Ciao, Bella!
How are you? And how is Rome? The Eternal City is all very well, but I’ve been here in Wolverhampton for two days now and that’s felt pretty eternal (though I can reveal that the Pizza Hut here is excellent, just excellent).
Since I last saw you I have decided to take that job I was telling you about, with Sledgehammer Theatre Co-operative and for the last four months we have been devising, rehearsing and touring with ‘Cruel Cargo’, an Arts Council-funded spectacular about the slave-trade told through the medium of story, folk song and some pretty shocking mime. I have enclosed a crudely photocopied leaflet so that you can see what a classy number it really is.
Cruel Cargo is a TIE piece (that’s Theatre-in-Education to you) aimed at 11–13-year-olds that takes the provocative view that slavery was a Bad Thing. I play Lydia, the, um, well, yes, the LEAD ROLE as a matter of fact, the spoilt and vain daughter of the wicked Sir Obadiah Grimm (can you tell from his name that he’s not very nice?) and in the show’s most powerful moment I come to realise that all my pretty things, all my dresses (indicate dress) and jewels (likewise) are bought with the blood of my fellow human beings (sob-sob) and that I feel dirty (stare at hands as if SEEING THE BLOOD) dirty to my SOOOOOOUUUUL. It’s very powerful stuff, though ruined last night by some kids throwing Maltesers at my head.
But seriously, actually, it’s not as bad as that, not in context, and I don’t know why I’m being cynical, defence-mechanism probably. We actually get a great response from the kids who see it, the ones that don’t throw stuff, and we do these workshops in schools that are just really exciting. It’s staggering how little these kids know about their cultural heritage, even the West Indian kids, about where they come from. I’ve enjoyed writing it too and it’s given me lots of ideas for other plays and stuff. So I think it’s worthwhile even if you think I’m wasting my time. I really, really think we can change things, Dexter. I mean they had loads of radical theatre in Germany in the Thirties and look what a difference that made. We’re going to banish colour prejudice from the West Midlands, even if we have to do it one child at a time.
There are four of us in the cast. Kwame is the Noble Slave and despite us playing mistress and servant we actually get along alright (though I asked him to get me a packet of crisps in this café the other day and he looked at me like I was OPPRESSING him or something). But he’s nice and serious about the work, though he did cry a lot in rehearsals, which I thought was a bit much. He’s a bit of a weeper, if you know what I mean. In the play there’s meant to be this powerful sexual tension between us, but once again life is failing to imitate art.
Then there’s Sid, who plays my wicked father Obadiah. I know your whole childhood was spent playing French cricket on a bloody great chamomile lawn and you never did anything as déclassé as watch the telly, but Sid used to be quite famous, on this cop show called City Beat and his disgust at being reduced to THIS shines through. He flatly refuses to mime, like it’s beneath him to be seen with an object that isn’t really there, and every other sentence begins ‘when I was on telly’ which is his way of saying ‘when I was happy’. Sid pees in washbasins and has these scary polyester trousers which you WIPE DOWN instead of washing and subsists on service station minced beef pasties, and me and Kwame think he’s secretly really racist, but apart from that he’s a lovely man, a lovely, lovely man.
And then there’s Candy, ah Candy. You’d like Candy, she’s exactly what she sounds like. She plays Cheeky Maid, a Plantation Owner and Sir William Wilberforce, and is very beautiful and spiritual and even though I don’t approve of the word, a complete bitch. She keeps asking me how old I am really and telling me I look tired or that if I got contact lenses I could actually be quite pretty, which I ADORE of course. She’s very keen to make it clear that she’s only doing this to get her Equity card and bide her time until she’s spotted by some Hollywood producer who presumably just happens to be passing through Dudley on a wet Tuesday afternoon on the lookout for hot TIE talent. Acting is rubbish, isn’t it? When we started STC (Sledgehammer Theatre Co-operative) we were really keen to set up a progressive theatrical collective with none of that ego-fame-getting-on-the-telly-ego-showing-off bullshit, and just do really good, exciting original political devised work. That may all sound dopey to you, but that’s what we wanted to do. But the problem with democratic egalitarian collectives is that you have to listen to twots like Sid and Candy. I wouldn’t mind if she could act but her Geordie accent is unbelievable, like she’s had a stroke or something and she’s also got this thing about doing yoga warm-ups in her lingerie. There, that’s got your attention, hasn’t it? It’s the first time I’ve seen someone do the Sun Worship in hold-up stockings and a basque. That can’t be right, can it? Poor old Sid can barely chew his curried beef slice, keeps missing his mouth. When the time finally comes for her to put some clothes on and go on stage one of the kids usually wolf-whistles or something and in the mini-bus afterwards she always pretends to be really affronted and feminist about it. ‘I hate being judged on my looks all my life I’ve been judged on my exquisite face and firm young body,’ she says as she adjusts her suspender belt, like it’s a big POLITICAL issue, like we should be doing agit-prop street theatre about the plight of women cursed with great tits. Am I ranting? Are you in love with her yet? Maybe I’ll introduce you when you get back. I can see you now, giving her that look where you clench your jaw and play with your lips and ask about her careeeeeer. Maybe I won’t introduce you after all . . .
Emma Morley turned the page face down as Gary Nutkin entered, skinny and anxious, and it was time for the pre-show pep-talk from the director and co-founder of Sledgehammer Theatre Co-operative. The unisex dressing room was not a dressing room at all, just the girls’ changing room at an inner-city comprehensive which, even at the weekend, still had that school smell she remembered: hormones, pink liquid soap, mildewed towels.
In the doorway, Gary Nutkin cleared his throat; pale and razor-burned, the top-button of his black shirt fastened tight, a man whose personal style icon was George Orwell. ‘Great crowd tonight, people! Nearly half full which isn’t bad considering!’ though considering what exactly he didn’t say, perhaps because he was distracted by Candy, performing pelvic rolls in a polka-dot all-in-one. ‘Let’s give ’em one hell of a show, folks. Let’s knock ’em dead!’
‘I’d like to knock ’em dead,’ growled Sid, watching Candy while picking at pastry crumbs. ‘Cricket bat with nails in, little bastards.’
‘Stay positive, Sid, will you please?’ implored Candy on a long, controlled out-breath.
Gary continued. ‘Remember, keep it fresh, stay connected, keep it lively, say the lines like it’s the first time and most importantly of all, don’t let the audience intimidate or goad you in any way. Interaction is great. Retaliation is not. Don’t let them rile you. Don’t give them that satisfaction. Fifteen minutes, please!’ and with that Gary closed the dressing room door on them, like a jailor.
Sid began his nightly warm-up now, a murmured incantation of I-hate-this-job-I-hate-this-job. Beyond him sat Kwame, topless and forlorn in tattered trousers, hands jammed in his armpits, head lolling back, meditating or trying not to cry perhaps. On Emma’s left, Candy sang songs from Les Miserables in a light, flat soprano, picking at the hammer toes she’d got from eighteen years of ballet. Emma turned back to her reflection in the cracked mirror, plumped up the puffed sleeves of her Empire line dress, removed her spectacles and gave a Jane Austen sigh.
The last year had been a series of wrong turns, bad choices, abandoned projects. There was the all-girl band in which she had played bass, variously called Throat, Slaughterhouse Six and Bad Biscuit, which had been unable to decide on a name, let alone a musical direction. There was the alternative club night that no-one had gone to, the abandoned first novel, the abandoned second novel, several miserable summer jobs selling cashmere and tartan to tourists. At her very, very lowest ebb she had taken a course in Circus Skills until it transpired that she had none. Trapeze was not the solution.
The much-advertised Second Summer of Love had been one of melancholy and lost momentum. Even her beloved Edinburgh had started to bore and depress her. Living in her University town felt like staying on at a party that everyone else had left, and so in October she had given up the flat in Rankeillor Street and moved back to her parents for a long, fraught, wet winter of recriminations and slammed doors and afternoon TV in a house that now seemed impossibly small. ‘But you’ve got a double-first! What happened to your double-first?’ her mother asked daily, as if Emma’s degree was a super-power that she stubbornly refused to use. Her younger sister, Marianne, a happily married nurse with a new baby, would come round at nights just to gloat at mum and dad’s golden girl brought low.
But every now and then, there was Dexter Mayhew. In the last few warm days of the summer after graduation she had gone to stay at his family’s beautiful house in Oxfordshire; not a house, but a mansion to her eyes. Large, 1920s, with faded rugs and large abstract canvases and ice in the drinks. In the large, herb-scented garden they had spent a long, languid day between the swimming pool and tennis court, the first she’d ever seen that had not been built by the local council. Drinking gin and tonics in wicker chairs, looking at the view, she had thought of The Great Gatsby. Of course she had spoiled it; getting nervous and drinking too much at dinner, shouting at Dexter’s father – a mild, modest, perfectly reasonable man – about Nicaragua, while all the time Dexter regarded her with a look of affectionate disappointment, as if she were a puppy who had soiled a rug. Had she really sat at their table, eating their food and calling his father a fascist? That night she lay in the guest bedroom, dazed and remorseful, waiting for a knock on the door that clearly would never come; romantic hopes sacrificed for the Sandinistas, who were unlikely to be grateful.
They had met again in London in April, at their mutual friend Callum’s twenty-third birthday party, spending the whole of the next day in Kensington Gardens together, drinking wine from the bottle and talking. Clearly she had been forgiven, but they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least, lying on the fresh spring grass, their hands almost touching as he told her about Lola, this incredible Spanish girl he’d met while ski-ing in the Pyrenees.
And then he was off travelling again, broadening his mind yet further. China had turned out to be too alien and ideological for Dexter’s taste, and he had instead embarked on a leisurely year-long tour of what the guide books called ‘Party Towns’. So they were pen pals now, Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them. In return, Dexter sent her postcards with insufficient postage: ‘Amsterdam is MAD’, ‘Barcelona INSANE’, ‘Dublin ROCKS. Sick as DOG this morning.’ As a travel writer, he was no Bruce Chatwin, but still she would slip the postcards in the pocket of a heavy coat on long soulful walks on Ilkley Moor, searching for some hidden meaning in ‘VENICE COMPLETELY FLOODED!!!!’.
‘Who’s this Dexter then?’ her mother asked, peering at the back of the postcards. ‘Your boyfriend, is he?’ Then, with a concerned look: ‘Have you ever thought about working for the Gas Board?’ Emma got a job pulling pints in the local pub, and time passed, and she felt her brain begin to soften like something forgotten at the back of the fridge.
Then Gary Nutkin had phoned, the skinny Trotskyist who had directed her in a stark, uncompromising production of Brecht’s Fears and Miseries of the Third Reich back in ’86, then kissed her for three stark, uncompromising hours at the last-night party. Shortly afterwards he had taken her to a Peter Greenaway double-bill, waiting until four hours in before reaching across and absent-mindedly placing his hand on her left breast as if adjusting a dimmer switch. They made Brechtian love that evening in a stale single bed beneath a poster for The Battle of Algiers, Gary taking care throughout to ensure that he was in no way objectifying her. Then nothing, not a word, until that late-night phone-call in May, and the hesitant words, softly spoken: ‘How would you like to join my theatre co-operative?’
Emma had no ambitions as an actress or any great love of theatre, except as a medium to convey words and ideas. And Sledgehammer was to be a new kind of progressive theatre co-op, with shared intentions, a shared zeal, a written manifesto and a commitment to changing young lives through art. Maybe there’d be some romance too, Emma thought, or at the very least some sex. She packed her rucksack, said goodbye to her sceptical mum and dad, and set out in the mini-bus as if heading out on some great cause, a sort of theatrical Spanish Civil War, funded by the Arts Council.
But three months later, what had happened to the warmth, the camaraderie, the sense of social value, of high ideals coupled with fun? They were meant to be a co-operative. That’s what was written on the side of the van, she had stencilled it there herself. I-hate-this-job-I-hate this-job, said Sid. Emma pressed her hands against her ears, and asked herself some fundamental questions.
Why am I here?
Am I really making a difference?
Why can’t she put some clothes on?
What is that smell?
Where do I want to be right now?
She wanted to be in Rome, with Dexter Mayhew. In bed.
‘Shaf-tes-bury Avenue.’
‘No, Shafts-bury. Three syllables.’
‘Lychester Square.’
‘Leicester Square, two syllables.’
‘Why not Ly-chester?’
‘No idea.’
‘But you are meant to be my teacher, you are meant to know.’
‘Sorry,’ Dexter shrugged.
‘Well I think it is stupid language,’ said Tove Angstrom, and punched him in the shoulder.
‘A stupid language. I couldn’t agree with you more. No need to hit me though.’
‘I apologise,’ said Tove, kissing his shoulder, then his neck and mouth, and Dexter was once again struck by how rewarding teaching could be.
They lay in a tangle of cushions on the terracotta floor of his tiny room, having given up on the single bed as inadequate for their needs. In the brochure for the Percy Shelley International School of English, the teachers’ accommodation had been described as ‘some comfortable with many mitigating features’ and this summed it up perfectly. His room in the Centro Storico was dull and institutional, but there was at least a balcony, a foot-wide sill overlooking a picturesque square that, in a very Roman way, also functioned as a car park. Each morning he was woken by the sound of office-workers breezily reversing their cars into each other.
But in the middle of this humid July afternoon, the only sound came from the wheels of tourist suitcases rumbling on the cobbles below, and they lay with the windows wide open, kissing lazily, her hair clinging to his face, thick and dark and smelling of some Danish shampoo: artificial pine and cigarette smoke. She reached across his chest for the packet on the floor, lit two cigarettes and passed him one, and he shuffled up onto the pillows, letting the cigarette dangle from his lip like Belmondo or someone in a Fellini film. He had never seen a Belmondo or Fellini film, but was familiar with the postcards: stylish, black and white. Dexter didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.
They kissed again, and he wondered vaguely if there was some moral or ethical dimension to this situation. Of course the time to worry about the pros and cons of sleeping with a student would have been after the College party, while Tove was perching unsteadily on the edge of his bed and unzipping her knee-length boots. Even then, in the muddle of red wine and desire he had found himself wondering what Emma Morley would say. Even as Tove twirled her tongue in his ear, he had conducted his defence: she’s nineteen, an adult, and anyway I’m not a real teacher. Besides, Emma was a long way away at this moment, changing the world from a mini-bus on the ring road of a provincial town, and what was all this to do with Emma anyway? Tove’s knee-length boots sagged in the corner of the room now, in the hostel where overnight visitors were strictly forbidden.
He shifted his body to a cooler patch of terracotta, peering out of the window to try to gauge the time from the small square of vivid blue sky. The rhythm of Tove’s breathing was changing as she slipped into sleep, but he had an important appointment to keep. He dropped the last two inches of cigarette into a wine glass, and stretched for his wristwatch, which lay on an unread copy of Primo Levi’s If This is a Man.
‘Tove, I’ve got to go.’
She groaned in protest.
‘I’m meeting my parents, I’ve got to leave now.’
‘Can I come too?’
He laughed. ‘Don’t think so, Tove. Besides you’ve got a grammar test on Monday. Go and revise.’
‘You test me. Test me now.’
‘Okay, verbs. Present continuous.’
She coiled one leg around him, using the leverage to pull herself on top of him. ‘I am kissing, you are kissing, he is kissing, she is kissing . . .’
He pulled himself up on his elbows. ‘Seriously, Tove . . .’
‘Ten more minutes,’ she whispered in his ear, and he sank back to the floor. Why not, he thought? After all, I’m in Rome, it’s a beautiful day. I am twenty-four years old, financially secure, healthy. I ache and I am doing something that I shouldn’t be doing, and I am very, very lucky.