Chapter 7
Seven
You hear that sound, or maybe the absence of it, roaring in your ears. Your skin turns cold, then hot. Your insides twist. Your mouth feels dry. Your legs shake. Butterflies, they say. You don’t have butterflies. Your stomach is a swarm of thick hairy moths.
The tannoy. The stage manager. Some discussion, argument. Resolved. The busyness of the theatre, the backstage areas.
Time ticks away.
You should look at your lines. Or not. You don’t want to overprepare. It should feel natural. Like you’re plucking the words from thin air. Use your breath. Think with your breath.
You can’t breathe.
Beginners call. Actors, this is your beginners call.
You exit the dressing room and a calm descends. Is it a calm? You don’t feel calm. You feel . . . nothing.
You stand in the wings, inhaling dust from the curtains.
Who washes these? Probably no one. You touch the rough fabric.
It’s tempting. You could just take a peek.
They’re here to see you, after all. Go on, just beyond the wings, through that crack in the curtains.
Not too far though, you don’t want them to spot you.
Everyone’s here, it feels like.Everyone.
Can you see your parents? There they are.
And your grandma too, sitting beside the dead grandad you never met, rotting in his uniform.
And look, there’s your primary school teacher, the one who said you had far too much energy for a girl.
And over there’s your middle-school teacher, the one with the halitosis and bushy eyebrows, the one who described you as a little brown mouse at parents’ evening while you turned red and sank down in your seat.
There’s that boy you fancied in Year 8, and he’s with his friends.
They’re not laughing now though. There’s the most popular girl in school, the one who developed early.
Can you see her blonde crown of hair, just there, above the sea of heads?
There’s Katie and Amy and Sam and Cassie.
There’s the girl whose body was found in the canal.
There’s Sammy and Alex and Holly and Jim.
There’s your sister, the back of her head, hair floating around her.
There’s David and Sara and Johnny and Rob.
There’s the boy who hanged himself in his bedroom.
There’s Carey and Ross and Melissa and Ben.
There’s the janitor, the baker, the candlestick maker.
They’re all here. They’re all here to see you.
You step back into the shadows and close your eyes.
All around you rings a hubbub of noise. Trolleys trundle back and forth, pushed by weary stagehands.
The lighting rig creaks above your head.
Standing next to you, the stage manager barks instructions into an earpiece.
The audience’s chatter rises, filling the auditorium, filling you up, plugging every leaking hole of you with thick excitable noise.
You open your eyes, your glittering bejewelled eyes, heavy with creams and powder. The stage manager whispers in your ear and the lights go down. A hush descends. This is it. The moment you’ve been waiting for, preparing for all your life.
You take a breath, and step out into the darkness.
‘OUT, DAMNED SPOT! OUT, I say.’
I crouched on the floor of the black-box studio. The rest of the class stood sentry along the perimeter of the curtain. Obi sat on a wooden throne upstage, backlit, casting a long shadow across my actions.
‘What, will these hands ne’er be clean? No more o’ that, my lord, no more o’ that: you mar all with this starting.’
A fan whirred above me. The hairs on my arm stood on end. I was wearing an ivory slip. Its static clung to the curves of my body.
‘Here’s the smell of the blood still.’
Frida, Malcolm and Casper were seated behind desks at the far end of the room, scribbling notes.
‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!’ My voice broke. Frida looked up briefly, then back down at her paper.
Archie, who was playing the Doctor, knelt down beside me and placed his hand on my temple. I stared past him. ‘This disease is beyond my practice,’ he said. ‘Yet I have known those which have walk’d in their sleep who have died holily in their beds.’
I pulled away from him and crawled towards an enamel jug and bowl downstage left. ‘Wash your hands,’ I said, splashing cold water on my face, ‘put on your nightgown; look not so pale. I tell you yet again, Banquo’s buried; he cannot come out on’s grave.’
I could feel the eyes of my classmates upon me; Stefano’s gaze, roving the surface of my skin.
‘To bed, to bed! There’s knocking at the gate: come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What’s done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed!’
I left the stage, and the play continued without me.