by Adam Foulds
In the back of the taxi, Nikki played with her fingers on Henry’s thigh. She leaned across him as if to look at something through his window and dropped her hand onto his fly.
Henry thought that people denigrated casual sex unfairly, applying a morality that wasn’t generous or sympathetic. He found it moving, the quick transition between strangers to nakedness and fierce close contact. It expressed a plain human need, without words, without personalities even, just iterations of the human types finding relief from their solitude in pleasure. Henry liked Nikki. She did not seem to be responding to his fame the way some women did. She did not feed on him, on the idea of him. You could look at some women and see in their smile and half-closed eyes that they were involved with some unreality happening in their heads, some wrong fulfillment, some point scored in life. She was very focused on their bodies, to the extent that she seemed almost indifferent to him, working on some pure escalation inside herself. To reach the top in the end she had to rear away from him, looking blindly up at the ceiling. Afterwards, she walked to the bathroom on the flats of her feet with no tension or self-consciousness in her body. She sang under her breath. Maybe she was too disconnected. Maybe she was in some kind of psychological state and Henry was part of an episode. Or perhaps she was in a relationship and didn’t want to linger or talk. She came back in driftingly, scratching something away at the corner of her mouth. A boat sounded its horn outside and she turned and smiled at Henry. That was one of the nice things about living in this part of town, the noises that boats sometimes made at night, that daub of lonely sound phoning across the darkness, or the faint thud of music and wispy cheering from a party boat. Still gently drunk, lying in the warmth of the sheets, Henry enjoyed it, the wide spaces of water and night it evoked that felt in that moment like a private kingdom, an extension of him.
“It’s like Oslo,” she said.
“Is it? I always think it’s a bit like Hong Kong here.”
She walked over to the window, bent apart the slats of the blind. “Sparkly black,” she said.
“What?”
She didn’t reply. She wandered slowly back from the window, reading the spines of books and DVDs on his shelves before picking up her clothes from the floor.
“It’s nice here,” she said. “You must have a nice life.”
“I must,” Henry answered. “I must.”
Nikki didn’t respond. She had taken her phone from her jeans pocket and sat on the end of the bed, still naked, reading messages in its glaring screen. She did this for a while. Henry could see the concentration in the back of her neck, the exposed ridges of her spine. Maybe a message from her boyfriend. Who could say? She dropped the phone on the bed, pulled on her underwear and socks, clipped herself back into her bra, pulled on her jeans and soon was again a public person, fully dressed in the middle of the night. She said, “I was sorry when you and that actress Hayley Whatsername broke up. You seemed like a nice couple.”
“Okay.”
She came over to Henry and, bending down, kissed him on the forehead as though he were her sleeping child. Definitely something going on with that girl. When she was gone, Henry was left alone with his images of the night, with his thoughts of the future without her distracting him. He could think of her wandering naked in his room before she’d said that crap about Hayley that was none of her business. Forget that stuff. He was moving towards something bigger and brighter. Another boat sounded as it navigated the river. The thing with cinema that made it different from theatre and TV and made him want it so much was that film was the world. It merged with the world. It was about real light and places, space and atmospheres, and about being a person, not acting them. You couldn’t get how Nikki had been in the room on stage, not really. You couldn’t be that quiet and alone surrounded by an audience. What Henry wanted was to be someone on screen, not performing someone in the theatre with its vocal projection and the strain of transformation. He could see all that in the coarseness of Rob’s behaviour and fatigue. In the theatre you launched your interpretation of a character out at the audience. Actors gave their Hamlet, one after another, gave their Willy Loman and their Blanche Dubois. In the cinema you just were that person in that place. No one “gave” their Travis Bickle. There was only De Niro with his twitchy gestures and shaved head and weird grin. And everyone imitated those, doing their impression of this undeniable, immortal thing. The more a screen actor carried his essence from one part to the next the better it was. The film actor is cast (Miguel García had cast Henry) to be, not to play. You make the smallest gestures. You stand still. You mumble and throw away lines. In The Grange, Henry had felt theatrical, hitting his marks and propelling the plot. Sunday night television was what repertory theatre used to be. They wore expensive costumes, were clear in their emotions and impersonated the past. Now he would have his chance to make a real movie, to be the star that you stare at, fixed above you, barely acting at all. And what comes out of that radiance, a thousand splintering rays of magazine covers and interviews and product campaigns and fans quoting dialogue and internet parodies and academic analysis and midnight screenings, all that would be beyond his control. He would be at the centre of it only, a permeating light.
*
His mother picked up on the sixth ring so Henry was already relaxed with the prospect of leaving a message on the machine when her live voice startled him.
“Hey, Mum. It’s me.”
“Hen, how are you?” She called to his father. “It’s Henry.” In recent years a phone call in that house had become an event that needed immediate explanation.
“I’m pretty good. I got the part.”
“What part?”
“The part. The lead in the next Miguel García film. It’s called The Beauty Part.”
“Is he the Mexican director who designs things?”
“Designs things?”
“Does drawing?”
“No. He’s Spanish. He made The Violet Hour and Sueños Locos.”
“Well, you’re obviously very pleased. Good for you. What luck.”
There it was. It hadn’t taken long. Luck was the word she always used, as though talent, effort or deserving had nothing to do with it. Henry was always just lucky in precisely the same helpless way that she was unlucky, having her children when she did and ending a singing career that had barely begun. There was no arguing with her. Instead, he simply reused the word with emphasis in the hope that she might hear it.
“Yes, amazing luck.”
There was silence for a moment while she thought of something else to say, a silence Henry refused to fill.
“When does it start filming?”
“Not for a while. Dates aren’t actually set yet. Which is good. I’ve actually got to lose quite a lot of weight.”
“Oh, no. Do you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“How much?”
“A lot.”
“But why?”
“For the part, obviously. García sent this amazing email about his vision for the film which is really all about my character, Mike. He’s back from Iraq and, you know, traumatized, and he ends up taking care of this single mother and her daughter and he decides to take out this dangerous loan shark she owes money to. It’s very processy, very quiet, lots of preparation, like The Day of the Jackal kind of thing half the time. Anyway, García’s idea—I don’t know why I’m telling you all this—is that he’s a cracked version of the American hero ideal, which is obviously much closer to reality than the ideal. The thinness is about intensity and separation. It’s a psychological image. García says he wants to X-ray part of the American brain.”
“If it’s about America shouldn’t he be very fat?”
“That’s a good point, Mum. I’ll definitely pass that on. Fat, thin, two sides of the same thing. And fat would be easier to achieve, probably.”
“I’ll get
your dad. You can tell him about it. He will ask you about The Runaways, just so you know.”
“No doubt he will. Put him on.”
Henry heard the knock of the phone being set down on the table and his mother saying, “He’s got that part,” and then, exploiting her opportunity to be exasperated despite not knowing herself five minutes ago, “You know what part. With the famous Spanish director.”
He heard the phone being picked up again. “How’s my famous son?”
“I’m great. I’ve got the lead in the next Miguel García film.”
“Sounds tremendous.”
“It is. It’s huge. All the big festivals. It’s the big next move.”
“Well, don’t fuck it up.”
“That is the plan. Not to.”
“So you’re going to be pretty busy, I expect.”
“I am. I will when it gets going.”
“I know you said your agent wasn’t the right person to show The Runaways.”
“Dad, I don’t know who is. She certainly isn’t. She’s an actors’ agent. She doesn’t handle scripts, let alone musical theatre scripts.”
“Yes, but there must be other people in that agency. I went online and had a look and there’s this person Simon Field or Simon Feld, something like that. He has playwrights that he looks after.”
“You should send it to him, then. You never know. You might be lucky. Oh, Dad, my agent is actually calling me at this very moment. My phone’s flashing. I better go.”
*
The strange thing was that Henry could not feel his own fame, could not see himself out in the world, while he could see other people’s very clearly, the interviews, the awards, the adverts, the images. He could see them all the time. The success of other people was solid and undeniable and always increasing. But his gaze burned through his own photographs and press appearances, annihilating them. They counted less, precisely because they were him. Even people stopping him in the street, asking to take selfies with him, could not convince him. It was transitory, silly, and left no trace inside him.
Nevertheless, he was famous. Six years of a TV show that millions watched and that had gone around the world meant that people knew who he was, even if only indistinctly. His voice was already inside their minds. They had imbibed him. He was installed as something familiar and safe. This gave him traction on their attention, potentially on the big decisions they made in their lives. This made him money for very little effort. He sat in a booth with headphones on and said to them, “Does your bank treat you like a real person?”
*
In the gym, Henry gripped the handles of the cross-trainer and pulled and pushed and shuttled the footplates back and forth. He worked through the first prickling sensation of fullness under the skin and broke a sweat, moving then loosely, rhythmically. He listened to his own music through his earphones and glanced up from the changing numbers on the machine to the music videos playing overhead, R&B tracks, the female shapes of the dancers, the exaggerated globes and narrow triangles emphasized in slow bends and swooping close-ups. Impossible not to look, designed to light up his hindbrain. Losing weight was simple, a question of basic maths. Less energy in, more energy out. The flesh will burn to keep you alive. He used the cross-trainer for an hour and stepped off, his legs trembling on the disquieting stability of the static ground. He went to use the weights.
To be Mike he needed muscles that were worked, knotted, a kind of weathered-in strength made in the world of combat and afterwards, anxious in his apartment, getting smaller and fiercer. García had sent him many images of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and many had the swollen bulk of prison yard bodybuilders, top-heavy chunks of American force. García was clear that he shouldn’t look like that, inflated with defensive swagger. He should be broken down and resistant, realist and dangerous. García had sent him photographs of thorn trees bent by the wind to show him what he meant. García told him to think about the physical world of the combat zone, prefabricated structures, dust and sand, weapons and vehicles, hardness and emptiness and temporary and how you carry that sense of a purely practical and collapsible world with you back into your life.
Henry slipped in his sweat on the leather seat. He got up and towelled it away. He sat down again and sipped water. His fingers were stiff, handling the bottle awkwardly. His arm shook. A woman walked past, groomed for exercise, her hair under a broad black headband. She smiled at Henry. Henry sat back and put his hands on the handles and hoisted the stack of weights up behind him.
García had told him to think about camaraderie among soldiers, the dependency that led to deep love. He sent him photographs of sleeping soldiers. Boyish and vulnerable they rested, helpless in dreams and exhaustion. Henry was supposed to look at them and feel tenderness and to think about all that Mike had lost.
*
Henry opened a tin of tuna and pressed the severed lid down on the fish and poured away the cloudy brine. He levered out the lid with his fork and took the tin over to his balcony to eat. Flakes and spiralled chunks that were smooth in his mouth. Flavour of salt and metal and flesh. Afterwards, he ate a green apple. He cut it into sections and ate it piece by piece, its spurts of sour juice seeming to accelerate his digestion. Hunger made his meals slow and sacramental. It made them strange. He observed the transformation involved in absorbing these external objects into himself, a tin of tuna and an apple becoming his own body, breaking down in chemical darkness, filtering into his cells. The weight was coming off fast. After little more than a week, his trousers hung from the gaunt knobs of his hipbones. The mirror showed his face tired and hollowed, a face of religious suffering. The hunger should be like that, a purification, a preparation for being Mike. That was the best way it could be. He would go out less. He needed to get to a low weight and hover there, waiting for the shooting to begin.
*
Once a day he went to the gym and watched the numbers and the writhing women on the screens. He passed the other hours in his flat. He watched the lights in the other flats come on in the evening, the lights across the water. Sparkly black.
Daily refusals. Drinks. A play’s opening night. A charity gala. The opening of a menswear store. An interview with a Spanish magazine and an American podcast. A panel show on the BBC. Turning them all away made him feel stronger and more certain. And it made them want him more. He could feel it.
The problem with hunger was the tiredness. Eating allowed you to rest for a little while but hunger meant an unquiet, anxious body. In the morning he tried to play the piano and found his fingers inaccurate, slow to arrive at the next key. He stumbled, making a garbled, amateur noise, and gave up. He went and lay down on the sofa.
On the other side of the room, the piano still shone, pristine. In childhood, the baby grand stood on its fading rug (it still did), and loomed over him with a kind of disappointed authority, as though it waited for someone who could, finally, live up to it. Henry’s mother played it sometimes with a wistfulness and sensitivity meant to attract attention. When it did and Henry or his brother or father said something, she reacted as if some fragile privacy had been violated. She would break off and go to some other part of the house, her point about her talent and her wasted life eloquently made. At the church hall recitals she sometimes gave with Henry’s father on the piano, singing Schubert and Schumann and whatever, she would receive the applause at the end and the compliments over the tea and sherry afterwards as proof against her husband and sons, victory in an argument that Henry and Julian had never, in fact, joined. Henry’s father played the baby grand with a kind of boisterous self-regard, making the great composers live again. At that same piano, he wrote his own music, the elaborate sonatas and the ponderous Victorian-style songs for The Runaways, his musical about the elopement of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning that he was convinced Henry could get on to the West End stage for him. Henry should never have given hi
m any advice at all. The title had been changed from September 12th, the day of the elopement, after Henry had pointed out that everyone would assume it would be about the day after September 11. With either title, this was not what London’s theatres were crying out for, something where the male lead had huge lamb-chop whiskers and sat down every five minutes to write a poem about love or Rome or the Pope, which he then stood up and sang. The whole thing reminded Henry somehow of a Christmas cake, the unpleasant richness of dried fruit and glacé cherries and alcohol and icing, traditional, festive, indigestible.
Henry picked up the TV remote and held it on his chest but didn’t switch the TV on yet. Over that preposterous piece of crap he and his father had had that argument. It was a betrayal, though. That was what his parents neither understood nor wanted to understand. They were not allowed to use him to get something. That’s what everybody else did who had been corrupted by his fame, inspired to make use of it. Just be parents. Go back to ignoring and disparaging him but don’t do that and ask exorbitant favours at the same time.
Henry’s older brother, Julian, never played the piano. Henry didn’t know how he’d done it, but from the earliest age Julian had declared independence, exempting himself from all the music and mawkish, entangling emotion. He’d gone out to play football. Later he’d gone out to drink with his friends by the war memorial. Later still, he’d got a banking job in Hong Kong and stayed there, starting his own family with Mei and their children and all her relatives.
Childhood piano practice for Henry had felt like today’s poor playing. His hands were too small. He was inadequate. And when progress was made, achievement was deferred, the difficulty of the next piece always dancing beyond his fingertips.
