Bitter Eden

by Tatamkhulu Afrika

  ‘Another great speech, maestro, but you’re forgetting you’re talking about the me in this shit,’ and I tug at the shift, ‘and that me knows that there is still nothing there except me. Two weeks now and the old cow hasn’t even given a fart to show that she’s alive and kicking and ready to go! For Chrissakes, Tony, why don’t you use one of your guys that already feels like a woman and stop wasting your time with me? No matter how you pretty me up, I have got balls down there and know it and like it and nothing’s going to change!’

  ‘Now you come off it, Tom! If you’ve learnt nothing from the first play you were in, I have. You’re a slow starter who needs a first night for everything to come together and turn you on, and how much more powerful that turning-on is going to be in the case of you who have never felt like a woman before than in the case of those for whom it is just another strut-around in drag? You concentrate on getting the basics of movements and lines right and the Lady will let you know on opening night that she has been growing in you all the time and is ready at last to quit that womb in you that you never knew you had.’

  ‘Jesus, you can’t half turn a guy off, let alone on! You going to give me a caesarean if I stall?’

  ‘I don’t think it will come to that,’ he says and flashes me his small, acid grin. ‘Now get to work and don’t mind if I keep on at you because that is what I am not paid to do.’

  Actually, Tony does not niggle me all that much. Why, I am not quite sure. Is he trying to demonstrate the fullness of his faith in me or shore up my faltering trust in myself? Whichever the case, he does not go for the jugular like he does with the rest, merely says, ‘I think you know you have to do that again,’ then sits in brooding silence which means I still have got it wrong, and so continues until he at last releases me with a grudging nod that holds more of reservation than acclaim. Such a seemingly preferential treatment of me does not go down well with the rest of the cast and interaction with them – and with Macbeth in particular – becomes an exercise in stoicism for which I am by nature ill-equipped, but when I complain to Tony that I am being treated like a disease, he merely grunts and turns away to sink his teeth into some other poor sod and I am wondering why the fuck I don’t just walk out of here and have done?

  But somehow – and I know but too well the why of it – I stick it out and, after rehearsal, hurry back to the barracks, eager for the companionship that will restore me to the real if not always more balanced world, but either he will not be there or he will be sitting listening without response to me whine on about how it went, his eyes opaque as the wrong side of a one-way glass. Never will he question me first about anything to do with the play, and when Tony takes my beard right off and cuts my hair jailbird-short in preparation for the inevitable wig, he stolidly holds up our fragment of mirror to his own unruly hairiness, then stands in the doorway of the barracks, back to me, his whole stance so expressive of separateness that it starts me throwing things around. But then I stop short, horrified, suddenly, searingly, aware that this is what a woman would do, that these are her hands, that she is surfacing even now in the way that Tony had foretold, and when he comes back and we sit down to eat, he still not openly opposed, more tiredly resigned, I have as little to say as he, grown afraid of the fragility of my façade.

  So a new, now mutual silence settles between us, sets hard as the long nights’ ice, and I lie awake for lengthening periods of pain, wondering if he, too, is awake, but never sure because he was always a quiet sleeper, not one given to snoring or thrashing about, and wondering also, as so often before, why I don’t just walk away from it all – or why he doesn’t just walk away from it all – instead of leaving the corpse unburied till it rots? Are we each too stubborn to break off before the other, he conceding me the right to ape a woman if I want, I conceding him the right to prudishly disapprove? – or is something deeper and finer holding us together and we are both knowing this and not wanting to finally let it go? – or have we simply grown too listless, with the listlessness that is the curse of all things caged, to want to change the status quo?

  As starkly and unsettlingly do I then also face up to what is taking place in me. Have I let Tony – or vanity – or both – trap me into a personality change that I will not again be able to shake off? Fearing yet fascinated, I let the often malevolent, often luminous beauty of the ancient play’s lines – both mine and those of the others – echo and re-echo through my mind, Tony having alerted me to their musicality with his seemingly offhand yet always carefully calculated asides. Was his coaxing to life in me this previously dormant foetus of my feminineness, this shadowy, sharpening presence that is beginning to manipulate my limbs, sometimes even my as desperately resisting tongue, equally calculating, or was any such calculation matched by my own subliminal, never-to-be-spoken-of readiness to learn? Compellingly as an incantation, the lines possess, disintegrate me and the shadowiness rises, weaving, out of me and hovers, descends, and I start up with a cry and find that I have dreamed.

  Then, as though washed up by a freak wave of time, I am standing, before the start of the dress rehearsal, swathed in the beads-and-tinsel splendour of my royal gown, Tony holding up to it his only, too-small mirror that I may view, albeit in segments, the final version of the want-to-be queen. Appalled, yet drawn, I stare at the voluptuous swelling of the padded chest, the gold-painted cardboard crown nestling in the flaming mane of the wig, the heavy-lidded, brooding eyes, the scarlet mouth’s imperious slash, and think, ‘Witch of my womb!’ then cringe as though I had spoken the words aloud.

  ‘You like it?’ Tony demands, daring me to say, ‘No,’ but I nod, though my eyes are more terrified than pleased, which does not seem to upset him at all.

  Then we rehearse, which is a relief, Macbeth mocking me as he is and wishing, no doubt, that he was wearing the gown. ‘He will be a nothing,’ Tony had said, ‘but the goons will be eating out of your hand.’ True or false? Rehearsal over, I still do not know. Certainly she has never been as near to the surface as tonight, but she is still the shadow beneath my breath’s ruffling the calm, scarlet lips only now and then nibbling up to snatch a line, dimple the norm. But Tony is not fazed, is, indeed, pleased. ‘Nearly there,’ he says, softly punching my arm. ‘Tomorrow night she will be out and away,’ which is fortifying, although I would have preferred it if he had used less apposite words.

  I do not expect Danny to ask me how it went, and he does not, so I brew up some tea and offer him a mug which he takes. Then I crawl into my bunk, dead beat, yet not expecting to sleep all that well, but it is snowing again outside, the flakes drifting down like silence revealed, and it is as though a separate self in me is saying, ‘I need to sleep as much as you, so sleep, and I sleep.

  When I again wake, it is still snowing, but dawn is drably about and I am expectant rather than tense and stay that way till the drabness is twilight’s and I must go. Leaving, I look down to where Danny is fitting a new handle of woven wire to his as makeshift a mug, his face half-averted and remote, and, on an impulse, I hand him the first night ticket for a friend that I had thought I would have to give to some hopeful at the door, and he looks at it and I bolt, not wishing to witness him tossing it aside.

  Tony ‘does’ my face himself, hand moving swiftly, widely, like Camel sketching, then narrowing in to the eyes and mouth, his face absorbed as the one I have just left, cannot forget, his tongue mercifully not burdening me with comforting chatter or muttered last-minute advice. Almost I grow drowsy, begin to drift away into the unreality that underlies the entire elaborate charade, and Tony jerks up my head, saying, ‘Hey!’ and I become aware of the audience’s roaring like a surf beyond the dressing-room’s closed door, the drawn curtains of the stage, and at once there is a bitterness in my mouth and my stomach heaves with a spasm of the nausea that has been lurking in me all this while like a toad under a stone.

  Tony has little pity for me, though. ‘Christ! Not now!’ he moans, massaging my shoulders, neck, with impatient, admonishing
hands, and my gut calms, but I am walking a thin wire now as he fusses on my wig and crown, helps me into the glittering sheath of the dress, hooking it up from behind. Only then does he allow himself to say, ‘The rest is up to you now. And her.’ They are the tough last words that I need and I take them with me as the overhead lights begin to flick out and I still snatch a look from between the curtains at the packed auditorium and the po-faced Krauts in the front row.

  ‘And her,’ Tony had said, and so it is. Macbeth, as Tony sees it, does not allow for a second breath. At once, it is a carnival of lights and noise, a beast ripped wide and its gut spewing out sometimes brilliant crap, sometimes jewels of imperishable truth. But she also does not permit a second breath, is ripping me wide from the instant of my first entrance, is a snarling tigress of malevolent cunning between my thighs. I know it is working by an almost shift of the air, a reaching out, not to me but to that which is transcending me, that is not me yet, from the beginning, has never been anything but this alternative according to Tom.

  Tony trips the master switch and, for a moment, I, too, am thrown as he, without warning, tries out one of his sudden new ideas, tapping softly on what sounds like a home-made drum – or is he just knocking on the dressing-room door? – the beat keeping pace with me like the beating of a giant heart as I sleepwalk through the featureless dark to the front of the stage, my face and hands lit only by the single candle I am holding, its flame streaming but secure in the barely perceptible breeze. Yes, it can only be Tony, decides a remote, detached fragment of my mind as the beating stops at the exact moment of my mouth’s opening to speak, a moment, that, which I prolong, facing out into the silence that is like none other because it is not the silence of desertion but of usually volatile and voluble tongues.

  ‘The goons will be eating out of your hand’, Tony had said, and that, too, is so, and I am knowing the sweetness of power and the bitterness of its encapsulated decay, but the set, with its intimations of turrets and medieval stone, is no longer enclosing me – only the timelessness of the darkness is – and there is no particular woman standing here, as there is no particular man, only an androgynous guilt that yet does not repent, would not have the deed, or the fruits of the deed, undone. ‘Up now, you bitch!’ I soundlessly exhort. ‘Show me what you can do,’ and, effortlessly, she does it again, her whisper commanding that the blood on her hands be gone, that her words be heard as, my instinct unerringly tells me, they are, eliciting the continuing silence that is the ultimate applause.

  Tony is the closest to weeping – without rage, that is – that I have yet seen, hugging me without trusting himself to even say, ‘I told you so,’ his too clear partisanship ensuring that I will not be invited by the rest of the cast to the traditional first night partying with raisin booze. ‘So what?’ I think, coming now off my high, woodenly thanking the well-wishers who press my hand, admire the robe, but do not look at the me beneath it because I am not a resident shaman in their make-believe world, then hurry on to cluster, chattering, around the beaming Macbeth. The depression in me deepens – or is it the loneliness that refuses to be denied? – and, at last, I turn away, take off the crown and wig, wipe the goo off my face and stand, drained and reluctant to grapple with the dress.

  It is then that Tony shows the true and sterling manner of himself, coming in, shouting out so that all can hear, not, ‘Tom, your boyfriend is here!’ but, ‘Tom, your mate is here. I have told him to come and take you away from all this shit,’ and leaves with a final whip-around of his tidy bum.

  I turn and look at him and he looks at me and I at once know the way to go. ‘Hey! You got no manners barging in when a lady’s stripping down?’ For a moment he is startled – is beginning to be annoyed – then he catches on and whoops it up, grinning in the way that makes me like him most, but his eyes are wet and I am thinking mine must be about the same. So I carry on, sensing that the way to go still has a way to go. ‘Let me just get rid of these tits,’ I say and unstuff my front, chucking the packing aside with a calculated don’t-care, then again turn my back to him. ‘Help me with this fucking thing,’ I plead, meaning the dress, and I feel his hands shake a little as he unhooks the hooks, and the sheath shivers down and I am male again, getting goose flesh in my underwear.

  We go out through the darkened auditorium, the staff already stacking the chairs so as to sweep the floor clean of the mindless litter that only humans leave, and he is standing leaning against the door’s opening into the night, an improbable black cardboard hat slanting across his eyes, his mouth as shocking a scarlet slash as the again dead Queen’s. ‘Hello, Tom,’ he says, the lips twisting in a grimace that could be either a smile or a sneer, the eyes glittering under the hat’s brim. ‘Welcome to the great sisterhood of creeps!’

  Shock locks my tongue and it is Danny that growls, ‘Get out of our way, you whore!’

  Slowly, the other straightens and I see that he has already been at the raisin booze. ‘Not so fast, lover,’ the alien lips purr in a tone as hideously strange. ‘No whore bigger than she,’ then, to me, ‘He giving you what you want, dear?’

  Danny lashes out then with the swiftness and viciousness with which he felled Camel on the night of the bird, and seizes my arm with the passion and possessiveness of a more ancient time, hastening me along. Professional that he is, he does not have to look back to know that there will be no coming back at us, and I, too, do not have to look back, the sight of Douglas, cruciform on the floor, the grown-skeletal face smashed and bloodied and screwing up like a snivelling child’s, ineffaceably imprinted on my incredulous mind.

  ‘Christ!’ is all I can say when we get back to the barracks, and again, ‘Christ!’ and sit, then, staring at the floor, and Danny brews us some tea and we sit sipping it, and he at last says, surprisingly resignedly rather than triumphantly, ‘Now you know why I can never like this theatre shit and why I always hated that fucking cunt back there,’ but I do not answer, suddenly hearing the again restive Queen whispering, ‘Out damned spot!’ to the blood on the hands that are also mine.

  It has stopped snowing, the clouds briefly clearing and baring the steeliness of the stars, but now the temperature is plummeting as frost sugars the snow, and I crawl into my bunk and begin to uncontrollably shake, the tension that held me together breaking up and the cold slipping past it into my bones. Danny climbs in beside me then, drawing me close, saying nothing, willing the shaking to stop, and, in the morning, he is still there, quietly sleeping, but, for the first time in I don’t know how long, I have an erection as pushy as a tusk, and I slip out to the nearest toilet and slyly masturbate before I piss, persuading myself that, Queen or no Queen, I am still as much of a male as ever I was.

  The camp’s bleak surrounds deny us the traditional extravaganza of spring. The pines seem a somewhat more buoyant green, but are still no big deal and a single flowering shrub in a corner of the camp is greeted with a far keener acclaim, someone even building a circlet of stones around it to preserve it from a straying foot or vandalizing hand. In our bodies, however, the seasonal resurgence is unabashed and a certain broodiness in the air and of the eyes suggests that masturbation is on the rise as, doubtless, is the even more covert buggering which those who practise it are the quickest to condemn. There are no orgies, though, no reversions to the blindly animal couplings which the essentially lawless structure of the camp could so easily induce, the reason for this being simply – and unflatteringly – that our diet, although maintaining us at a not unhealthy level of thinness, does not arouse in us the physical equivalent of our randy dreams.

  The libido stays a tricky beast, however, and Danny and I are sexually experienced enough to know this with the clarity that we should and that is wise. It is not in the nature of either of us to discuss a matter of this kind, but we know each other well enough by now to sense – or to deduce from small, seemingly irrelevant acts, or abstention from acts – what the one would so have the other know if an intangible boundary of the proprieties
is not to be crossed. So when spring comes and the killer-cold is gone and there is no excuse for him to go on sleeping alongside me at night, but he only slowly relinquishes it instead of stopping it all at once, I know that he is saying, ‘Look, I liked being with you like we were and I’m wanting you to know that and still feel good about it when I’m gone.’ And when summer’s here and the odd cautious bird sits, gaping, on the fence, and the pines seem to shiver in the heat as in a wind, and we both sleep, naked and gasping like the bird, in our bunks, and he occasionally still comes up on the pretext of having something to discuss, but now allows only his naked side to touch mine and never draws me close, I know he is saying, ‘Look, what I’m really wanting to say is that I’m wanting to be near, but I’m knowing your body like I’m knowing mine and this is summer and the grass is dry.’

  Does he mean by this that, when naked, my nakedness arouses him as his arouses me? Is he, perhaps, thinking way back to the night in the paddock when I took his genitals into my hand? Does his nakedness wake me in a forbidden way? Involuntarily, I now, too, think back to the night in the paddock, recall his body-hairs’ bristling against my obversely smooth skin, bolt in a blind panic that I am powerless to control. But just how far can I run? Relentlessly, I am forced to face up to the nature of the relationship between us since the play. Never closer, we are yet no longer interchangeably one. He takes a certain pride in having me as his mate, flaunts me a little as though I am a particularly snazzy shirt or cunning knife, treats me with a subtle considerateness, almost gentleness, that draws me nearer even as it sets me apart, is, in fact, seemingly forever hooking me back into that dress. That final image goads me into wild denial, as does my reaction to the following question as to whether or not I feel good at being treated with a macho possessiveness that started off with Danny’s fisting Douglas in the mouth. But, as I said, just how far can a man run?