Writing for Nothing Read online

  The afternoon’s radiant. It’s the kind of afternoon when you can believe that light’s made of particles. In fact you can see them streaming down from the sun like pollen. How many times I must’ve made this walk – from the house to the theatre, from the theatre to the house. All the shops have changed. They used to sell the things we need: fish, fruit, thread – now they sell shoes, scented candles, and stainless-steel ‘professional’ cookware for people who have no time to cook.

  The house next door has changed hands, too. The labyrinth of bed-sits was stripped out, the way ours once was. Now there’s a single doorbell, and behind that small glinting square of glass, the lens of a camera. The man has a very pink face. He told me his name was Richard and that we were neighbours. He travels a lot and has the happy confidence of a man who has been serviced by prostitutes in a number of different time-zones. This is his right, since he’s clearly the ‘provider’. I don’t know what the woman’s called. Sometimes I see her bring out her child and strap it into a military-looking vehicle with enormous wheels. The child is very quiet and wary: already it suspects it should never have been born.

  The effect has been to make our own house look shabby, quite frankly. Even in this most flattering, most golden of lights, there’s no hiding the flaking and cracking. It needs scaffolding. It needs a couple of men in white overalls – not kids who don’t give a toss – but older men with families and a bit of humility. It needs those ladders with wheels – roof-ladders – that roll up the slates and hitch over the ridge – someone to sort out the flashing, the pointing on the chimney-stack, rake out the crumbling mortar, replace the lead.

  The front door still opens easily enough. The hall’s still wide and cool. Let’s deal with this calmly and rationally, shall we.

  — Madeleine?

  There’s a murmur in the first big drawing room, but it’s the TV. The sun’s shining on the screen, bleaching the colour out of it. I switch it off and pick up the little cluster of mugs she always leaves where she’s been sitting. Straightening up, I catch sight of myself in the antique mirror: in the stained silver I look like a character from the past – the servant.

  — Madeleine?

  I put the mugs with the other debris on the kitchen table, which is where I find the note: ‘Dubbing. Back later. Love, Madeleine xx’ This note has a number of unusual features – the x’s – the breathless punctuation – the use of ‘love’.

  — Madeleine? Are you here?

  What exactly does she mean? The full stops betray a kind of repellent excitement – haste, purpose. And does she really imagine that those x’s are anything other than marks on a page? As for love, the word drops like a stone down a mine-shaft, never reaching the bottom.

  Then she’s home – bustling in – clattering along the passage.

  — Did you find my note?

  — You look very happy.

  — I am very happy, says Madeleine, I’ve got wonderful news.

  — I know you have, I say.

  — Oh?

  She looks at me. She’s out of breath – running or something – and with all those bags – shopping – spending money – there’s something reckless going on.

  — I spoke to Nicholas.

  — Nicky? How is Nicky?

  — He’s thrilled, I say.

  — What about?

  — Everything. Everything thrills him. Everything is thrilling. Nicholas is perpetually thrilled.

  — Don’t make fun of the poor boy. It’s his job to be positive.

  — The house needs painting.

  — Does it?

  — Of course it does.

  But she’s unstoppable. If the house needs painting, she’ll see to it, she’ll be up there on a ladder if necessary. She even smiles as she says:

  — Have you been drinking?

  — I had lunch, if that’s what you mean.

  — What? With Nicky? Did he say anything to you?

  — Alone, actually.

  — But you spoke to him?

  — He wants me to take a sabbatical.

  — That’s weird. What kind of sabbatical?

  — Why did you tell him about the telly thing?

  — Oh? Did he mention that?

  So innocent. So bright. What next? She’s rummaging in the bags.

  — Yes he did mention that, I say.

  — I just wanted to make it sound like you were doing something. I was trying to support you. I’m sorry.

  — I am doing something.

  — I know you are.

  — I am doing something. But not that. You had no right to talk about it.

  — In which case forgive me.

  Suddenly she hoists herself up on to the edge of the table and sits there swinging her legs like a child. Her eyes ‘sparkle’ as she bites her lip in pure and shameless pleasure.

  — You left the TV on again.

  — Don’t be so boring, says Madeleine.

  She straightens her legs and points her toes. She wants me to notice the new shoes. She waggles her feet.

  — Don’t be so boring, she says.

  — What d’you expect me to do?

  — I expect you to kiss me.

  — What if I don’t want to kiss you?

  — You have no choice, says Madeleine, you’re my husband.

  It sounds obscene, as if she’d just said: ‘You’re my cunt.’ The shoes are like birds – or the beaks of birds. She makes them dart and peck. She can’t take her eyes off them.

  — Is that why you lied to me?

  — Lied to you? I don’t understand.

  — Because I’m your husband?

  — How did I lie to you?

  — About the play.

  — How did I lie to you about the play? What play?

  — You know what play, Madeleine.

  — I didn’t ‘lie’. I don’t know what you’re talking about. What d’you think of my shoes? Aren’t they nice?

  — You’d already been offered the part. You’d already accepted the part. You didn’t tell me. You lied to me.

  — That’s a very strange definition of a lie – but the fact is, is I only got the phone call after you went out to your meeting or whatever it was.

  — And you accepted?

  — Well of course I accepted.

  — You’re not going to do this play, Madeleine.

  — I beg your pardon?

  — I said you’re not going to do this play.

  She stops waggling the shoes. She looks up from her feet. Her face has changed: the false girlishness gone out of it.

  — What? she says.

  — You heard what I said, Madeleine. You don’t need to look at me like that. That girl is completely mad.

  — What girl? I’m lost.

  — The writer.

  — So? Is she? What if she is? What’s it to you?

  — She talks about being buried alive.

  — What if she does? Maybe that’s how she feels. Maybe that’s how lots of us feel.

  — Us?

  — Women.

  Please God – not this again.

  — I don’t want you to get involved, that’s all.

  — Involved? It’s a play, John, not a relationship.

  — A play is a relationship, Madeleine, as you well know. And this is a bad one. Believe me. I’m just trying to be honest with you.

  — Well that’s extremely kind, but I’d rather you were honest with yourself.

  — Meaning what exactly?

  When did she acquire this ability to make my skull feel transparent? It’s as if years of scrutiny have worn away the bone. Whatever happened to the privacy of my thoughts? She’s always there, looking in, like a warder at the peephole. The bird flaps round my head. Its steel beak scrapes against the door and sparks fly. The eye sees everything.

  — Meaning what, Madeleine?

  — Meaning you’re jealous. Of me and of her. Meaning you don’t want me to succeed. Or anyone to succeed. You’re
so full of hate. Why are you so full of hate?

  — This part is degrading, Madeleine. It’s sick and degrading. The simple truth is he’s offered it to you because no other actress in their right mind would go near it – because he knows you’re desperate. I am not full of hate. On the contrary: I’m saying this because I love you. I love you and I want you to stop making a fool of yourself.

  — You love me?

  — Is that funny?

  — It’s certainly unexpected, says Madeleine. It’s certainly a long time since I’ve had any material evidence.

  She retains that cynical, suggestive grin for another second or two before performing the most extraordinary movement: her face jerks away to the side and she begins to slide back from me along the top of the table, as if being pulled suddenly by a rope. The first things to go are the dirty mugs, cracking apart on the floor. The sugar spills and the dregs from the smashed glasses bleed into it. The knife flicks up out of the jam. The jam pot rolls. The knife lands and begins to spin. There goes the teapot: it splits open along its glazed surface – tea seeps out of the mass of wet leaves. There goes the empty milk bottle, and the bottle next to it with milk still in it. There go the teaspoons, the car keys, the door keys, the crumbs, the burnt crusts. There go the bills and the reminders for the bills and their envelopes with windows through which we could see our own names.

  The candlesticks from Daddy jump off the table. The candles fracture but the thread inside holds the broken parts together. The stems snap off yesterday’s wine glasses and the bowls of the glasses break into shards like tulip petals. The pepperpot explodes. And all this with the most terrible clatter and ringing while Madeleine slides back and back losing one shoe after the other – one on the floor – one on the table – or glides perhaps would be the better word – glides as if pulled by a rope wound into a machine – before she rolls off the edge – one hand up to her face – the other out to break her fall – flailing – trying to grip, trying to stop – on to the pile of newspapers. Then almost immediately she’s back on her feet, ‘finding her feet’ almost immediately like an overturned cat, that hand still clutched to her face, covering her eye. She’s running out of the room. She’s running up the stairs. A door slams. Well!

  I don’t think my mum and dad ever came back to the house. They didn’t like the house. It was too tall. If they stood on the front steps and looked up at it they felt as if they were falling backwards. If they looked out of the upstairs windows, they could see too far, they could see the whole city, which was also something that could make you dizzy. They didn’t like what happened in the house even though they had no idea what happened in the house, only an impression: a cheeky young girl flicking her ash into a ‘crystal’ vase. They were ‘quick to judge’ – (meaning my mum, because my dad, of course, never let you know what he was thinking) – and that’s why they never came back. They were offered tickets to see Madeleine, but they said no they were busy, it was too far. Or they said yes, they’d love to, and the tickets were posted to them – but on the night there’d be two empty adjacent seats in the middle of the stalls. And at those performances my mum and dad were far more present than if they’d bothered to turn up. The two empty seats on those nights had an alert and destructive life of their own. When everyone around them burst into applause, they quite deliberately sat with their arms folded, poisoning the celebration.

  I pushed the door. It gave a little, in a spongy kind of way, but it didn’t open. I knew exactly what she was doing: she was sitting on our bedroom floor with her back against the door. I might’ve pushed harder. I could push harder and force my way in, but then what? I was concerned for her, but she’d very cleverly set up the scene so that if I proved my concern by forcing my way in, the use of force would not only cancel out my concern but provide further evidence of what she would inevitably call my ‘brutality’.

  — Madeleine? Let me in. Are you alright?

  I could hear that she was crying.

  — Is your eye alright? Would you like me to get a flannel? D’you want me to look at it?

  I waited a little – I knew this game, oh yes – and tried the door again. It began to swing freely, then banged shut in my face: she must’ve shoved hard back against it.

  — Madeleine.

  — Go away.

  — I’m sorry.

  — Go away.

  She’d been right about the house: you couldn’t breathe here, let alone work or think. She knew that, but she’d agreed to it anyway. I’d never understood that change of heart next to the stream. Perhaps it was just one more symptom of her perversity. Because the house shut out the world and once the world was shut out, what was left? Simply this squalid argument between husband and wife on either side of a closed door.

  Still, I wanted to go into the room. I wanted to be forgiven. She owed me that much: forgiveness. But more than that, I wanted to be told there was nothing to forgive. I wanted her to see – to admit – because in the end she would have to admit – to the enormity of her provocation. I wanted to play back to her the look on her face. I wanted her to hear the cynical intonation of her own words.

  I tried the door one more time, but now it was completely rigid. I realised she’d stretched her legs out in front of her so as to tense them like rods against the side of the big wardrobe. If the crying had stopped it was because she was concentrating on turning her body into a machine.

  — Madeleine?

  No answer.

  I wrap up the shoes (each shoe has its own soft bag) and put them back into the shoe-box. I get down on my hands and knees, pick up the big pieces and sweep up the rest. I rescue the bills: the bills have survived. But the play is covered in jam and fragments of glass, and is beyond saving.

  Stage Kiss

  What kind of actor? Well let’s just say you’d almost certainly know my face, but might not know my name. One evening, for example, on the way home from a performance (I’m walking back to my flat), a young man stops me. He’s wearing the kind of hat whose earflaps fasten at the crown. He blocks the path. ‘I don’t know your name,’ he says, ‘but I saw the show and I’ve been thinking about it. Tell me, he says, that moment, that moment when you kiss the girl, is your tongue in her mouth? And what about hers? What does she do with hers?’

  I like streets. I like the slight unevenness of the paving stones, the map-shapes on the trunks of plane trees. I enjoy the movement of traffic, the separation of lanes, the use of indicator lamps. At night, why is it that looked at in a certain way buildings take on the aspect of ruins? The lintels of the doorways, the laborious pointing of the bricks, become mysteries whose function can no longer be explained. Occasionally on my walks I pass a street lamp buzzing violently behind its slim galvanised door. Some of these galvanised doors have been smashed in – wires dangle in the cavity – but the lamp is still shining. What strange gleam of metal light on the green fingers of chestnut leaves!

  From time to time after the show I meet up with our director. The two of us go to a kind of café or club I suppose you’d call it, popular with people in the business – the Safety Curtain. This club (cosy despite the terrible name) has mirrors along the walls. One night our director looks into the mirror beside him. He starts to make faces and pull at his skin. It’s quite alarming the way he’s pulling the loose skin of his cheeks right down. ‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘Fuck. Is that what I look like? Is that really what I look like?’ I have to laugh. He’s raised his voice. It’s a little embarrassing.

  Outside the theatre signs hang by chains from the canopy. They say things like this:

  MAGNIFICENT

  or:

  HUGELY ENTERTAINING

  We’ve collected a whole row of them and they remind me of railway stations or hospitals. Like the queue for returns, they continue round the side of the building. As you make your way to the stage door you pass beneath one which says:

  TWO SUBTLY EROTIC PERFORMANCES

  I know he’s in love with Clair, but this
is embarrassing. I say to him: ‘Keep your voice down. You don’t need reassuring. It’s us, the actors, who are the vulnerable ones.’ Vulnerable. He doesn’t believe that for a moment. He’s not prepared to be deceived, and that makes him intolerable. I want nothing to do with this, and I tell him so.

  These feelings are at their most destructive when they interfere with the work. For example, he always refused – although of course in a roundabout way – to rehearse the kiss. And when we did finally pin him down, all he would say was: ‘Go for it.’ We’re standing in the middle of the rehearsal room, talking very quietly, intimately, his arms around us. Clair catches my eye. She finds this physical contact repellent, that’s obvious. She’s biting her lip, trying not to laugh. He can’t see that. He’s bowed his head between us. It’s hanging there. For a moment it’s as if he’s lifeless and we’re holding up a corpse. The kiss? He raises his head and smiles. ‘Better just go for it, boys and girls.’

  Tomorrow I’m visiting Steph, my dentist. She’s gradually replacing the black fillings in my molars with tooth-coloured material. I love these visits. It’s so silent out here, in the suburbs, where Steph lives. Even though there’s plenty of space outside, I park my car (it’s surprisingly modest) a few streets away just for the pleasure of walking past houses which, although similar, have all been treated differently by their owners. Some have planted a screen of fast-growing conifers. Others have stripped the paint off their front doors. One house has a ‘hand-made’ ceramic number plate, with a pattern of entwined flowers. Another has its three digits – 149 – stuck to the front gate with self-adhesive stickers. The numerals are black-on-silver and slant like italics. Not so long ago I would have held all this in contempt – curtains chosen to match wallpaper, the life-like statuette of a cat about to pounce from the garage roof, the half-barrel planted with an azalea – but now (I’m nearly fifty but I don’t look it), particularly when the light is low and rakes across the lawns and flowerbeds, I find in these things a quite extraordinary beauty. Some of the wooden gateposts have little plaques announcing professions, e.g. ‘Teacher of Pianoforte’, ‘Chiropodist’. Unlike the polished brass plates you find in a city, these are made of hard black plastic with letters in white or grey. Stephanie’s is no exception, and lists her qualifications. The Victorian bays of the front elevation are filled with white Venetian blinds. However, this is deceptive, the treatment room itself being on the ground floor at the back of the house. Through French windows framed by rust-coloured vine leaves the client is treated to a view of Stephanie’s back garden. She injects at the base of the tooth, and the needle grates against the buried root. These days she wears surgical gloves for all procedures.