Felicity walked carefully up the brick ramp and let herself in through the small door inside the big rusty roller. Holding my soft head protectively, she edged through the dark dusty space which was called ‘the foyer’, and walked painfully — her inner thighs hurt, her vulva hurt, every step hurt — up the wide wooden stairs to the second floor where the air was scented with patchouli oil, dirty laundry, incense, cigarette smoke, musk, and the insidious but persistent odour of a blocked toilet which was the subject of dispute with both plumbers and debt badgers. The poky cells in which the great Ducrow had once housed his students were now covered with posters both political and theatrical, the brick walls with spray painting, the frosted glass with glass beads, cane blinds, folk prints.
When my maman arrived on the second floor she was already beyond exhaustion. She had no plan. She began the narrow splintered stairs up to the tower thinking only about the impossibility of the next step, and once she finally gained the safety of the tower, she did something she only did when making love — she locked the door.
Then she laid me on the bed, lay down beside me, and began to cry. I woke and vomited — more green stuff. Sobbing, she wiped me clean with a pillowslip. She had no tissues, no bandocks, nothing but a bottle of eau mineral for herself to drink.
When the company, alerted by our crying, came tapping on the door, she would not let them in or even whisper through the door.
Afterwards she pretended that this had all been part of her plan — her dramatic announcement later in the evening of that day. This was how she liked history told, but the truth was, she lost her nerve.
Bill and Vincent were called. They left gifts at the top of the stairs — a pack of bandocks, a tape of meditation music, a cellular telephone — but she stayed behind the locked door, ashamed, frightened, shaken. When the hospital sent a pair of doctors and a Gardiacivil demanding that the baby be handed over for special treatment, she left them hammering on the door.
Vincent tried to talk to them, but he had no status with the authorities and so learned nothing, only that there was something possibly illegal about the baby’s care.
The company did a line run for the show in the afternoon. I slept from two until six-thirty, and when I woke Felicity was already putting on her make-up.
5
Wally had first fallen in love with my maman from a theatre seat. To say he worshipped her is not hyperbole, but although his love was not requited he carried his sorrow without complaint, revealing it only in the slight widow’s hump that began to show across his shoulders. It was a load, always present, a pain, a pressure, and it was this which drove his engine, which kept him moving, dancing, talking, joking, as if the sheer pain would be too much if he sat down and let himself feel it.
No matter what went wrong, he was always positive. He believed, or said he did, that what happened was always for the best, that you could triumph through the expenditure of will and optimism. He spent his days and nights in ceaseless motion across the cobbled floors, through the labyrinthine corridors, running up the stairs, down the stairs, fretting, sweating, and he spent my first day on earth being positive, not merely about my maman, or the Gardiacivil who were ominously knocking at her door, but about all the things which will concern a small theatre before press night — the First Witch’s absence, Macduff’s sore throat, the props list, the hot weather, the noisy air-conditioning, the bookings. At half past six he was in the first-floor office, manning the telephones.
On the ground floor, the doors of the hot little theatre were already open and a few of the actors — Banquo, Lennox, the Porter — were on the sawdust stage, pacing, whooping, publicly performing all the normally private activities that go under the name of ‘warming up’.
Wally found the ASM smoking in one of the old stables and sent her out for bandocks for ‘the baby’. He filled two jugs with water and ice. And in all of this he kept up a manic, snapping sort of fret, a hand-clapping, irritable, sometimes sensible commentary. When the ASM returned, Wally took the bandocks, the jugs, and personally delivered them to my maman’s door. A moment later he was back in the office, slipping a red usher’s waistcoat over his white T-shirt. He kicked off his rubber thongs. The white phone rang. Claire Chen took it. The black phone rang — four more seats. Wally took the credit card details and smoked a cancerette right down to its fat white filter.
He put his elbows on the long bench and looked out through the high arched windows, across the rusting rooftops, the trawler hulls beached at the end of concrete driveways, the dense shows of bougainvillaea, the wind-torn palms, all the way to the wide mudflats where his great-great-grandparents had met, ankle deep in mud, their backs bowed by the weight of ‘blue briques’, the little gastropods which the Imperial Dye Works bought for a penny a sack.
It was in Gazette Street that his grandparents’ union had been ‘gazetted’ in a weatherboard government office — number twenty-eight — which was now the site of a bankrupt panel-beating business in front of whose closed roller doors the cast of the Scottish Play was presently demystifying itself. Macduff — tall, anachronistically bespectacled, cadaverously thin — was playing cricket with … a busload of noisy giggling schoolkids who had somehow got themselves tickets to a press night.
‘Shit,’ said Wally. ‘Rug rats.’
Claire Chen put her plump little hand across the phone and looked down into the street.
‘Get rid of them,’ she said.
‘Yes, your majesty.’
‘Get rid of them please.’
‘Get rid of who?’ It was Bill Millefleur in his Macbeth costume — pale, nervous, sweating inside the sculpted foam rubber.
‘It’s not who,’ Wally said. ‘It’s what. Get rid of what. Ask me.’
‘Tsk,’ Bill said.
‘Paper-clips,’ Wally said, kneeling to pick up one from the floor. He took Bill’s arm and drew him away from the window to a place where the actor would not be upset by the sight of schoolchildren. As Wally had a much caricatured tendency to furtiveness, a habit of bringing his mouth up to your ear to communicate to you the most public facts, his behaviour did not seem unusual. ‘We’ve had a major problem with the paper-clips, frere,’ he hissed to Bill, still holding his arm tightly. ‘I wondered if I could get your advice.’
‘You want to talk to me about paper-clips?’
‘You don’t have time for that sort of stuff? OK, I understand. So how is the suit? Is it too hot?’ He began patting at Bill’s sculpted foam rubber like a tailor, shifting the shoulders, smoothing the chest.
‘Stop it, frere. I’ve got to talk to you about the set.’
‘The set. Of course. Let’s get out of here.’
Bill didn’t move. ‘I don’t like that platform. It’s lethal.’
Claire Chen placed her phone on the cradle. ‘Oh great …’
Wally winked at Claire and made a face and pushed his hair back from his hair line so it stood high on his head. He raised his ginger eyebrows at her, rolled his eyes, trying to signal that he did not want Bill looking in her direction.
To Wally, Claire said, ‘What?’
To Bill, ‘Who was the macho man who didn’t need the rails?’
‘It’s OK,’ Wally said. ‘Just leave this stuff to me.’
‘It is not OK,’ Claire said, ‘to say one thing at a company meeting and then come in here half an hour before the curtain in a funk.’