Before I leave the park, I will permit myself one last glance at the child by the bench. I tell myself this as I move away. I see a cab, I signal and it slows down. Just before it reaches me, at the kerb, I turn. The girl is crying; the father is bent over his bag, searching for a cream, a lotion, anything. I crane my head to see, and the movement causes something to poke me in the ribs. I feel inside the pockets of my jacket, my palms sliding along the silky, slippery lining. My fingers encounter the reassuring rectangle of my passport. Folded into it will be my ticket. A flight to the States, my first in five years, a return to the house of my father. There it is, in my breast pocket, directly above my thudding, tripping, treacherous heart.
I Am Not an Actress
Claudette, London, 1989
It was almost the 1990s, the very start of the final decade of the millennium, and we had just arrived in London. We had not long ago left university. Just months previously, we had been holding the whole of critical theory in our heads; we had crammed all night to memorise the dates of European wars, the fluctuations in meaning of the imperfective aspect in Russian. We had entered exam halls, turned over the papers set down on the desks, taken up our pens and known that these were the last exams we would ever sit.
The things we knew! The sequence of Shakespeare’s plays, the defining characteristics of a villanelle, each and every muscle in the human hand, the myriad similarities and differences in the multiple translations of The Iliad. We were experts, in our way, with sharp spikes in our knowledge: we knew everything there was to know about one narrow field.
And now? Now we camped out on the floor of anyone who’d have us and we were looking for jobs.
Now we pored over the vacancy columns in the newspapers. Now we wondered what it was we were going to do, how to be, how to live. Now we realised that all the things we had learnt were useless. That no one would ever ask us what degree we got. Or how to recognise a metonym or what were the dates of Chaucer or the dying words of Robespierre or the stages of Italian unification or the finer details of Disraeli’s foreign policy. We saw that no one cared. All they wanted to know was: can you type? Are you familiar with word processing, spreadsheets, phone systems? Can you fix a photocopier? Can you replace the carbon in a fax machine? Can you answer the phone while making coffee at the same time as opening the post and tidying the in-trays?
We wondered at times whether our degrees had been worth it.
It was very nearly the 1990s. We arrived in short skirts with thick tights, tiny T-shirts that showed our flat, childless stomachs, trainers in bright neons, coloured cagouls bought from second-hand market stalls. We were hopeful. We wanted this to work. We looked at the clothes the people wore in the offices in which we temped. How did they do it? We wondered and studied. The trouser suits and spike heels, the shirts with crisp fronts and high collars, the handbags with tooled flaps and brass fastening, coats of tweed that buttoned down the front. And the hair: straight and flat as paper, cut so that it swung cleanly around the cheeks. How to achieve these things when we had no iron, no fixed abode, no regular salary, nothing in our suitcases but creased clothes that weren’t right for our new life?
We kept reading in newspapers and magazines that London was where it was at, the epicentre of cool, that the best bands were playing every night in pubs just round the corner. We never quite understood this. When we went to the pubs, they seemed dim and close, rows of people sitting with their backs turned, music from hidden speakers cutting through the smoke. London to us, then, was exhausting, a struggle to keep up the appearance of knowing what you were doing, of long journeys on the tube, of finding somewhere to write, rewrite and print your CV when none of us had a computer. London was about interviews, about a desperate scramble to find a niche in this vast, threatening ecosystem, just a small one, a toehold, to pull off that magic pairing of job + flat, with any luck simultaneously, because one seemed impossible without the other. So, we temped and stayed on the sofas of long-suffering friends or relatives or lovers until we could find the golden key to open the door, to persuade the city to admit us, to pass Go, to reach the point where we could say, yes, this is my address, and, yes, I would like to buy a monthly travel pass – no more messing about with day tickets for me.
We went out because the city was there and we were grown-up and we were free, and because we couldn’t impose all evening, every evening, on the people whose sofas we were sleeping on. We went to repertory cinemas in basements for all the films we’d heard of but never had the chance to see. We went to parties in warehouses in the east of the city where drum’n’bass pulsed from speakers and blokes in knitted hats offered us cocaine and a famous artist was said to be about to arrive, any minute now. We arranged to see each other by phone, at work, snatched conversations, fixing on a café or bar that one of us knew about, one of us could identify. We would make it with time to spare, clutching our street maps and day tickets. Our sense of different locations began to mesh. One day we grasped that we didn’t need to change tube lines to get from Leicester Square to Covent Garden: they were just five minutes’ walk apart.
One of us landed a job, a proper job, at a newspaper. We were amazed. Some of us phoned others to discuss this occurrence. Some of us were jealous. Then another of us was appointed as an assistant at an art gallery. More phone calls.
The worst fear was not that the city might defeat you, not that you might not find that job, might not secure that flat, might fail to master the different tube lines, what colour they were and where they intersected; the worst fear that kept us all awake at night was that you might have to go home. You might have to return to your parents and say, here I am. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t manage it. I couldn’t pull it off.
More and more of us were finding work. One signed the lease on a flat right by the river, and there was a party, and you stood on the balcony and you breathed in the smoke and noise and splintered light of the city and you knew you didn’t have much longer, that you had to do something quick.
You went into the temping agency again and you knew the woman didn’t like you. You weren’t sure why. You’d passed your typing test, you’d smiled nicely, you’d worn a clean blouse (borrowed without permission from the girl whose floor you were occupying that week, washed and replaced that night).
The temping agent glanced up when she saw you come in, then down. ‘Nothing this week,’ she said, and you were about to turn and go, when she added, ‘unless …’
You stopped, at the top of the stairs.
‘Are you interested in film?’ she said, as she lifted some papers on her desk, first one way, then the other.
‘Yes,’ you said, ‘yes, I am.’ You were, as it happened, but you’d have said yes if she’d asked if you were interested in chicken farming.
‘Something just came in from … the Film Society,’ she said, and it was as if you’d suddenly run up a hill – your pulse was galloping and your lungs were empty. This was it: this was your route in, your pass, your golden key, your way to effect the metamorphosis into adulthood. It took everything you had in you not to snatch the proffered piece of paper from her hand.
‘It’s only a few days’ work and they’re looking for someone with experience but you could call. It might be worth a try. Fix a time to go in tomorrow.’
‘I’ll go now,’ you said, groping in your bag for your map.
The Society occupied a building under a bridge at the edge of the Thames. When you stood at the entrance, gathering yourself before you went in, you had the river at your back and buses over your head, sliding in opposing directions, north and south.
The job required you to fold two thousand fliers and put them into two thousand envelopes. Two thousand address labels then had to be affixed and the envelopes fed, one by one, through a franking machine. You got the job: two days’ work. You executed it in a damp-smelling room in the basement. You thought that might be it but they said, come back tomorrow. You came. You were sent to the printer’s to collec
t a box. More fliers. More envelopes. The franking machine. You were sent the next day to the post office.
You watched everyone carefully. You saw what they did, how they spoke, what they drank. You made them their coffee without being asked. You took an old T-shirt and, after some deliberation, cut off its arms and hems and wore it over a white shirt, just like the deputy programmer did.
At the end of two weeks, they said there was a permanent job as an admin assistant in the office upstairs and would you like it as you seemed to have a good work ethic, it wasn’t very much money but it was a start, and what did you think? You said, yes, yes, please, yes, I would, yes I have a good work ethic, I do, yes, I love to work, I love it.
You ran outside, filled with euphoria. You felt like a shaken bottle of carbonated water. You wanted to shriek, you wanted to roar. You ran up the steps and over Waterloo Bridge. You weren’t looking where you were going and you ran into a lamp-post. A swelling the size of a doorknob rose on your forehead. You didn’t mind.
And you loved the job, you loved it so much. You answered phones, you took messages, you made coffee, you inputted what you learnt was called data into databases (this turned out to mean typing addresses). You were amazed that, at the end of the month, money appeared in your empty bank account. The miracle of work! The next month, there it was again. It seemed such a simple, alchemical transaction. You were required to arrive at the office at ten a.m., to stay there until the evening, doing whatever it was the people wanted you to do, and then they gave you money.
You searched the narrow columns of the newspaper and found a room in a shared flat: own bed, near tube, sixty pounds per week. The room was marginally larger than the bed, overlooked a main road and had no curtains, but you didn’t care. You sent your new address to your mother, to your brother, to your friends, to all the people you knew. You couldn’t have been prouder.
The head of the Society was solicitous and said things like ‘someone of your calibre’ to you. You didn’t know what she meant by that but you smiled and tried harder not to reroute her phone calls accidentally. She let you sit in on meetings, go out on what she called fact-finding missions, asked you to read documents for her. She wanted you to ‘learn the ropes’, she said, to ‘bring you forward’.
She took you shopping and made you try on collared shirts in dark colours, trousers that covered your feet, shoes with laces and stacked, rubberised soles. You painted your room the white-grey of the London sky. You had a drink with your friend on the newspaper and she told you the hours she worked, her salary, the difficulty of fixing a mortgage. Most nights, you went downstairs from the office and into the flickering dark of the Society’s cinema and watched films until it was time for the last tube home. You ate popcorn for dinner. There was so much to know, so much to watch, so much you had missed out on. You didn’t want to forget a thing so you watched most of the films two or three times.
When a director or actor came to give a talk or a lecture, it fell to you to book their hotels, their flights, their restaurants. You made sure they had drink and food in the green room; you put them into a taxi at the end of the night. You were surprised, sometimes, by how nervous they could be. An acclaimed French director went away to throw up just moments before he went onstage. An actor who had appeared in huge blockbusters before producing a low-budget indie film said he couldn’t go on without a double whisky inside him.
You took care of it all, every whim, every request. You were good at this, you discovered.
You moved to a different flat; this one was closer to the tube. Your room was painted yellow and had a bed reached by a ladder. You would lie in it at night, when you got back late from work, and feel as though you were in the rocking cabin of a ship, being carried by night, that you might wake up in an entirely different place from the one in which you’d gone to sleep.
Opposite the bed was a small oval window. You wanted to take off the curtain but you couldn’t reach it. You liked to look out at the city at night. You told yourself you would paint the walls grey-white but you never found the time.
You knew the city now. You were part of it. You no longer carried a map in your pocket. People asked you for directions and you could give them. You looked like a Londoner, you dressed like a Londoner, you walked like a Londoner, fast and without eye contact. You tried to phone your mother once a week but you often forgot. Yes, you told her, I’m OK, everything is good, yes, I’m eating, yes, the job’s fine. She didn’t really understand what your job was. You suspected she was telling people you were a film director.
The Society held a series of events on the new wave of cinema coming out of Europe. You arranged flights for a group of young, foreign-language directors and their entourages: some came from Berlin, Milan or Barcelona, some from LA. There was great excitement about these events. Journalists rang, wanting interviews. Tickets sold out. The Society’s head added more dates and these sold out, too. You booked hotels, you liaised with assistants, you scheduled press days.
You darted in and out of the interviews. Phone calls came in all the time for the directors: producers calling from the States, journalists from other countries, wives, girlfriends, casting agents, managers. You fielded the calls, you wrote down the messages, you carried slips of paper about the building. There was a buzz, an almost palpable frenzy. You gathered, from listening in on various interviews and phone calls, that these directors were all under the age of thirty. They were reinventing the parameters of film, expanding the potential of the medium.
There was a dinner. You booked the dinner. You didn’t choose the restaurant – one in Soho, owned by an artist – but you called it, you confirmed the numbers; you discussed dietary requirements with all concerned. You sent out invitations to members of the press, carefully selected and vetted by the Society’s head. You booked cabs when the time came, you went and told the various directors that the cabs had arrived, you rounded up the directors, you guided them to the doors, where the cabs were waiting, you gave directions to the drivers: over the river, to Soho.
As you shut the door of the last cab but one, something caught on your sleeve. You turned. A director had you by the wrist, his index finger hooked into your cuff. ‘Are you coming?’
You said, no. You said, not tonight. The truth was that you weren’t invited, you were too lowly, too assistanty, but it didn’t feel right to say so.
‘That’s too bad,’ the man said, in a mixture of American vocabulary and Scandinavian accent. He was Swedish, you knew, and had closely cropped blond hair. When he was with the others in the group, he seemed reserved and watchful; he didn’t say much.
You shrugged and smiled. You gestured towards the final cab, where two other directors were waiting.
But he didn’t move to get in. ‘Where are you going now?’ he said instead.
Home, you said. I’m going to walk over the river, then get the tube.
The man lit a cigarette. ‘Is it OK if I walk with you?’ He lifted one shoulder, then the other. ‘I’ve been indoors all day. A walk is just what I need.’
What about the dinner? you said, and the man, Timou Lindstrom was his name, waved his hand, motioning the cab to leave.
‘I’ll go later,’ Timou Lindstrom said.
You walked. He walked. He told you stories about the other directors, some of them rude. He related an on-set anecdote from when he was a runner about an actress who asked him to help strap on her false breasts. You tried not to be anxious about the dinner: would you be blamed if he didn’t turn up? What would your boss say if there was an empty seat? Would he go to the dinner when you reached the other side of the Thames?
He showed no inclination to head to the restaurant. You reached Aldwych, you went past Holborn, you walked through Covent Garden. At Cambridge Circus you took the plunge and stopped. The restaurant is just up there, you said. You pointed. You smiled. You put out your hand for him to shake.
He looked at your hand and laughed. ‘You think I want to go to the dinne
r? You think that’s why I’m walking with you? I hate those dinners. I hate those guys. They drive me mad with all their narcissistic jabbering. I’m walking with you because I want you to have a drink with me.’
Oh, you said. Oh, I see.
You went for a drink. You were secretly proud that you knew of a place just round the corner, up some steps and along a corridor. A row of grimy fairy-lights framed each window. The table was unbalanced. Timou wedged it with a beer mat. You leant your elbows on it to test: it no longer rocked back and forth. Magic, you said.
He asked you about your job, about London, about where you came from. You told him about your English father and your French mother, how they were wildly incompatible but had somehow made it work, about how your father had died when you were a teenager, about how you and your brother hated your suburban comprehensive school and lived only for the holidays, when your mother would whisk you back to Paris. She was, you said, the only mother who came to parents’ evenings dressed in Chanel.
As you spoke, his eyes roamed over your face, as if he was collating information about you that he might use later, as if he was thinking up his next question, his next line of enquiry. Tell me more, he said, while you were talking about the car ferry to France, about growing up bilingual; what kind of things did she wear, he said, when you were describing your mother walking into the school hall.
Timou told you about the script he was writing. It was about a group of friends who take a trip to a remote Swedish island. It unfolded in real time, he said, and he was just in the middle of describing the technical challenge of this, when he said, ‘Have you ever acted?’
You were so surprised that for a moment you said nothing. Then you shook your head, laughing a little, saying, no, never, maybe once or twice at school, but really not at all.
‘Look …’ he began, then grinned. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t even know your name. What is your name?’
This Must Be the Place Page 5