Fallout (13 page)

‘Are you upset?’

‘Why would I be?’

‘It’s not very romantic.’

The word sounded odd coming from him – generous, as if he was making himself say it for her, because he wanted to be clear what he wanted them to be like together.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.

He leaned awkwardly over and kissed her. Then he took her hands and kissed them, too.

‘We’ll make it romantic,’ he said.

Luke was in bed but not sleeping, just lying in the dark thinking about a problem he was having with the latest play he was writing and not planning to show to anybody. He was not expecting sleep. He heard Paul opening the front door noisily. He wasn’t being careful. It was as if he wanted to let Luke know he was there.

Voices.

Paul saying, ‘All right?’

And then a woman whispered, ‘Yes.’

She said it very quietly but Luke recognised Leigh immediately.

He closed his eyes in his dark room and listened to them walking about, murmured conversation, the bathroom light going on and off, water, doors. He kept his eyes closed as the floorboards of the flat creaked, and Paul’s bedroom door shut for the last time. He realised with strange release that he felt happy that Leigh was there. It felt right to him that she should be there with them. He went to sleep quite quickly after that, and his sleep was dreamless.

‘THIS SHOW DEGRADES WOMEN!’

Nina watched the other dark-haired girl making the scene on the steps with a mixture of envy and embarrassment; caught in the moment of her rage without vanity, without fear. Nina couldn’t imagine feeling so strongly about anything that it would free her from herself. Her mother always said that women’s libbers were the ugly girls, just jealous, but this girl wasn’t ugly. In fact – this once – Nina forgot to judge whether she was pretty or not, and saw only her actions, heard only her words; unsexed by rage.

All Tony said was, ‘Pity there were no press here.’

XXX Cinema Club
.
Peepshow
.
Girls
.
Models
.
Paradise Club.
The red and pink neon flashed, streaming past Nina’s unfocused eyes from behind the thick glass of the taxi taking them home from dinner. Tony always locked the doors of taxis when they got into them. The cab bumped down Old Compton Street. The signs floated past her vision –
Raymond’s Revuebar
.
Triple X-Rated Striptease
.
Massage.
The women stood in pairs by open doors, red-glow behind them, piled-up hair.

Nina felt the cool weight of something sliding onto her lap. She looked down. It was a manuscript.

Tony eyed her with satisfaction. ‘It might do very well for us. Let me know what you think of it.’

The play was in several stapled sections, paper-clipped and well-thumbed. Nina read the title.

En Custodia/In Custody
by Hector Romero.

‘What’s it about?’

‘Argentina. Lanusse. It’s a two-hander. Very shocking. Quite new. It’s set in a prison and I believe it’s based on the experiences of Hector Romero’s wife – or his sister. The part of the woman made me think of you.’

Nina looked up from the page and across at Tony. ‘Why?’

‘I’m always looking for roles for you. Didn’t you know?’

Nina felt honoured. ‘No,’ she said softly, ‘I didn’t. Thank you.’

‘It just takes the right part. Yours is a very delicate soul,’ said Tony, and smiled at her. ‘And
that
is an extraordinary piece of work.’

As Nina switched on the reading light the degraded world she had been contemplating outside the taxi disappeared. It was the two of them, and the play.

She turned to page one.

ACT ONE. Scene One. An unknown country. A bare stage representing a prison
, she read.
The sounds of metal doors. Tortured cries, echo. A woman enters, Elena. She is gagged and blindfolded
.

Luke was making breakfast when Leigh came out of Paul’s room to go to the bathroom. She was wrapped in a sheet, like a Greek statue, thick hair curling down her back. He glimpsed her going down the hall.

‘Morning,’ he said, turning round with the frying pan full of sloppy bacon.

She stopped, turned – smudgy eye make-up, messy hair. ‘Hello . . .’

‘Do you want some tea?’

He was in jeans and a T-shirt – socks. Not his working self, intimate.

‘Yes, please.’

‘Is Paul awake?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll make a pot.’

‘Okay.’

‘Don’t look like that.’

‘Like what?’ she said.

‘All . . .’ He shrugged and made a face.

She smiled, backed away into the bathroom and closed the door.

In the end, it wasn’t at all as strange as she had feared, having Luke there. She bathed, and dressed, and the three of them ate breakfast together at the kitchen table and talked about rehearsals and the days ahead. There was no need to hide, just the peculiar natural comfort of the three of them together, made stronger by her sharing of Paul’s bed. March. April. May. June. July. The summer days were long and exquisitely balanced, as if happiness were so strong it could not leave them, but perhaps sharpened by the unexamined sense of something hidden; the more permanent wounds of their longer lives waiting, undiscovered. Sundays were peace. Shops shut. Empty streets. If they had found time the day before, and had enough money and had remembered to go to the shops, they would give Luke the day off cooking and roast a chicken at Paul’s flat.

‘We’re playing house,’ Leigh said once, and Paul kissed her neck underneath her ear.

Luke often slept for twelve or fourteen hours after the show on Saturday night, catching up after his week. When he woke he was quiet. He would eat and write his postcard to Seston Asylum then spend the day reading or typing up the handwritten work in his notebooks. He would curl up in his corner out of the way, with the typewriter on the floor and his knees to his chest, not minding the record player or if Paul and Leigh kissed, or talked. They comforted him with their company, and because Luke never spoke about himself the other two did more easily. The simple fact of him made them appreciate the blessing of a past that could bear examination, the luxury of memories. Leigh would tell of the slow realisation in childhood of her father’s infidelities, her mother’s growing unhappiness, and then the shock of their divorce. Paul had decided his family were dull enough to make an exaggerated satire of middle-class drabness, and made her and Luke laugh with ‘The Day My Dad Announced My Mother Should Learn To Drive’ or ‘I Had Measles Once’. It was so exotic it delighted Luke, but then –

‘What about you, Luke?’ would be met with –

‘I don’t remember.’

Or he would just turn the tables with –

‘What’s your mum doing now, is she proud of you?’ because storyteller as he was he could not articulate his own self.

Paul did not ask because he knew Luke didn’t want him to, and Leigh learned not to either. He was like a jigsaw with pieces missing, she thought. She noted the postcards he bought and posted with mechanical regularity. She knew he went home each Christmas. He received letters which he took to his room to read and did not talk about. Sometimes she was repelled by the extent of his abnormality and welcomed the feeling, shoring it up against him as proof to herself he was not right. She did not want him to be worth her pain.

Paul stayed nights at Leigh’s flat less often. They told one another they relished it when it was just the two of them but it wasn’t true; they were better together when Luke was with them. Paul felt reassured that Leigh was a girl Luke could be near without making a pass. She was a balancer, a small offering towards keeping his friend whole.

For Luke it was more simple; Leigh and Paul were home to him. Late at night when the music was turned off and radiators cold, deep in the dark, he would go off to sleep with the security of them both next door to him and feel – at last, just a little – at ease. He loved the three of them together and he thought they did too. Sometimes, when he was having his bedtime wank before sleeping, he would know that Paul and Leigh were making love at the same time, on the other side of the wall. They weren’t noisy about it, but he could tell. It wasn’t exciting or disgusting to him, and he didn’t picture them or imagine it, but in that half-sleeping state there was a certain companionship to it, to be doing the same thing they were. Having no experience or understanding of intimacy, it was to him a safe sort of loving.

Graft found a rhythm of rehearsal and production, and each cycle of plays was stronger. Theirs was a risky public training ground. In July, they had a new piece called
Cartwright’s Army
about to open and were rehearsing an adaptation of Kafka’s
The Penal Colony
at the same time
.
A very young writer with no agent had pressed it into Leigh’s hand on the pavement one night when the audience for
Macbeth
was coming out. He was insecure, and
The Penal Colony
, gripped in Jack Payne’s iron fist, could not breathe. Exploration of the text was stamped out by Jack’s stifling certainty.

The only thing they could all be enthusiastic about was the centrepiece of the play, the torture machine. Described in Kafka’s text, it was interpreted by Luke with such painstaking care it looked fit for horrible purpose. He and Patrick built it in a friend’s garage, over weeks, with spare parts and rubbish-dump findings, and Luke was obsessed by it.

‘It’s a fucking
crucifixion bed
,’ he’d say. ‘Isn’t that perfect? You’d think Kafka was Catholic. You learn the lesson of society because it’s
written
into your body as you die – by the harrow, see?’

The machine took a day to install, had to be dismantled to get it up the narrow steps and then rebuilt – Luke welding the rusty iron back together recklessly, setting fire to the floor. And it was extraordinary: a magical, miserable monument to distress around which the four characters moved as its cruel justice was gradually revealed.

At Leigh’s insistence they had cast women in two of the four roles and Jack, as revenge, made the actress playing The Soldier cry every day, like a ritual.

‘It’s after eleven,’ Paul would whisper to Leigh, ‘she’s not gone yet – oh, there she goes.’

The other actress, who played The Condemned, cried because Luke had slept with her the week she was cast but now had forgotten and didn’t watch her rehearse. Then Luke slept with The Soldier, so she cried more, and then The Soldier found out about The Condemned, and
she
cried even more.

‘He’s sabotaging the company and upsetting the cast,’ said Paul, shocked at the disparity between Luke’s vast humanity and the way he consumed girls like a drunk with a bottle. There was nothing happy in it.

He tried to talk to him but Luke just blamed their Soviet-style uniforms.

‘They look so good dressed up like that,’ he said.

It got so that if any actress was late or blowing her nose everyone looked at Luke. Luke himself was oblivious; frenetic – there was no anger to be found against him because he did not understand the rules he was breaking. And as he spread chaos with distracted abandon Leigh was there, but she held Paul’s hand. She comforted weeping young women and tried not to watch. She could see it coming; the look he had, noticing them, and then the sweet, interested way he spoke to them. The rapt attention they gave him; the way he could move in close, very quickly, without making the girl back off. She saw, and she knew how it felt. He had done it to her. Watching him, she felt freshly how he had hurt her, as if he were opening her up again. So she turned her face away, and looked back only when he was satisfied, and was returned to them – to her and Paul – and the kind sureness of their lives together, the three of them.

On 14 July,
Cartwright’s Army
opened. From the first night they knew it was different to everything they had done before. And it sold out every night; the pub was packed, queues out onto the pavement for stand-bys five nights in a row. Normally, audiences were a simple crowd of separate people; for
Cartwright’s Army
they became one person. The audience, the production, the actors, the words, all were part of a single mechanism, connected, and the life of it charged the air. Even Jack and Paul forgot their disagreements. The actors proudly told their friends what they were doing at the moment; not
something in a pub over in the City
, but
a play for Graft, they’re new
.
Cartwright’s Army
was reviewed – not only in
The Stage
and
Time Out
– but written up in the broadsheets. Critics travelled to see it, felt the ripples of its impact touch them. On the pages of the invisible Domesday Book of works, sensed but never precisely defined – sometimes called success, respect, even fame – Graft had made their mark.

‘
George Myers has written an acerbic but still heartfelt diatribe against the smug inertia of the suburban classes
,’ read Leigh, with her scissors, cutting out clippings to send to her mother in New York.

She was on the sofa. Luke was lying on his back on the floor with his feet up next to her and Paul was in the armchair, smiling like a man after a three-course dinner.

‘He has, bless his little cotton socks,’ said Paul.

‘
Judith Hallaway shines as the neurotic, desperate woman driven to desert her child
.’

‘She does,’ said Paul. ‘I like that one.’

‘Look, there it is again,’ said Leigh. ‘This play Malcolm Dewberry is directing at the Nag’s Head.’

‘Argentine playwright, Hector Romero,’ said Luke to the ceiling. ‘Lanusse locking everyone up. Can’t go back to Argentina or they’d shoot him. And the pies are rubbish over there, too, so he’s stopping here.’

Leigh looked up and smiled. ‘That’s the one,’ she said. ‘I can’t bloody go, can I? Nobody cares if the producers are there, but I actually have a job to do.’