by Julia Gray
‘Good luck, Nora,’ she said. ‘I’m very interested to see your performance.’
Surely she must have known it is bad luck to say ‘good luck’ to an actor.
By mid-morning, my nerves were in full flow. My lines, once as cemented in my head as Nana’s Bible verses were in hers, crackled and faded as I recited them in the toilets. I had to do something I’d not needed to do for weeks, which was to check my script. I told myself not to panic. It didn’t help. I was in the far-end cubicle, where the overhead light was broken, with my feet tucked under me on the closed toilet seat. What did Phyllis Lane do in the thick of a panic attack? I couldn’t remember. Footsteps echoed and pipes whistled as girls came and went, their voices shrill and excitable.
At last, I heard Phyllis’s voice, soft and fuzzy, in my head.
‘I focus on the smallest possible thing,’ she’d said in an episode of Inside the Actors Studio. ‘I see the universe in the petals of a rose. I look at a wall and find one brick, and focus on that, and then on a single speck of dust on the surface of that brick. Smaller and smaller, until it’s practically just a molecule.’ (She’d sounded very like Bel, when she said this bit.)
There were no bricks in the grey toilet door. Only graffiti. Poor-quality slogans of love and the occasional subversive poem about drugs. Still, I obediently sank my gaze into the arrow that pierced a lopsided heart and waited for my own to beat more slowly. The bell rang for the end of break.
I reread the graffiti.
Chrissie ♥ Josh 4EVA
a friend with weed is a friend indeed
Nora Tobias tells lies
There it was, tucked down below the lock, small and scratchy. Not in black-and-white so much as purple felt tip. Nora Tobias tells lies. I was known. How long had it been there? I wondered. A month? More? Who wrote it? Did everyone know? Would the entire audience tonight be replete with knowledge that I, Nora Tobias, was a manipulative little witch who had punished her art teacher out of spite and petty vengefulness? Would it be like Carrie? I wondered. Would a bucket of pig’s blood (set up by Sarah Cousins, harbinger of justice) come tumbling down on my head as I took the stage for my opening scene?
‘Nora? You in there?’
The voice belonged to Megan. Grudgingly, I slid open the lock; the door swung open. Megan’s honey-coloured hair, usually up in a high ponytail, was brushed straight over her shoulders, and it tickled my neck as she bent down and hugged me.
‘What’s up, wife? You look like a pixie crossed with Gollum,’ she said. ‘I brought you a tampon and a tube of Werther’s Originals, in case you need either of them. What’s the matter? Is it nerves?’
I nodded at the writing on the door. She read it aloud. ‘Nora Tobias … but … did you just write that yourself?’
‘I …’
Megan looked at the pen that I still held loosely in my hand. She licked her cuff and scrubbed at the letters until they began to disintegrate. ‘All gone,’ she said. ‘Silly Nora.’
Saying nothing, I kept staring at the smudge where the writing had been. Had I written it myself? Was my guilt becoming such a burden that I was losing the ability to control my own actions? And what was my guilt about, precisely? Jonah, or Bel? Or simply everything?
‘Look,’ said Megan. ‘Who doesn’t tell lies? I’ve heard worse rumours about other people.’
‘What have you heard about me?’ I said, unable to keep a kind of childish whine out of my voice.
‘I’ll be honest,’ said my co-star. ‘I heard you made up a lot of different stories about your father. And you know what? How he died, or why, is none of anyone’s business, and I’ve said so. I also heard …’ She paused to examine her inky cuff. ‘I also heard that you maybe had a little more involvement with Jonah Trace than the school officially knew.’
Perhaps the cubicle had the aspect of a confessional box in a church; I just don’t know. But I found myself telling Megan the entire story of Jonah Trace, from the beginning, nothing withheld. Internet searches, science-fiction movies, the kiss on the common, the story I had made up for Sarah Cousins, everything.
‘There,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what you’ll think of me.’
‘I don’t know you well enough to think anything,’ said Megan thoughtfully. ‘But I can tell you what I think of him. You know in Costa, when I asked you about him then? And what happened?’
I nodded.
‘Well,’ said Megan. ‘What I didn’t tell you was this. He brought me there too. We sat at a corner table, near the loos. By the newspaper rack. Like he didn’t want to be seen.’
‘We sat at the same table,’ I said, remembering.
‘I’ve been trying to work out whether it was before you, or after you,’ said Megan. ‘I think it must have been just before.’
‘And he asked you out?’ I said.
‘He did. All: I really like you and I want to get to know you better and all this crap. Just like you said. I said no, and he backed off, and it must have been you next. I never told anyone. I don’t know why … I think … I was just so embarrassed. I thought it was my fault. Everyone thinks I’m so good at everything, so confident and stuff. I didn’t know how to tell people. Even my parents. I thought perhaps they wouldn’t believe me.’
Silence. Just our breathing in the cubicle, the sound of water in pipes. How often, I wondered, were true stories told and their tellers disbelieved?
‘I should have said no too,’ I said. ‘But I wanted to punish him, I guess.’
She hugged me, and it was a proper, no-nonsense hug. ‘Glad someone did.’
‘Sarah Cousins,’ I said. ‘I reckon she knows. They were mates, her and Mr Trace.’
Megan said, ‘She took your statement. I know how these things work. If she tries to involve herself any more than that – for whatever reason – she’ll be in the wrong, and they’ll come down on her like a ton of bricks. They messed up, hiring him. Trust me, Nora. If you ever need me to, I’ll back you up.’ She motioned me out of the cubicle. ‘He shouldn’t have been teaching in a school,’ she said as we left.
‘Break a leg, my children,’ said Mrs Tomaski.
Lady Agatha’s theatre, with its rickety seats, creaking lights and dusty curtains, was hardly the National Theatre. But as I sat backstage while a helper dabbed thick peach makeup under my eyes, my nerves fled, all at once, like a shoal of fish. I inhaled the adrenaline and hairspray, and heard the audience coming in, and I felt electric with anticipation. It was a feeling I associated with Bel’s more hyper moods – when she danced along the garden wall or broke into some high-security building in the dead of night – and with Evie’s old upswings, when everything in the world was beautiful and right and had a tune or two to go with it.
Up, I thought. This is what it’s like to be up.
It was sensual, and I mean that in two ways. Firstly, that all of my senses were awakened: the plasticky smell of my lipstick, the hotness of the lights overhead, the sonorous way our voices carried from the stage to the seats as we performed. It was also a physical wanting, like the wanting I felt when I watched certain films, or read certain books. I wanted the audience to want me, and the more they wanted me the more I wanted to give back.
I forgot about the flowers and the darkness. I forgot about Bel, and the house in Rosewood Avenue, filled with talent and sadness. I forgot about Cannes and Anton Ingram. I forgot about Jonah Trace. I forgot about Evie and Nana. I forgot about my father and I forgot about every iteration of every Nora that I had ever been, because now I was Ibsen’s Nora, Nora Helmer, and no one else but that Nora.
And then the applause.
The cast in a row, hot with achievement, happy. We bowed, synchronised, Megan’s hand warm in mine. The applause was cheery and sustained; some people were standing.
This is up, I thought again.
This is the highest possible point.
And what goes up comes down.
By the time I’d come backstage, weary, my throat dry from speaking
and the heat of the lights, I was starting to feel it. No one can be brim-full of adrenaline for long; it has to run out of you some time. The praise I’d heard from the lips of Mrs Tomaski, from the other girls, held less and less meaning. Doubts surfaced like weeds: had I really done all right? What about the moment I nearly tripped on the hem of my skirt? Could the audience have been bored? What if someone couldn’t hear me? Down and down I went, like Alice in her slow-moving freefall, as I moistened a sponge and wiped the foundation away, until I was nothing but empty and tired, though ready already for the next night, when I’d be able to come up again.
If that is not the basis of addiction, I don’t know what is.
‘There’s someone to see you, Nora,’ said Megan.
For a moment, I couldn’t remember who in the audience might be coming backstage to see me. Then Anton Ingram, stooping a little, appeared through the archway. He had on a red-checked shirt and dark jeans, still with a bit of a tan and looking – to my eye – every inch the movie executive. I scanned the darkness beyond him for Darian, but Darian wasn’t there.
Anton gave me a kiss on both cheeks, saying: ‘Brava, Nora. That was really quite something, you know.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
He sat on a chair next to me, moving a pile of programmes and a box of hairgrips in order to do so. He smelled of that lavenderish fragrance again.
‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘Was Bel’s hospital drama really the first time you’d ever acted?’
‘Yes.’
‘Staggering,’ said Anton. He wasn’t one to exaggerate, I was pretty sure. Was he just trying to be kind?
‘Bel instructed me to offer you a lift home,’ he said. ‘I feel I should offer you champagne somewhere, if you …?’
And that is how I found myself sitting opposite Anton Ingram in a dark booth lit with an old-fashioned lamp with a green shade in a private members’ club in Soho that I’d heard of, but never been to. Bel didn’t care for members’ clubs, she always said, but this was most likely because she was banned from most of them. Someone was playing the piano in a corner; muted discussions were taking place around us, and everywhere I looked I saw beautiful people. At a table nearby, a group of people – more conservatively dressed than Bel’s crowd but with the same free-and-easy air about them – were singing Happy Birthday to a rotund young man with a dark goatee. It amused me to hear that his name was Frodo; I wondered if it was a nickname. Once again, I thought about how a few months ago I could never have imagined myself in such a place.
It was surprisingly easy to have a glass of champagne with Bel’s father, and that was because he knew how to hold a conversation. We talked about Evie’s work, and he said how well he thought the costumes had worked in A Doll’s House. He told me how his late wife had also played Nora, when she was quite young, at a theatre in the north of England. He congratulated me again. We talked about Darian’s music, and I said how much I liked to listen to Darian play.
‘It seems that both my children have inherited our love of the arts,’ he said. ‘But Darian wants to immerse himself in music. He wouldn’t care if he never got a penny for his talent. Bel’s wants are different, I find. It’s the thought of stardom that motivates her. The parties in the Cannes hills, the money … she finds it irresistible, and I understand that, of course. I mean, what teenage girl wouldn’t?’
At this he gave me a look, as though to ask what I thought.
‘I don’t think the trappings would mean much to me,’ I said, brow lowered in consideration. ‘It’s the research that I love so much. Reading scripts, looking at old performances, reading books about the actors … learning the lines, preparing myself, being that person, imagining the context, how they talk and think and feel … I guess I’m more like Darian. It’s the immersive quality that appeals to me.’
He listened and nodded intelligently all the while, and then said: ‘So you don’t feel motivated by the thought of success?’
‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘I do want to be successful. I do want that. Although, you know, I’m not like Bel. I don’t really feel like I … belong in this world. I don’t have the right background.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Anton. ‘The theatre is for everyone. Don’t ever forget that.’
I sipped a little more champagne. The glass was very cold. I felt a drip-trickle of adrenaline again. The pianist was playing something I recognised: a song from Cabaret called Maybe This Time. Bel loved to perform it, drunk or sober, with great flourishes and a peal of falsetto at the end.
‘About Bel,’ I said, after a pause.
‘Yes,’ said her father promptly, as though he’d been waiting for this himself.
‘I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s just money and parties that she cares about,’ I said. ‘I think there are people that make decisions about who they want to be and how they want to live, and there are people who are so … forceful and full of life and absolute talent that they almost don’t have the same kind of ability to choose. Bel can’t help the way she is. She doesn’t study a part so much as … she just lets her talent kind of overflow into it. She’s a proper, natural actress.’
‘You think so?’
‘Maybe I don’t know that much about it,’ I said, ‘but I’ve seen her on stage a few times in different things. She’s not just competent or convincing. She’s … orchestras and fire-works. She doesn’t just want to go to parties. I’m sure of it.’
He finished his champagne, pushed the glass aside and poured water into a tumbler from a bottle that stood on the table. ‘How lucky she is to have you for a champion,’ he remarked. ‘Now, Nora, I’m going to tell you something that my children don’t know. Jacaranda is a project I’ve wanted to do for a long time.’
Making a cat’s cradle of my fingers, I listened.
‘But raising the finance was very hard,’ Anton went on. ‘In the end, I put the house on the line. Which sometimes happens in film.’
At first, I didn’t understand what he meant. Then it was clear. He’d mortgaged the Rosewood Avenue house, or put it up as collateral, or however these things worked. Well, it was a large, probably very expensive piece of property – Evie and I could have fitted all our things into the conservatory, more or less. I appreciated the huge financial risk that Anton had taken.
‘What I cannot afford is for anything to go wrong on-set,’ he said. ‘Now, you may not think it would be much of a problem, say, if Annabel turns up late or forgets her lines or messes up a scene or causes a drama off-screen, but I’m afraid it will. If she had to be replaced a couple of weeks in, it would necessitate costly reshoots, the budget would spiral out of control … to say nothing of how embarrassing it would be, for her and for me. Then again, she and I did make a kind of deal. And apart from this recent debacle with her English exam, I realise that she has kept her side of the bargain. And oh, I know she can act. That’s not really in doubt.’
I nodded sagely, just as he had done earlier on.
‘So what I’m asking you, Nora, is this. You’ve spent more time with Annabel than anyone else has this year. You’ve been more or less inseparable. You’ve seen her in good moods and bad, and you’ve presumably seen many things that I haven’t. I’ve spoken to Cody, and I’ve spoken to Darian, but I’d like very much to hear your take, because you seem like an exceptionally intelligent girl.’
We looked squarely at each other, as the pianist played on.
‘Do you think Annabel is capable of playing Clementine?’ said Anton Ingram. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t say I’ve asked you, I assure you. I want you to think carefully before you answer.’
The pianist finished the song and began another. In my head I rehearsed lines, discarded them, rehearsed others. In the dim-lit room, while the pianist played on, the wheel of Bel’s fortunes turned imperceptibly, with only my hand to steady it.
‘Anton,’ I said.
He leaned forward.
‘I want to say that I don’t think Bel would cause any tro
uble,’ I began. ‘I really, really want to … but I don’t think, in all good conscience, that I can …’
It must have been close to midnight by the time he dropped me home. Checking my phone, I saw that I’d had three missed calls from Bel.
I sent her a text: Did everything I could. See you tomorrow.
For reasons I couldn’t articulate, I felt indescribably sad.
8
Closing Night had such a different ring to it, I thought, all through the hymns and prayers at Chapel. It felt oddly like someone was going to die. Lori Dryden was asleep, her head on Sangeeta’s shoulder. Out of habit, I looked for Bel. But Bel, of course, no longer came to school. She was officially a Leaver now. If she came to the play tonight – and there was no reason why she wouldn’t – it would probably be the last time she ever set foot inside the Agatha Seaford Academy.
I tried to put the previous night out of my mind, but it was hard to do. Flashes of the conversation between me and Anton – cold champagne, tinkling piano – kept repeating and repeating, sending little flashes of fear and anticipation along my skin. The question was: what would he do with the opinion he’d sought from me? Would he decide against casting Bel? And if so, was there … was there the smallest chance that he’d think of casting me instead? Would he think it was appropriate? I had an idea that Anton would do what was right for Jacaranda. But he’d have to tell Bel eventually, if so. And then – what would happen to our friendship? This was so tricky to handle in my head – thorny and snarled – that I kept giving up and focusing on the performance that lay ahead of me, the upness that I longed to recreate and the applause that I wanted to go on and on into the night.
It kept coming back to me, all the same.
There were many things I could say to myself to justify my actions, and all through the day I said them. But even though I tried my best to persuade myself of three possible outcomes – one, that nothing would happen; two – that Bel would want what was best for the movie; three (a vague one, this) – that ‘everything would be all right’, I felt less and less sure that this would be the case.
