MY TOENAILS ARE red and I am dead. Of all the days to forget my ballet shoes I had to choose today, with a pounding hangover. I will be seen as jolie. Being pretty at Lecoq is a fate worse than death.
I consider leaving my socks on in the Grand Salle, to keep the toenails well hid, but I’ve seen what happened to Amy Beijing’s right hip on these hardwood floors. I can’t risk it. So when warm-up begins I take off my socks and pray hard. Oh god, let them not see, and please god, let it not be true that the teachers sit up in their hidden staffroom, high in the rafters, watching us all. If they see my jolie nails, I’m sure not to make it through to second year. And I will die if I don’t make it through to second year.
Ju-Yong puts us in pairs. We learn to mime paddling a boat, plunging an imaginary oar deep into the water to push us across the pond. Étienne is next to me and points at my toes. Shut the fuck up, I say to him with my eyes.
Ju-Yong claps his hands and we start running around the space. He claps and we stop and mime throwing an imaginary net out as far as we can. I’m right at the back of the room, thank goodness. Marie-France has seen my toes and moves in front of me, trying to cover for me. I smile at her and she gives me a serious nod. He claps and we’re off again. I avoid the front of the room. Clap. Damn, I am dead centre. Ju-Yong points straight at my toes.
‘Ah, Jayne. Very beautiful.’
Everyone looks. He lets the silence sit. Bright red nails detract from the idea. It’s not about us. It’s about what we’re creating. Painted nails draw attention. They are womanly. And dressed in our blacks, we have no gender, no detail to differentiate us except our drawn, pale faces and varied body shapes.
Once Ju-Yong is satisfied that my face has turned as red as my nails, he claps his hands and the lesson continues.
Later, in neutral mask class, I’m up the back watching, pants pulled down over my feet, when a dumpy Brit called Peter lets out a high squeaky fart in a silent, serious part of the mask journey. The mood is so serious it makes me want to burst with laughter, but I hold it in and run out of school straight afterwards and call Kiki, knowing she’ll see the humour in it. She almost does, any fart story is funny to her, but she can’t quite picture the solemnity of the deadpan leather mask, the almost meditative silence of the classroom as we watched each actor make their journey over the plain and across the river and up the hill. With our faces covered and only eyeholes to look out of and a small slit to breathe through, our bodies are our only means of expression and each gesture is magnified. It’s a weird sensation, both to watch and to wear the mask. The teachers say the mask has a powerful effect on the psyche and can provoke strange dreams.
Kiki tells me the sex with Wil was tops – a straight-up drunk fuck, which she needed because Zahir’s meticulous sensitivity has started to become annoying – and asks me to come and see Zahir’s play with her tonight, to which I say no because I’m too hungover, but she says I owe her for the happy future with Adrien and also the Barrio Latino, to which I say but you get a happy future with Wil out of that, and she says no, that was just a drunk fuck, to which I say touché. I go home and throw on an outfit with way too many colours in it and run back out to the métro.
The play is extremely good, and very boring. A woman twirls for twenty minutes in a circle of white eggs without getting dizzy while a guy does some jerky dancing next to her, like he’s having a fit, and Zahir moves around randomly, speaking Arabic with a grandiose air. Then he takes off his shirt, which makes it all truly wonderful. Zahir is a sort of bald god.
Afterwards the three of us go to a bar shaped like a horseshoe in the Marais. Kiki and I drink beer. Zahir drinks tea and shows me a photo from back in Palestine when he had wild, fuzzy black hair.
‘You look so different,’ I say.
‘As an actor in Palestine I get typecast. So I grow my hair. It help.’
‘Really? How?’
‘To take focus from my beautiful face,’ he says with the utmost solemnity. I see his point.
Kiki asks me to come back to her studio, as she doesn’t want to spend the night with Zahir. We lie on the fold-out bed and smoke a joint, watching Rain Man dubbed in French. Then we eat miso soup that she’s made with vegetables and noodles in it and afterwards she makes hot chocolate with real chocolate and we suck on sweet, juicy clementines.
‘Pull my finger,’ says Kiki, and her fart is joyful with a little question mark at the end. I cry with laughter into the pillow.
‘Farts are very funny,’ she says, and lights another joint.
‘Why do they so often go unacknowledged?’
‘If someone had laughed, then everyone would have.’
‘I should have laughed.’
‘But then if nobody else laughed it would have been embarrassing.’
‘Which I guess is why nobody laughed.’
I get up and go to the window and look out. There has been no snow since Narnia and I’ve been praying for it to return. It’s a clear night and I can see all the way down the river to the top of Notre-Dame.
‘I could live here forever and become a Frenchy and have little baby croissants,’ I say.
‘Not moi. I like it here but I would never stay.’
‘Everyone at school says the same thing. They can’t wait to get back to their own countries.’
‘I like Manu, my yoga teacher,’ says Kiki. ‘He’s a Frenchy.’
‘There you go – marry him and stay here with me forever and ever.’
‘He says shanti shanti om at the end of phone calls.’
‘You’re talking to him on the phone?’
‘And in the classes he feels me up.’
‘Isn’t that illegal? In the yoga law?’
‘Nothing is illegal in the yoga law.’
‘What about Zahir?’
‘I’m bored of Zahir. Can’t get it up anymore.’
‘He seems pretty turned on by you.’
‘I mean me.’
‘Oh. With that beautiful dick and all?’
‘Yeah. But you know – the pussy knows.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘The pussy knows. I read it somewhere.’
She yawns and kisses me, going into her little bedroom.
‘What does that mean?’ I call out, getting under the covers.
‘Nothing else matters,’ she yells. ‘Your pussy knows when it’s over.’
‘You’re completely guided by your pussy? What does she say?’
But Kiki is already doing her lady-snore. I lie awake wondering if my pussy is trustworthy, before falling into a deep sleep.
Kiki is opening the curtains naked when I wake. She has amazing round breasts and a clipped little bushy triangle. Her nipples are pale pink, which is surprising considering her olive complexion and raven hair. Girls’ parts, evidently, don’t always match their bodies.
Outside it’s sunny; November is a constant surprise. She stands amongst the curtains looking out at the sky, the river, the trees, closing her eyes and swaying gently, curves bathed in the cool light. When she opens her eyes and turns she looks almost sad. Then she walks towards the kitchen, picking her nose.
She comes back with coffee and I get up and hug her, looking out at the windows twinkling over on the Île Saint-Louis, excited by the unexpected sun. She serves a comprehensive breakfast involving yesterday’s baguette toasted and little jars of yoghurt. As always, her coffee, made in a silver contraption, is delicious. It must be nice to be you, I think, looking after yourself so nicely. When I’m on my own I never bother to do things like make a good coffee. I eat the little toasts from a packet and drink teabag tea. I make a pact to make my life nicer for myself, even when nobody’s there.
‘Did you sleep well?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, except for Zahir banging at the door.’
‘Wow. I never sleep through anything.’
‘His play has been extended! How am I supposed to live my life with all these men wanting to extend their stay?’
‘What did you say to him?’
‘Fuck off back to Palestine.’
‘You didn’t.’
‘No. He was drunk and ranting – I can’t believe you didn’t hear.’
‘How did you make him go away?’
‘I didn’t.’
I poke my head around the corner and, sure enough, there is Zahir’s beautiful face asleep on her pillow.
Kiki nods. ‘Crazy man.’
I somehow make it to school on time and get up to do my impression of a plastic cup toppling off a table. I spent an entire afternoon perfecting this movement, watching a cup fall over and over again. But plastic requires a certain tonicity that I don’t have, and mine is floppy and inarticulate.
‘Can anybody tell what she is?’ asks Angela.
‘Dirt?’
‘Water?’
‘Wood?’
‘What are you?’ Angela asks at last.
‘A plastic cup,’ I squeak.
‘For me, it is caoutchouc,’ Angela says. ‘Sit down.’
My plastic looks like rubber. How embarrassing. Angela gives us an exercise in which we wash a T-shirt, then become the T-shirt, then hang ourselves out on the line to dry. After that we practise being paper – small pieces, thick pieces, tissue paper, toilet paper; being scrunched up, torn, thrown. My piece of paper is a letter someone didn’t want to read and is thus savagely murdered. Murdering myself feels great. I tear myself to shreds and lie bleeding in strips of my former self. Angela says it was a bel engagement but didn’t really look like paper. I wonder what it did look like but am too scared to ask. How to find the delicate yet sharp texture of paper? Its flatness and pliability, lightness, fragility, strength. Paper is hard, and I decide that I will practise until I master it.
That night I have a dream. Something smells strange. I’m in Mum and Dad’s bathroom with the cough-drop lampshade and the shower door coming off its hinge. The basin reads Hermitage Shanks and Dad’s Old Spice is on it, beneath the sliding mirror with the tiny groove in it for your fingers. The place is splattered with soap scum. It is too silent.
Something is behind the door. I can’t see it but I can feel it. The door is pushing against something soft. I peer behind it, heart racing. It’s Mum. She is a pile of yellowing bones. She looks up and holds out a jaundiced arm. Her eyes beg for help. I don’t know what to do. In a moment of panic I put the door back in its place. Then I go downstairs. I feel disgusting: I know I should have done something to help her but I just keep moving forward. Relatives are in the kitchen. Mum’s sisters, our cousins, Dad, Kate, Alex, Ben. It’s a tea party, but sombre. They begin to wonder why Mum’s not coming down. I say nothing, guilt deep in my belly. People whisper, ‘Where’s Annie?’
My uncle bursts into the room. ‘She’s alive! I found her! She’s alive!’
The terrible feeling at having left her is replaced by a searing joy. She’s alive! She’s alive!
Mum stands on the staircase, radiant. We all stare. She looks at us all, then moves down the stairs into the kitchen. The dishwasher hums. Everyone goes back to the party.
She walks towards me and smiles. She knows I left her there. But everything is okay now.
I wake with the swelling feeling that she’s alive. Then the horror as I remember she is dead. The shock is intense, it cuts my breath. I sit up and clutch my knees, breathe, breathe. I won’t cry, I don’t know where I’ll end up if I start. Keep it together. You are here, in Paris. Breathe. Lie back down. Look at E.T. Go to school.