by Laura Elvery
‘So, this acting thing, my beautiful girl,’ her mother said, rinsing crumbs from the dishcloth under a heavy stream of water. ‘Where is that leading, hey? And your brother’s lack of any sort of direction. How hard can it be?’
Damien swung through the kitchen, shirtless, tickling himself and making monkey noises. He took the stairs two at a time. He called out.
‘Love you, Mum.’
‘Love you, too, Damien.’
*
Marlee accepted her brother’s offer to drive her to the audition. She packed her bag into the boot, and they shot off up the street.
‘Do you want to practise on me?’
She shook her head. Her guts were churning. She’d already had diarrhoea multiple times that morning. When she thought of all that rehearsal chocolate milk, she felt like throwing up.
‘Slow down,’ she said. ‘Or, speed up. Just do something different.’
Marlee dropped her head to her knees and Damien took one hand off the wheel and rubbed, hard and certain, between her shoulderblades. He dittied the theme tune to Batman. Damien followed the map on his phone and Marlee didn’t tell him to watch the road. They reached the university gates and wound up a hill covered in ashen-trunked gums. Damien parked the car and spun his keys into the air while she retrieved her bag. They nodded at a pretty girl in a university T-shirt giving directions at the top of the car park. They followed signs. Dozens of kids lined a black-carpeted hallway that was decorated with framed portraits of heavily eyelined alumni.
Damien stopped, pointing to where her bag lay with the costume zipped inside. ‘Leave you to it, then?’
‘Yep.’ Marlee breathed deeply. She’d managed to forget her guts for a quarter of an hour.
He clutched her shoulder. He still had the keys in his hands. They made a sharp jab in Marlee’s skin that felt good.
‘Break a leg,’ Damien said. ‘See you back at the car.’ Off he scurried, up the stairs and out of sight.
Around Marlee, kids her age chatted and took selfies and burst into laughter. Some paced the corridors, whispering to pieces of paper.
Out, damned spot! Out, I say!
the regulars’d stand aside to let ’em through, just as if they was a – a coupla kings
on the kindness of strangers
Marlee flagged down a passing university helper. ‘I’m here for the auditions. When should I change into my costume?’
‘No costume required, babe. Christopher and Trish like to see you “as is”.’
‘Okay.’ Marlee picked up her bag. ‘Thanks.’ She turned and saw a sign, indicating up, for the bathrooms.
This was real life, Marlee decided, taking the stairs two at a time, focusing on her diaphragm, on her stage breathing. This was what it meant to be an adult, no apologies, no one else even around, only yourself to rely on, not even Damien, who was surely at that moment being a prowler in the bushes of the car park, too afraid to approach the hot helper girl, but wanting to, so badly. No one else was going to lug that overnight bag upstairs to the bathroom that hopefully had a disabled toilet to accommodate her new wingspan. No one else had stayed up late at night trying to poke black thread through the eye of a needle. Her mother had touched the furry hood on her way to bed, and told her it was pretty but also a bit full-on, and called Marlee her beautiful darling girl once again.
In the bathroom mirror, Marlee tied her hair into a low bun and slipped on the hood, leaving her face open and expressive – the face Emmett said evoked his vision of the real and transfigured Marguerite. She powdered her cheeks bronze. She circled a brown eyeliner pencil onto the tip of her nose. She pulled on black leggings and laced up the soft leather boots Geraldine had given her.
Marlee returned down the stairs to the corridor with the framed photographs. The other students in the hallway looked up and said things softly like, Wow, that’s weird.
‘Marlee Hamilton?’ said another university helper. The boy ushered her into a small theatre.
On stools behind a tall desk sat a woman with close-cropped red hair and thick-rimmed glasses, and a bald man with a broad smile.
‘I’m Christopher. This is Trish. Welcome, Marlee.’
‘We see you’ve decided on an Ulrich piece today. But it isn’t one we’re familiar with.’ Trish paused. ‘Marguerite, the Fledermaus by Emmett S Ulrich.’ She looked up. ‘Sounds very interesting.’
‘Fledermaus means bat.’
Christopher asked, ‘How did you come upon it?’
Marlee couldn’t express it exactly.
‘Did you find it on the internet?’
‘No,’ Marlee said. ‘I met Emmett at the bakery, and I told him I was auditioning for this, and he offered to let me use one of his unpublished pieces.’
‘Sorry, the bakery?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s quite an endorsement, wouldn’t you say, Trish?’
Trish smiled. A low hum was coming from a vent above her head. ‘I would.’
The hum turned into a ticking, grating sound. Marlee felt a slick of sweat ride down her belly.
‘That’s just the air conditioner kicking in,’ Christopher said.
Trish asked, ‘Would you like to set the scene for us here?’
‘There’s this girl called Marguerite and she’s the daughter of the mayor’ – Marlee’s words came out in a rush, louder than she’d rehearsed because of the air conditioner kicking in – ‘in a town that’s filled up with bats. You know, loud and smelly and you can’t hear yourself on the phone, and no one can sleep. Anyway, one by one everyone goes mad, even the mayor, and they either leave town or kill themselves. Except for Marguerite, who goes into this sort of weird trance whenever she’s around the bats. Until she’s the only one left and she turns into a bat herself.’
Marlee raised her black wings to demonstrate. Trish cleared her throat and puckered her lips.
Marlee kept her wings outstretched. ‘Oh, and I think I’d be an excellent fit for your university acting program.’
Christopher was nodding. He righted himself on the stool and leant over a notepad. ‘Okay, Marlee, we may take notes during your performance. When you’re ready to start.’
Marlee was aware of the room’s smells – coffee, paint, the tang of a marker pen. She tried, as Emmett had suggested, to summon Marguerite’s hometown. Trees overhead loaded with the chaos of low-hanging bats. From that dramatic space, she would burst forth with her first line. Crouched on the floor, Marlee was aware that Trish and Christopher were concentrating very hard on not looking at each other. Marlee’s thoughts turned to Lou and Cassie and Alexis and Elleni, who, after a year or so of being in Drama together, stopped saying We Had Absolutely No Idea You Were Good, and she was never sure if it was because she wasn’t, or because they finally believed it.
Marlee began.
Screeching, one of us is screeching, and I am filled with vim and vigour.
Shards of black-noise, bark-noise, cave-noise, come from the folded papery parcels.
The bats show shiny, wet-nosed concern for my undistilled grief
And their descent to the ground is as hasty as starfall.
They are stretched with the angular glee of a thousand shrill lawyers.
In their fine, leathery strait-jackets, I see myself.
The air conditioner forced Marlee to project her voice from her diaphragm, that was for sure.
*
Damien opened the letter for Marlee one hard, hot afternoon in early January and left it in the lap of the Marguerite costume that he’d stuffed with toilet paper and propped up on the couch. She’d got in. She’d passed the audition. Soon after that it was the trip to Brisbane, and then several trips to Ikea and Woolies for coat hangers and peanut butter and jars of pasta sauce. For a while, Marlee lived on campus in a room with a bookshelf and narrow bed, and a desk ca
rved with semi-revolutionary slogans, beneath a window where giant brush turkeys shuffled about.
They kept her awake.
Marlee started spending time in the middle of the night in the dorm room kitchen (brand new fridge, individually locked pantries, stove with stuck-on egg batter). One night, Joe from Room 3 burst in to find Marlee eating scraps of pear and rockmelon from a plate.
‘Hey!’ he said, delighted. ‘You’re nocturnal like me.’ A sliver of green showed in his teeth.
In second semester, Marlee felt Christopher’s frustration when he became her tutor for the Friday early morning workshop. All the girls in her class were like Cassie and Lou and Alexis and Elleni. Marlee thought for sure Christopher would mention the audition, but he never did. The parts of him that had seemed cool and amused watching her in her wings, following her eyelinered nose, made him now seem harried and exasperated. He was obviously furious with all his students, but Marlee felt his displeasure personally and keenly. She froze to let him pass during warm-ups when classes started at five past eight. She tried to shrink and change. When Christopher saw Marlee scuttle across the stage as Dogberry or Ismene or Betty Parris, her front to the audience like her high school teachers had taught her, Christopher yelled from his stool, ‘Your back! Show the audience your back!’
In her dorm room, Marlee sandwiched her head with a pillow. The brush turkeys grunted outside.
One night in mid-semester, the girls who were most like Cassie and Lou invited Marlee to the uni bar after a History of Theatre lecture that everyone else hated but Marlee loved because it meant sitting still for two hours, and because she was soothed by their lecturer’s slow-moving, cottony voice.
They met at night on the brightly lit footpath outside the uni bar. That semester, posters all over campus warned female students – the pictures were only ever of girls – to protect themselves from sex pests. Footpaths threaded down the hill through the scrub to the bus station. Reports of students being attacked were either entirely true or largely exaggerated. Marlee felt the collar of her shirt tight around her neck and wanted to loosen it. Where did it end, though, this loosening? She could only go so far. If she left now, Marlee thought suddenly, she could make it back to her room in time to change her shirt, in time to text and cancel the beers. The scent of eucalypts pitched in the air. Marlee felt it high in her nose like fruit rind. She saw her classmates. Tori – the one most like Lou – wore a thin-strapped tank top and tucked herself up tight next to Marlee. Marlee made herself be the first to speak.
‘I’ve never been here before.’
Chloe – the one most like Cassie – cracked up.
‘Honestly,’ Marlee said.
‘We believe you.’
At the door to the bar, a man checked their IDs. Marlee stopped herself from telling the girls this was the first time she’d been carded. They took two beers each to the big verandah out the back. The beer garden was set among trees, with tables bellied through the centre with trunks, stools pulled up, fluorescent lights buzzing above.
‘So, Marlee, do you think you’re going to be an actor?’ Chloe asked.
Marlee shook her head slowly.
‘Not even on Neighbours or something?’ Tori asked.
‘I doubt it.’
‘Yeah,’ Chloe said. ‘You’re probably right. I mean, about all of us. It’s fun, right? But no one actually believes it.’
All around Marlee were tables of students, shrill and sharp. Gold light across the timber planks. Black coats and boots. Leaning over each other, making arguments that blossomed from the residue of tutorial discussions. Marlee yearned for her bedroom, her vase of slender flowers, the photo of her brother and mum set in her wardrobe so she would ration it. She was smitten with the idea that they were missing her. The beer was softening her mind. Tonight, surely, she would be able to sleep. Chloe and Tori touched hands when they talked to each other. They were elastic, they were liquid. Boys from the lecture drifted over to their table and Marlee felt unable to speak. One boy tried three times to ask Marlee a question, his voice growing hotter and louder and closer. Her ear, feeling a bruise. No one was unkind. She was stone, she was composed of straw.
Marlee stood. She pressed her hands to the sides of her face and closed her eyes.
‘No way. What? Stay,’ Chloe said.
Tori held out her arm and pulled her into a hug. ‘No sleep! One more?’
Damien never did anything he didn’t want to do. Marlee thought, I don’t want to. She said it aloud. Chloe and Tori shrugged and blew kisses. No one was unkind.
All semester: more noise. Roommates having sex: Rooms 1 and 7, then Rooms 7 and 4, then 4 and 3, then back to the original formation. Starting at lunchtime when he rose, Joe played hours of podcasts about Tarantino movies and economic conspiracies and melting ice-caps that streamed out of his room and down the hallway. And, yes, Marlee could have afforded to be more light-hearted. To be more tolerant in this shared space. To welcome things like everyone else seemed able to. To make being open and cool her thing. Open-minded, open-hearted, show us your back.
But the noise.
The turkeys shuffling, TV blaring. Before university she’d never noticed, but now Marlee was aware of a seam in her mind that let the noise in. Even those noises that she knew weren’t there. The high ringing of a bell, somewhere. Scratching. Screeching.
It took a lot of willpower for Marlee to make an appointment at the campus medical centre. The nice bulk-billing doctor tapped details into the computer and lined up his questions. How long had she been feeling this way and who had she told about the lack of sleep and did she know there was no shame in asking for help and did she realise she was brave, actually? Marlee tried not to cry but the pain of trying was hot and cold in her forehead. She could taste only one question: Why is it easy for everyone else?
Despite all her efforts, Marlee could not get herself to metamorphose.
*
Damien texted that he was parked outside the dorm. Marlee said goodbye to Joe in the lounge room, who woke up in the late afternoon light in front of the TV – a hostile glow on his white dinner plate. More scraps of food. Joe, irritated, turned underneath his brown blanket and got twisted there. He stayed snug while Marlee made three more trips till Damien’s car was full. They drove home with the radio on. News of early summer bushfires scalding somewhere west.
When she and Damien got home, her mother fixed her with a kind look, like, My beautiful darling girl, twelve months is nothing, not in the grand scheme of things.
‘There’s lasagne,’ was what she said.
Up in her bedroom, Marlee found that the screeching had stopped. She lay flat on her bed and closed her eyes.
*
Marlee’s boss at the Milford bakery was a beautiful Italian woman who sent her home with leftover jam biscuits for Damien and gave her a pedicure voucher for her birthday. She let her keep her phone on in the back room, past the ovens and the dough mixers, and Marlee checked it before she started her shift. A message from her mother to bring home bread. She washed her hands and knotted her apron behind her back.
Marlee lifted a tray of sausage rolls onto a shelf. When she straightened up, she saw a face and for a second she linked it with someone from her time at university. The woman – was she a lecturer, a librarian, the sweet nurse at the clinic? The woman up-ended a bottle of orange juice, then set it upright on the counter, ready to purchase.
‘Oh,’ Marlee said, realising who it was.
‘Yes?’ the woman said.
‘Nothing.’
‘Now, wait, I know you!’
Reluctantly, she explained. ‘Marlee. We met last year. I came to your house.’
‘Of course, yes, the barbecue. How lovely.’
Coins in Geraldine’s fingers. Clink on glass countertop. Marlee’s boss chiming in from the back room, I found the other carton, da
rling.
‘We’d have you round again,’ Geraldine said, ‘but Emmett and I are just now selling the place.’
The seaside timber house with the lawn all around. Sweat on the back of her chair at the barbecue and yellow lights strung across the verandah. Marlee would have loved another night like that.
‘Oh. Where are you off to?’
‘Nothing like that.’ Geraldine unscrewed the bottle and took a sip that was dainty. Still, a thin stream of juice dribbled down her chin. She wiped it with her finger. ‘Emmett,’ she said, ‘has been unwell.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
Geraldine smiled. ‘There was a lot more in life he wanted to do. But we mustn’t be ridiculous. We don’t get a say in all that, do we?’
A needle of panic as Marlee waited for Geraldine to ask about the audition, about university. Geraldine was precisely the type of person Marlee was afraid of. Everything she’d tried to hold on to had been taken away, and she felt that if Geraldine asked her she’d crumble right there. Cassie and Lou and Alexis – not Elleni, she hadn’t heard from her once all year – had wanted to know. But only in the early days of her year at university, and even then only in an Anyway how are youuuuuu? kind of way.
