished the transcription I printed it out, twice by mistake, which gave me a thrilling sensation. I even laughed as the printer coughed up the sheets and delivered them out on to the floor. I didn’t pick them up or read them but just left them right where they lay. When my laughter stopped I felt quiet and calm. I sat on my mattress and closed my eyes, thinking of nothing in particular. I felt terrifically happy. Apart from the moaning of the wind, the attic was quiet. Every now and then there was a gust, fluttering my sheets. Sometime later I stood and began to busy myself with domestic tasks. I swept the floor. I emptied my bucket. I went down to the pantry and renewed my supply of beans. I had a sudden urge to take a walk. Strange. I had not left the house in quite some time. I got dressed and brushed my teeth. I stuffed my ears with cotton wool. It was late morning. Quite a breeze. I stood for a while letting the wind play with my hair. On the way to the beach I had a scuffle with a cat. I dusted myself off then walked on the sand. I watched the dogs, many different breeds, chasing the surf. Their owners I noted too. The Lindsay twins. Mrs Ewan.
Now I am back at my desk. Before me is the diary that belonged to Damaris. There was a time in my history when I would have paused to describe it at length, noting its appearance, its size, make, the image on its cover, as well as the condition of the paper, its general state of decay and so on. I might have related how Damaris left her diary behind when she left me. Perhaps I would have talked of the difficulties of deciphering her handwriting, how she never used ‘and’ but a sign which looks like an inverted ‘y’. No longer. All I can say at this late stage is that I brought the diary from the wardrobe and opened it somewhere near the beginning.
Night falls and so do I. The terrors. Always on tour and in cities like this. What’s his word again? Spectral? Edinburgh, he said, is like a pen-and-ink drawing left out in the rain. Rehearsals going well. The most beautiful drowner he’s ever seen, he said.
Silent terrors, and they silence me too when I’m awake because I can’t describe them. They turn me to stone. Ironic really, is what I think whenever I sneak off in between rehearsals to go stand frozen on the Royal Mile, acting the statue. He’d go mad if he knew.
Today is his birthday. Champagne after rehearsals in the theatre bar, this far out little cellar dive with red-check tablecloths and candles in old wine bottles. One by one the rest of them leave until it’s just him and me. Then he went to the toilet, and I left. Walking out the door, I saw the barmaid give me this look. I’ve seen her before. She works as an usher here. Strange bird.
This morning at rehearsal I winked at him. He ignored me. He won’t have liked being left like that. As though I’d just let him pounce! He looked more annoyed than usual during the lost in the forest scene when Jack has to carry me across the river. Me and Jack had a laugh about that, wondering which of us he was more jealous of. We open in six days. I’m out of money. So tomorrow after rehearsal I’ll spend the evening as I’ll have doubtless spent the night, dead still, dead silent. A living statue.
It’s not just the money. I like being looked at. And it’s different, in the street, in the middle of the crowd. When you’re on stage, the audience can’t touch you, even if they want to. Out in the street, they could but they don’t. They know the rules. I like that. You pick your spot, lay down your crate, put out your tin, step on to the crate, assume a pose. They flip a coin into the tin and I shudder into motion, then halt, only moving again when they drop in more coins. Mostly it’s kids and couples, tourists. But sometimes it’s men on their own. With them it’s different. To them I’m an object. How could I not be, a statue! They stare openly, rudely, crudely, knowing I can’t stare back. They walk round me, farmers inspecting cattle at auction, knowing I can’t turn to follow their gaze. My costume, black leotard and tights, a shadow made solid with my face painted out a ghostly white. They stare, then, having established they’re masters of the situation, drop money into the tin, allowing me a few seconds of freedom. Turns me on a bit, I think.
That bargirl from the other night. She came up to me today, as I was playing the statue. Girl I say but more like a young man with her cricketer’s stride, hands in trouser pockets. That’s how she approaches, and then she stands in front of me, never minding that a couple of young boys are there, about to make me move. She elbows them to one side then stares so hard at me she freaks them and they skedaddle. Meanwhile I’m still standing there, still. Usually, I can’t look over the person looking me over – being looked at makes it impossible to do any looking yourself. Like being onstage when the footlights blind you to the individual members of the audience. But this bird spends so long in front of me, drops so many coins into my tin, that with each move I’m able to take in a bit more, until I get a sense of the whole of her. Which is, strong and determined like a Channel swimmer. One from the 1920s. Tall, flat-chested, severe bob. And those ears! A boat with its oars out, I thought. Something paddle-ish
Paddle-ish!
Something paddle-ish about her shape too. Something Edwardian about her. But she’s young, my age. And so the young Edwardian man-woman
the young Edwardian woman stands in front of me for quite a while, giving me this funny look. Different funny to the other night, but still funny. Head to one side, smile lopsided like it’s about to slip off her face altogether, looking for all the world like she’s expecting something, like she’s waiting for me to do something she’s known all along I was about to do. That annoyed me, and I wanted to wrongfoot her. So I gave her the Seven Deadly Sins. When she dropped in her change, I moved into a different position. More coins. Again, I moved position. I gave her several versions of Lust. The one where I look like a gargoyle. The ones from the convent I used to commune with during mass. She didn’t seem impressed. Or unimpressed. It was as if she was expecting me to assume a particular pose, and, when I didn’t, felt the need to keep paying up until I moved into the exact position that would satisfy her. What this position was, I never knew, cos after an hour or so of this, I saw her pat her pockets and look at me sadly. I knew from her gestures and sorry expression that she’d run out of money, and I knew too she’d come back. And it was funny, I realized as she walked away, never looking back as she loped off in that way of hers, how she’d communicated all this to me without a single word.
Yesterday she came back. I gave her Pride every time. Hand on hip, chin tilted, and, as I turned my cheek, I thought I saw the wardrobe girl, Tamara, passing through the crowd. I hope not. She’s having a thing with Jack and doesn’t like me. She’s bound to tell on me.
That strange girl came back this morning. But this time, she just put down a crate of her own, painted white in contrast to mine, positioned herself in front of me, in my direct line of sight, face a foot from my face, and stood still as a statue herself. Copying my exact pose. For the full twenty-seven minutes she was there – according to the clock tower – passers-by just kept passing by, staring, to be sure, but at her, instead of me. No one stopped to put money in my tin. Don’t know if they found the whole scene too strange or too intimate – it felt both – they just walked straight past me and my odd, inverse shadow. She was dressed all in white, gauzy white fabric like paper with the light shining through it. And her face all smeared in black boot polish! Between us, this channel of silence, despite the mad noise of the crowd all around. But though we stood in identical poses, and though I now had a clear image of her, I still felt like it was her looking at me, because, I suppose, the rules of our game meant that she could, if she chose, move any time she liked. But also, there was something – what’s that word from the Commandments – covetous? – something about her stare, trying to claim me, her look pinning me as though she was a butterfly collector and me a brittle and unwieldy specimen. There was a kind of effort in her stare. Then, abruptly, she broke out of her position, stepped down, picked up her crate and strode briskly off. And it really was like she’d pinned me in place, because I realized, after she had left my line of vision, that I would have run after her, had I been able. And this bothered me. Me, who never runs after anyone.
What a joy to transcribe from Damaris’ diary!
Fuck fuck fuck. He only caught me! Didn’t see him till it was too late. I was looking out for her. When he came out of nowhere I really did fucking freeze. His face went as white as mine in mime. We open tonight, he says, You’ll need your rest, and sends me back to the b’n’b telling me, We will talk about this later. So I’m lying here now picking at the bobbly bedspread, supposedly resting up for tonight, half of me wondering what the fuck he’s going to do about all this – if he gets me kicked off the American tour! – while the other half wonders if she came back to find me this afternoon.
We opened last night. Full house. We went down well but we won’t know what’s what till the papers tomorrow, if there’s even any mention of us. He was completely satisfied with my performance. And I don’t mean by that that I was satisfactory, more that everything he was hoping for, I did. I felt that even on stage, but he could hardly look me in the face when he told me as much afterwards. Not after running into me in the street like that. I have betrayed him. Made a fool of him for the second time in two weeks. Afterwards, we had drinks in the theatre bar. I looked for her, but she was not there. Instead this Orcadian chick with those faraway fisherman’s eyes some have. I asked about her colleague, a bit embarrassed when describing her, and she says, Oh you mean Evie. She’s away looking after her da. She wasn’t able to tell me any more. So I invited her to come and have drinks with us. But she was shy of me as pretty girls often are, and said she couldn’t, she was working. D came down later, said how much he’d loved the show. I noticed the kinds of looks he attracted, and the look he gave in response. Acknowledging their acknowledgement of his fame, as though it was he who had recognized them. And it made me think of her. Evie. That look she gave me that first night. As though she knew me.
So this is how he’s getting his revenge. He’s using the reviews as an excuse. Some are cautious, some are catty, some are raving. And one was smutty. I didn’t look virginal enough to play the title role, ha!
Ha!
He thinks what the reviews are saying is that something is missing. He wants to freak ’em all out, he says. So this is what he’s done: in the mornings, we’re rehearsing the whole show again, with me as the boy and Jack as the girl. I have to forget my part and learn Jack’s and vice versa. Everyone else has to play to me where they played to Jack and vice versa. Unlearn in order to create he says, with a foxy smile, aimed straight at me. The cheese weasel. We both know what this is about.
Exhausted. Sleep walked through rehearsals. He says I’m miming being a mime. Ha. Ha.
Today in rehearsals, when me and Jack were tripping up on bits of our old roles that remain like debris in our memories, he said again, Unlearn to create! Unlearn to create! No, I screamed. DESTROY! I screamed louder, DESTROY TO CREATE. Then I kicked a jug of water across the stage which smashed hysterically, and I walked out.
Last night was our last night and the opening of the reversed version. We all felt something. It felt right. And knowing this, we felt exhausted. After a few drinks, we said our goodbyes until Oxford next week and slipped off separately into the night. A hot night in Edinburgh, damp heat off bare skin and the smell of sweat mixing in with reefer and patchouli. Got a bit stirred up by all that and found myself wandering down a cobbled side-street when someone grips my elbow.
It’s her. That bird. Evie.
You’re better as the boy, she said. When she smiled it threw me a bit. A real freak when she smiles. Nothing wrong with the smile itself except it doesn’t belong to her face. It’s like one of those children’s flip-books where the pages are cut into top, middle and bottom sections which you match randomly. The top half of her face does not go with the bottom half.
I’ve been to every one of your shows, she said. This did not surprise me.
We ducked into a bar, to a tiny table in the corner where the walls were all pasted over with playbills and covering those a slight sheen of condensation from the heat of the summer bodies pressed in together, and we ordered some red wine, and I said, How’s your Dad? Mad, she says, and we both laugh, surprised. That’s where you get it from then, I say, and she doesn’t smile at this but says, What do you mean? And I chuck her under the chin. Last time I saw you you were more of a statue than I was myself! An experiment, she mumbles. I don’t know if the mumbling is her being embarrassed about admitting this or because I just touched her face. Both, I realize. What kind of experiment? An experiment in (mumbles). In what? I cup my ear, miming, Pardon? I still can’t hear. I lean closer. She can see down my shirt. No bra as usual. She jumps back like she’s been burned. An experiment in what? SILENCE she says, louder than she meant. Asked her to explain. The essence of mime is silence. She says this quietly. The essence of mime is imitation, I say. And I tell her where the word comes from. It’s how we learn. How we learn to do anything. By copying. And then I notice that we are both in the same pose, elbows up on the table, chin in hands, and when she clocks that I’ve clocked this I look straight at her. She drops her gaze. You are a vessel of silence. She is mumbling again. I am a mirror, I say. What you see is what you see. So I tell her what he said in our first ever rehearsal, in his little speech about mime (a contradiction in terms): ‘The fire which I see flames in me. I can know that fire only when I identify with it, and play at being fire. I give my fire to the fire.’
I reach out my fingers as though to stroke her face. Again, she jumps back, fearing to be burned. I reach for my cigarettes instead. After the wine came whisky. She asked me about the statue thing. Why I did it. So I told her. I like being looked at. I’d imagine you get looked at anyway. It’s very zen, I said, just emptying yourself out like that.
I told her a joke. This couple, two statues in Hyde Park, are granted a wish by a fairy who feels sorry for them. They wish to be human for the day. They spend it touring London, seeing the sights, going to a fancy restaurant and so on. At midnight the fairy comes back to meet them in Hyde Park to reverse the spell, as agreed, but the statues are not there. Then the fairy hears rustling in the bushes and goes to investigate. The fairy finds one of the statues clutching a pigeon, while the other one says, Quick, hold him still while I shit on his head.
Then Evie told me the story of the Happy Prince. Who wasn’t really, in the end. The whole time she tells the story, she’s not looking at me. She’s smoothing over the same patch of wax which has dripped from the candle on to the table. She smooths away at it and tells me the story of a young prince who has all that he desires, and lives a decadent, pampered life until he dies. Once he is dead, he is turned into a statue. A statue as beautiful as he was in real life, Evie says, with skin made of pure gold, and eyes of sapphires. His statue is set up high over the city, where he can see all the misery that was hidden from him during his life of luxury. The poor seamstress with the feverish child who cries for oranges she cannot afford. The young writer, freezing in his garret, unable to complete his work of genius for he is too cold. The prince sees all this, Evie says, now scratching at the wax with her little finger. And it kills him. As a statue, he is powerless. He can’t move. It’s only now, as I’m writing, that I realize what a sweet, sad story this is. One day, Evie says, a swallow comes to shelter under the statue of the prince, on his way to join his friends in Egypt for the winter. The prince asks the swallow to delay his journey by a day, and to deliver the jewels in his scabbard to the poor people he sees. The swallow obliges and delays his journey to help the prince. The next day, the prince makes a similar request, asking the swallow to delay his departure by another day to deliver valuable bits of himself – gold leaf from his skin, sapphires from his eyes – to the poor. And now that the prince has given away the jewels in his eyes, he is blind. So the swallow stays with him, and tells him stories of the misery he sees, stripping the rest of the gold leaf from the prince at his direction and distributing it to all these unfortunates. In the end the swallow decides to abandon his journey to Egypt and stay with the prince, because he loves him. The swallow dies from the cold. The prince’s lead heart cracks. And the prince – now stripped of his jewels and his gold leaf – is considered shabby and unsightly by the town councillors so he is taken down from his pedestal and scrapped.
When Evie reaches the end of her story she is crying. And then she says, Do you know why the swallow fell behind his friends on their way to Egypt, why he delayed his journey in the first place? No, I said. You must read the story then, Evie said. Oscar Wilde.
We must have been pretty drunk by the time we left the bar cos she had one of my smokes and she doesn’t. She snatched it out of the pack as we were leaving the bar, and when I went to light it for her she grabbed my wrist to look at the matchbox. It was a souvenir one from the play. She asked to keep it.
A strange and sad and funny day. Woke this morning to a note left by Evie. She’d obviously stayed the night. Don’t remember her being there. Would you meet me today at 3 p.m. by the cemetery gates?
Which fucking cemetery? Too hungover to think of how I might start asking so I leave it to chance and walk around the b’n’b in circles – bigger and bigger circles – till I hit one. It’s after 3 p.m. She’s not there. That’s how I know it’s the wrong one. I continue circling. I hit another one. It’s 4 p.m.-ish. She’s not there either. I carry on. A third – Edinburgh’s full of cemeteries! – a fourth, and she’s there, waiting. I asked if she wanted to show me a grave. Said she was taking me to visit Mr Rafferty. Her grandfather. He was quite mad, and we would be visiting him at the institution where he lived.
To someone else it might have looked like a country house. Walked into the building and felt small with something sad and familiar. That smell. The convent came back in a rush. Evie warned me that Mr Rafferty might mistake me for someone else and if so, would I mind playing along? Of course, I make my living doing just that!
He’s in his seventies with a face like a soft felt hat, one that has been sat on, with its hollows and bulges. Hair a deep blue black and obviously dyed, giving him a sort of surprised look. Gave me the most delighted smile, Evie’s smile. But on his face, it fit.
Called me Julia and gave me a big hug, crying into my hair. Glowered at Evie as though she were intruding. Called her Rex. Who were these people he had taken us for? He swept us into the room. Quite bare. Just a bed, desk and chair, and wardrobe. The chair was set askew, the desk cluttered. I saw that he’d made some strange little object out of what looked like tiddlywinks sellotaped together. He grabbed it, then presented it to me with a sort of bow. Thank you, I said. He’d been working on it for months, apparently. I made appreciative noises. Evie peered over at it, and, addressing me as Julia, asked if I had ever seen such a beautiful timepiece! No, I murmured, choking back the urge to laugh. Mr Rafferty said it was his wedding gift to me. He looked into my eyes and squeezed my hands. His gaze made me think of the near-human look you see in pictures of chimpanzees sometimes.
After, me and Evie went to the pub. She told me she planned to travel to Easdale, a tiny island off the West Coast of Scotland, for a few days, to stay in a friend’s cottage. Asked me to join her.
So I said, Why not?
It’s only now, writing this, that I’m wondering why I said yes. Sometimes I don’t know what I think until I write about it in my diary. Like that reed. Oh! Now I remember. Something from our night together. Early in the morning, asking Evie, pestering Evie, to tell me about the swallow from the story, why he had delayed his journey. Eventually she mumbles, Fell in love. I pester some more then she says, Reed. The swallow fell in love with a reed. This silent, graceful thing just blown about in the wind. It never even noticed him. And now something that Evie said in the bar that night comes back to me. A vessel of silence. More emptiness, I think. There’s got to be a link between that and keeping this diary. There’s got to be a link between that and saying yes to invitations made by near- strangers.
We drove here in a single night. I don’t know why she wanted to drive at night, but she did, and that was the plan, and I was just bumming a ride so what could I say? The others were already on their way to Oxford when she pulled up in her dad’s Morris Minor. Dusk had just fallen, the sky was that fairytale blue. A few stars starting to poke through. I slung my bag in the back and myself in the front. I was bad driving company, just dozing off in the front seat and twitching awake at intervals to fiddle about with the radio. It made her wince. She is sensitive to sound. Vibrates a bit like a violin string depending on what’s playing. Rock got her all taut like she was overstrung. I left on some jazz until the lights of a combine harvester flashing across us woke me up. And I thought harvesting was daylight work, such a city girl am I! I found something beautiful and classical, and she seemed to slacken, and her eyes went dreamy and a little less, well, pebbly looking. We listened together to this sad noble music which I thought was Mozart, but the only Mozart I knew was jolly stuff. This got quieter and quieter, or rather, fewer and fewer instruments played, until there was only this lonely violin. Towards the end, Evie lifted a hand from the wheel and then brought it down, as if wielding a conductor’s baton, in time with the final note. But there was no final note. Or rather, the note she was anticipating was not played. She had got it wrong. We both laughed. But of course I didn’t really miss that last note, she said. What do you mean? Well, everyone thinks that music begins and ends with the first and last notes. And it doesn’t? No. Music begins and ends with silence, she said.
The radio announcer was explaining how Haydn had come to write the symphony. Evie was about to speak. I told her to shush cos I wanted to listen and she gives me this funny look. You like stories, don’t you? she said. Who doesn’t?
Woke up to Oban at sunrise. Drove up to Ellanbeich where Evie turned off the engine and slumped over the wheel like we’d crashed. Exhaustion. Slept for a couple of hours then stood on the dock by our bags, waiting for the first ferry, drinking bitter black coffee from styrofoam cups. Just the smell of it when you’re wrung out with tiredness! And the smell mixing in with old fish and wet rope and the slapping waves … We’re at the cottage now. My room is right at the top, under the eaves. Ha! So why come here? To get away from him, from the others, to be taken somewhere I’ve never been before? We’ll sleep a little and then explore.
Not writing so much as dragging my pen across the page. Out here the salt air comes at you from everywhere, this being an island and a tiny one at that. It leaches your energy and turns your blood to porridge. Eyelids at halfmast. All I want to do is sleep. But I have to write about today. After the tour, it’s no surprise I’m exhausted. But this air! By the time we came back this afternoon we were sleepwalking. Maybe the air made us mad. Maybe we were dreaming. I would pinch myself but there are scratch marks from the bushes. And the light! So late here and so light. It won’t leave us alone. Maddening and magical and not like daylight but like night with the darkness leached out of it.
We started off fresh enough. A clear morning, like a kid’s crayon drawing, green lawn, blue sky, white cottage, red roof, yellow gorse. We ran outside, down the springy grass to the path. Two dogs came, a sheepdog and a black labrador. Dogs sometimes look like they feel an excess of joy, so much it confuses them and they almost seem in pain with it. The sheepdog and the lab bounded on ahead, looking back every now and then to make sure we were following, as though they’d arranged to take us on a tour. We let them. They took us through tangles of wildflowers, over hillocks and hummocks and down to the rocks, where the air became damper and saltier as we approached the sea, turning, eventually, to seaspray. Then we could get no closer as the waves got high and snatched at the rocks and whatever might be on them and we shouted and laughed and scrabbled back to a safe distance as fast as we could. She is clumsy, I’ve noticed, and looks like a puppet when she runs. Not a puppet, no, one of those Victorian children’s toys, paper figures with jointed limbs that swivel stiffly. The dogs wandered off, and with them went Evie’s energy. Before, with the dogs, she had run with me, not saying much, just laughing, almost hysterically, harder and harder, as if her laugh was something funny which made her laugh even more. But now she was quiet. With the dogs gone she seemed to feel more alone with me. We came inland a little, into the open, where there was nothing else to focus on except each other. Whenever I made some comment, she only mumbled. When I looked at her, she turned her eyes away, seemed to struggle not to turn her head away. She’s the shyest person I’ve ever met. There was something about her nervousness which provoked me. We came to an abandoned quarry which had been flooded. We stood on the edge and looked down. Sunbeams reaching right into the water. Up went my dress, down went my knickers, off came my shoes. Come on! I said to Evie. She couldn’t look at me. She shuffled around, trying to unhook her bra under her t-shirt and slip off her knickers under her skirt. I leaped out over the edge. Water so cold, it stung. She asked me what the water was like. Refreshing! (teeth chattering). In she jumped and up she came, gasping and laughing. We swam. The ruins of a roman bath. Water slate blue, smooth, calm, shadowy. The walls sheer rock flecked with gold. When I got tired of swimming I started on Evie. She’s easy to tease. I ducked down underwater and she started thrashing around, trying to cover herself up. She needn’t have bothered, all I saw was a greenish white glow. I grabbed for her feet, she kicked out, I came up, pretended she’d hit me in the face, she swam up to me all concerned then I splashed her. It was fun. When we got tired of that we thought about going back. And then she realized. How are we supposed to get out? I pointed to some rocks and laughed when I saw her realize we would have to climb them naked and walk all the way round to fetch our clothes.
The sun was bright but we were cold. The best thing to do was run out quick and warm yourself like a lizard on one of the rocks higher up which got the sun. That’s what I did. When I looked down to find Evie she looked so funny I had to ask her what the fuck she was doing. What do you mean? She was cross. You look like some creature crawling out of the primordial soup. It was true. She was crawling over the rocks on her belly but with arse and legs tucked under. Trying to show as little of herself as possible. So I stood high up on my rock and stretched my beautiful arms out to the sun and lifted my breasts to the sun and turned up my beautiful face to the sun and said, Here, this is what a woman looks like, and she looked up at me from the rocks below. That is what you look like. And what do you look like? I said. She slowly stood up from her horizontal crouch. Long, white feet, strong white legs, flat hips, a fluffy, tea-coloured bush, concave belly, long waist, small low breasts with large pink nipples, wide shoulders. I can’t say she has a body I want, but I’ve had people with bodies I wanted less. And I cannot say I wanted her because she was nothing I wanted, not sassy or cute or strong or sly or ironic or teasing or searching or dangerous or pure or delightful or feral or any of the other things that have made me look past a body I don’t want to the force of the person within. She is clumsy, awkward, bizarre, self-absorbed. But I like the way she looks at me. And there is always one thing. One thing to want about someone. Her sides, her long waist and flanks, like a boy’s, I liked, I decided. And so I reached out my hand, and she climbed up the rocks, upright this time, and took it.
We must have looked like a painting to him, the young guy out walking his dog who saw us in the distance, me and Evie holding hands. Another woman would have squealed instead of the sound Evie actually made, a kind of surprised bark like a seal. Before I knew it she had shoved me into a bush and fallen in on top of me.
I was held in suspension. It hurt to move.
When the knowledge of the branches became old I became aware of Evie’s weight on my back, her breasts pressing into me, and a softness, her bush, on my arse. And close to this, suddenly, barking – the dog. Honey! Away home! A smile in the guy’s voice. The dog yelped with disappointment as her master dragged her off, whistling. We stayed there a while. Evie’s breath in my ear, first a sound, then a warmth. Then, very slowly, she started to move on me. The branches needling but she didn’t care. Slowly, I felt her getting wet, slippery, faster, her breath hot in my ear, her lips not quite touching me, and me suddenly wanting to feel a kiss and what I got then was a lick, she was licking my ear and she was grinding, pressing me into the needles, and then that sealbark again and she was still.
What a joy! To copy Damaris’ diary, to type out words no longer my own, leaves me feeling calm. My whole being throbs sweetly. Every now and then I pause to gaze around the attic, at my skylight, which gives off a white luminousness, and then at the piles of papers, of which Damaris’ diary is just one among many, barely distinguishable from my other objects. And yet those papers, which until recently I have thought of as just another kind of object, decaying in the moist air, like the rest, seem to take on an enormous importance. They seem to emit a special kind of radiance. I can think of nothing better than to take them in my hands, spread them out on my desk and rifle their precious contents – not so much because of what they say, but because they contain thousands of words to transcribe.
We got our clothes back. We dressed without speaking. On the way home, she was quiet again, but not self-conscious at all this time. No, self-absorbed, dreamy. This made me angry. When we got into the cottage, I felt like punishing her. I brought her into the front room. Evie, I said. What you did in that bush. She smiled. You hurt me, I said. I sat on the edge of the couch. I slipped off my knickers and pulled up my dress. I lay back and opened my legs. You need to soothe me, I said. And she kneeled down before me, and I took her head in my hands and I guided her mouth to my cunt.
Later this evening. She’s a terrible cook. She thinks adding lots of cream to the dish (a mixture of chicken, red wine and orange juice) will improve it. It hasn’t. But it could have been my being in the kitchen. She seemed clumsy. Horribly shy. My glance was caustic to her. When she poured in the cream, she dropped the tub and it went everywhere. I got up and took her hand and licked it off. Then in between her fingers, slowly.
When you are drunk and you fall it doesn’t hurt, not until the drink’s worn off. Then you feel tender and offended at gravity. You feel more mortal than you did before. And so it was with this salt air, and Evie, I think. It made her drunk. And drunk on that she’d touched me all over in the branches and only now was she starting to really feel me. With my creamy lips, my creamy tongue, I kissed her. I knew from this great feeling she gave off of … What was it? Relief? Gratitude? I knew then that no one had touched her like that before. I could feel how much she was feeling. And the more she felt, the more I realized I had never felt anything like that myself, starting so young and so casually. And that no matter how good it was with someone, it always felt rehearsed. I’d never had my touch received like this before. And to be felt like that was to feel like that myself – too much. I broke off, told her the colour of the food looked wrong, I didn’t want to eat it, and went up to bed, and locked my door.
The salt-air and too much fucking.
What day is this anyway?
Our last night. Too full up on each other to touch. We fall on talk as something new. We talk about the island. I said how this would be a bleak place in winter. Exposed to wild winds with the great heaps of slate piled everywhere grey and unforgiving with no sun to pick out the metallic sheen. The wind would be wild, wouldn’t it? She sounded almost envious. You would like that? When we walk inland, in the quieter places, I feel anxious, she said. About seeing people? (We had seen that same guy with his dog that afternoon.) No, she said. The quiet. I thought you worshipped quiet. In others, I envy it. But quiet for me is torture. Why? I can hear myself. Your thoughts, you mean? The sound of me. I like it best by the sea or in the wind, where I can’t hear myself. Most people feel anxious when they can’t hear themselves. ‘I can’t hear myself think.’ Then I told her about D’s brother. He heard voices. It was bad in the wind or by the sea. Noises outside turned to voices inside. He goes mad with the sound of other people in his head. And you go mad with the sound of yourself!
Evie told me about the castrati then. Those boys who had their balls cut off to keep their voices sweet and high. When they sang they did not sound like boys, and they did not sound like women. It was an eerie sound, Evie said. The practice had been banned by the Vatican in the nineteenth century, but she had heard a recording, made during the earliest days of recording technology, when the last castrato was still alive and singing in the Sistine Chapel. A moment in time, she said, when the sound could be captured for ever. What were her words? Beautiful synchronicity. But think! (she clapped a hand over her mouth). Think of all the sounds we will never hear! And what about the sounds that are facing extinction, she said. Sounds that future generations will never hear!
Like certain rare songbirds, I said. Or the din of yourself.
The castrati! I have not thought of the castrati in decades. There was a period in my teenage years, before I met Damaris, when I thought about almost nothing else. One day in Edinburgh, in a charity shop, I came across a recording of Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato, who died in … I forget the year, I will have to consult the Encyclopaedia. What do I recall of Alessandro’s entry, read all those years ago, after I returned from the charity shop? That as a child he had a beautiful singing voice (needless to say). That at the age of nine he was placed in a warm bath, drugged with opium and castrated. That he sang in the Sistine Chapel choir. That he was the only castrati to have made a recording. As soon as I returned from the charity shop – this, shortly after I left boarding school – I went to my room and listened to the recording of his voice. I became obsessed by Alessandro Moreschi, as well as by the strange race of which he was a last member: emasculated giants whose voices did not change with puberty, but whose limbs and ribcages, lacking testosterone, developed abnormally: long and heavy for the limbs; thick-boned and swollen for the ribcages. By the time Alessandro reached maturity, I read, his chest was cavernous, his lungs enormously powerful, and he could sustain a high c, no, d for over a minute. More than this I cannot recall. Once again I am forced to consult my Encyclopaedia. That is something I have often found myself doing, while writing this history. It has never been easy. The set is in constant use, although not the use for which it is intended. The volumes of my Encyclopaedia are not so much repositories of information as elements of furniture, since they comprise the legs of my desk, four pillars supporting the wardrobe door. Let me (briefly) describe the Encyclopaedia. Bound in blue leather, each volume measures approximately ten by seven inches. The pages are yellowed and in places eaten away by the moths and damp. Pasted on the inside front cover of Volume 1 is an advert cut from a magazine.
WHEN IN DOUBT – ‘LOOK IT UP’ IN The Encyclopaedia Britannica, THE SUM OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE, 32 volumes, 31,150 pages, 48,000,000 words of text. Printed on thin, but strong opaque India paper. A COMPLETE and MODERN exposition of THOUGHT, LEARNING and ACHIEVEMENT, a vivid representation of the WORLD’S PROGRESS, embodying everything that can possibly interest or concern a civilized people, all reduced to an A B C simplicity of arrangement.
So much for the Encyclopaedia. Let me describe how I constructed my desk. Having decided to use the wardrobe door as a surface, I searched for the volumes of the Encyclopaedia, which were scattered about the attic, mixed in with other books. When the set was complete (except for Volume 13, which I could not find), I arranged it into alpha-numerical order. Then I made four pillars out of the volumes: Volumes 1 to 8 for the front-left leg of my desk; 9 to 16 the back-left; 17 to 24 the back-right (replacing the missing volume with a book of similar thickness); Volumes 25 to 32 formed the front-right leg. Now the pillars were in place, I placed the wardrobe door on them.
That is how I constructed my desk. The problem was that now, whenever I wanted to consult the Encyclopaedia, I had to take my desk apart! Let me demonstrate the difficulty. Say, as now, I wish to read about Alessandro Moreschi, I must carry out the following steps:
– Take the computer off my desk and hold it in my hands
– Kneel down before the legs of my desk
– By the light of the computer locate the relevant leg (in this instance the back-right) and, within that leg, the relevant volume (MEDAL–MUMPS)
– Place my computer on the floor with the screen facing the relevant leg
– Stand up, remove the various items that have accumulated on my desk – cups, pencils, rubber bands, books, the tape recorder, Damaris’ diary, paperclips, keys, a hair slide, a lamp, a vase, some stones – and place them on the floor
– Lift the wardrobe door and lean it against the attic wall
– Take the topmost volume of the relevant leg (Vol. 24, back-right) and place it on the floor
– Take the next volume (23) and place it on top of the first (24)
– Repeat the process with the succeeding volumes (22 on 23, 21, on 22, and so on), until the volume I wish to consult (18) is exposed
– Take that volume and, by the light of the computer, locate and read the relevant entry (MORESCHI, Alessandro)
– Enough!
Oxford. A golden crust, hot from the oven. Me and Evie wander the city, hot and golden ourselves. My skin, her hair (lemon juice, like I told her) in love, why not, and, in a week’s time, with nothing to do for the rest of the summer. She’s coming to London with me. She follows me everywhere. She came to our show last night. He was not surprised to see her. He made a bitchy comment. A chick this time? Too quietly for her to hear. But then, this afternoon, she mentions it. Comes to meet me after rehearsal and we go down to the river. Lying on the grass, my head on her belly as usual. She has a horror of lying on mine, sensitive as she is to the sound of me. Her fingers twining the roots of my hair, as though her fingers themselves were trying to take root in my scalp. Lightly she says, So the last one was a boy? I say, Yeah he was, the boy in the play. Or the chick now. She said he was handsome and what was it like with a boy. Told her me and Jack would show her sometime. I asked if she was jealous (seems that’s always a rhetorical question). No, she says, just curious. I ask if she gets jealous when I’m on stage. What with everyone watching me. She said, No. Then she gives me this big speech, not really looking at me. About how when I’m miming, the audience, strangers to her, to me, to each other, all of them, and her, are looking at me. She says, We forget ourselves. We forget ourselves, and one another. Only you exist. And you? she says, You are oblivious to everyone except yourself. I imagine you to be moving in a different element, a heavy silence, the kind one might experience after a loud and sudden explosion, in the seconds before one’s ears begin to ring. Or some such scat. Then, to herself, Hiroshima after the bomb, what were the first sounds made after that? She went on. She couldn’t say she was jealous at these times cos I was trapped. Trapped in my own silence, or my illusion of it, up there on the stage, with everyone looking at me. She said that at those times she felt nothing but pity for me. For me! That made me angry and I pulled her fingers out of my hair so roughly it hurt, and still hurts. Can’t say exactly why I was angry, but as I write now, I think perhaps it was fear, fear that she was right. Fear of the loneliness that gets me sometimes. I went apeshit on her. Pity for me? You pity me? Look at yourself! You’re trying to dress like me, you follow my hairstyling advice, you’ve started to put on make-up now to make yourself more attractive to me, but you look like a monkey in a wedding dress! You know nothing about life, modern or otherwise, you don’t know what’s hip, you’ve got no sense of humour, no idea how to speak to people, how to behave, how to move or even how to fucking fuck for fuck’s sake! And YOU pity ME?
Here was the silence after the loud explosion. She sat staring at her hands with her pebbly eyes wide open, shining with tears that she would not allow herself to shed. I had no idea, she says. If I am so … pitiful (electric blue mascara now starting to run), why are you … with me?
I thought about the poor swallow and wondered why anyone loved anyone. Because I realized then that I loved her. I was in love with her. I just wanted to take the poor lost freak in my arms and kiss her and that is what I did and as I did I said, Why Evie Steppman, can’t you see, it’s because I pity you. She made a good job of trying to laugh then. Later that night, after we’d fucked she said, puzzled, No sense of humour? How could you say that? I am always laughing. Yeah, Evie, but at things no one else can dig.
Today we went to Botley cemetery to visit Evie’s mother’s grave. She has never been before. Her mother was from Oxford, she told me this morning when she announced the trip. I invited myself along. To protect you from your sentimental excesses, I said. She told me I was rude but she said it like it was a compliment. The chapel was one of these buildings that look like a toy-sized building built to human scale. It was squared off by cherry trees. After we had found the gravestone I left Evie crouching by it and wandered the grounds. As I did I felt as though I were looking for something, but wasn’t quite sure what until I came across the grave of a woman named Virginie, born in the same year as me. I realized then that I was looking for some sign of myself. Damaris X. Born 1950–Died 5 Minutes Ago. All this time I was breathing in the ashes of the dead, since the crematorium next door was in use. Those great ostrich plumes of smoke seemed extravagantly Art Nouveau and gave me an idea. I ran back to where Evie was kneeling, tugging up weeds, dandelions which looked rather pretty, I thought. So now a flowerbed, as well as a deathbed (and to the French, Piss-in-Bed). Oh Evie, you are a sentimental old boot, I said, pulling her up to her feet, just how she was pulling up the weeds, How can you cry for a mother you never knew! I never knew my parents. Do you see me weep for them? No. They should weep for the loss of me. Besides, it’s too hot for manual labour today. I know somewhere lovely and cool.
And that is how we came to visit the Pitt Rivers museum. To be wandering in that dusty Victorian half-gloom on a hot summer’s day – what a treat! We walked around together until I got impatient cos she lingered too long by each case. Me, I was keen to see as much as I could, moving on quickly from whatever didn’t interest me. Stayed until the guard announced the museum was closing and we were reunited outside. On the walk back to the boarding house, through the long slants of light and the lengthening shadows, I counted off all the things I had seen. Let me try to remember:
A cabinet of benevolent charms entitled, Sympathetic Magic.
A cabinet of objects occurring in nature which had been collected because they look like something else in nature (a seed pod which looked like a snake; a rock which looked like a monkey’s head, etc.).
A cabinet called Treatment of Dead Enemies, which included a skull that looked like it had sharpened pencils sticking out of its nose.
A huge, swishy-looking Hawaiian ceremonial cape in a striking black, yellow and red pattern that looked as though it were made of fur, but when you looked closer you realized it was made up of feathers, thousands and thousands of hummingbirds’ feathers.
A charm with a label written in tiny, tiny writing which stated matter-of-factly how/where it should be displayed (I forget) its particular powers (I forget), and its ingredients, some of which I remember. They included:
Earth from the grave of a man who has killed a tiger.
Earth from the grave of a woman who has died in childbirth (except I misread the label and saw, at first, Earth from the grave of a man who has killed a tiger that has died in childbirth).
A letter in some ancient Eastern pictographic language on a very long strip of palm leaf that looked like silvery skin which had been rolled into a tight neat coil.
A display on the West African communication system based on the exchange of those tiny cowrie shells that look like Sugar Puffs. A single shell sent to someone conveyed the message: I consider you less than nothing and have no wish to ever see you.
A foetus in a jar. It must have been about four months old. Its little ears had been pierced and it was wearing a necklace.
An odd-looking fifteen-year-old girl with thick glasses shouting, ‘Paula! I’ve found the shrunken heads!’
The shrunken heads. Like withered apples.
And you, Evie? What did you see? Just the Benin Bronzes. But that’s where I left you! What’s so interesting about them? I asked her, annoyed. Just a load of bronze masks. Look, I said as we passed a couple of beautiful young guys with perfectly symmetrical golden features, See their faces in the sun! They make more beautiful bronzed masks. E shakes her arm out of mine and tells me I don’t understand, more sad than angry.
E didn’t turn up to meet me after rehearsals today. After waiting fifteen minutes, I went back to the boarding house, but she was not there. I waited there until it was time to leave for the show but she didn’t turn up. After the show I waited backstage for her. She didn’t come. When I got back to the boarding house she was there in her bed, asleep. I got into my bed, and turned my back to her. I left the room in the morning and when I got back after rehearsals she was still there, in bed. I asked if she was ill and she said no. She hasn’t said a word more all afternoon. I’m in bed now, writing this. I’m due to leave for the theatre in twenty minutes and she’s still here. I don’t know where she was yesterday, or what she did. A moment ago I put my face close to hers, to see if she really was sleeping. I saw a small tear, like a bead, lodged in the corner of her eye.
Evie has spent the last two days, Alice-like, swimming in circles in her own tears. What can I do? I kept saying. As though I were at fault for not being able to dispel this, this I want to say blizzard, or fog, or downpour. Why is it we reach for meteorological metaphors to talk about our moods? Our many weathers. If anything, it is like the sandstorm in Nigeria that Evie has told me about, the kind that blinds and chokes. Is it your mother? I ask. Is it the Benin Bronzes? She shakes her head and laughs at me, a laugh which causes her some pain.
I wonder about those Bronzes. I wonder if they carry some curse. I wonder if E has been cursed by them. Objects are not mute. That cape from the museum. My guess is that you couldn’t fail to sense a thousand heartbeats, the thrum of a thousand tiny pairs of wings, if you swished about in it, knowing what it is made of. And perhaps that bestows some power on the wearer. To be able to stand in a cape like that you’d quell compassion, conscience. And that would make you more ruthless, more powerful.
Today Evie, exhausted with crying, was able to sit up in bed and eat a little soup, after refusing food these past days. She told me she periodically experiences such episodes. Calls such attacks the Faulty. Believes the Faulty was passed on to her by a woman she knew as a child, some blonde who smoked a lot and believed in Voodoo! When I ask her what causes them, she says, The din of myself, and laughs.
I’ve not slept all night. Last night, Evie began to talk, after four days of silence. It came out in a flood. She told me all about her bedroom in Lagos, about all the sounds she could hear from it. She told me stories about her mother and father, stories from her childhood. Stories her father told her when she was a child. And in the womb?!? One nasty little story about a medieval mapmaker who arranged the mass abduction of women from Nubia then basically raped them. She told me that story in raptures, not hearing what she was saying. And the opposite happened with me. I could not speak as she told me those stories, such stories. A story about a kind of spirit-child called Sagoe. Stories about the people she’d known in Lagos. Most of it lies. No doubt as a child she believed this stuff really did happen. But when she tells me now, is she relating what she believed as a child, or what she believes now? If she believes it now, that would make her mad.
Last night was the last show. Evie came along. When we got back to the boarding house, I slipped into her bed, hoping we could fuck since the last time had been just after our row, and that had felt disconnected. She felt far away again. The gratitude, the relief, have gone. I wonder if she feels like we’re just rehearsing now.
E is a blind person to be guided. No. She sees too much. She can’t screen out the distractions you need to ignore to make safe/efficient progress down a London street. Head in the air, looking up, around, never ahead. Or swivelling with each beautiful freak who walks past, ignoring her. Evie’s feeling free, giddy with it, no longer a freak of the first rank.
Now Jack has moved in with Tamara, I’ve moved us into his room. The best room, the attic, where I am now, Evie making supper in the kitchen, down in the basement, full of green light from the garden down there, feels like it runs on for miles, getting wilder. The attic covers the whole house. You come up through a hole in the floor. Like camping, Evie says, laughing, and it’s true, the room is tent-shaped and we’ve draped fabric on the wall behind our mattress which Evie has christened Bedouin. As in, Let’s go to Bedouin now.
Orange walls. Two huge dusty skylights at either end we’ve covered in chiffon scarves – one seaweed green, one red – underwater or perpetual sunset depending on which end of the room you’re in. It’s hot in here, but we can’t leave the skylights open or pigeons gatecrash. We hear them constantly. So loud and close it feels like we’re eavesdropping. Our first day we left the skylights open to air the place. We came back, via the florist’s with armfuls of lilies I stole from outside the shop, to find a pigeon sitting on Bedouin. A terrible thing to chase it out, flapping and shitting everywhere. Evie dropped a wastepaper bin over it. I slid an LP (Harvest – sorry, Neil) underneath. The bin was openwork raffia. We could see it panic, trying to peck us through the holes as we bundled it out of the skylight.
There’s a broken piano in a corner of the room. Evie tries to play it sometimes. In another a stack of half-finished canvases. Impossible to guess what they were meant to be. All that’s left of the original ideas are pencil marks and vague brushstrokes. The room encourages laziness. Mostly we lie on Bedouin in the stifling heat, smoking pot and fucking, the room like a hothouse, the lilies shedding mustard dust on the floorboards.
Feel a bit lost. I wanted that tour. His doing, of course.
E loves the squat. A house full of young people after that big old place on her own with a madman in the attic. Today, we all sat in the kitchen, shelling peas from the garden (eating them sweet and raw from the pod as we did). Evie told the joke about the statues in Hyde Park and everyone laughed. She looked so pleased I could have kissed her.
Last night at dinner we were talking about star signs, and the others found out it’s E’s birthday soon. Michael suggested a house birthday dinner. Evie, I thought, would hate the fuss. I’d planned on serving her a special meal in Bedouin, Birgitte already cast as waitress (her first role in months). But no, Evie puffed up like a pigeon at the idea. I found this too funny. I think we’re her first real friends.
We wake up, and Bedouin feels like a womb. Today we are born, I say. Let’s go out into the world. We spend the whole day out in the garden, sunbathing naked.
The Faulty. E lying in Bedouin, naked and sweating as though knocked out by some tropical disease, eyes closed. No, not closed, screwed shut, as if what little light there is in here pains her. I apply more chiffon scarves to the window, wipe her body with damp flannels.
I put a record on and she says, Take it off, like she is choking.
I make her pink lemonade. She waves it away. I ask her, What is it? What is it, Evie, dear? She shakes her head slowly as though it hurts to move. A small tear is squeezed out, like the last drops of juice from the lemons.
Day two of the Faulty and she is lying now with her back to the room, face to the wall, staring at it, though there is nothing to see, no interesting cracks or whorls in the paintwork that might be turned into new planets and escaped to.
So I take an old postcard I saw in a pile of books downstairs, one showing a snowstorm in an Egyptian city, and I pin it to the wall, just in front of her. I couldn’t bear for her to stare at nothing like that. But she does not blink or focus on it or acknowledge my presence. This devastates me. I cannot stand to be ignored.
E beginning to walk and talk again. She doesn’t say much, but at least she is able to read. After three days without attention, barely existing for her, I am jealous of her books, as I am jealous of her staring into nothing and of her silence and of her sleep and of her dreams and yes, even of her Faulty.
That is, jealous of any time she is removed from me. Perhaps not jealous. Fearful, maybe. I don’t know what I am without her attention.
Growing times. In knowing Evie, and learning how Evie is beginning to know me, I begin to know myself. And so I am beginning to realize the extent of my jealousy. What a bitch! My need to be noticed. In between shows, I barely exist. Keep thinking about that tour I’ve missed out on. And now that Evie has been accepted by the others, I feel I exist a little less. She’s no longer the freak who needs me. Not here, at least.
Michael and Birgitte upset tonight since Finn cooked lamb in the vegetarian casserole dish. Delicious!
I found Evie’s birthday present today. No, like the best presents, it found me.
This is how. I wake up, and she’s not there. I can smell something cooking so I lie waiting for my breakfast until I realize she isn’t coming up. Find her in the kitchen with Michael. Eating food I don’t recognize, something Michael has made. Look! Eyes shining, spearing what looks like a slice of fried banana on her fork. Plantain! I haven’t had plantain since I was a girl! Taste it.
Ashamed to say I pull a face. Say Yuk, as though it’s disgusting. It wasn’t. It wasn’t anything really. Just tasted of fried oil.
Michael says they’re celebrating. That cat has this habit of never giving you quite enough information, so that you have almost to ask for it, and he makes you feel you’ve begged it off him. So I don’t ask what they’re celebrating and leave them to it. I go looking for Evie’s birthday present. No money. And I don’t want to lift it. Go down Trafalgar Square – a couple of hours’ statue-ing. Walk up Charing Cross Road and into all the second-hand bookshops. I want something big and antique with beautiful engravings. I find an edition of Paul et Virginie! One lovely engraving of them both, the same one from the box of matches. Paul stripped to the waist, trousers rolled up to his knees. Standing on a rock in the middle of a swollen river, trying to cross it, Virginie on his back. But I hadn’t enough money. Too late to earn more, so I walked until I hit Bloomsbury. That dusty part of the city left me feeling thirsty so I walked up Rosebery Avenue to Angel, then all the way along Upper Street, heading, I realized when I got there, for the William Camden. Had half a bitter I lingered over, exchanging humid glances with the boy (all eyes and lips) behind the bar. He came out to collect empties and as he leaned over to wipe my table I told him to follow me out back. A good cock, thick and hard. Nice surprise and all the hotter from someone so slight and pretty. I sat on a bin and sucked him, not off though. Brought him close – brought me close – then stood up, hitched up my dress. He slid my panties down then stayed there, licking. The sweetest tongue. Then we fucked, kissing. I came quick on that cock, quicker than I wanted, he held off for as long as he could but I saw it in his eyes when he just couldn’t any longer, and it was during his sharp last reflexive shudders, almost piercing, that I saw it, in a cardboard box full of junk by the bins. The tape recorder. After we had finished and he’d gone back inside, I picked up the tape recorder and put it in my bag.
When I got back, Michael and Evie were out. I just had time to check it worked (it does!) then hide it when Evie came in. She told me they’d been to the British Museum, to see more, different, Benin Bronzes. What? The museum in Oxford, she said. Suddenly I remembered. Just before her first attack of the Faulty. I am livid with Michael for having taken her there, and her not long past that last attack.
Right now E is lying next to me on Bedouin, reading. The Walk by Robert Walser. I have hidden the tape recorder inside the broken piano. She has no idea.
Evie’s birthday, mid-morning. We’re in the kitchen. The others wander in and out and kiss her, saying Happy Birthday. I tell her she’ll have to wait until tonight for her present from me. Birgitte takes pity on her, Ach Evie you should hev one gift to open, and gives her a bundle wrapped up in some pages from The Stage. A rose-printed shawl. What is Birgitte thinking of? Evie delighted with it but yes, I will say it again, looking like a monkey in fancy dress when she threw it around her. I would dress Evie in nothing but shifts. Plain madhouse garments of hemp. What is odd in her and freakish becomes gaunt and beautiful if you look hard enough. Like those Depression-era photos of raw-boned lank-haired women tired and tragic in floral prints, but heroic in denim. What do you think, says Evie, looking down at herself in the shawl. I am spared from either insulting her or being forced to lie when Finn announces I have a visitor. And in he walks. I am stunned. What is he doing here? I take a look at his expression, shit-eating, bit pissed off, and I know it means he is resentful of having to give me some good news. And I’m right. I’m in! Felicity twisted her ankle and I’m needed for the Rainbow Theatre gig. Which means I get the US tour too!! So I’m whooping round the kitchen, and Evie asks what’s up, and I tell her: a show with one of the hottest, hippest, coolest cats in rock history. Then a two-month tour round America. And then I look at E, hunched up in her shawl, and the scraps of The Stage on the table where she tore the paper open so excited was she to get this gift. And suddenly I wonder. When was it that anyone last remembered E’s birthday?
Before I know it, I throw my arms around her. Evie! Evie! We’re going to America! And I realize now I must give her the present, that it is somehow linked to our trip around America. So I drag her upstairs, push her down on Bedouin, take the shawl from her shoulders and throw it over her head. As though she were a parrot. The tape recorder feels satisfyingly bulky, all wrapped in newspaper. When I place it in her hands she tears off the shawl, then the paper. You will record America, I say, hugging her from behind with my arms and legs. She just sat there, turning the thing over in her hands and half-pressing the buttons a little cautiously. Lost sounds, she mumbles. When I ask what she means she says she can record the sounds of America which will soon be lost for ever. Tears in her eyes. You can record the sound of wind through bluegrass, I tell her, kissing the back of her neck. The alien corn.
Tonight, three weeks before we are due to leave for America, he told me that none of us will be going after all. It’s too costly a project. D will make do with just the band.
I have not yet told Evie. She has been working hard on her plans for the archive. Every day she goes to the British Museum reading room, where she fills ledgers full of notes. She has not had an attack of the Faulty since before her birthday. She barely notices the others.
I have written to D asking if we might accompany him anyway. He liked my style at the gig. Said I’d pay our way by assisting somehow. Told him about Evie’s project. The entourage is planning to travel by bus. He can spare two seats, I’m sure. And there is always money to be made making myself into an object.