by Julia Crouch
She sat back on her knees and surveyed the hallway. The carpet was fitted to the room, so was no theatre prop; it must have been here for many, many years. She would ask James if she could pull it up.
Up in the bedroom, she set The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead going on iTunes, using the drum break of the first track to give the energy to haul the suitcases on to the bed.
Lifting Jack’s clothes out of the case she had shared with him, she placed them in neatly folded piles on the wooden shelving in the eaves room at the side of the bedroom.
She liked unpacking. Even if they were only going away for a night or two, she would find a home for everything. To an outsider, it might look like a housewifely habit, but it was only partly that for Lara. If things were organised, lined up in piles, serried in their ranks, then she could cope. The same love of order had drawn her to graphic design as a career. It was also why she found Marcus and his slobbish chaos so infuriating. If it weren’t for her, the children wouldn’t ever have clean clothes, food in their bellies, dentist appointments …
She stopped that train of thought and instead applied her mind to getting the individual pills and creams out of the first-aid kit and lining them up on the shelf.
Circumstances had forced domesticity on to Lara at an early age. When she was nineteen, her plan had been to go to drama school, to train to be an actress. But during her year off, when she was working as a barmaid at the Dirty Duck – the Royal Shakespeare Company actors’ watering hole in Stratford-upon-Avon – she met Marcus. Thirty-one years old, a proper actor, he seemed impossibly glamorous to her. He asked her out and in six months’ time they were married – a royal one in the eye for Lara’s staid parents, who had found her theatrical plans hard enough to stomach, let alone an older man taking her, their only offspring, for his child bride.
Morrissey’s vocals and Johnny Marr’s jangly guitar pulled her back, as they always did, through the fabric of her past.
She tried, as she placed the box of plasters next to the antiseptic lotion on the shelf, to recall the feeling of excitement she had experienced whenever Marcus came into her bar.
It was hard to remember. A short while after their wedding – a while Lara tended to gloss over – they moved to Brighton and the twins were born. Marcus had to be available to go off to, say, Pitlochry, for, say, five weeks, at the drop of an agent’s phone call, and it would have been unthinkable for Lara to get a job when the twins were tiny. With no qualifications beyond her A levels in Art and Drama, she would never earn enough to cover two lots of childcare. So that was when the pattern was set: he went off and she found herself stuck at home with not enough pairs of hands to care for her two voracious infants. That was the end of any acting thoughts for Lara. She stepped off the ladder before she had even found the first rung.
She wondered if that was the root of her current disgruntlement. Thwarted ambition. It was, she thought, like a maggot boring into an apple. Just one small hole, but the entire fruit ruined. Looking back over the first three years of the twins’ lives, she couldn’t recall any sort of interaction with Marcus. He was there sometimes, though. He must have been there.
Perhaps that was when she began to shut down. But she knew it wasn’t. She could pinpoint that moment exactly, and it was even earlier. But she refused to let herself think about it any further.
She lined Jack’s few toys up on a low, reachable shelf: Floppy Dog, Woody, Power Rangers, some Star Wars junk.
In the end it was the Art A level that took her out of the house. When the twins hit three, they qualified for free day-care while Lara did a part-time Visual Communication course at the local college. Initially she had signed up as a way to regain her sanity after spending her early twenties up to her neck in baby paraphernalia. By the second year, she began to see its potential. She even managed to acquire real-world clients for some of her final-year projects. After she graduated with a distinction, she won a grant to buy an Apple Mac, scanner and printer, and set herself up in a corner of their front room.
She didn’t earn much, but felt good bringing at least some pennies in. And she could fit around Marcus’s work, which was brilliant in theory, except he was going for months at a stretch without so much as an audition. This was useful for Lara, because she had become quite busy and she welcomed the free childcare. But he hated it.
‘It’s just that the right job hasn’t come along yet,’ she would say, trying to cheer him up. ‘It will, soon.’ But it didn’t, or it didn’t very often. And if it did, it would be Equity minimum wage for some small part in a tiny regional theatre hundreds of miles away. He got these jobs through old friends putting in a good word for him. Not once after Bella and Olly were born did he find employment by stunning a director with a blinding audition.
Lara dutifully dragged the twins up and down the country so some wardrobe assistant could mind them for a tenner while she watched her husband perform. She remembered the moment – during an Agatha Christie as it happened, in a theatre somewhere up North – that the penny dropped for her. It had always been a given that acting was the only thing Marcus knew how to do. In the long, penniless stretches between jobs he refused to do anything else to earn money. While he never exactly said it was beneath him, he maintained it would be a diversion from the main project. He had to be ready to act, he said.
But that day, sitting in the dark of the auditorium watching him mark his way through the play, Lara realised his main project was missing something. His neck and shoulders had tightened up; his voice was slightly strangled. What had once looked as natural as breathing for him now appeared false and strained. He was committing that most awful of actorly sins: he was being unbelievable.
The lacklustre production – a stilted postmodern rendering that failed to be sufficiently ironic – didn’t help; but, the truth was, Marcus stank.
Of course, as she went backstage afterwards she couldn’t tell him. No one would tell him, she thought as she kissed him and said how marvellous he was. The work would just trickle away slowly as the same realisation struck the people he relied on for employment. Back then, when the children were tiny, she hated herself for disrespecting him. She had made her choices and she worked hard at keeping to them. Knowing he was a bad actor was very difficult for her.
She sighed at the memory and studied the two suitcases side by side on the creaky bed. Her own clothes were rolled into cigar shapes as her house-perfect mother had taught her to do when they went on their package holidays to Corfu or Majorca. ‘You get more in,’ she had said. ‘And the creasing is minimal.’ This habit her mother had of talking like a walking advertisement had always irritated Lara. It was one of the many things she now checked in herself – little genetic or habitual tics that parents, willing or not, hand down to fuck you up.
The random scramble of mostly chinos, baggy shorts and T-shirts in Marcus’s case showed he was not what you would call a natty dresser, and he didn’t exactly take care of his clothes.
It was this chaotic side of Marcus that finally got in the way of her working at home. He didn’t respect her time or her space, interrupting her to ask her where the toilet paper was, filling the house with fellow unemployed actors who would sit around all day, drinking endless cups of tea – graduating in the afternoon to wine – and bitching in well-modulated tones about this director or that agent.
Lara sat at her desk in the corner of the living room, trying to concentrate on her Quark layouts. Her job was to bring order and form to the bare text she received from clients, and the noise and desperation around her made her wince.
She thought about renting an office, but it seemed like such an enormous leap. At twenty-four she had been too young, too green. She hadn’t had a head for business – for example, her prices were far too low – and besides, she was too tied up at home to take any big risks.
So when Lara heard about the council job, she jumped at it. The pay, while not riches, covered the bills, and the hours were perfect: nine thirty until t
hree, five days a week. She could leave the house to Marcus, and nothing would fall apart if he had to go away for work. She applied for the job and got it, despite feeling she was somehow bluffing her way in.
And, she wondered as she arranged Marcus’s clothes on the shelf above Jack’s things, where had that got her? Not very far.
She hung up his one good shirt, a Paul Smith number she had bought him the previous Christmas. It was beautiful: blue with tiny pink flowers on it. But she couldn’t look at it without remembering how annoyed he had been at how much he thought she had spent on it. His estimate, as it happened, was well below the mark.
It had taken her one week to realise that in working for the council she had dug herself into a graveyard of ambition. Her office was full of people who liked an easy life: any display of spark was met with mistrust. And she had no respect whatsoever for her team leader, a vacillating man in his early forties who didn’t have it in him to make a single decision.
But she stuck with it because it fitted her life. And when Jack – as Marcus said, her happy accident – came along, the council’s maternity policies proved to be munificent. When he was six months old, she secured a place in the subsidised workplace nursery and returned to work. It all seemed so effortless that her new plan of giving up her tenured, risen-through-the-pay scales status and going back to freelancing looked bonkers.
But something had to change. She was bored. So bored she sometimes felt like screaming. When she first married Marcus, she had imagined she would lead a life of bohemian glamour. Now she found herself a local government employee with a pension plan and a weekly time sheet.
She knew that, older and wiser, she could now make a business work. In a few years’ time she would have her own office – a modern affair, she imagined, of taut steel wire banisters and pale oak – and two or three employees working on contracts with those mysterious blue chip companies that paid so well.
The deal she had struck with herself after the abortion was that if there were not going to be any more babies, there would be a career. If her marriage was going to survive after all these years, she had to make herself happy again.
She sat down on the squeaky bed and finally got her own few things out of the suitcase. What had she been thinking when she packed? Besides her running gear and the clothes she had worn on the journey, she had one pair of olive linen trousers, a green sleeveless top, two T-shirts, an inky tunic, a black jersey Boden thing and a pink floral dress she had bought years ago in a slim phase and hoped still fitted her. There were not enough clothes there, not really for a whole summer.
Wondering what she was going to wear to the barbecue, she eyed the pink dress. Before she let herself have a chance to think about it, she had peeled off her clothes and slipped it over her head. It was low cut, with a slightly structured front section that laced up like a corset. Smoothing down the front, she looked at herself in the worn, full-length mirror someone had propped up against the wall thinking, no doubt, that no actor’s bedroom is complete without one.
She was pleased to see that the dress fitted. Her breasts were still quite large from her recent pregnancy, giving her something of a cleavage. She turned for a side view, breathing in as much as she thought she could manage for the whole evening. It wasn’t too bad. She decided that this dress would be her outfit for the night, worn with her denim jacket and her black pashmina.
She was still looking at herself when she heard the staircase rumble under Marcus’s heavy step.
‘So the big ’uns have taken the little ’un off to the playground, or something,’ he said.
‘Great.’
‘Can we get the suitcases off the bed?’ he said. ‘I’ve got my lines to do and there’s nowhere else for me to go.’
Lara thought of the big, empty house, about how many perfect line-learning nooks and crannies there were.
‘Don’t you want to wait until you’ve done the read-through before you learn them?’ she said. ‘You’ve always said that’s the best way.’
‘Best way unless you’ve got the fuck-off lead part,’ Marcus said, smiling and pushing the suitcases on to the floor. Then he stopped and looked at Lara. ‘What’s that you’ve got on? Did you buy it?’
‘It’s ancient. What do you think?’ She breathed in and held her arms out.
Marcus looked her up and down.
‘Yes,’ he said in his slightly strangled acting voice.
‘You don’t like it, do you?’
‘I do,’ he said.
‘What’s the matter with it?’ She wished he was a better actor.
‘Don’t be angry with me.’
‘I won’t be angry with you if you tell me the truth,’ she said.
‘OK. Well, you look a little, well, bulgy in it.’
‘Bulgy?’
‘Um yes.’
Lara paused for a second and took a sideways glance in the mirror, catching herself unawares, not pulling in.
It’s true, she thought, her spirits plummeting.
‘Thank you for your honesty.’
‘No look. It’s lovely. It really is.’
Lara pulled the pink floral dress off and, hung it up at the far end of a rail running down one side of the eaves room, where it would stay all summer. She walked naked back into the bedroom holding the black jersey thing Johnnie Boden promised would flatter any shape. Marcus was already lying on the bed, studying his script. He didn’t look up at her.
She slipped the jersey thing on.
‘How about this?’ she said. ‘With my amber beads?’
Marcus sighed and raised his eyes. ‘What? Oh yes, that’s a lot better,’ he said. Then, pointedly, he returned to his script.
‘Right,’ Lara said, taking off the dress and hanging it up again. ‘Well. I’m going to have a shower, then I’m going to get on for a bit.’
‘Great,’ he said.
‘We’ll leave for the show at about four thirty, then?’
‘OK, babe. Could I just get on with this?’ He gestured to his script.
‘Fine,’ she said. And, picking up her laptop, she went out of the door, pulling it tight shut behind her.
Nine
‘THIS HEAT IS DISGUSTING,’ BELLA SAID, AS SHE, OLLY AND JACK dangled on the school playground swings.
The wooded hills beyond the perimeter of the playground made Bella feel tiny, encircled in their vast shawl of greenery. They were different to the South Downs back home, those long ridges of chalky grassland that spelled a welcome when she returned from a trip, filling her with freshness and possibility.
These New York hills were something altogether different. They hemmed her in, as if they were sucking the breath from her and transpiring it as yet more wetness in the awful, muggy heat of the late July afternoon.
These New York hills made her feel watched.
A trickle of sweat worked its way down the hollow of her back.
‘Ugh.’ She shuddered.
‘Push!’ Jack commanded from his own swing.
‘Your turn, Olly,’ Bella said.
‘But …’
‘Just do it.’ She pulled back and swung herself up, pointing her feet in front of her, silhouetting them against the hazy sun.
‘Shitting hell,’ Olly said. But he got up and pushed until Jack was giggling and soaring, his small legs catching the arc of each upward swing at the same time as Bella, so they hung together for a second each time in the dense air.
Bella and Olly had reached something of a truce since the day before – a practical step based on the fact that they were rather thrown together on Trout Island. In their usual manner, no words had been spoken about this – the ability to communicate silently with one another being one of the more socially acceptable aspects of their connection.
‘Looks like we’ve got company,’ Olly said, nodding over to the trees by the graveyard. Bella squinted across the shimmering tarmac and saw three boys, a little older than Olly and herself, leaning on a couple of shady headstones, s
wigging from bottles of Bud and passing a smoke around. One of them pushed a basketball from hand to hand, rolling it along the dirt.
‘Mmmmmmm … Reefer …’ Olly said, sniffing the air like a tracker dog.
‘Calm down, drug fiend,’ Bella said. ‘Do you think they’re OK? They look a bit sketchy to me.’ The boys were dressed almost identically in dirty baggy T-shirts, massive shorts and baseball caps. Despite the beating, sweltering sun, all three had preternaturally pale, malnourished skin. And they were eyeing Bella, Olly and Jack like a pack of territorial mongrels.
‘Are you worried we’ve taken over their “turf”?’ Olly teased. ‘Do you think it’s going to be Sharks and Jets or Crips and Bloods?’
‘They might have guns,’ Bella said, trying not to move her mouth too much in case her lips could be read.
‘I doubt it. Look at them. They’re just a bunch of yokels,’ he said. ‘Observe and learn.’ He gave Jack one last big push and wandered over the playground, hands in pockets, towards the boys.
‘Olly!’ Bella said. But it was useless trying to stop him. Olly just did things like that. He had no sense, and no reserve. Usually, though, he had charm enough to wangle himself out of the sticky spots this approach got him into. Their father had a similar way with him, but it tended to be so unctuous it embarrassed his offspring. They also got very peeved that the same delightfulness was rarely on display once the family doors were shut and there was no outside audience for it. With Olly, Bella thought, it was more ingrained, more in his bones than merely manufactured for public show.
Being the opposite of her brother in this way, Bella at once admired and was exasperated by his get-up-and-go. Sometimes it also made her feel like a complete mouse.
‘What a moron,’ she said to Jack, who giggled. But she had to admit she was impressed as Olly shook each of the boys’ hands, introducing himself and pointing out his sister and brother over by the swings. Then he selected a gravestone to sit on and accepted a beer and a toke on the joint.