The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘How much do we get paid?’ Murray says it with a laugh but there’s an answering murmur from the rest of the group.

  ‘Nothing,’ Roz says. ‘I’m hoping that you’ll volunteer. I’m not paying myself or my actors either. Like most things on the Fringe, I’ve no budget and I’ll be working on goodwill and hope. The money the show makes will cover the flyers, the advertising, the insurance and travel expenses for my actors who live out of town. Rehearsals need food and water; so do performances. It all adds up. I’ve been drinking in this pub since I was seventeen, and I’ve talked them into letting me have the space. I’m sharing receipts with them because they’ll need to man the bar up here on show nights. If this goes well for them, next year they’ve got a venue with a track record. We’re doing modern dress and next to no props, and we’ll work with the lighting in the room. I’ll rope in a designer for the set for free, but even a minimal set costs money. Edie and Eliza have introduced me to a milonga trio who love to play more than they love to be paid. It’s the magic of theatre, I’m afraid. For actors, this show is a chance to get seen. For me, it’s an opportunity to explore ideas. For you – it’s a chance to do something a bit different, to take to the stage, if you’ve ever fancied it, to be part of something that might, if the stars align, be talked about all over the place in August, and for all the right reasons.’ A pause. ‘No one will be out of pocket, so if you have travel costs, I’ll cover them. We’ll have a party on the last night, and if there are any profits, they will just about cover the cost of that. If not, it’s on me.’

  Roz looks around the room, waiting for more questions, and when none come, she continues, ‘I’ll plant some of you in the audience each night to join the cast for the party. They’ll come into the audience to ask you to dance, so the rest of the audience will feel as though they are really there, seeing Romeo and Juliet fall in love, not just watching a play. And there’s another thing, too . . .’ She raises her left hand, and Edie and Eliza, who moved away when Roz started talking, and have sat themselves at opposite edges of the room, are suddenly on their feet, yelling at each other.

  ‘WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?’ Edie slams her fist on the table.

  Eliza points at her sister, her finger a weapon fired from the shoulder. ‘NOTHING! WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?’

  Ailsa jumps – thump-a-thump – and Venetia shouts, ‘Fuck!’. There’s a titter of nervous laughter, silence.

  Roz waits, smiling, until everyone has looked back to her. ‘And I want you to add some – colour. There’s quite a lot of fighting in Romeo and Juliet. And there’s a lot of egging-on from the ones who aren’t fighting. People who can stand up and yell when I need them to. Who will make the audience feel as though they’re in the thick of a feud. We want to scare them, panic them, make them root for Romeo and Juliet. We’re going to make the people who come to this show feel this story, as though it’s their own life.’

  Feeling not seeing. Oh yes. Ailsa’s in.

  She’s been wishing for an ordinary life, and somehow, this extraordinary thing feels as though it will help. Because surely even the most everyday of people, the ones Ailsa has envied, all of her life, for their average health and their undramatic existences, must have spikes of excitement, moments where they step out of the everyday and do something that makes their story? The thought of dancing here, not as a learner but as a performer, makes her quake and thrill. And if it is the show that Seb’s going to be in – she doesn’t have time to decide what that means before Eliza chips in.

  ‘We’re not going to do formal choreography. We’re going to dance the way that we dance at milonga: leaders will lead and followers will follow. It’s not about being a great dancer, it’s about being confident in what you can do. If you lead in the dance, you need to be a clear leader, and if you follow, you must be able to understand what your partner is asking. And if you get into a – muddle, you need to be able to tango yourself out of it. That’s all. Everyone who is here tonight would be able to participate, assuming that they keep coming to class between now and August.’

  Murray laughs. ‘You mean I’ll know my left from my right by then?’

  ‘You’ll be amazed,’ Edie says. ‘Just think about how much more you know than you did when you walked through the door two weeks ago.’

  Roz adds, ‘Edie and Eliza are going to do some work with my actors too, so we’ll all be clear on how we’re dancing.’

  ‘Any questions?’ Edie asks, and there’s a slow shaking of heads, as the learner-dancers and maybe-performers look to each other. Ailsa realises that, although she’s felt like an outsider, she really is part of this club. Apple warms up a notch.

  ‘OK,’ Roz says, ‘well, the Tango Sisters here are going to send an email, once the show has been announced, explaining the details.’ She smiles, stands, shakes out one leg and then the other, as though she is about to dance herself. ‘I’m away downstairs for a drink. If you think of anything else you want to know, feel free to come and ask.’ She’s walking towards the steps when she turns, as though she’s forgotten the tiniest of details, and says, ‘Please don’t share this until after it’s announced in the press tomorrow. But my Juliet is Meredith Katz and Romeo will be played by Sebastian Morley.’

  *

  Roz is as good as her word, at the bar in easy eyeline of the dancers as they come down the stairs after a slightly shorter, slightly more excitable than usual, milonga. Ailsa is first to leave. She is about to walk past when Roz waves her over.

  ‘You’re Ailsa, right? Do you want a drink?’

  ‘No, thank you, I have to get away fairly soon.’ The 10 p.m.-at-the-latest medication slot had seemed like a good idea when she’d never been able to stay awake much beyond then. She might need to start to edge it earlier, or later, or just get organised and bring snacks and meds with her. Too much information for this conversation, though. ‘I have to – do something.’

  ‘Seb told me about you,’ Roz says. There’s a high stool, empty, next to hers, and she pushes it out with her foot. Ailsa drops her satchel and shoe bag onto the floor and gets onto it, a half hop with the wrong leg, the least dignified move possible. She wonders what it was that Seb said to Roz that made her recognisable. Her glasses, maybe. Her only really unusual feature is on the inside.

  ‘Really?’ Ailsa says. She’s not sure that she ever had a view on what actors talk about, but she really didn’t think it would be her.

  ‘He was quite taken with your unicorn get-up, I think,’ Roz says. ‘Did he tell you about this? The show?’

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ Ailsa says. ‘Well, he said he was here to talk about a show, last time I saw him, that was all. We don’t know each other that well.’

  Although, if she’s honest, she would have liked him to have taken her into his confidence.

  She hasn’t felt like this – as though her relationship with someone is an equation where the variables keep changing – for a long, long time. She thought it was a teenage thing. Maybe Apple is a teenage heart. The thought of that – of a seventeen-year-old dying, of her mother letting all of the good, working parts of her go onto other, older bodies – makes the world wobble. She holds onto the bar.

  Roz nods. ‘I’ve known Seb a long time.’

  ‘We’re not in touch all the time. Just the odd email.’

  ‘It’s nice that you’re part of this group, though.’ Roz smiles. ‘Synchronicitous.’

  ‘I suppose.’ There was a moment, after Roz’s announcement, when Ailsa had wondered whether Seb had told Roz about her going to tango, and Roz had been inspired, seen the direction for her production . . . But that would have been the sort of thing that would happen in a film, not in real life. Ah, the everyday. It’s not all it whispered it was going to be, when she was in hospital.

  ‘What do you think people thought? The other dancers?’

  ‘I think people like the thought of dancing with Seb. Especially after StarDance.’

  ‘Of course they do! Our wounde
d hero. I’m going to have Juliet on the sidelines for most of the party scene, probably, but Romeo as a bit of a tart. There’s a – distractible – side to him, I think.’ She looks at Ailsa; she seems to be expecting something.

  ‘I don’t know it that well,’ Ailsa says, her shoulders shrugging in apology, ‘only from school. I saw it a couple of years ago with a friend. But I remember thinking that he changed his mind awful quick, about Rosaline, and if I were Juliet, I’d have maybe given it a week to just see how it went.’ She wonders, as she says it, whether she would have done. Or whether the declaration of love would have swept her away as easily. The thought of being loved brings back Lennox. Even in those last days, the smell of his aftershave, clean and flinty, always there, if you searched your inhaled breath for it, separated it from the smells of hospital and illness and sadness. She might not have consented to a wedding in less than twenty-four hours from a first meeting, like Juliet, but she would have been ready to fall for Romeo. She realises, with a shock, that she is ready to fall, again. Might be falling.

  Roz laughs. ‘Quite! Give it a week, Juliet!’ Then, just as Ailsa is about to say goodbye, ‘Seb said you didn’t know who he was. He’s not used to that. It made me laugh.’

  And oh, look, here he is, bright in her memory, sliding up his sunglasses, squinting, opening his eyes wide to show her the place where the stitches are.

  ‘Between Meredith and Seb, we’ll sell out in a heartbeat.’

  A heartbeat. Or the blink of an eye.

  *

  Ailsa checks her phone as she waits for a bus to take her home. She should be back just in time for her meds; if she’s a bit late, it won’t kill her. (She tries not to think about how, if her heart does reject – or is rejected, she’s never sure which way around it goes – it will kill her. It’s like not thinking about being cold, if you’re cold.)

  She has missed three calls, all from the same number, which she doesn’t recognise. There’s still a moment of panic – what if the calls were a heart, how could she forget to check – and then she laughs at herself, before she dials her voicemail. It’s probably Christa’s boss, calling to arrange for her to come in for her trial shift.

  Ailsa stands on the street, catching pale pools of moonlight on the toes of her silver plimsolls, which are starting to look the worse for wear now they are doing more miles than they’re used to. Funny how the more beaten-up her satchel gets, the more she likes it, but the shoes are going to have to go.

  There are two messages from Libby. She actually speaks the word ‘re’: ‘Hello, Ailsa, this is Libby Douglas, at eight-pee-em on Wednesday. Hoping you can give me a call re Lennox’s fundraiser.’ Then, thirty minutes later: ‘Hello again, Ailsa, Libby Douglas. I’m going to be away from tomorrow noon for two days, so if you could contact me before then, I’d be grateful.’ She doesn’t sound as though she’d be grateful. She sounds as though she’d be matter-of-fact. Ailsa reminds herself that it’s not personal.

  Tempted as she is to leave the call until 11.55 ay-em tomorrow, Ailsa calls as she waits for the bus. The phone rings twice and then is answered with a crisp, ‘Libby Douglas.’

  ‘Libby, hello, it’s Ailsa here. Ailsa Rae. I’m returning your call. I was just – dancing.’ As Ailsa says it she smiles at the sound of it: normal, adult behaviour, to be dancing on a Wednesday evening.

  ‘Ailsa. It’s about our first fundraiser, for Lennox’s trust.’

  ‘Yes?’ Ailsa thinks about everything that she imagined she’d do, before her new Apple-heart arrived, when there was only sleep and weakness and thinking and trying not to think. She is doing nothing. Tango doesn’t count. The latest blog poll has been interesting on this: she didn’t know how much she needed an answer until she’d asked the question.

  ‘We’re thinking of getting a calendar together, as our first project. People who’ve had transplants, looking happy and healthy, you know the sort of thing. I want people to stop thinking of organ donation in the abstract and for them to see the human side of it. It’s much more effective.’

  Ailsa has a terrible thought. ‘Not naked?’

  ‘Did you say naked?’ Libby, unexpectedly, laughs, and when she does she sounds like Lennox. The echo of him takes Ailsa right in the gut, a punch of hurt. Sometimes he’s gone from her; sometimes he’s seventeen, grinning and holding out a hand, saying, ‘C’mon, we’ll stop if you get tired.’ She looks up to the gloom of the city sky, thinks of Lennox laughing as a good thing, a part of the world that surrounds her, part of what has propelled her here, even if he will only ever now be in her past. She puts her fingertip to the hollow behind her ear, so that she can feel her blood beat. Breathes deep. She can find good in the thought of him.

  ‘Yes, I did. It’s quite a popular thing, isn’t it? And when you said “healthy” and “human” . . .’

  ‘Heavens, no. We want something that people will have on their kitchen wall, all year. Nobody wants to look at someone with a scar.’ There are many ways to wrestle that sentence to the ground and beat it to a pulp, but by the time Ailsa has opened her mouth to begin, Libby has moved on. ‘I’m lining up a photographer. It all needs to be done professionally, of course. Will you do it? Be photographed?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Ailsa suspects that as far as Libby is concerned, she’s sitting on her ungrateful backside while the transplant unit continues to do all it can for people like her, like Lennox.

  ‘Good. I’ll email you the date next week, and if you can confirm that you’ve got my email and you’ve saved the date, that would be helpful.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘There’s one more thing, Ailsa.’

  ‘Yes?’ She waits to be asked to set up a sales link on her blog, or to write about the calendar, but she’s wrong.

  ‘I thought it would be good if we could get your radio friend to do it. The one with the eye.’

  ‘You mean Sebastian Morley?’

  ‘Yes, I mean Sebastian Morley. Will you ask him?’

  ‘He’s not my friend.’ Ailsa realises that she’s not being fair: he was lovely after the interview, came to see her, he agreed to be interviewed, and if those aren’t things a friend would do then – She tries again: ‘I hardly know him.’

  The faintest of sighs down the line. ‘Then you’ve nothing to lose, have you?’

  Guardian Online News

  19 April, 2018

  Morley is Romeo at Last in Edinburgh Fringe Debut

  Sebastian Morley, the actor who was forced to pull out of StarDance last year with a serious eye infection, has announced that he is to take the role of Romeo in an Edinburgh Festival Fringe production of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Following a corneal transplant in January this year, he has stayed out of the spotlight, but says he is ready to return to acting – although treading the boards will be a new experience for him, as he’s worked exclusively on TV since shooting to fame in 2007.

  The small-venue, modern-dress production will ‘take its cues from the tango, which is a dance that connects partners both at body and at heart, and asks them to be absorbed in each other to the absence of everything else,’ said respected director Roz Derbyshire when announcing the show. She won a Critic’s Choice Award for her direction of the 2016 surprise hit The Pickwick Papers, which was staged in the British Library.

  ‘When we first discussed the show, I could see Seb’s hunger to take part, and when I heard him give Romeo’s speech about his love for Rosaline, I felt the goose pimples rising on my arms. This will be a sparky, sexy production and I’m happy to have Seb as one of two great actors at the heart of it.’

  ‘Being the runner-up in Wherefore Art Thou? launched my career,’ says Seb, ‘but, if I’m honest, it also made me feel as though I wasn’t good enough to do Shakespeare. I haven’t acted on a stage in ten years and I haven’t had to learn this many lines in one go in my life. So it’s a big challenge for me. This is one of the most famous parts in theatre. I’m ready to do it. It will be hard work but,
at the end of the day, I became an actor because I love acting. This is a pure sort of acting and I can’t wait to get stuck in.’

  Meredith Katz will play Juliet. The American actress is best known for playing Dottie the au-pair in Parents Two, Kids Three. This is her first UK stage role, though she won a Tony Best Featured Actress award for her portrayal of Honey in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? in an acclaimed Broadway production in 2013.

  Derbyshire and Morley met when Roz was one of the mentors on Wherefore Art Thou?, working with the wannabes on their acting tasks each week. She was visibly disappointed when Morley lost out to Xander Maxted-Morton.

  The production will take place above the Dragon’s Nest pub, in Newington, as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Tickets will go on sale on 1 May, and are expected to sell out for the run. Members of local dance school Two to Tango will support the production.

  From: Ailsa

  Sent: 19 April, 2018

  To: Seb

  Subject: Romeo and Coffee

  Dear Seb,

  The news is out! And Roz came to talk to the tango group.

  I have news too: I’ve got a trial shift at a coffee shop tomorrow. Well, not really a shift – 2 till 4. Followed by a chat with my mum and my Auntie Tamsin (who’s my mum’s best friend) about the move. I feel as though my life is moving forward at last.

  I hope all’s well with you. How’s the eye?

  Ailsa

  From: Seb

  To: Ailsa

  Dear Ailsa,

  That’s really good about the coffee shop. And I hope the chat goes well.

  Roz was really pleased with how it went. Had you guessed?

  I’ll be in Edinburgh a lot more, in July and August anyway. (Roz spells it ‘Embra’. Is that a thing?) It would be nice to spend some time with you. If you’re not working all the hours after your coffee-making trial. (You’ll ace it.) And we can dance.