Chapter Nine #5
night Laurie made his way back to the flat. He walked. Bus fares
across even that distance were expensive, and he was spinning out
the remains of his advance. Sasha had been right. Twenty pounds was
not broke at all, and something in the action of walking home began
to reconcile him to the street, the approach to it through the maze
of others just like it a route that could only be learned by
experience. Now he was part of the crowd that forged up and down
its pavements. Each night he told himself that he was not expecting
Sasha to appear, and this became his talisman, a silent mantra. If
he did not expect, he could not be disappointed, and his solitude
would not get the chance to consume him. He wouldn’t expect. He
wouldn’t push.
On the
first night, the faint, hesitant tap at the door came after he’d
been home for half an hour, diligently warming the place up and
cooking himself a sensible meal from a recipe suggested on the rice
pack. Sasha stood outside, a rucksack over his shoulder, which
turned out to contain more groceries, as well as the dried herbs
from which Mama Luna made her poultice. Laurie tried to pay but was
only too happy to accept Sasha’s suggestion that they share
whatever he was cooking up instead. There was certainly plenty.
Laurie tried to tell himself that the excess was only down to his
incompetence, not a hopeful doubling up of ingredients. Sasha
stayed till late that night but, just after eleven, broke from
their heated tangle on the sofa and excused himself to catch his
last bus with a fierce restraint that Laurie did not dare
question.
Did not
want to question, he told himself. Sasha was a free agent. He had
never promised Laurie anything. And Laurie—or at least he told
himself so, settling alone into the chilly single bed—had never
expected Sasha to make himself responsible for him. Sasha had urged
him to leave home, but the decision to do so—or at any rate, not to
return—had been Laurie’s alone.
They had
never talked about what they were to one another. Laurie had never
even thought about it, till loneliness and fear had begun to make
him yearn to have some tangible thing to call his own—a boyfriend,
a lover, whatever labels the world might choose. He could see the
world’s need for them now, and he was ashamed. On the second night,
he made even less of an assumption and did not start cooking at
all. He was fine, tired enough to sprawl on the sofa and not mind
one way or the other if he did so all night alone. He was doing
well, he thought, and that illusion lasted him until the soft rap
at the door brought him off the sofa and upright in one barely
voluntary pounce, convinced it was almost midnight, dismayed to see
that only one bloody hour had passed since he had sat down. This
time Sasha had clothes in the rucksack—T-shirts, underwear, and the
cashmere sweater Laurie had given him. Being asked to accept this
disturbed Laurie’s composure; it had been a gift. But he could see
the sense. He had been getting by in the shirt and jeans he’d left
home in, washing out his boxers and leaving them to dry by the fire
each night. Sasha, reading his face, kissed him and told him the
sweater was only a loan—he’d never owned anything so lovely in his
life and damn well wanted it back—and Laurie’s ice melted in a rush
that knocked them both to the mildewed carpet.
But
outside of passion, he would not push. Over breakfast that morning,
he offered Sasha one of the free tickets he’d been given for that
night’s opening performance. Sasha went pale and told him
hesitantly that large crowds in enclosed places scared him. Laurie
only nodded. They were elbow to elbow at the little kitchen table.
Sasha said, “Laurie, if ever I…needed to go away, if I wasn’t
here…you’d be okay, wouldn’t you?”
Laurie
swallowed. He looked around the room. Sasha had brought a potted
plant along with his supplies the day before. It sat on the kitchen
windowsill, a green splash in the gray morning light. He didn’t
know if it was just habituation, but the place didn’t seem so
sordid to him anymore. It had begun, in some plangent, sharp-edged
way he had never known before, to look like home. “It wouldn’t be
for long,” Sasha said, “and I’d come back to you, I promise. Can
you trust me?”
“Yes,” Laurie whispered. He locked his hands together under the
table, where Sasha would not see. He wouldn’t even ask a question.
“Yes.”
* *
*
The opening night of Hamlet
brought a fair crowd to the Empire. Jacobs had a
reputation for getting a good show out of his semi-amateur troupe,
and the area was in that state of gentrification which could bring
large numbers conscientiously away from their TV sets on a cold
night for a new show.
Padding about in the wings, automatically helping out with
props and backgrounds despite Mr. Jacobs’s efforts to make him
behave a bit more like his lead actor, Laurie watched them gather.
They were not like the languid little groups that used to
accumulate in the Twilight, all cocktail frocks and tuxedos, on
their way to late suppers at the Ivy. Earnest was the best word Laurie
could think of to describe the crowd filtering through to their
seats now. Middle-class, well-intentioned, determined to support
community drama. Dressed much as they would be for the office, and
most of them probably came straight from there. A lot of them had
kids in tow, something Laurie seldom saw in the West End, for
Shakespeare at least.
He saw
his fellow cast members watching their arrival too, and noted pale
faces and nervous sweats with compassion. For himself, he wasn’t
bothered. He had a kingdom in the balance. His mother had barely
waited till his father’s corpse was cold in its grave before taking
up with that noble creature’s shuffling toad of a brother,
something that struck him as bordering on incest. He was filled
with unease and disgust and wonder at the strangeness of the
world.
Mr.
Jacobs, watching his makeup artist begin work on Laurie, had
stopped her after the first few dabs of greasepaint. Whoever he had
hired on the off chance four days ago, the man sitting in the chair
surrounded by glaring bulbs and mirrors now was, apparently, the
young prince of Denmark, and to paint him would be the gilding of
the strangest lily Jacobs had ever seen. As for the bruising—well,
the director had always found Hamlet a sufficiently annoying young
man that he might well have got in a ruck with the other Wittenberg
students before returning to Elsinore. Budget restraints kept
costume to a minimum too, and so when Hamlet took the stage with
Claudius and Gertrude for his first scene, he was simply Laurie in
black shirt and jeans, nobility suggested by a thin gold coronet
that was one of the Empire’s few authentic and valuable props. But
Laurie was gone. Hamlet walked quietly to the stone bench, sat
down, and delivered his first line, and the audience, still a
little restive with arrivals, coats, and cough drops, fell
silent.
Only for
one instant did he return to his flesh. He had given his spare
tickets to Ophelia, and her proud parents were beaming at her from
the second row. Laurie understood Sasha could not have sat there,
damp from the car wash, all on his own amid the doctors and social
workers. What he had not predicted was that he would look up and
see him standing in the back, at the auditorium’s farthest reach,
leaning on a pillar and smiling. Hamlet muffed his line—just one,
and a kind of sympathetic exhalation left the crowd’s collective
lungs, a relief that this eerily good unknown was human after all,
just a boy, not the reincarnation of a prince they had been brought
up to believe was fictional. Laurie smiled back at Sasha—one bright
flash—and picked up the beat.
* *
*
He
searched for Sasha after the show. Throwing a jacket on over his
shirt, he ran down the back steps into the car park, then up again
to see if he was in the foyer or caught in the crowd on the main
steps. He saw occasional faces flash surprised recognition at
him—felt his sleeve caught, kindly words he could hardly remember
deserving following him in the air. “It’s him, Mum. Look, it’s
Hamlet.” He paused to throw a smile back at a little girl whose
resemblance to Clara placed a new knife in his heart, but he did
not stop. Only when the theatre and its surrounding streets were
almost empty did he come to a ragged, breathless halt by the box
office, wrapping his arms over his chest.
Soft
footsteps approached him from behind, and he whipped around. But it
was only the director’s assistant, Alison, her sweet face creased
in a puzzled smile. “Laurie! What are you doing out
here?”
“Nothing. Er…looking for someone. Why?”
“Because he wants to see you. They all do.”
“Who?” Laurie asked stupidly. His mind tried to twist the
universe into the shape where Sasha had somehow made his way
backstage to find him. Sent the cast and crew out to
look…
“Mr. Jacobs,” Alison said. “He’s bouncing off the walls. You’d
better come on.”
“Oh, dear.”
“What?” She glanced up at him, then shook her head and smiled.
“Oh, no. Not like that. He’s wildly excited.” She took his arm and
began to lead him off across the foyer. “Laurie, don’t you know
how good you
are?”
* *
*
Many
people that night told him the same thing. Laurie heard them with a
distant pleasure. After all, this was what he had wanted all his
life, and he wasn’t immune to admiration. But the means by which he
had come to this place were dreamlike to him tonight, and dreamlike
the men and women who clustered about him backstage. Mr. Jacobs,
flushed and drunk on half a glass of sherry, kept seizing his hand
and pumping it up and down as if they had just met, and Ophelia,
damp flowers still wilting in her hair, clung to his arm,
attracting thunderous looks from Alison, which Laurie for a long