The People at Number 9

by Felicity Everett

  “Oh God,” Lou squirmed and her breath boomed intimately on the mic. “I hate this.”

  “Well, of course, if you’d rather not say.”

  “No, no, it’s fine,” Lou said, “I’m just…” she clutched her hands to her breast and seemed for a moment too moved to speak “… there’s so much of me in Cuckoo.” There was a pause, which threatened to become awkward. Then Lou rallied, looked up, with forced brightness, and winced into the spotlight. “And yet when I was writing the script; putting her in that scenario, tormenting her in all those ways – I was almost laughing to myself, because it was just so… right, if you will. Because a cuckoo essentially doesn’t belong, you know? It’s an interloper, a threat to the natural order of things and it’s only fair that it be expelled, banished, whatever. I mean, Cuckoo, she’s a very vulnerable, very damaged little thing, but you know, by the end, she’s also well, come on, she’s a pain in the arse,” she appealed to the audience and elicited a burst of warm laughter. “Right?”

  “I was going to ask you about that actually,” said the interviewer, “there’s a lot of humour in the film.”

  “Yeah,” Lou nodded, smiled and took a sip of water. “I’m glad you got that.”

  Sara glanced at Neil. Had he got it? She certainly hadn’t. Nor had she noticed anyone else rolling in the aisles; then again it obviously wasn’t that sort of humour.

  “I just think, you know,” Lou shrugged, “you can’t beat people about the head with this kind of thing: with anger, with pain, with humiliation, without acknowledging that actually, we may be doing the dance of death, but sometimes that can be pretty hilarious. I mean – it’s preposterous isn’t it, really? That we’re born and we live these short, often sordid, apparently meaningless lives, and then we die.”

  “Ah,” the interviewer pounced on this, “would I be right in thinking then, that that is the symbolism of the maggots – the sordidness? The life span?”

  “I don’t really want to talk about the maggots,” Lou said abruptly.

  “Oh, right.”

  “I’m sorry but, you know, I just don’t think it’s for me, the film maker, to confer meaning on the film; to explain it all. That’s for you guys to do. You bring to it what…you bring.”

  “No, quite,” said the interviewer, “I see that, of course. It would be like asking Buñuel to explain the eyeball scene in Un Chien Andalou.”

  “Well, I’d hesitate to compare myself to Buñuel,” Lou said, then added with a radiant smile, “but if you insist...”

  She was a class act, Sara thought, moving apparently effortlessly between self-deprecating humour and a self-belief that bordered on arrogance. Listening to her, Sara was converted. Cuckoo had not been incoherent, it had been uncompromising; the acting had not been amateurish, it had been raw; the seasick camerawork had been no accident, but a deliberate ploy to reflect the queasy moral world of the characters. But the further Lou’s artistic stock rose in Sara’s imagination, the further her own seemed to plummet by comparison, until she could hardly bear to think that she had actually entrusted Lou with the final draft of her manuscript to show to Ezra Bell. A manuscript, to make matters worse, that had incest as one of its central themes. People were sure to think she’d copied that from Lou. She shuddered at the thought. Compared to the assured, allusive, mood piece she had just seen, her own storytelling seemed schematic, and over-ripe. Lou’s film was a work of art; Sara’s novel merely a potboiler.

  The discussion went on for some time and then it was thrown open to the floor. Sara no longer had the heart to ask the question she’d intended to put. These people were cleverer than her, they knew Lou better than her. They knew film. Everything on which her intimate friendship with Lou was predicated seemed flimsy and insubstantial now, for a whole aspect of Lou’s character had been concealed from her. She might know that Lou’s favourite book was One Hundred Years of Solitude; that the track that was guaranteed to get her on the dance floor was “Deserts Miss the Rain”, she might even know that Lou liked it rough in bed, but did she have a clue where she stood on the unconscious of cinematic discourse? No. These people knew Lou’s body of work. The affection in which they held her was palpable and, judging by the way she bandied around first names and teased them with in-jokes, it was reciprocated. They questioned her about her decision to use analogue sound; the limitations of the hand-held camera, the redundancy of auteur theory, post-Dogme, and left Sara staring into the abyss of her own ignorance, vertiginous with self-disgust. Really, in film terms, compared to most of the people in this room, she and Neil were Neanderthals. It was with some alarm then, that she realised Neil now had his hand in the air. She gave him a friendly “What the fuck?” kind of look, but he just smiled smugly back and left his hand where it was. The interviewer had said, two questions ago, that they were nearly out of time and people were getting restive, so why was the wretched woman still scanning the audience? Neil sat up a little taller, stretched his hand a little higher, just as he must have done in primary school.

  “Yes, there,” she said, “the man in the open-necked shirt.”

  15

  There was nothing so wrong with the after party, and yet Sara realised an hour in, that she was miserable. Lou had given her a fragrant kiss on arrival, and seemed gratified to be told that Sara had found Cuckoo really incredibly moving. Then a man with a goatee had come along, whose good opinion seemed to matter to Lou a little more than Sara’s, so she had drifted away feeling like a spare part.

  While Neil fought his way to the bar, Sara stood by the toilets observing the scene. The décor was a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of the traditional gentlemen’s club, its rickety floorboards, button-backed armchairs and reading lamps undercut by artworks of lacerating modernity and a soundtrack of ambient music that would have caused apoplexy at the Drones club. There were a lot of people there. They couldn’t all have been at the film, but since everyone was dressed in the same stridently non-conformist way, it was impossible to tell whether they were guests of Lou and Gavin or just regular club members. This made the prospect of mingling even more daunting and Sara determined only to approach people she had definitely seen before. She spotted a guest from Lou and Gavin’s housewarming making a beeline for her, and readied herself with a smile, only for it to die on her lips when the woman barged straight past her into the Ladies. Neil bought her a drink and then left her in order to take Lou a congratulatory glass of Champagne. Her shoes were chafing and she was tired of standing in the gusts of jet-propelled air wafting out of the toilet, so she threaded her way through the crowd to a back room, where she subsided gracefully onto a leather Chesterfield next to an old woman wearing owlish glasses and magenta lipstick. The room was hot. Sara could feel sweat collecting on her top lip. She slipped off one shoe and rubbed her heel surreptitiously.

  “Did you enjoy the prem-ee-er?” the woman said, in a gravelly American accent.

  “You mean Cuckoo?” she said in surprise. “Oh, I did. I absolutely loved it.”

  The woman pursed her magenta lips, nodded sagely and closed her eyes. Sara waited for her to open them again and vouchsafe some finely honed critical response, but realised after a moment that her companion had nodded off. She sat, marooned, torn between her need for another drink and the dread prospect of making her way to the bar. She had all but resigned herself to sobriety, when she glimpsed, through the forest of legs, a familiar pair of battered suede brogues.

  “Hello, stranger,” she said, tapping Gav on the shoulder. He turned, a little reluctantly, from a pretty redhead he’d been talking to.

  “Oh, hi Sara,” he said. “Rohmy, this is Sara.”

  The redhead slowly relinquished her grip on Gavin’s lapels, which she had been clutching in a humorous attempt to convince him of her point of view, and acknowledged Sara with a grudging smile.

  “Hey, maybe Sara knows…”

  If Gavin felt any frustration at Sara’s interruption, he didn’t show it. “Settle a little argument for us,
will you?”

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  “Johnny Thunders, right?”

  Here was Sara’s opportunity to admit that she had not, in fact, heard of Johnny Thunders and was therefore in no position to arbitrate.

  “Sure, what about him?”

  “How did he die?” Gav asked. “Rohmy reckons—”

  “No, don’t tell her!” Rohmy interrupted. She turned to Sara, expectantly. Sara opened her mouth, and then closed it again.

  “God, I know this,” she said. “Doesn’t it drive you mad when you know you know something, but you can’t…?” She screwed up her face in an attitude of all-encompassing concentration. “Car crash, wasn’t it? No, plane crash. One of the two. Actually, sorry… Johnny…?”

  “Thunders,” supplied Rohmy, smirking.

  “Ah, no, in that case…”

  “Who did you think we were talking about?”

  She was really milking this.

  “Yeah, no, I know who you mean. I just…” She shook her head. “Nope, it’s gone.”

  “Oka-a-ay,” Rohmy said, widening her eyes significantly at Gavin.

  “Isn’t she sweet?” Gavin pulled Sara into his embrace. “She thought she knew, but she doesn’t know.”

  Sara grinned sheepishly and submitted to the hug. She never found out whether Rohmy thought she was sweet or not, because another couple, Steve and Alexis, joined the group and settled the argument – guitarist from the New York Dolls; heroin overdose, of course – before moving the debate on to iconic deaths in general and then to a discussion of whether the net contribution of drugs to the rock and roll songbook had been positive or negative – a topic on which Sara judged it prudent to remain silent. It wasn’t long before she found herself on the periphery of the group, listening to a bloke with a lot of facial hair telling her how he had once shared a bong with Tim Buckley. She had never been so grateful to see Neil, who scolded her for disappearing and thrust a glass of fizz into her hand.

  “Great place, isn’t it?” he said. “I could get used to this.”

  “Well don’t. We’ve got to leave in five. I promised Mum we wouldn’t be late.”

  “I was just saying, Gav,” Neil called across, apparently oblivious to Sara’s advice, “I’m loving the whole Jeeves vibe.” He waved his glass to indicate the room at large.

  “Yeah, cool isn’t it,” Gavin agreed.

  “May one ask,” said Neil, in what he must have imagined to be a Wooster-ish tone, “how much membership would set one back?”

  Sara winced.

  “It’s pretty reasonable, actually,” Gav replied. “A couple of grand if I remember rightly. You might have to be patient though – I think the waiting list’s pretty long.”

  “Not a problem, old boy.”

  “God Neil,” Sara hissed, pulling him to one side, “you’re embarrassing yourself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can’t you tell when you’re being fobbed off? You can’t join a place like this. It’s for people in the arts.”

  “I’m sure they’re not that strict.” Neil looked hurt.

  “I think they probably are. I mean, look at these people.”

  “I’m looking.”

  “Well, if you can’t see it.”

  “See what?”

  “The difference.”

  “What difference?”

  “Between them and us.”

  “I don’t see a difference. I’ve met some nice people tonight. You’d be surprised how many of them congratulated me on the question I asked at the Q and A.”

  “Well, that’s great, but a question’s not a body of work, is it?”

  “Well, what about you? You’re a writer.”

  Somehow, Neil’s faith in her as a novelist only made Sara feel more fraudulent.

  “I’m not a writer, Neil, I’m just another unpublished wannabe.”

  “Ah, but Lou’s working on that.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “No, she is,” Neil said, “she’s over there bigging you up right now.”

  “Really? Who to?”

  “Oh, er some nerdy American, name escapes me.” He snapped his fingers, pretending to fish for it. “Eric? Esau?”

  “Not Ezra Bell?” Sara gripped his arm. “Is he here?”

  “Might be.” Neil grinned.

  “Oh my God!” she glanced over at Lou, her heart melting. What a woman. Her doubts all but evaporated and she felt herself grow in stature. She wanted to saunter over to Rohmy and ask if she’d ever heard of Ezra Bell. The Ezra Bell, the one who was shortly to endorse her – Sara’s – first novel. That’d wipe the smug smile off her face. She turned back to Neil.

  “What did he say? Did you tell him about my book?”

  “We talked sport.”

  “Jesus, Neil!”

  “Chill out. You’ll have plenty of time to schmooze him. He’s staying next door.”

  “God, I feel sick. Ezra Bell.”

  Neil glanced at his watch.

  “Anyway, I should just point out, we’ve got seventeen minutes to get to Charing Cross, if you want to get the last train.”

  Sara grabbed Neil’s wrist and stared at his watch as if willpower alone could make its hands move backwards.

  “We’ve only just got here,” she wailed.

  “Your mother; your call,” Neil said.

  She thought of her mother. She thought of the face.

  “Oh God,” she said, “we can’t just leave. We’ll have to explain.” She rushed over to Gavin, interrupting him mid-punchline.

  “Sorry, Gav, we’ve got to go. Just wanted to say thanks for a great night.”

  “Wha-a-at? You can’t! I forbid it.”

  “I know,” Sara gabbled, “it’s a real pain. Only, my mum’s babysitting and she volunteers at Barnardo’s on a Saturday morning, so…”

  ***

  There was a pale glow behind the council flats as the taxi juddered to a stop. One by one, the stars were going out.

  “Bye, amazing night, thanks.”

  “Bye.”

  “Bye Ezra, great to…”

  Their final farewells were drowned out by the vehicle’s thrum as it U-turned and set off back up the street.

  “The driver was a bit narky,” said Sara to Neil, when the clunk of Gav and Lou’s front door had finally severed the stream of merry banter. “Didn’t you tip him?”

  “I barely had enough for the fare,” Neil said. “I got a hundred quid out after work. Don’t know where it all went.”

  “They’ll pay you back.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m not worried.”

  “Great night,” she shook her head fondly, then her eye fell on her mother’s Golf sitting in front of the house, neat and censorious with its Christmas-tree air freshener. “Don’t know how it got so late, though.”

  Neil turned the key in the latch and they stumbled into the hall.

  “Hello?” he said in a stage whisper.

  “She’ll have gone up,” said Sara.

  “The light’s still on,” Neil pointed out, nodding towards the sitting room door which stood ajar.

  “Mum?” Sara poked her head into the room. Her mother was sitting on the edge of the sofa, coat on, handbag at the ready, as if waiting for a bus.

  “What are you doing still up? It’s after three.”

  Sara’s effort to disguise her tipsiness made her voice sound clipped and false. Her mother checked her watch.

  “Quarter to four, actually,” she said. “Patrick had a nightmare, but I sat with him for an hour and he’s been fine since. I haven’t heard a peep out of Caleb.” She stood up. “I’d better get off now. At least the roads will be quiet.”

  “Oh Mum, I’m so sorry. There was a bed made up in the spare room. It never occurred to me you’d—”

  “Yes, well, I did say I’ve got—”

  “Barnardo’s. I know. I know. I wanted to leave ages ago, but we ended up getting a cab with our friends and it all got
a bit later than I’d—”

  “Would these be the same friends you’re setting up a school with?” Her mother arched an eloquent eyebrow. Sara was aware of Neil listing drunkenly beside her.

  “We’re not setting up a school. We’re just teaching our own kids. Lou’s a film director and Gavin’s an artist, so it should be a fantashtically rewarding experience.”

  Sara’s mother weighed this claim in silence.

  “Right. Well. I’d best get off,” she said at last. She brushed her lips past Sara’s cheek and bid Neil a terse goodbye.

  “Fuck!” murmured Sara as the latch clicked quietly behind her.

  Sara and Neil lay in bed like two corpses, as grey light seeped round the edges of the curtains, and the burble and clatter of a waking neighbourhood drew them further and further from sleep.

  “He’s nice, Ezra, don’t you think?” said Sara to the ceiling.

  There was a pause, and she wondered whether Neil had dropped off.

  “He’s all right,” he said finally, “but I thought he was a bit out of line in the cab.”

  “Oh well, we’d all been drinking. I don’t think Lou minded.”

  “Just because he’s a hotshot writer doesn’t give him licence to…”

  “I wonder what he’ll think of my book.”

  “Oh, I should think as you’re young, female and attractive, he’ll probably be predisposed to like it.”

  “Thanks very much,” Sara propped herself up on one elbow. “Now I’m going to feel bad about it even if he does.”

  Another silence fell. A car door slammed in the street. Its engine stuttered and then turned over.

  “Why’s he the arbiter anyway?” Neil said, his tone a little more peevish, Sara felt, than was warranted by Ezra’s misdemeanour.

  “Well, he is a pretty amazing writer,” said Sara, “you said yourself that Appalachia was one of the best books you read last year.”

  “It was all right,” Neil said grudgingly. “Not a patch on Franzen.” He turned away from her and yanked the duvet up to his ear.