by Toby Litt
First off, I fetched my address book and made a list of the numbers we might both have called. Quite a few I recognized immediately: Lily’s mother, her agent, her analyst. The others I dialled, pretending to be a telemarketer.
‘Hello,’ I’d say. ‘I’m Marcus Fishbourne from Direct Telesales International. Am I speaking to Made-Up Name?’
With many, I recognized their voices the moment they answered. With most of the rest, Marcus Fishbourne from Direct Telesales eventually extracted their real name from them.
Lily, as it turned out, had made the kind of calls you’d expect from anyone – to girlfriends, acquaintances, family. Then she’d made the calls of an actress – to her agent, to casting directors, to theatres. There were even some of her calls to me – at home and at work.
However, a few numbers continued to baffle me – there was a mobile number which Lily had called twice on her final day (once at 11.00 and once at 19.55)
I thought this might be important. Particularly as the printout revealed she’d never phoned this number before – at least, not during the month before she died.
I was about to put the phone bill aside when I noticed another couple of slightly odd things – near the end of the bill. It was hardly surprising I hadn’t noticed them first time though. They were numbers I’d seen so often. The two calls came together:
30 Aug
16.47
Lily’s home number
0:04:44
0.158
30 Aug
19.51
My home number
0:01:07
0.042
The first was to the number of Lily’s flat in Notting Hill. Probably, she’d been checking her answerphone to see if there were any messages. What I found odd was that she’d spent over four minutes doing this. But then, maybe, she’d just had a lot of messages. It was possible.
The second call was to my flat in Mortlake – a number which she’d also called earlier in the day (16.25). When she hadn’t found me there, she’d immediately called the Discovery Channel (16.27). She knew I’d be working there – when I was working – for at least three months after we split. I’d only just started on the temporary contract. So she hadn’t had to try the other cable places.
(This is how dead relationships continue for a while, in zombie form – each knowing the other’s movements and being able to anticipate them. Slowly, though, the zombie-knowledge becomes out-of-date and the relationship becomes rancid and clumsy. Mine and Lily’s zombie, at the time of her death, was still fairly fresh – its face had yet to fall off, its eyes still worked.)
The question now was: why had Lily bothered to phone me at my house when she knew I definitely wasn’t going to be there?
For the first time in a long while I was grateful for my mother’s meticulous attention to detail. From a drawer in the hall, I pulled out her list of Messages Left On Your Machine While You Were Away.
As I’d guessed, the first message dated not from the last time I set the answerphone (Thursday evening) but from the following Monday, a couple of days after I’d been shot.
Now, although I wasn’t exactly Mr Popular, I knew that I would have received at least one call during that time. Sunday evening was the most acceptable time of the week for people to appear to be at home with nothing better to do than phone other people they didn’t really give a shit about. As lots of people didn’t really give a shit about me, someone would almost certainly have called me on Sunday evening.
Checking further down the list, I saw that a couple of my genuine friends were missing completely. These were friends I spoke to almost every day, and they didn’t appear to have called once. This might be because they didn’t phone on Friday and, by Saturday afternoon, had heard of my condition. But even after Monday some friends were still calling my answerphone to speak to it, as if to me. One message my mum had noted down read: ‘Distraught sobbing, female, one minute, no name left.’ I wished I knew who that had been. Anne-Marie, maybe? Or some other secret admirer, regretting a romantic opportunity perhaps for ever missed.
These calls, according to my mum, had only started to arrive on Tuesday afternoon – which was hardly likely.
It seemed there was only one conclusion to draw. I went to my answerphone and confirmed it: the police had taken away my original answerphone and replaced it with an identical one.
One thing was certain: the police knew what it was that Lily had wanted to say to me only minutes before we met up for real.
I could make a few guesses at what this might be. She would have known that what she was about to tell me (the pregnancy, the abortion) was more than likely to make me very upset – in which case, it was quite possible that she’d phoned to leave a placatory message on my phone.
But why do that before the meeting even took place? There would surely have been time afterwards to call up and deal with a specific situation.
Another guess was that it was something she found too embarrassing to discuss in public, but needed to convey to me somehow. Also unlikely.
Another that she was phoning to cancel, but, when she found I hadn’t gone home to change, she gave up and accepted that our dinner was fated to go ahead. Maybe not.
And there another possibility occurred to me – perhaps she hadn’t, after all, been intending to break the news about the baby in person. It seemed rather cowardly for Lily, but this was an unprecedentedly awful situation. Perhaps she would just have said, ‘I’ve left a message on your answerphone. It explains everything.’
In one minute seven seconds? Everything?
I dismissed this theory, as well as all the others.
The truth was, it was a mystery. I really didn’t know, and the police really did.
In the end, Lily’s mobile-phone bill looked something like this:
Date
Time
Destination
Duration (hrs:mins:secs)
Cost before discount (£)
30 Aug
09.15
Disconnected number
0:06:26
0.314
30 Aug
11.00
Unknown mobile
0:09:59
0.314
30 Aug
11.12
Lily’s mother’s mobile
0:09:23
0.314
30 Aug
11.41
Lily’s solicitor
0:07:43
0.314
30 Aug
11.55
Vidal Sassoon
0:03:33
0.042
30 Aug
16.25
My home number
0:00:13
0.042
30 Aug
16.27
Discovery Channel
Edit Suite
0:02:59
0.042
30 Aug
16.47
Lily’s home number
0:04:44
0.158
30 Aug
19.51
My home number
0:01:07
0.042
30 Aug
19.55
Unknown mobile
0:03:01
0.042
30 Aug
21.52
Asif’s girlfriend
0:02:01
0.042
30 Aug
21.54
Asif’s mum
0:01:37
0.042
By the time I finished, it was almost six o’clock. I was exhausted.
Perhaps it was this that made me act so stupidly when I dialled the mobile Lily had called twice on her last day. No-one had answered the five times I’d tried it before. This time, though, a rough voice answered.
‘Who’s this?’ it said. ‘Where’d you get this number?’
In my confusion, I completely forgot my pseudonym and said, ‘This is Conrad Redman from Direct Telesales International –’
‘What do y
ou want?’
‘I’m sorry. It must be a bad time. I’ll call back later.’
I put the phone down.
Something about the voice made me very afraid.
This wasn’t helped by the fact that mistakenly I’d given out my real name.
37
Going to the theatre in a wheelchair was an interesting experience. Slight lulls in conversation announced and followed me wherever I went. When I rolled up to pre-order an interval drink at the bar, people got out of my way rather faster than they would a Sherman tank. (I was a Sherman tank armed with pathos – and they didn’t want to catch a round of that full in the heart.) But the most interesting thing was the fact that there was no difference in my posture and attitude whilst watching the play and milling around beforehand and during the interval. Other people were able to mark their periods of (relative) concentration and relaxation by the difference between sitting and standing. For me, it was all the same performance – unbroken from beginning to end – and the beginning had been when the taxi-driver rang the doorbell and I sat down in the wheelchair and opened the front door; and the end would be when the taxi-driver (another taxi-driver) dropped me off back home.
The play itself was much as I’d expected. All in graffitoed concrete, the stage set was intended to re-create the reccie on a Glasgow council estate. The Scottish thanes were kitted out in garish tartan sportswear and last year’s trainers. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth wore too much gold jewellery and wiped their noses on their acrylic sleeves. The Drunken Porter was an incoherent street-person who knew the combination lock numbers to every building. Videocameras on tall posts made a statement about surveillance – watching the actors and the audience from all four corners of the stage. On large television screens we could see ourselves – rows of heads in the reflected stage lights. The director, Sub Overdale, had obviously had a problem with updating the Shakespearean swordplay – so everyone on the estate was armed with machetes. (‘MacBetty with a Machete’, one of the reviews had been headed.) All in all, as is usual with the Royal Shakespeare Company, there was far far too much acting going on. The actors attempted to liven up ‘the boring bits’ by unnecessary pieces of business – acting out and literalizing every figure of speech. Their accents wandered all around the highlands and lowlands, occasionally taking a short holiday in Brooklyn or Bavaria. Every one of the usual RSC trademarks was on display: the men doing their stamping-stomping big-balled walks, the women about as feminine as drag queens, the overfussy crowd scenes (each crowd member trying to catch the audience’s eye with some little bit of business), the far-past-pensionable actors who think verse speaking means e-nun-ci-ay-TTT, the young actors who think it means treat it all like slangy prose and the messianic middle-agers who, whenever a line comes through as if written in modern English, plant it in the audience like a flagpole: this is why Shakespeare is still relevant, why he still speaks to you, why we need more funding.
If I hadn’t had ulterior motives for staying, I’d have wheeled my way out of there before the end of the first act.
Instead, I played my usual theatre-tedium games: Spot the members of the cast who…
a. are sleeping together?
b. have slept together but don’t any more?
c. will sleep together before the end of the run?
d. will sleep together after the last-night party?
e. hate each other’s guts?
f. hate the director’s guts?
g. hate themselves? (easy, they all do)
h. hate the audience?
All that remained, finally, was the ultimate ordeal: the curtain call. How many hours – not in actual physical rehearsal, but in mental anticipation – do the actors secretly spend on this minute or two? How many times have they envisaged themselves stepping back to applaud a co-actor, smiling in admiration – behaviour which only says to the audience, ‘Wasn’t she marvellous? And doesn’t she just know it?’? Or how often stood in front of the mirror perfecting that businesslike dip, upper body still curtly to obedience, which says, ‘I’m a down-to-earth fellow, just like you – I have no airs. (But I was good, wasn’t I?) Or how frequently practised that exhausted flop, hands dangling, which says, ‘To you, my audience, in this my bravura performance, I have given my absolute all’?
I coped in the only way I could think of, by closing my eyes, listening to the clapping. I tried to imagine that it was an inhuman sound – a distant waterfall or a motorway heard across flat fields.
38
When it finally finished, I trundled round to the stage door and announced myself. Two years of Lily had been more than enough for me to learn the various techniques of blagging my way backstage. (What you must realize is that most security men would be profoundly grateful if someone were to execute the entire cast of any given play. Looking really suspicious is often all that’s required for green-room passage to be granted.) With the added prop of the wheelchair, I could hardly fail.
I’d never been behind-the-scenes at the Barbican before, though I’d endured many thesp anecdotes about its legendary unpleasantness. Every cast that ever worked here became ill, through the lack of natural light and the constantly recycled air. They had a name for it: Barbicanitis.
I got into the lift and pushed the button for the dressing rooms, conveniently placed six floors above the stage.
The backstage décor was a curious mixture of office block and primary school – yellow walls and fuchsia trim.
And this was where these people wanted to spend their time, apart from the time they spent doing the atrocious things they’d just done to Shakespeare, the English language, my patience and over a thousand pairs of buttocks?
I only had to ask one passing person (the Drunken Porter, as it happened) where the star dressing-room was. Alun and Dorothy were famous for sharing, despite their exalted and senior status. Here it was that they were always photographed when interviewed as a couple – sitting side-by-side in front of a mirror with bulbs around it. (Dorothy, solo, specialized in looking winsome whilst leaning on trees; Alun, left to his own, did the far-gazing windswept-hilltop thing). These were proper actors, the Sunday supplement readers were meant to think: surrounded by make-up, costumes and cards from well-wishers.
It was Alun who said, after I knocked, ‘Who’s there i’ the name of Beelzebub?’ I went in anyway.
As I had taken my time wheeling round, they were both of them out of their costumes, showered and ready for home.
They had no other visitors – and the lines on their faces relaxed as they saw my wheelchair. (Though they cannot have been delighted to see the unlucky-coloured green shirt I was wearing. I knew it would discomfort them: Alun had once put his name to a ghost-written book about theatre superstitions.) They instantly expected me to deliver some banality of thanks, on behalf of the Variety Club, for the much-needed new minibus.
I’d decided to go all out for shock value, and their smug faces only encouraged me in this.
‘Alun,’ I said. ‘Don’t you remember me?’
He was used to this, but not as used to it from cripples – cripples are meant to be unforgettable. Like hospital visits to girls in comas and whispered chats with autistic boys who really understand Shakespeare better than all the critics, don’t they?
‘Ah,’ he said, buying for…
‘Conrad,’ I said. ‘I used to go out with Lily.’
The effect was so startling that (if I could) I would have repeated it straight away. Alun jumped out of his seat, at first as if he wanted to shy away from me and then – checking, as I thought, his first impulse – stepping up to the side of my chair and putting his huge hand on mine.
‘Conrad, forgive me. How could I not recognize you?’ he said.
Dorothy now joined him, bending down over my other side, touching my other hand. Not a situation I wanted to stay in very long – they both smelt rankly of animal exertion, and of expensive fragrances trying to refute animal exertion. I jerked the wheelchair into a wheelie
and did one of those double pirouettes that pedestrians find so impressive.
‘Quite simple, I’d’ve thought,’ I said as I touched down. ‘Last time we met I didn’t have this.’
Alun looked at Dorothy, his contracted brow telegraphing her the message Possibly disturbed.
Dorothy knelt at my side and put her arms around me – this wasn’t so much a hug as a black hole of perfume and female flesh felt through fabric.
‘Oh, Conrad,’ she said, going straight into a copeable-with recognition scene. ‘How are you – after that terrible, terrible –’
The hug continued. I tried speaking, but my voice was muffled by muliebrity, baffled by breasts.
I felt Dorothy’s body jerk slightly to one side – she had moved her head. While I was blinded, messages were passing between her and Alun – I wondered what they could be, apart from guilty.
My strongest desire was to bite one of Dorothy’s nipples (they wouldn’t have been hard to locate, dangling as they were) and force her to give me slightly less ‘love’ and slightly more room. But I compromised, and began faking a monster coughing-fit.
On cue, she stood up and stepped back.
‘I’m sorry,’ I gasped – cough, cough. ‘Allergies.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Dorothy, and looked down at herself as if it were her very flesh that I was allergic to.
‘A glass of water?’ asked Alun, who (while I was engulfed) had moved over to stand by the mirror – rather further away than seemed truthful, particularly after the kneeling and the touching.
The mirror was plastered with photographs, mostly of Laurence, their son. In the early shots he was posed on beaches or in parks, holding some prop (a primary-coloured ball, a tennis racket) and smiling widely; in the later snaps he’d been caught, scowling and black-wearing, either at his computer or on his bed.
