Radiance (13 page)

Once upon a time I played Conrad and Carlotta with the neighbour boy, the son of a lowly junior lecturer in astronomy and therefore utterly delicious with the
frisson
of slumming it. I do not imagine Conrad and Carlotta did half the things in their capsule that I did in the peach trees with … oh, what was his name? Lucius. Or Lawrence. Lawrence! From the Latin
Laurentius
, meaning from the city of Laurentum, near Rome.

Well, I missed the first big rush. One always does. The good bit is forever one generation back. But I'm not such a latecomer that I escaped the sense of being
historical
. Here I sit, writing in my little green book while I gnaw over whether or not I can afford a bowl of the monkfish soup to insulate my belly against the fact that I've (finally!) gotten a part in the new Stern flick but not been paid yet. I know, I just
know
, that my little diary will be read by somebody someday, and not just to divine how to get me in the sack. It'll be read because I'm an actress in the early days of cinema and the somewhat later days of interplanetary immigration. I don't have to do a thing to be interesting! Did she or did she not have the monkfish soup? Did the thyme taste like the thyme she knew back home? (Or the scrubbly stuff we call thyme even though it's lunar native and in no sense of the word thyme. Though, for that matter, it wouldn't be monkfish either, but we call our local long scaly bastards with their razor snouts and six vestigial legs monkfish because the Savoy, good sir, does
not
serve moon-monster soup!) Did the flavour make her think of innocent days in the manger of man?

Not especially, no.

But we all keep diaries. We all scribble and babble. Because we know the future is watching everything and taking its own notes. So I shall tell you, Mister Future, all about Conrad and Carlotta, just in case you get careless and misplace them along the way.

I was saying I missed the first big rush, wasn't I, Mister Future? By the time I made my entrance, all the planets had their bustling baby shantytowns, each and every one with a flag slapped on it. You weren't anybody at the imperial picnic if you didn't have a planet. Moons, though lovely, just lovely, are consolation prizes. Sino-Russian Mars. Saturn split between Germany and Austria-Hungary. French Neptune. American Pluto. Spanish Mercury. Ottoman Jupiter. All present and accounted for—except Venus. Nobody owns that Bessie because everyone needs her. The path to the stars is paved with treaties. If I wanted to stay English, I had my pick of the Moon or Uranus or a sea of satellites. But I didn't see it as a choice. Only the Moon for the likes of me! Who wants to freeze on Uranus where there's no paparazzi at all?

I hoarded my little walnuts like a good squirrel, sitting for advertisements and doing the occasional shimmy on some appalling stage. I'll have you know I was the face of Dr Goddard's Premium Disinfectant
and
Little Diamond Brand Refined Sugar in the same fortnight. And that very fortnight I did my evening shifts at the Blue Elephant Theatre, playing Ariel in an all-female, mostly nude production of
The Tempest
. The glitter stuck to my nipples something vicious. Stained them green for a month after the coppers shut us down on indecency charges.
Fair enough,
I said then, and I say now. I drank too much and ate too little, got in a spell of trouble with a stage manager and had it taken care of; put something up my nose and something in a pipe, but that's what was done. Preparations for a better role. I tried to get plum work. I did try. Turned out for Mr Wilde and Mr Ibsen's affairs, lined up round the block to be seen for the opportunity to cough offstage in Chekhov. But the bold truth is that nothing on your person earns as well as tits earn, and only after I did a spell as a cheesecake bacchante (I got to carry Pentheus's head three nights out of five—four if Susanna had a boyfriend that month) did I have my egg.

I lined up in Kensington Gardens with the crowds. Passed by the statue of Peter Pan and reached up my hand to pat him as thousands have done. Millions now, I suppose. Built but the year before and already his foot is near worn away. Second star to the right, my lad. Right-o. Carpetbags and cold-weather rags and the afternoon sun like a sickly porridge glooping over the lindens. The cannon towered over me. I went terribly quiet inside, as you do when you're little and your father looms over you and you don't know yet whether he means to praise or scold. I went up on a boat called the
Topless Towers of Ilium
, which made me smirk. I looked round and saw a sea of flappers—flappers!—heaps of girls with bleached hair and dance shoes and carmine lips. All of us piling in for a day's flight in cramped quarters with a lot of men who will be happy to tell you they're directors, kid, you just sit right here by me. It was like an audition. An audition for a whole world, to see if the Moon would accept us and let us in or turn us out after a spin as an extra in a crowd scene and a starring role on a hotel bed with a producer in a top hat testing your range with his prick.

Oh, the wide universe needs us all, great and small, to fill her up and make her good, make her ripe, make her full and teeming. There are no small stories, only short ones. But the Moon … the Moon is where they make
movies
. And the Moon is a heartless bitch. She only needs a few. She wants fewer than that. She sits up there, high and mighty as you please, on her starry director's chair and she ticks off the weak on a clipboard stained with ingénues' tears. The Moon cares nothing for our cute little troubles. She ate a thousand girls for lunch yesterday, and she was hungry again in an hour. She barely even looks at us.

But I only have eyes for her.

So here I am. I've a room—not at the Savoy, goodness, perish the thought! I've the room they assigned me at Princess Alice's Landing, at the top of a three-floor boarding house on Endymion Road, back end of Grasshopper City. Five girls to a room. And our wardrobes count as a sixth tenant, for not a one of us earns her keep anywhere but before the lens and on the boards. Callista's Virgin Queen getup takes the whole rear corner, and all our cats live under the skirt. But I save my little shillings for luncheons at the Savoy so that I can feel
grand
. So that I can feel like I'm somebody going somewhere. So I can read Algernon B dishing gossip and maybe spy with my little eye old Wadsy Shevchenko canoodling with a prop boy. So Søren Blom can find me if he's scouring the cafes for an Ionian duchess who might just look like me, or if that dashing darling Percival Unck comes looking for a new heroine to drop into a bucket of ghosts. So I can watch the summer Earth at half-wax going down over the froth of Mare Nubium and the candy-coloured streetlights come on in a long bright wave over my city.

My city! Tithonus, jewel of the Moon, Queen Slattern of the Alleyways, Grasshopper City, my home! I stepped off the
Topless Towers of Ilium
and took in her round blueglass spires and filth-fat holes and opium gardens and botanical dens and the wicker-coral palaces barely keeping the moss at bay like I was taking the first breath of my whole life. I was in love. I was a new bride. If I'd had a penny left over I'd have grabbed the first whore I saw and had her right there against the side of the Actaeon, just to have the city inside me and my hands on its heat. Nickelodeons every four steps, but those four steps also hoisted up grand theatres like castles, studio gates like St. Peter's, peep shows and brothels and dance halls coming up like posies in every which spot between. They even built a Globe, so achingly, throbbingly familiar out there on this new West End, looking like an ice queen's personal gladiatorial arena, blueglass and silver and scrimshaw.

I am going to play them all.

Oh, I thought I'd be sensible about it.
Don't pan for gold
, says the wise man.
Sell pans
. I'd learn cameras, I thought. Inside and out. I could do it. Find work as an assistant to an assistant to an assistant. As long as I could be near the movies, I'd've won. Maybe someone would catch a glimpse of me taking light readings, notice the way the Earthlight caught my profile. Maybe not. Manage your expectations, Mary! But oh, I took one look at Grasshopper City, at the Globe and the Actaeon and the Savoy, and I knew it would never do. I don't give a fig how a camera works, just as long as it works on me.

No, I am going to play them all. I intend to step on-stage as Ariel with my dress
on
. I shall pose just so at the Actaeon's emerald double door at my own premiere, name above the title, all in lights, all in red, like a rose, like a mouth, all in. I shall absolutely
murder
Wilde and Ibsen and Chekhov; I shall eat Claudius's heart in the marketplace, I shall pine for the love of Robin Hood. All of them, all of them. Men's parts, too. Hamlet in high heels, and don't you
dare
forget my name! I will hunch my back as Dickie III until I am quite literally blue in the face. I will make the Moon love me if I have to spike her drink and knock her on the head to do it.

And I
am
turning blue. It thrills me to my toes! I would say I'm a shade between powder and sky so far. I shall be quite sapphire by Christmas, I expect.

Granted, it's not going
so
well on the working front. I ran around like a perfect fool during the slaughter of the suitors in Dorian Blister's
Odyssey
last year. My bathwater ran pink with fake blood. Even after I seemed squeakingly clean, the bubbles said I still had a bit of Telemachus on me somewhere. But the camera lingered on me for a half second longer than the other handmaids, and I had a
particularly
good expression of horror on. Then, I was a dead body in
The Mercury Equation
. Strangled in a short dress. Big black finger marks on my neck. (Pssst: The prodigal son did it). And a fairy in
The Fair Folk Abroad
, which if you ask my opinion was an absolute coke-addled
mess
. Just a great wad of big paper flowers and suspension wires and pukingly sweet orchestral nonsense, along with half a circus's worth of animals that'd had rum poured in their water bowls the morning before their scenes so they'd stagger docilely across the soundstage instead of ripping Titania's face off. You can see a panther passed out cold on the horn of plenty in the second scene.

I've learned it's important to have a name. Fairy #3 is a losing game. At least let me be Mustardseed in the credits, Mister! It won't cost you anything. I do so long to graduate from being a number to being a name. Dead Girl #2. Handmaid #6. I celebrated with one of my four flatmates (Regina Farago—you'll see her in that big splashy Napoleonic flick next year: built like a giraffe, tall and brown and possessing that clumsiness that looks like grace when you've got legs like hers) and a bucketful of gin when I was cast as Faun #1 in
The Thrice-Haunted Forests of Triton
. Moving up in the world! Yesterday #6, today #1!

But now I've a character with a proper name! Signed the contract
Mary Pellam
with a big flourish. Maybe something will come of it. Probably not. But I've got years to make my go.

Today I'm Clementine Salt.

More important, Miss Clem is my ticket to a studio contract. Oh, the Grail, the chalice, the font of prosperity! Locked away in the castle perilous and just
sloshing
with fine print! I do so dream of selling myself to a studio. For a tidy sum, of course—Dr Pellam didn't raise a fool. I positively
wriggle
with the thought of some big meaty boss closing his clobbering hand over mine and guiding a gold pen across glossy pages. Sign here and we'll make you immortal, little missy. And they'll own you for just as long. A pretty unicorn in a pretty zoo. What to eat; who to breed with; shows at seven, nine, and eleven.

Look at me, I'm growing a proper lunar coat of cynicism.

The fact is, a unicorn cage is the safest place to be. And I want to be safe. I
have
to be safe. And to be safe I need protection. These studios prowl the Moon like little emperors bouncing on great stupid beasts. They've carved up the place between them like England and France and Austria-Hungary and Russia.

They've put on actual wars!

You won't hear a breath of it back home, no sir. But it's happened. They've all the costumes and props and explosives for any battle in history, after all. Why let it go to waste just because no one is making a war flick this week? Tithonus is divided into territories: the north belongs to Capricorn, the south to Tranquillity, the east to Plantagenet Pictures, the west to Oxblood Films. The rest of Luna is carved up the same way, minus a few independent strongholds here and there. Virago, Wainscot, Artemisia. Woe betide the soul who crosses lines! Little wee emperors with ivory crowns jousting on rhinoceroses. Only, what actually happens is that Oxblood swipes Maud Locksley from Plantagenet and Simon Laszlo storms their backlot—which is more or less the whole west end up to Coriander Street—with a hundred actors who think they are re-enacting the betrayals of the Duke of Burgundy until their bullets actually blow the heads off the “loyal French peasants” and Miss Locksley gets a shell-shocked escort home and a month locked up in Laszlo's house with her head stuck in a bushel of af-yun before she can pull herself together enough to stand on her mark.

Oh, the money on the Moon is English—you can see Vickie's sour old kisser on the bills. But no one is under one single illusion as to who runs this joint. You take sides if you're smart. Offer up your loyalty, 'cause it's all you've got to trade.

Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody's buying.

I picked up this little notebook at the shop round the corner from the Huntress, which is a whorehouse, but quite a good one. If I'm ever in a bad way, I'll hope to get hired on there. You get breakfast brought on a tray and don't have to start work 'til four. I mean to record in it Things I Know. There is such an awful lot to know up here. I suppose I thought the Moon would be like London, only bigger and less expensive. I'm quite certain that was the idea. But just like everywhere else, it only took about five seconds for folk to notice that Earth is very, very far away.