Chapter Nine #6
time could not understand, then could not bring himself to care
about when he did. The idea of himself as attractive to anyone but
Sasha was dreamlike to him too, and irrelevant.
The heat
and the chatter seemed to pitch around him. Walking away from the
questions of a young man whom Mr. Jacobs informed him later—with
some asperity—had been a reviewer, Laurie slipped down to the
dressing rooms and got changed into his street clothes. The
production didn’t run to a dresser. He hung up his own costume
carefully, ready for the next performance, and went out into the
night.
Not to
expect, not to hope. These had been his mantras. All the way home
through the chilly streets, Laurie repeated them to himself. The
long terrace by the railway lines was almost empty, only the
occasional late bus and taxi disturbing streetlamp flowers forming
in the freezing mist. His building’s communal hallway was empty,
silent for once of TV chatter. The stairs and the landings, the
doorway to his own flat, all empty. The flat itself, a patchwork of
shadows. Not one of Laurie’s careful denials this time served to
bring soft footsteps padding up the stairs, to make the sullen
chipboard door vibrate under a cautious, flat-palmed tap. Curled up
on the sofa, Laurie methodically strangled hope, and Sasha did not
come.
Not on
the next day or the next. No skinny figure threading a way through
the crowds or smiling at him from beside a pillar in the
standing-room-only section. As long as Laurie was Hamlet, his
absence hardly mattered—served, in fact, to improve his
performance, making it imperative for him to slip into another
skin—and he barely noticed that the empty rows that had remained on
his first night gradually filled, until on the Friday, just before
curtain, Mrs. Jacobs startled all of them by dashing through from
the box office hissing, “Full house! Full house!” It was a first
for the company, and the curtain came down on tides of applause
Laurie heard with the same detached enjoyment he’d have felt for
the sound of the sea.
It was
Hamlet’s last night, and Mr. Jacobs found him in the dressing room
and saw with wonder how the dashing, tragic prince became a
tired-looking boy with the removal of the coronet. He watched in
approval while Laurie boxed the precious prop and shook out his
costume before hanging it up. He said, “I hope the flash didn’t
bother you.”
Laurie looked at him inquiringly. Jacobs might as well have
said I hope the roof falling in didn’t
bother you. “That reviewer you gave the
brush-off to the other night was here again. I let him take a
couple from the wings.”
“Oh.”
“Just oh? Most
of my young men at this point go becomingly pale and turn into
Laurence Olivier.”
Laurie
smiled, trying to picture it. “No,” he said, sitting down to tie up
his shoes. “I’m glad he came, though. I…I’m pleased it all went
well.”
Jacobs
sighed and came to sit on the edge of the dressing table. “It did,”
he said. “Very well. Is this your only job, son?”
Laurie
nodded, and Jacobs went on. “You’ll need another one, you know.
Something with flexible hours that’s not too draining. Some of my
young actors with stupid degrees put in hours at the adult literacy
college in Shawcross. You could try there.”
“I don’t have a degree, sir.” Laurie shrugged, a small, tired
movement. “Not even a stupid one.”
“Well, you can read. Try it. It beats flipping burgers.” Jacobs
watched him thoughtfully, riffling the pages of his prompt copy.
“Listen, Laurie. You need to pay council tax. You need to give me
your National Insurance number so that I can take a chunk of the
pittance I pay you and hand it to faceless government drones to
make warheads. So that, when I start rehearsing our Christmas
performance of The White Devil
next week, I don’t have to jump every time the
door bangs.”
Laurie
gave a faint snort of laughter. “Webster? Very festive.”
“Well, you can wear some holly in your doublet.”
“Oh. You want me to come back?”
“Very much. But I’ll tell you truthfully, son, I think you
should look around. Get the Stage
tomorrow and see what else is rehearsing. You
forced your way in here unqualified. Imagine what you could do with
an actual theatrical review behind you.”
“No. No, I love Webster. I’d rather come back here.”
“Well, good. But mind what I say about the tax man.”
Laurie
shrugged. It was plain to him by now that no great seeking hand
from his old life—his old home—was going to reach out to find him.
This was, of course, a huge relief—and part of him was desolate. He
reached for a pen and scribbled his NI number and new address on
the back of a flyer. “There you are, sir.”
“Laurie, where are you from? Don’t call me sir. It makes me
feel like a Victorian papa. I don’t suppose you’ll be joining us
for the last-night party, will you?”
No hopes, no expectations. But I have to go
home. “No. I’m sorry.”
“And no chance I can tell poor Alison you’ll join her for
whatever raucous jaunt around the nightclubs she’s got planned for
afterward?”
Laurie
smiled. He met Jacobs’s eyes ruefully for an instant. “Sorry, sir.
No chance at all.”
“Didn’t think so. Well, sweet prince, I hope you get yourself
sorted. Meanwhile, go out by the box office. Mrs. J has a week’s
wages for you, and the take was so big tonight I’m splitting
profits up between the lot of you, ten percent extra for Elsinore
royalty. Okay? Hope I see you on Monday.”
* *
*
It wouldn’t be for long. And I’d come back to you, I promise.
Can you trust me? If I had to go away.
On the
bus out to the heath, Laurie asked himself why it was a matter of
trust. Because it was; in the cold, lonely gap between his last
sight of Sasha and now, Laurie had felt faith falter. It occurred
to him that he had never had a friend, not one he cared about
enough to exercise the gift of letting them alone when need be. He
had always been able to take people or leave them, accept them as
they were, with nothing but mild, detached interest in their myths
and their masks.
But what
the hell were Sasha’s? This refugee who wouldn’t seek refuge, a boy
who had known his mother well enough and long enough to be
perfectly, idiosyncratically bilingual and yet who would not or
could not talk about her beyond the barest facts of her existence.
He told himself that he had never doubted Sasha, and a hot rush of
anger went through him that he even need do that much.
God, no.
All Laurie’s incertitude, his lack of faith, should be reserved for
himself. What right had he ever had to approach Sasha, disturb the
dignity of his survival with his easy handouts? Something in Sasha
must have despised him for it, sweeping through the underworld and
picking out what he fancied, like Madonna choosing African babies.
Sasha had never shown him contempt by a word or a look, but he must
have felt it. Laurie felt it. Even now, what was he? A fraud,
playing at poverty, while not five miles away, his father’s house
glimmered like a ship of diamonds in the night.
The people of the encampment knew him for what he was, at any
rate. Sasha had been his passport, his key to the city there.
Without him, he was nothing but an intruder. Mama Luna was nowhere
to be seen, and Gunari only grunted negatives to his hesitant
questions. Gunari lumbered after him like a bear all the way
through the camp to Sasha’s caravan and leaned in the doorway, face
a hostile blank, while Laurie looked hopelessly around the cramped
living space. For what? A note, a sign like the ones he had read of
in childhood, made of leaves and stones? Patrin, Sasha had told him those were
called. Not a myth at all, but rather a sophisticated messaging
system still in use today. Even if he had, Laurie could not have
read it. In every way that counted, he was utterly ignorant. They
came from different worlds. Sasha’s visits to his had been
short-lived miracles.
Laurie
missed the last bus home and walked back to East Hill, a trip that
took him half the night and left him so footsore and exhausted that
the other half was not a trouble to him; he fell facedown onto the
sofa and slept still wrapped in Sasha’s jacket, the lingering scent
of Sasha’s skin and the greasepaint on Laurie’s own combining to
send him lurid dreams, where he and Sasha met as lovers in a lost
Shakespearean play, ran like deer through the Forest of Arden with
ruthless hunters on their heels—leaped, despairing, hand in hand
off the Hungerford Bridge. He woke with the taste of the river in
his mouth, and Sasha was still gone.
On
Sunday morning, he walked down to the Tube station. He had to
collect some of his clothes. He had to see Clara. Telling himself
that these were his sole reasons, he got onto a train bound for the
city.