Sweet Sorrow

by David Nicholls

  ‘Tomorrow then,’ she said.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ shouted Helen.

  ‘Tomorrow!’ said Alex.

  ‘See you, Charlie,’ said George. ‘Tomorrow,’ said Keith and Colin and Lucy, and I cycled away with their eyes on my back and thought, well, no choice now.

  I’ll give it to the end of the week.

  Swords

  At this point in my life, I had seen exactly one half of a play.

  Miss Rice, our fresh-faced English teacher, had arranged a coach trip to the National Theatre to see a matinee of The Way of the World. With its witty wordplay and sly, satirical jabs at the social mores of Restoration society, it was a bold choice for a coach-load of fifteen-year-olds, but we loved the concrete staircases and runways of the South Bank, whooping through tunnels and cheering the skateboarders. It was a great venue for a game of Laser Tag and by the time we took our seats in the auditorium, hopped up on Lucozade and wine gums, we were in full-on Lord of the Flies mode. Irresponsibly, the box office had placed us in the first row of the stalls and it didn’t take long for war to break out, Class 4F on one side, actors and audience on the other. We were outnumbered but with the actors constrained by their lines and professionalism, it was a desperately uneven match and soon a number of Maltesers had found their way through the fourth wall, so that the cast were unwittingly engaged in a football match with hissed cheers whenever the chocolate was kicked off stage right. As Congreve’s jokes sailed high over our heads, we laughed at the fop, not with glee but derision, so that the actor began to visibly doubt his performance, fixing his eyes elsewhere like someone trying to avoid a fight in a pub. Other actors were not so easily intimidated, delivering their lines with barely suppressed fury, even in the love scenes.

  And oh, the battle was long, so long, the interval like one of those desert mirages that moves further away the closer you get, the actors getting louder as their frustration grew, our running commentary losing it’s humour. There were complaints, and in the interval Miss Rice, close to tears, called us all together and told us how embarrassed she was, what a disgrace we were, and the fun had stopped abruptly. Most of us did not return for the second half – Miss Rice no longer cared what we did, couldn’t bear the sight of us – and instead we wandered the South Bank and threw gravel into the Thames. On the way home, the back of the coach felt like the rear seat of a police car, and we never found out what happened to the witty young lovers.

  If there was such a thing as a theatre bug, then I was immune. The problem wasn’t acting. I was happy to watch people pretending to be other people in the films and TV that I sucked up indiscriminately. But all the elements that were supposed to make theatre unique and special – the proximity, the high emotion, the potential for disaster – made it seem mortifying to me. It was too much, too bare and artificial.

  Then there was the whiff of pretension, superiority and self-satisfaction that clung to all forms of ‘the arts’. To perform in a play or a band, to put your picture on display in the corridor, to publish your story or, God forbid, your poem in the school magazine, was to proclaim your uniqueness and self-belief and so to make yourself a target. Anything placed on a pedestal was likely to get knocked off, and it was simply common sense to stay quiet and keep any creative ambitions private.

  Especially for a boy. The only acceptable talent was in sport, in which case it was fine to strut and boast, but my talents lay elsewhere, very possibly nowhere. The only thing that I was good at, drawing – doodling, really – was acceptable as long as it remained technical and free of self-expression. There was nothing of me in the still life of a half-peeled orange, the close-up of an eye with a window reflected in it, the planet-sized spaceship; no beauty, emotion or self-revelation, just draughtsmanship. All other forms of expression – singing, dancing, writing, even reading or speaking a foreign language – were considered not just gay but also posh, and few things carried more stigma at Merton Grange than this combination. This was why our school productions were populated almost entirely by girls in trousers with stick-on moustaches, speaking in low voices. Like the Elizabethan theatre in reverse, there was something disreputable about boys who did plays, and Shakespeare plays in particular. Shakespeare was play-acting in poetry, and all the beat-boxes and knife fights in the world could do nothing to change that fact.

  So I had joined a cult. We even looked like a cult, all of us standing in a circle in loose garments in the morning light, barefoot on the lawn of a large secluded mansion.

  ‘… and now I want you all to roll back up from the base of your spine, one vertebra at a time into a standing position … and now reach up, up, up high towards the sun …’

  No one could ever know that I was reaching for the sun. I reminded myself of the reason I was here, standing just a little to my right …

  ‘Charlie!’ shouted Alina. ‘Eyes, please! Focus!’

  Alina had none of Ivor’s spaniel-like bounce. She carried with her an air of furious disappointment, like a cabaret chanteuse who has unaccountably found herself booked for a children’s party, and we would stiffen as she walked amongst us, prodding at locked knees, pushing heads down closer to the ground as vertebrae popped, digging her fingers under rib-cages to check the engagement of the diaphragm. I didn’t even know I had a diaphragm.

  ‘Deep breaths! Really feel the air. Don’t forget to breathe … and roll forward once again. Charlie – how can you be expected to move freely like this?’

  In one last puny and self-defeating act of rebellion, I was still wearing jeans rather than the vests and jogging bottoms that the rest of the company wore, everything either too baggy or too tight. Alex was practically in a body stocking, but dancewear was a line I would not cross. What if I was knocked off my bike?

  ‘You can’t move like this, and if you can’t move you can’t act. Tomorrow, please come prepared for the work in hand.’

  This would be the routine from now on, early starts and a company warm-up, after which we’d consult the schedule. Rehearsals took place in various spaces around the Manor, so while the Nurse and Juliet were with Ivor in the orangery, the Capulet and Montague gangs would be with Alina in the orchard, prowling like panthers, lunging like cobras. The end of each session was marked by the ringing of a giant triangle hanging from a tree. No other indication of time was permitted – no watches, no phones for those who had them, in this case Alex and Miles, the sixth-formers. In ‘free periods’ when not required to rehearse, we were asked to go and find Helen and her production team in the stables, to help build scenery, dye costumes or work on publicity.

  Next Friday afternoon, the whole company would come together on the Great Lawn for a workshop on the making and wearing of masks. There seemed no way that this could turn out well, and the prospect hovered over me throughout the week, like an appointment for some dental procedure. In the meantime …

  ‘Montagues, Capulets, please – choose your weapons!’

  In the orchard, we were invited to pull items from a tub of broom handles and bamboo canes. ‘Try out your weapon,’ said Alina, with a Jedi’s solemnity, ‘see how each of them feels in your hand. Let your weapon choose you. I want you to keep it in sight at all times, whether you’re here or at home – wherever you are. I want you to carve it with your initials, keep it by your bed at night, decorate the handle if you wish. I want you to give it a name!’ I looked at the sawn-off broom handle in my hand and searched the orchard for someone to laugh with. But there was Lucy testing the weight of her stick and Colin balancing his on the tip on his finger. Alex was testing the imaginary edge of his bamboo pole with his thumb, while Miles seemed to be whispering to the mop handle. Even George, usually watchful and reserved, was gleefully whipping a long, narrow bough of hazel back and forth, trying to make the air hiss and whistle.

  And there was no denying that there was something satisfying about strutting around with a sword, even one made out of an old broom, the same primal pleasure I felt raising Harper’s air-r
ifle to my shoulder or playing with his dad’s sharpened axe or flicking a penknife into the trunk of a tree. Better yet, we were each given a broad leather belt to be worn low on the hip like gunslingers. The idea, said Alina, was that carrying a weapon changed the way you walked and stood and sat and held yourself, and though a great deal of the morning was spent tripping over the thing, I finally gave myself up to it, posturing with my hand on the imaginary hilt while waiting for a cup of squash and a biscuit. Maybe if I wound it round with thick rope, I thought, and glued it for a better grip, or shaved a little off the blade and rounded the other end, varnished it perhaps and this is how they get to you, the cult. This is how they wear you down …

  Later in rehearsals there’d be proper fight training with realistic-looking swords, but for now we swaggered towards the outdoor buffet like the lusty young Italian noblemen that we’d become, and chose from an array of vegetarian dishes courtesy of Polly and her mysterious staff: loamy wholemeal pasta-bakes surfaced with greasy cheese, chickpeas like a pile of goat droppings, salads of gritty grains and mulched beans, warmed and fermented by the sun. At a separate table, George stood hunched over a loaf of dense, mahogany-coloured home-made bread, sawing away as if it was the joist of a barn. It was very generous of Polly, but this was a kitchen where flavour played second fiddle to the necessity of a healthy, regular bowel, and the communal flatulence gave an edge to all our warm-downs.

  ‘It’s certainly a lot of roughage,’ said George, sawing away.

  ‘I swear,’ said Alex, grouting the grooves of a celery stick with hummus, ‘one day we’re going to roll forward one vertebra at a time and all simultaneously shit ourselves.’

  I found a banana as green as a lime and a scrawny bunch of grapes, and there was Fran beside me, script in hand.

  ‘So what have you named it?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Your sword, what’s it called?’

  ‘Stick,’ I said. ‘I’m going to call it Stick.’

  ‘Good choice.’

  ‘I didn’t choose Stick, Stick chose me.’

  ‘So how do you and Stick feel about finding somewhere private?’ With one hand on the hilt and the other holding the bowl of grapes, I followed Fran down to the meadow.

  Pygmalion

  We settled in the shade of a low-boughed tree, near the spot where she’d first seen me. At that time, I’d been reading with a cigarette in my hand and no top on, and perhaps she’d thought I was an intellectual. If so, it wouldn’t take long to reveal the truth.

  ‘I think we should just read it through, line by line, just to see how it sounds. Is that all right?’ Though we strained for informality, there was something unavoidably teacherly in her manner. I’d not expected to be a student again, and I felt the old anxieties. ‘When you’re ready.’ She put her hands behind her head and closed her eyes. ‘I’m listening.’

  I licked my lips and ran at it. ‘Here were the servants of your adversary close fighting ere I did approach—’

  ‘Don’t ignore the comma. Punctuation is your friend. Not your only friend, but it will help. And what does ere mean?’

  ‘“When”? When I approached—’

  ‘Or “before”.’

  ‘So “when” is wrong?’

  ‘Both work, but “before” is better than “when”.’

  ‘Before I approached—’

  ‘As in “even before”. So he’s saying it because …?’

  ‘It’s an excuse? He doesn’t want the blame?’

  ‘And what are they doing?’

  ‘Fighting.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Close fighting.’

  ‘So it’s …’

  ‘Close combat.’

  ‘So it’s …’

  ‘Stabby?’

  ‘Really stabby. So …’

  ‘Here were your enemies, stabbing each other before I’d even got here.’

  ‘Not just enemies.’

  ‘Servants of your enemies.’

  ‘So he’s a …’

  ‘Snob?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe he’s—’

  ‘Posh. Posher than them.’

  ‘Now say it again, bit more acting.’

  ‘Here were the servants of your—’

  ‘But not with a funny voice. Just talk normally.’

  ‘Aren’t I meant to, what’s it called … project?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m right here,’ she said, and without opening her eyes, she reached above her head and, for a moment, laid her arm across my leg. ‘Just tell me what happened.’

  ‘Here were the servants of your adversary, close fighting ere I did approach.’

  ‘Getting there. Again.’

  ‘Here were the – you do know there’s pages of this stuff?’

  ‘It’ll get easier.’

  ‘You say it.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Just say it and I’ll copy you.’

  ‘I can’t do your part for you.’

  ‘No, but you do it and I’ll copy you but it will be me. Say it!’

  ‘No!’

  I nudged her with my foot. ‘Go on! Say it.’

  ‘Just this once,’ she sighed. ‘Here were the servants of your adversary, close fighting ere I did approach.’

  I copied her, the intonation and emphasis.

  ‘Okay. Let’s go on, shall we?’

  And so we did, tiptoeing through it until along came Fiery Tybalt, who ‘cut the winds who nothing hurt withal hissed him in scorn. O-kay.’

  ‘It’s fine, take it bit by bit.’

  ‘What’s withal?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly, but don’t worry.’

  ‘Is it “as well”? “Also”?’

  ‘Or “nevertheless”.’

  ‘But which one?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, I understand it.’

  ‘So the wind was not hurt.’

  ‘Because …’

  I thought of George and his hazel stick back in the orchard, his helpless grin as he whipped it through the air, trying to make it whistle. Did boys do that four hundred years ago?

  ‘He’s swishing it about and missing, and the air sounds like it’s sort of taking the piss.’

  ‘Exactly. So …’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So say this but mean that. That’s all acting is, really. Knowing what you want to say but with the words you’re given.’

  I nodded, then, ‘Can you repeat that?’

  ‘Okay.’ She flipped onto her front to face me. ‘Okay, what I mean is, imagine I say, “I hate you.” Not you-you, but you. I can say it like, God, I really hate you, or I can say it like I secretly love you, or I find you disgusting, or beautiful, or, hm, you intrigue me. I’ve got to say “I hate you” because that’s what’s written down, but I can say those other things too. If I say “I hate you” but I mean “I really want to kiss you” then you – not you-you, but you – will know what I really mean. Not in an obvious way but it will come across, in thousands of tiny little signs that we’re not even aware of or able to control – the way we sit or eye movement or whether we blush or whatever and … you will know what I really mean. Not you-you. The audience. Does that make sense?’

  I reached for a word I’d heard but never used. ‘So, like … subtext?’

  ‘Not just subtext. Irony and metaphor, all that stuff, they’re all ways of not saying what you mean, but still saying it.’

  ‘I think it’d be easier if everyone said exactly what they meant in as few words as possible.’

  ‘It might be. But where’s the poetry in that?’ She lay back down, dropping the last of the grapes into her mouth. ‘And when does anyone say what they really mean? Seventy, eighty per cent of what people say is – not a lie exactly, but … off to the side. Just coming out with feelings, complete honesty, I think it’d send people crazy. Besides, much more entertaining to work out what’s really going on.’

  A moment passed in which I wondered if this was the most profound conversati
on I’d ever had. Not only had I used the word ‘subtext’, but the notion that a conversation about subtext might itself have a subtext, the complexity of this, was as dizzying as standing between two mirrors in a lift. She nudged my leg. ‘Read it to me again.’

  ‘He swung about his head and cut the winds/Who nothing hurt withal hissed him in scorn.’

  ‘There you go, that makes sense. It’s quite … witty, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, not laugh-out-loud.’

  ‘I mean “wit” in the other sense.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I didn’t know that there was another sense, and perhaps she knew this too, because she went on, ‘Not a ha-ha joke, but playing with an idea, improvising. So he’s clever or he thinks he’s clever or he wants the Montagues to think he’s clever. That’s something you could use. If you wanted to.’

  ‘I could wear glasses.’

  ‘Like clever people do?’

  ‘You think that’s too obvious?’

  ‘No. I like it. Look at you, with your bold character choices.’ She stopped abruptly, and spat something into her palm. ‘Sorry. These grapes are really manky. Carry on.’

  Jamming

  In the afternoon, Fran rehearsed with her Romeo and we clattered with our swords back to the orchard to rehearse the opening. The thumb-biting business had been handed over to John and Lesley, the new arrivals from the Lakeside Players and, according to Keith, ‘practically semi-professional, leading lights of the local scene’. They certainly had a youthful lustiness, hanging off each other’s necks in breaks, tucking their hands into the other’s pockets.

  ‘I think they might be swingers,’ said George.

  ‘Semi-professionals,’ said Colin.

  ‘Leading lights in the local scene,’ said Alex.

  ‘They’re certainly very touchy-feely,’ said Lucy, ‘considering how ancient they are.’ They were perhaps in their mid-thirties, but were tireless and keen and I was happy to sit in the shade and watch them bite their thumbs, and the afternoon wore on, as sticky and soporific as any in old Verona, until it was time to go. We gathered on the driveway, Lucy balancing her bamboo on the tip of her finger, Colin leaning on his and swaying from side to side like Fred Astaire, George writing his name on a broom handle with the fountain pen he kept in his top pocket; street toughs.