Fallout (7 page)

The lights came up on an almost bare set, a few pieces of polished nineteenth-century furniture, out of place in the modern square, suggesting a large drawing room. Upstage and centre was a square opening, brightly lit, through which shone white sunlight on silver trunks, a dream exterior. Three young women were seated on the stage. Luke felt a stab of recognition as they began to talk because he knew the play so well. Hearing it spoken gave him a rush of emotion, as words that he had felt existed only in the limited contract between his eye and the page were given life.

For three hours he alternated between Chekhov and sex. Thinking too hard, feeling too much, the thrill of new experience always jolted him to raw desire. Intensely focused, he studied the actresses. The men interested him less and looked silly in their false moustaches. It was a woman’s play and he had thought it funnier when he read it – not comedy, but treading the path of its story more lightly. This
Three Sisters
seemed all-out tragedy. The maid, Anfisa, came on after some time, and Luke pitied her her thankless task, eighteen playing eighty and not much to say. He mentally de-wigged and stripped her of her apron before turning back to the amber-haired girl who was complaining about her life. Her voice was limited. And it saddened him, having read her, that Irina should be belittled by this girlish telling.

Marianne waited for Nina in the emptying foyer.

‘You were forever!’

‘I had to get my make-up off. I looked like a hag.’

‘Come on,’ hissed her mother, furious.

‘Was I all right?’

‘This is hopeless.’

Marianne pushed ahead through the crowd, stopping once to kiss a man’s cheek and introduce Nina, who didn’t catch his name and felt only shame and embarrassment that they were running out as others stayed to talk and meet, names and glances exchanged, compliments, the happy thrill of afterwards that she, for some reason, was being denied.

‘Your Chrissie Southey is a pill,’ said her mother.

‘Shh! She’s just there. Shouldn’t we stay?’ Nina leaned closer and whispered, ‘Mummy! Agents!’

Her mother laughed, shortly. ‘Not for you, darling, not this time. Would you mind if we just got out of here? It’s dreadful . . .’

Nina realised her mother was embarrassed to be her mother and not somebody else’s. Then her arm was grabbed by Tad Lambert. The thinning crowd threw them together.

‘Nina!’ he laughed, inches from her face. ‘Come to the pub with us.’

‘Congratulations, you were marvellous,’ said Marianne warmly. ‘You
all
were.’

‘Thanks.’ He let go of Nina, grinned and met her eye. ‘Can I kidnap your daughter?’

Nina could have hugged him, there was something to be salvaged from the evening; with only months to go before they were all parted, she had friends.

‘Mummy?’

‘Not too late . . .’

Just behind him, Paul and Luke left the theatre. Nina registered them as they crossed the edge of her vision; two young men, one dark, one fair, arresting her attention for a moment before she looked back at Tad, and smiled, and let go of her mother’s arm.

‘See you later, Mummy,’ she said, and watched her leave with rebellious delight.

Paul put up his collar in the doorway and Luke, as had been his habit in Seston, a town too small to dominate the sky, looked for stars but saw only the glow of the city’s lights diffused.

‘Pub?’ said Paul and Luke nodded. ‘The Hansom Cab, up the road.’

‘Brilliant,’ Luke said and nodded.

And the people all moved out into the night.

The pub was seething with locals and the sudden influx of Friday-night crowd. Twenty minutes to last orders, a rush on the bar. Luke, trying not to trip people up with his holdalls and record player, glimpsed the bottles on the far wall gleaming in the false Victorian lamplight, flock wall-paper behind them like a jungle. It was a moment before he realised Paul was not with him, but still outside on the pavement, with a cigarette in his mouth and his hands shoved deeply into his pockets. Luke hovered on the edge of the crowd.

‘What?’

‘Sod it, let’s go back to mine.’

So he joined Paul on the pavement, London girls and city noise denied him.

‘There’s no sodding point,’ said Paul.

He began to walk and Luke followed, while inside, crushed up against the bar, Nina, drinking a gin and tonic, kept her back to Jeremy Elton and took comfort in the fact that she had perfected, over time, a mask. Hardly anybody ever knew what she was feeling. She fended off Tad’s after-show euphoric flirtation and endured Chrissie’s wide-eyed surprise at having not one but three agents interested in signing her. As the high relief of coming off stage drained she felt only disappointment with herself. She looked around what seemed to her the uniformly bright and sure faces of her classmates and felt her own talent, her will, too weak and uncertain. It was Chrissie who had won the prize that night, not she.

‘I think you’re the sexiest old lady in London,’ said Tad in a cod Russian accent, breathing beerily into her face. ‘Won’t you lift up your apron and let me see your samovar?’

Nina laughed, matching his accent.

‘I’ll show you my samovar if you take me to Moscow,’ she said, ‘and buy me a drink.’

Paul didn’t speak during the short walk back to his flat and trudged morosely up the stairs ahead of Luke, who kept silent, an unwelcome guest weighed down by bags, trying not to think about what he would do if he were thrown out. Inside, Paul slammed the door behind them both, swiped at the switch and the room was flooded with light so bright it seemed to ring. He fetched a bottle of whisky from the fake-wooden sideboard and held it up.

‘Thanks,’ said Luke and Paul fetched two tumblers from the kitchen.

He sloshed the whisky into them, cigarette in mouth, and handed one to Luke, going over to stare out of the window into the street below. Luke held his full glass and winced and fidgeted and wondered what to do. His bags were heaped like a pair of bulging corpses in the middle of the room, the record player leaning damply against them.

Without turning, Paul barked, ‘What did you think of the play?’

Luke hadn’t moved or taken off his coat and was just holding his glass of whisky like a prop.

‘I imagined them real when I read it,’ he said, quickly, ‘but two of them were like schoolgirls, and I thought it was sad. The words have everything. Masha was the best of them. That redhead just did a face.’

Paul turned round to face him.

‘I don’t know what I’m
sodding
doing,’ he said.

‘Right,’ said Luke, nonplussed.

‘I don’t want to be an engineer. I’m an engineer. I want to be a –’ he stumbled, ‘– producer . . . but I don’t
do
bloody anything except go to the theatre and read and ring people up and not get rung back and I haven’t a blind sodding clue what to do about it. I hate my job. I’ll be twenty-three in a month! I spent all my money from my dad on this flat and now I don’t have anything else to get started and—’ He stopped and drained his whisky. Luke had the impression he wasn’t normally a drinker. It was a lot of whisky all for one time and afterwards he recovered, obviously embarrassed by needing to choke and having made a speech and revealed himself.

‘You’re an engineer?’ said Luke.

Paul nodded, red faced, and then shouted, ‘NO!’

Luke knew he was going to laugh – and it burst out suddenly from him in a kind of explosive
HA
sound, making Paul’s head spasm up to look at him.

‘What’s so bloody funny?’ he said, but before finishing saying it, laughed too, still half-choking on the whisky. He stopped laughing and visibly relaxed, exhaling and exhausted like a man twice his age. He sat on the edge of the sofa and looked into his empty glass.

‘Sod it,’ he said, with relative cheeriness.

Luke handed him his still-full glass. Paul said ‘yeah’ and put his empty one on the floor.

‘What’s in those, then?’ He nodded towards Luke’s bags, gratefully moving away from the discomfort of confession.

‘Clothes. Books. Things.’

‘Quite a lot of things, isn’t it?’ said Paul.

Luke knelt on the ground and unzipped a holdall. He held up a book.

‘
Three Sisters
, see? And it’s got –’ he checked the tattered cover, ‘
The Cherry Orchard
and
Uncle Vanya
in there, too.’

‘Grand,’ said Paul.

‘Brought my Fitzgerald and my Brecht, cause you can’t do without, can you?’ said Luke, showing him another. ‘And my Shakespeare – Kafka . . . and then . . . some other things. Couldn’t leave my records.’

He opened up the other bag and showed him as if they were private photographs.
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
, The Velvet Underground, Leonard Cohen . . .

‘And what’s that?’ said Paul, pointing to notebooks underneath the records, drawing-covered and filthy with dust and ink.

‘Just writing. You know.’

There were at least ten of them, dark blue cloth-covered notebooks. The doodling on the outside was a pattern of geometric and snakelike shapes.

‘You draw, too?’ said Paul.

‘Not that much just now,’ said Luke, thinking of the crucifix, that he supposed he had chosen words and wondering what that meant.

He sat up and put his legs up in front of him, resting his forearms on his knees and looking at his belongings spilling from the bags like guts with something approaching a father’s love. Or a mother’s. Paul put down the second whisky, barely touched. He was warmed and softened by drink already and he got up, opened the window a little, lit a cigarette and sat down again.

‘There’s so much to do,’ he said to Luke with hunger, the urgency of somebody hearing the clock tick – taking the moments away from him.

Luke looked up at him, open, as if he knew what Paul was going to say as if he spoke for both of them. Paul took a long drag on his cigarette, talking quietly through the smoke, not meeting Luke’s eye.

‘I’m not talented. I don’t mind. I like it. Talent is . . .’ He frowned, unable to articulate what he did not miss. ‘But I want to be
part of things
. I know what’s good. I’m sick of pressing my nose up against the fucking window. There’s so much happening – I want to be in there but I don’t know how to get in.’

Luke nodded.

‘My dad is a structural engineer. He’s a successful man. Worked on the Post Office Tower.’ He jerked his thumb in its general direction. ‘He knows what he is. Came down from Yorkshire. Builds. Thinks I should do the same. I
did
what he wanted. I got my degree. I thought I could please him
and
myself but I can’t. I’m going mad just
acting
as if I’m someone, when I’m not.’

‘You said you were a producer,’ Luke pressed him, wanting truth.

Paul got up and went to a cupboard in the corner. He opened it and took out a pristine rectangular box with an address label on the top. He handed it to Luke and sat down again. It was surprisingly heavy. Luke took off the lid. The box was full, a stack of letter-headed paper, still in its paper-band seal, unused:
Paul Driscoll Management
.

‘I had those done a year ago. Longer.
Producer?
No. I’m an engineer who goes to the theatre, as it turns out.’ He gave a half-smile.

‘I gave notice on my job in Seston last month,’ said Luke. ‘I’ve got about a hundred and fifty pounds. I’m hoping it will let me stay away for long enough.’

‘From?’

‘Seston. And.’ Luke didn’t trail off, he stopped.

Paul leaned back against the brown sofa with the ashtray on his stomach and looked up at the overhead’s unforgiving glare. The box of a room and the two of them in it were lit like an interrogation. Luke expected a white-coated lab technician to lift the ceiling off and poke them with a giant pencil. The silence waited for him, demanding his confession in return for Paul’s. He did not know what he would say, but knew that it might define him. He wanted to convey himself, the path of his hopes, but those were not the words that came.

‘My mother’s in a mental hospital,’ he said. ‘She’s been in it since I was five. She’s not coming out.’

It was dug out of him like a wound. He never wanted to have to say it again.

Paul did not speak. He looked down in either embarrassment or respect and, finally, ‘What’s your father like?’ he asked.

‘He’s Polish.’ Luke didn’t feel the need to add to this.

‘Isn’t your name Jewish?’

‘Everyone thinks that. Polish. Kanowski.’

‘Stay away long enough – for what?’

There was silence.

‘Don’t know.’

The future was a blank presence in the room, like fear.

Paul was still looking up at the ceiling. Luke, on the floor, glanced down at the pristine box of writing paper. He slipped four fingers under the loose paper band and closed his hand. It gave a snap as it broke. He picked up a sheet of the letterhead, turning it in the light. Not another word was spoken. Whatever it was they were looking for, they were in it together.

Now – London – 1972

They called their company Graft. After more than four years working in touring theatre they knew the meaning of the word. Graft’s home was a 150-seat space above a pub in the City called the Lord Grafton. They liked the counterpoint of it: up front the Lord Grafton, while behind was the dark space where the work took place,
Graft
.

Paul had met Jack Payne when he and Luke were in Liverpool with the Playhouse. Jack had come from rep and had been a staff director in Cardiff. He was thirty-seven, bearded, and smoked a pipe. They all shared socialist convictions and the hope of shaking up the status quo, and Paul was impressed by Jack’s experience. Together with Luke they dreamed up their small company over late-night red wine and the spark of new friendship. Graft would find serious, current work and place it in the heart of the establishment, they would carve their ideas, welcome or unwelcome, into the City.

They had two plays and would alternate them each for a month while rehearsing another two – which they hadn’t yet found. Their first production was a play called
Deaf Hill
, written by a fifty-five-year-old Yorkshireman, Mike Wall. It was a short piece; a violent, bestial hour about mines and miners. None of them could agree on much about it except that it was ‘important’ and it needed a lot of work. Jack Payne, sucking on his pipe, world-weary, seemed confident the many wrinkles could be ironed out under his direction and, as the writer was willing, they were pushing on. They scheduled a tentative three weeks rehearsal, to open the play at the end of the month.

The lease was signed, the permit was given, and the Arts Council grant was enough to get started. So Paul and Luke painted the upstairs windows at the Grafton black on the inside and fixed roller blinds over them. The floorboards of the two-hundred-year-old pub bumped and sloped, creaking, so that the stage didn’t lie exactly flat and had wedges – corks and doorstops – filling the gaps. The seating was benches: pine boxes with oval holes for handles, that doubled as steps and could be bolted together. They installed a rudimentary lighting rig; heavy, deep-black dusty tabs on hinged poles and a brand-new cyc, white and pristine at the back of the stage. Two fire extinguishers, a red fire bucket full of sand and fag-ends, and nothing but black paint on the walls. They were made children again by their delight in the thrill of ownership, or else they weren’t yet fully grown. They would sit downstairs in the Lord Grafton proper, an unlikely band of players in the old City drinking hole, and not real customers to the landlord, Ron; he always served them last. The corner table was their office. They didn’t wear suits like the City gents, coming in for their pies and pints with their briefcases, secretaries on their arms, pinstripe three-pieces and sideburns. Graft were like infiltrators. Astrakhan collars. Suede. Coloured socks, cheesecloth and black polo necks. Gitanes and roll-ups. Graft were:

Paul Driscoll, artistic director.

Jack Payne, co-artistic director, director.

Patrick Orange, lighting/set design.

Tanya Cook, stage manager/costume design.

Luke Kanowski, ASM/props.

Luke was part time because he was working for Hammersmith and Fulham Council as a dustman three days a week in the mornings and wasn’t free until lunch. He had needed a job that would free his days and wanted one that wasn’t in an office. He’d had enough of offices to last a lifetime. He was up at four, and on the dustcart from a quarter to five. Their route was a square mile of Hammersmith that took in neat river-view terraces and council flats, office blocks and the hospital. The other men, the lifers in Luke’s mind, were bent by the grind, heavier on top than below from the carrying and tipping of metal bins for twenty years or more, and oblivious to the smell. They were second and third generation, some of them – bodies invisible beneath heavy jackets, hands like thickened leather. They didn’t think Luke would last – laughed at someone like him taking it on – and he agreed with them and didn’t mind being laughed at. He didn’t want to last, and was grateful for the work. He didn’t care about the dirt and stench because the job gave him the streets; it gave him London, all of it, from top to bottom, an endless supply of humanity, the living and dead-heaped detritus of everyday life. He would finish his shift, get back to Paul’s flat, wash, and arrive at the Grafton with the sandwiches at one or two, in time to hear the latest round of arguments.

Deaf Hill
was not near ready. They were casting female roles for
The Duchess of Malfi
that afternoon, and then the men for both plays the following day. They were eating ham sandwiches from the paper they’d been wrapped in and drinking beer. Ron, behind the bar, pretended they weren’t there, pulling pints for the City gents and sherry for the ladies.

‘I’m interested to see Trevor Albert for Tel,’ said Paul. Jack Payne lit his pipe and sat back, legs wide, a man whose silence was like a knock on the table –
I’m the director, listen to me.

‘We don’t need
telly
actors.’

Paul caught Luke’s eye. ‘If Trevor Albert wants to take a punt on a new play in pub theatre who are we to turn up our noses?’ he said.

‘I’m not chasing sales to fill some Arts Council balance sheet.’ Jack sucked his pipe, intractable.

‘Yes. We agree. Although it would be nice to sell some tickets.’

Paul looked to Luke again for support, but Luke had his own problems; Tanya Cook was edging towards him with the look of a girl who might climb onto his lap.

Tanya was a tiny blonde girl from Bristol. She had studied at the Old Vic and was homesick for her family in Temple Meads. She chain-smoked and had pockets full of tissues and shadows under her eyes. She leaned forward, biting her lip.

‘Luke?’ she murmured, two drawn-out syllables, and Paul saw Luke smile at her, then wince, hoist up his left foot over his right knee and rub his ankle, glancing around the pub urgently as if he were looking for something. Tanya sat back, lit another cigarette and turned her face away from him.
Hello
, thought Paul.

‘What time is Mike coming in?’ asked Patrick Orange. He was a big-nosed young man, with longish fair hair, who smilingly underlined stage directions in his coloured biros and climbed ladders to fix gels over the lights with tiny crocodile clips. His place within Graft had become the peacemaker, beatific.

‘He should be here any minute with the new draft,’ said Jack. ‘We’ll have an hour or two before the birds start coming in.’

‘Which is the other thing . . .’ Paul didn’t finish the sentence.

They all knew they had only one play, the
Duchess
, with any female roles.

‘We can’t
shove
women into Mike’s play just to satisfy your casting rules,’ said Jack. ‘Wives and daughters making Yorkshire pudding for the menfolk just because we need them in corsets for the
Duchess
in the evening?’

‘I know that, Jack,’ said Paul, noticing that Tanya had begun to cry and was having her hand held by Patrick. Luke rustled a newspaper, hunched up over the foreign news as if his life depended on it.

‘Here’s the man himself,’ said Paul as Mike, the writer, came into the pub.

‘Hello, you lot,’ he said, grizzled, grey-haired, and more ancient to them even than his fifty-five years, one wrinkled manuscript stuffed in the pocket of his overcoat and another poking out of the string bag he carried his Heinz tomato soup about in.

‘Just the two drafts with you today, Mike?’ said Paul and grinned at him.

‘The two latest,’ said Mike. ‘Gentlemen. Lady.’ He looked around for a chair.

Tanya stood up, quivering inside her scrappy suede coat, nose red and clutching her cigarette and tissue.

‘You can have my seat, I’m off.’

They all looked up – except Luke, studying the tiny news-print, deaf.

‘Look, I think this is really shitty of you, after yesterday. You’re a right shit, Luke. I’m off.’

Paul started up. ‘Hey, Tanya, can I—’

‘No, Paul! It’s all right. I’ll see you. I suppose.’ And she left, her swinging shoulder-bag bumping against the backs of businessmen as she went.

The men of Graft shifted in their seats, raised their eyebrows.

Luke looked at Paul, but Paul refused to smile.

‘Great,’ he said. ‘Marvellous, Luke. Are you going to go after our stage management and costume department, or just let her go?’

‘Bit late,’ said Luke. ‘Probably.’

They all absorbed the new reality. Graft minus one.

‘So what now?’ said Paul. ‘No bloody stage manager. It’s a shambles.’

Patrick smiled and shook his head. ‘Not to worry, fellas,’ he said. ‘I’m sure we’ll sort something out. I might ring this girl I know, she’s really nice.’

‘What girl? Just any girl?’ asked Paul, looking at Luke pointedly.

‘She was ASM at The Basement.’

‘Still might be.’

‘I’ll call her.’

‘You call her,’ said Jack. ‘Mike and me will adjourn upstairs. Paul can come if he likes, and Luke can have a cold shower.’

‘Yes, Jack, of course I’m coming. Casting birds at four,’ said Paul. ‘And one of us will have to read with them now Tanya’s gone.’

He, Mike and Jack trooped off through the flock wallpapered door that had a sheet of A4 taped to it that said ‘Graft Upstairs’ in Tanya’s black marker, Patrick went to the payphone and Luke was left in disgrace. He moved to a chair against the wall, pulled a notebook from his pocket and began to write.

Leigh Radley left her bedsit in Camden for the Lord Grafton as soon as she got Patrick’s call. She had been out of work for three weeks, just helping out and hoping, writing her diaries and stories she hated immediately they were finished, and eating too much, and she didn’t want to be late.

Another day without electric light. A power cut was scheduled between two in the afternoon and eleven that night. Winter dark was already falling faster and more completely than usual as people hurried home to their houses in an atmosphere of endurance and perverse excitement at facing the long hours ahead with no electricity.

Leigh caught the bus and sat upstairs in the smoky fug, poring over her
Duchess of Malfi
beneath the yellow bulbs and counting the stops.

‘Smithfield Street, Snow Hill!’ shouted the bus conductor from the lower deck and then the
ting-ting
of the bell as they moved on.

Two old ladies in headscarves complained to one another about the government as the bus bounced along.

‘I’d like to see Mr Heath wash his smalls by candlelight; it’s all right for some.’

Leigh rested her forehead against the glass, watching the blind-black shop windows and a supermarket lit like a cathedral full of tins and cigarettes. They passed St Barts, the windows blazing above the city that was gradually fading away into shadows around it.

‘That’s the place to be, Dor,’ said one of the old ladies and they clutched their handbags, laughing their Monty Python laughs and Leigh bit her lip to stop from laughing with them.

‘Newgate Street!’

She hurried down the steep spiral as the bus leaned, and waited, clinging to the barley-sugar plastic-wrapped pole in the cold air, past the emptying offices to her stop. She got off, dragging her
A–Z
from her bag, striking up her lighter to read it, and set off through the unlike-themselves streets.

She found the Lord Grafton, closed and locked, and knocked on the glass. She looked up and down the street and checked the sign above her; a rough painting of a coat of arms: a sword, a shield.

Inside, Luke was lighting cheap, white candles from a box under his arm and waiting for Leigh. The moment Patrick Orange said her name he had remembered her: the wet night in Seston four years before. The Mini throwing up a dirty wave as it left him. He hadn’t told Paul yet that Patrick’s ASM friend was Leigh Radley. They had never talked about her, he might not remember as perfectly as Luke did. It was so long ago.

Through the frosted patterned glass, Leigh could see a shadow-figure inside, moving around with lights. Thinking it was Patrick, she smiled. She knocked again, straightened up and tucked her hair behind her ears as the figure came towards her.

He had a candle on a saucer that threw a flickering light up onto his face as the bolts were slid back. He opened the door. It wasn’t Patrick. She knew him immediately. Luke.

‘Come in,’ he said.

He stepped aside. She went past him into the pub. On the bar an oil lamp and candles pooled light along the shiny wood. Luke held up the flickering candle-stump on the saucer. She felt spotlit. She couldn’t think what to say. The soft light held them close.

‘I love power cuts,’ he said. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Am I in the right place?’ she asked.

‘You don’t remember me,’ said Luke, smiling at her.

‘Yes, I do,’ she said, an admission. ‘Luke.’

The small flame blew sideways and went out. He closed the door.

There was silence. It was cold.

‘Patrick’s just gone for more candles,’ he said. ‘The landlord has loads but he’s that mean with them. Come over here.’

She followed him, trying not to bump into the chairs, to three more candles on saucers on the corner table and a notebook, open, with a pen lying across the pages. Luke closed it.

‘Y’all right then?’ he asked.

‘It’s like the Blitz or something.’

‘Good, isn’t it?’

She nodded. Luke just kept looking at her.

‘Is this where Graft are?’ she prompted.

‘They’re all upstairs. I’ll take you up if you like. What have you been up to?’

‘Since . . . ?’

‘Since back then.’

‘Four years.’

‘Yeah.’

She shrugged. ‘Working in rep. Here and there . . . I should probably go up.’

‘Oh, yeah. Come with me. Take one of these. I’ve finished anyway.’

She took the candle he offered and followed him to a door in the wall. He opened it.

‘So the director is Jack Payne?’ she asked.

‘Yes, do you know him?’