Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

by Barney Norris

  My dream of being an actor died two weeks later on the Talgarth Road in London, at LAMDA. I knew they didn’t want me the minute I walked in the door. I was terribly sad, because I knew before I started doing my pieces that it was the last time I’d perform them. So I did my Margaret like I was saying goodbye to her, then walked out and no one felt the need to say very much to me. And I looked around me on my way back out the doors and almost persuaded myself I wasn’t in love with it.

  That’s how a lot of people find their lives, I think. They try on different social groups till they find one that fits them, or one where they feel at least a little bit at home, then do the work that’s needed to belong to it. But I seem to have stopped after I realised I couldn’t belong to the theatre. I never did find that group of people just like me. But I found you, and that has felt like home ever since that summer, and then we had James, and he became part of that home I carry with me too.

  I have kept the shoebox out. I didn’t go through all of it. I found I was becoming suddenly quite upset, looking over everything and remembering that time, so that I had to come down out of the attic. I saw my hands were shaking and I didn’t feel well; I felt weak inside, as if I hadn’t eaten. There was a bottle of white wine open in the fridge, and I took it out and poured a glass and drank it, just to distract myself, just to have something to do. And it’s so easy, isn’t it? That first glass, when you feel it rush through you, and all of your body relaxes. It’s so easy to feel better that way. I know I shouldn’t. It’s a road to ruin if ever there was one. But nothing works so fast, and at the bottom of the glass I found I was calmer. I sat down, turned the radio on. I listened to bad music and thought of nothing, and for as long as the wine worked through me I didn’t feel upset. I didn’t find my Joni Mitchell. I don’t know whether I will have the courage to go through the photos with you.

  What do people do with their lives? I mean seriously, literally, hour for hour, what does everyone do? When I was at school I felt perfectly ordinary, just like anyone else, but now it is as if I have forgotten how. I have to do impersonations of a real human being to fit in anywhere or even get served in the supermarket. I have lost my instinct and my taste for life, and my days feel like eating with a cold now, knowing you need soup, swallowing, not being able to taste it.

  Friday, 31st May

  You have been away for four months today. I’m getting to like the area. Salisbury’s a nice city. I go in as much as I can just to potter round and look in the shops. I can spend the morning going in and out of them or looking round the library or going for coffee and reading the papers in the cafes and watching the people. It’s not too far from James, and I like knowing that if he needed me, or if I wanted to go and see him, I could get there without too much trouble. I haven’t gone, of course. It would embarrass James, so I must be disciplined and wait for the holidays. That is the awful truth of a boarding school: they teach their students not to need anyone, and I suppose they teach the parents not to need their children as well, in the end, though for me it is hard to learn. It is a graceful softening of the process of separation that I imagine falls on us all more completely when our child enters university or starts their career. We aren’t there yet, James and I, which is a relief to me for now. I have all those separations still to go through. I don’t really know what I’m talking about there just yet, except for remembering my own parents and the way it felt. I never spoke to them properly again after I left school. Isn’t that strange? The way you get to the end of school and suddenly you are required to enter your life, as if it were a river you were plunging into, as if you had been sunning yourself on the banks all this time? And suddenly you must make choices and get on with it, with all the structures you have been educated into removed, or at least made invisible, because I suppose we live within the confines of our schools from the neck up for the rest of our lives. But isn’t it strange that a starting pistol is fired and all of a sudden we must get on our feet and begin to run? I don’t know what I will do when that happens for James, when he is really running away from me. If he stops speaking to me like I did with my parents I won’t have anyone to speak to at all.

  Rehearsals for Hamlet are still going well, and I will run through my lines once, all the way through without the book, before I sleep. We will have rehearsed the thing for three months by the time it opens, but I still feel the terrible pressure of time. It has been so long since I did anything so exposing. I feel sure I won’t be able to get it right, and everyone will see, and everyone will feel sorry for me. I think that, above all else, is my greatest fear in life. The pity of others. That’s what makes my neck tight and my shoulders seize, makes my back curl up like paper in a fire. And the worst of all is that you can’t do anything about that feeling while you’re at a rehearsal, you can’t stop for a sit down or a drink to steady yourself. Everyone would see you couldn’t cope; to look for help would only make everything worse.

  There is more pressure because I am having to play Ophelia. It’s because there are never enough people in these amateur dramatic societies. They are always looking for women who can pass themselves off as younger than they are. Women under sixty, really. The older you get, the more easily you find people who want to participate in amateur opera or theatre, in voluntary activity, in society, in life. Perhaps because we are all aware it is ending for us, ever so gradually.

  You would like Studio Theatre, I think. I fell in love with it the first time I went to visit the building they were based in. They had been going on for years and years, maybe thirty years, and in all that time they had been saving for a building. Around the millennium they finally raised enough, and in between Waitrose and the Five Rivers Leisure Centre, looking out over an empty stretch of grass by the fire station, they built a theatre. It wasn’t a beautiful thing. The car park wasn’t tarmacked and the building was all breezeblocks with a sort of gridiron roof, but looking at it and knowing people had saved so long to make it, that couples who had spent a long time working on it had got married in there, that under its rough surface was a whole world of love and ambition and dreaming, made it seem very beautiful to me. This was the real theatre in Salisbury. This was where the city spoke up. And it seemed like the sort of place that might welcome someone who hadn’t been welcome in LAMDA or the Old Vic or anywhere else. So I went and auditioned for Hamlet, and they asked me to play Ophelia, and I’d never felt so happy because I’d thought I would be auditioning for Gertrude, and it’s always nice to be told you’re too young for something, even if it is only because everyone else in the play is far too old for their parts and even more badly cast than I am.

  In fact, I didn’t think I would be good enough for a part at all, even Gertrude. I thought it would be a chance to do a bit more ushering. But they’ve let me get involved, and so I’m getting as stuck in as I can. I help with the upkeep and cleaning of the building, doing the loos and the sinks every week. I buy a bottle of bleach and get through all of it dousing the toilets and the urinals. I always wonder why there isn’t a security check if you buy a bottle of bleach in a supermarket. If you drank it down, it would kill you in an instant, and in some places they’ll stop you before they let you anywhere near paracetamol, let alone alcohol, but bleach is easy. I wonder how often people kill themselves like that these days? I associate it with poor housewives after the war. There are less terrible methods now – the swallowing of sleeping pills and painkillers. I wonder what criteria go through your mind on the day you decide to kill yourself. You probably go for what’s nearest, what’s most easily accessible. Surely no one in their right mind kills themselves, after all, so I doubt the thinking is ever sophisticated. So perhaps there are still lots of people who kill themselves with bleach. They say you always have to close the coffin for people who do that, because you end up with terrible burns down the side of the mouth.

  For all the pressure they put on me, I do love the rehearsals. It is wonderful to be sitting in a room with a group of people talking about
a play and trying the lines out; I haven’t done it in so long. It has been so exciting to get out our scripts and fill our mugs with tea and wrestle with that play, the biggest play, the greatest play in the world. Bits of it are so frustrating to me, because it’s all about men, and the first thing you realise when you look at old plays is that people in the past hardly thought of women as people at all, the way they were used in the plots of stories. Ophelia and Gertrude sort of come on so the men can express new aspects of themselves; they’re shunted through the story without ever really getting to affect it at all, poor things, and it kills them both in the end of course. You feel like a bit of an eavesdropper playing a woman in Hamlet, because it’s a story about a boy deciding whether he loves himself or his father more, when you get right down to it. You can tell Shakespeare wasn’t a woman, whoever he was.

  It’s still a wonderful play to be part of. I love the mad bit, singing and throwing lavender around. I get to change into a torn dress and trail on like seaweed caught in a tide. My favourite part, though, is the nunnery scene. Shakespeare hardly writes her like a person at all. Or if she’s a person she’s like a very battered wife, because Hamlet turns round and shouts at her for a whole speech and she just takes it. Doesn’t say a thing back. She just stands there in this huge silence and looks at him. It’s so sad, because she really loves him and he throws it all back in her face. She can’t bear it; she can’t even speak. In that moment I feel like Shakespeare did understand Ophelia, even if he didn’t write her that much of a part. That is the bit that shakes me most in the acting. I stand there looking at Stuart, the man playing Hamlet, and think of you. Imagine you tearing me apart like that. I imagine the violence you face every day, and then I picture you turning it all on to me so that it is like a TV set screaming static right into me. And I shake and shake, and Bridget, the lovely old lady directing the play, always says it is the best thing I do.

  I’m not sure whether it’s very good or very bad for me. Most of the time I block out the life you must have in Afghanistan. I can’t stand the thought of the heat and the boredom and the bullets and the danger – all of that happening to my man, I can’t bear it. Sometimes I get home and cry after rehearsals, but even while I am crying like that I get a feeling it might be doing me good. Missing you is like a pressure that builds in me, and I think in the play and in the crying after rehearsals I am able to release some of it. Even to find a use for it. Perhaps I could have been an actor after all, if I had just had a bit more to worry about when I went to those auditions. That may be what they mean when they tell you that before you become an actor you must first get experience of life.

  Tonight on my shift at the Playhouse one of the actors rehearsing the next play came and spoke to me! A very nice man who I think was being kind because he knows all of us ushers get terribly star-struck by actors and wanted to make himself feel famous, but nevertheless it seemed nice of him. He’s never been to Salisbury before and asked me where was a good place to get away from the rest of his company because he’d had a hard day in the rehearsal room and they always went for a drink together and today he wanted to be on his own. I told him I wasn’t the best person to ask but gave him all the tips I could think of all the same.

  Sometimes I think social contact like this, however small it may be, is what’s keeping me sane. I have my work at the school, but I dread the bell at half three that means the day is ending. The night is such a long stretch of time when there’s no one to share it with. Phone calls with you and James sometimes, but never any real sharing; a voice on the end of a line isn’t being with anyone, is it? Tidworth is not somewhere you would choose to spend your life. It’s a place to get out of as much as you can. We all hold ourselves apart round here. It’s so strange how so many women all in the same boat pretend they have the life raft to themselves. I watch them in Tesco, sailing through the aisles, the same distracted look on all their faces. We are all trying our best to forget this is the only chance we get at life; we are all trying not to admit this is what we have ended up doing with it. Of all the things that could be possible for us in the world, we’re doing this. Tesco. I want to talk to them, but I’m too afraid. They must be lonely too. They must be frightened. They must fear the end of the day, and going back into their houses, and bad television. I want to ask them how they cope, but I’m too afraid to say anything.

  Even without the conversations I sometimes get out of it, I love ushering, which surprises me and might perhaps surprise you, because I worried it would be too passive, too like sitting on the bench. But I love the way watching the same show several times makes you appreciate it differently. You stop listening to the stories and start to look at how it is all being done, what is technically happening in front of your eyes. Some nights I can watch the play as if it were music, structures and patterns repeating and varying; some nights it is like a lesson in geometry, the arrangement of bodies in space, varying in relation to each other, the traces of a director’s instructions in front of your eyes as the actors find subtle excuses to move round the rooms they’re in, refill their glasses, stoke the fire, keep the bodies moving and the patterns changing across the stage. I have started to get to know the audiences, and when the show changes I like meeting some of the regulars again and finding out who remembers me, who is friendly, who thinks they own the place. And I have come to appreciate in a way I had never known before that the permanent thing, the lasting thing about a theatre is the audience who visit. I have watched the actors go from rehearsals and on to the stage and realised that already, only a few months after arriving here, and without earning a penny from it, I own the theatre more than they do, belong there more than they do, will outlast their mayfly stays.

  This imaginary world. It will always be a beautifully dangerous place to visit. All these people, all so bright and talented, who could have been anything, done anything, been lawyers or teachers with pensions to look forward to or made millions in the City, willingly and knowingly surrendering all thought of career security or career progression, or comfort in old age, or lavishness in the way they live, in order to take part in this ramshackle project. It is almost a political act when you live in the theatre, because you turn your back on what people are supposed to value, on profit and loss, in order to participate. And I’m no great one for political acts, but I enjoy the courage of people who go in for them. That is something I have always loved about you, because your life is a kind of politics as well, to be out there fighting on behalf of other people. But my own political statement of choice, had I only got through one of those auditions, would have been to be part of the theatre. To use my life as a way of arguing that people should tell stories to each other, share their lives and care about each other. That would have been my kind of politics.

  It is very late. I do not know why I have been writing for so long. I don’t want to put down the pen and be on my own in the house again. Perhaps I will take a pill again tonight. A sleeping pill robs the night from you, but at least you get through it faster. The computer button I wish I could install into my life would be Edit Undo, that’s the function I dream of, a way to go back; all that medicine has invented so far is the sleeping pill, a way to fast forward. Still, anything that breaks up the passing of time is an improvement on what I have stretching before me in the mornings, behind me in the evenings.

  Saturday, 8th June

  I am frightened by how many packets of sleeping pills and painkiller pills and pointless drugs are filling the cabinet in the bathroom. I look in the mirror each morning and see my face and can’t stand the woman in front of me. I am so low, so beaten down by life, and yet there is nothing really wrong with me, is there? I am just a silly woman, worrying about nothing, imagining all the world into opposition with itself. When really I am so lucky. I must seem so ungrateful to everyone who meets me, to live in this world, in this country, to have security and family and even hobbies I enjoy, and still not be able to smile in the mirror in the morning. What has ever been
denied me in my life? What have I ever wanted for?

  Then I open the mirrored cabinet and see that behind my face there are pills and pills, all waiting to be swallowed. And that’s when I really hate myself. I have such a good life, an easy life. Why do I need to dope my way through it like that? And why can’t I get through a day without something, a way to take the edge off? What is it I find so difficult about being alive? But still I keep buying the little pills just as fast as I consume them. Faster. I should get rid of all of them, but I don’t. Every morning I stare at my face and I hate my privilege and my ingratitude, and then I see all those pills piled up, and I wonder.

  Thursday, 13th June

  How long do you have to spend on hunger strike before you become actually, dangerously ill? Roaming idly through the Internet in a quiet hour this afternoon, I came across some statistics for the weight loss of people who refuse to eat, and of course I know it’s very bad for them, but really it seems to be a very effective way of losing weight. Pounds a day just falling away. Might starvation ever be an advisable way of getting into shape? It’s so difficult to find out, because of course no doctor can ever really recommend it. I suppose it might all be the kind of weight that you put straight back on when you start eating again. And I think if you don’t eat at all you do damage to your liver or your kidneys, I don’t remember which. All the same, I don’t know why no shock doctor hasn’t recommended it as a course of action for the overweight. It seems to be very effective, to make the body eat itself.