Maeve woke from a dream of ghosts. She was surrounded by them – their big, pale bodies, their tiny mouths, their hot and angry breath. The ghosts needed something from her but she pushed them away and fought to escape. It was still dark when she woke. The heater next to her bed clanked loudly and she sat up, shivering in the icy morning.
Stephanie was slow and moody over breakfast, poking her fork at the poached eggs on her plate until the yolks bled over everything. Maeve wished they were out in the day, away from the close atmosphere of the B&B. Only Bianca was cheerful, humming to herself as she buttered a piece of toast with a thick layer of raspberry jam.
The girls had a couple of hours for shopping before meeting up again for a workshop at a Dublin school of acting. Maeve couldn’t wait to get to a phone booth. If only her mobile would work here, she could call Margaret right away. She bit her lip, fighting down impatience. But after she’d finally slipped away from Steph and Bianca and found a public phone, she discovered she was trembling.
Margaret’s voice was warm and friendly on the other end of the line. ‘Now you tell him that your mother gave you this number before she passed away. I’m not meant to be handing out private phone numbers, but as your mother was a friend of his . . .’
Maeve balanced the phone against her shoulder as she took down the number. When she hung up, she was breathing hard and fast. What if it was a wrong number? What if it led to the wrong Davy Lee? What if Margaret had made a mistake? Could he really be that one in a million? She shoved the paper deep into her pocket and started walking towards the theatre school. Suddenly, she didn’t want to be in Dublin any more. She ached with longing for Sydney, to be home, to not have this choice handed to her, this phone number in her pocket, this father so close at hand.
Ms Donahue was waiting at the bottom of a flight of stairs, chatting to a tall, lanky-limbed man in a dark tweed jacket. Stephanie and Bianca were already hanging around at the top of the stairs.
‘Where do you keep disappearing to?’ asked Steph.
‘Nowhere. I was sightseeing.’
Her two friends eyed her suspiciously but there was no time to chat. The class was about to begin.
The tweedy man introduced himself as Patrick Cassidy, drama teacher, and he gathered the girls in a circle around him.
‘To begin with,’ he said, ‘I want you to get a sense of your own self in the space. Here you are, in this space. We exist here, now. You have to know the space you’re in.’
He crossed over to Maeve and took her hand. ‘Your hand, connected to your arm, connected to your entire body.’ He dropped her hand. ‘Now, your mother may have told you it’s rude to point, but not here. Not in this class. I want you to point to that chair.’ He gestured towards a bentwood sitting in a corner.
Frowning, Maeve pointed at the chair. She wished he’d picked on someone else. ‘And now to each and everything in the room,’ he said. ‘And point with both hands. With your whole body. I want you to feel this room.’
Bianca began to smile. She looked at Maeve and raised her eyebrows.
‘All of you – make your place in this room. Know the space. Come on then. What are you waiting for?’
Cassidy kept firing questions at the girls so quickly that they barely had time to think of an answer before he was asking something else. Maeve’s heart started to race and she could feel a prickle of sweat on the back of her neck. She hoped he wouldn’t ask her a question. But then his sharp hazel eyes focused on her.
‘Why were you late?’ he demanded.
Maeve blinked. How could she possibly tell the truth? But he moved on to the next girl before she could even frame a response. He was forcing questions on every girl at gunfire pace, moving from one to the next. He didn’t wait for answers but the questions left the girls breathless and edgy. He strode across the room and came back with a shiny black box in his hands. Inside were sheets of paper and each girl had to take one and read its contents to the group.
‘This is acting that’s felt, not acting that illustrates,’ he said. ‘I want you to feel your story or poem in your body, feel your presence in the space, in the world – feel where you are, who you are.’
Maeve wanted to call out in exasperation, ‘How can anyone know that!’ She looked down at the story that she had pulled from the black box. At the top it said it was an excerpt from ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ by someone called Yeats. She read through it quickly, anxious to get it right.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Maeve grew restless waiting for her turn to read the poem. She’d never been good at waiting. It was why she liked dancing much better than drama. She needed to be in motion. As she read the poem, she felt the urgency inside her growing. She had to find out where her father had been in his years of wandering.
When it came time for the break, Maeve wanted to leave and find a phone booth straight away. But as quickly as the feeling swelled, it broke again and she felt as uncertain as she had when she first wrote down her father’s telephone number.
‘This is so cool,’ said Stephanie. ‘That guy is awesome.’
‘Scary if you ask me,’ said Bianca. ‘A total fascist.’
Maeve shrugged. ‘Are you okay?’ whispered Bianca, as Cassidy signalled for the girls to start up again. Maeve was glad there was no time to reply.
For the next activity they were each handed an excerpt from a play by someone called Beckett.
‘This is the work of a master,’ Cassidy announced. ‘A master of the Irish theatre. Of the theatre of the world. I want you to listen, not just to the words, but to the silences.’
He recited a fistful of lines, holding the spaces between them as if each were a precious moment. ‘Now, girls, you take it, a line each, a line with the silences and the waiting.’ He strode around the circle, drawing a phrase from each girl.
‘Take it, girls, again and again. “They make a noise like wings”,’ he intoned.
‘“Like leaves”,’ said Steph.
‘“Like sand”,’ said Bianca.
Cassidy snorted. ‘Feel the words! I want it to sound like an onomatopoeia, not just a noise from the back of your throat,’ he shouted.
Maeve looked up and said, ‘Like the noise of green water against the dock, the sound of tears falling on stone.’
‘You, stop – Like the noise of what? This is Samuel Beckett, not something you mess with. You’re not to bugger it up with some bit of faddle from elsewhere. Your line was “All the dead voices”, which you missed when it was your turn, I might add.’
Maeve pulled back inside herself. She wanted to apologise but she couldn’t. For a moment, she’d felt as if Sydney Harbour was inside her, ebbing against her chest.
After the class, the girls collectively breathed a sigh of relief. ‘That was so cool,’ laughed Stephanie. ‘It was wild.’
‘You just like being bullied,’ said Bianca.
‘No, that was what acting should be about,’ said Steph. ‘He treated us like real adults, real actors, not just a pack of kids from a high school.’
All of a sudden, Maeve wondered if she could ever be an actress or even an adult. It felt too much like being skinned alive. ‘I think I’ll stick with dancing,’ she said.
Cassidy came up to Maeve. Now that the class was at an end, he was smiling, unlike the fiery taskmaster of the workshop.
‘That line, the one you threw in. Now who wrote that? Where did you find it?’ he asked.
Maeve bit her lip and tried to think where the words had come from.
‘You should credit your sources, girl.’
‘I found it inside me. It wasn’t a “dead voice” or anything. It was my voice.’