by Various
It took me a moment to be able to speak. “That sounds like … the opposite of my mother. I think she’d find some … horrible words to describe yours.”
“What, you’re setting me up for meeting her today, all the while thinking of her like that?”
“Would you prefer it if I lied?”
“Well, she is your mother. Perhaps she deserves some falsehoods being told on her behalf. None of us can really judge our parents. I don’t believe in karma, but…” She shook her head quickly and changed the subject. “I have to introduce you tonight. Have you chosen your ace name?”
“I sometimes think … The Understudy.”
She considered it, flatteringly seriously. “I like the humility of that. But you’ll need to know when to become the lead. You’ll need to be strong enough to make that change and have people accept it.”
I felt ridiculously close to tears. I shouldn’t have got into such a serious conversation with everything that was hanging over my head. I needed to keep a distance. “I’m not ready yet. Nowhere near.”
“Not after today?”
“Of course not.”
She nodded, pleased again. “Have you told your mother your real name?”
I couldn’t even shake my head.
“Before we go on,” she said, “decide your name.”
* * *
This next part of what happened is something that I can only tell you about secondhand, from what Croyd told me when he called me that afternoon. And yet it’s the most important thing. So you’ll have to accept my memories of his memories. He went over everything several times. The sound of his voice scared me from the moment I took the call. “I have to tell you,” he said, “I have to tell you before you see her again. She swore me to secrecy, and I said yes, I don’t know why I said yes—”
I was frightened that I was talking to someone who wasn’t the man I knew anymore. I also knew, instantly, that she’d done that to him. That the rocklike tradition of what she was had put a hole in him and he was sinking. I said, “Don’t tell me, let me come and see you,” but he started yelling at me that my career was the most important thing, that I had to stay there and get ready, and he made me swear to keep that promise. Finally, I managed to get him to tell me what happened, and here it is, for you, through all the distortions.
He’d taken Mum out for lunch at an excellent diner he knew in Greenwich Village, one where the dodginess was a little more under the surface than usual, and which had, to use his words, “A billion kinds of coffee, cause that always impresses you Brits.”
“I’d just like to say,” he said, holding her chair for her, “I’m charmed by how open-minded you’ve been about your daughter and me. I think she’s a peach.” He frowned at her reaction. “That’s a good thing.”
“You talk,” she said, “like you’re from my father’s generation. Why is that?”
He’d shrugged. He didn’t want to lie again to her, when he’d been going to tell the truth.
“What do you do for a living?”
“Recently I’ve been a DVD wholesaler. Before that, I was an importer. And I’ve been known to dabble in the security business.” He coughed as the waiter brought them the coffee.
“The sort of thing a con man would say.”
Again, he was forced to silence, cornered.
“Your daughter’s got a delightful power—”
“Ah, I was wondering if she’d told you. Please don’t use that like it’s a key to unlock the mysteries of my own approval. Abigail is infected. It’s a medical condition, not a political cause. I mean, look at her, look what’s become of her! I had to come over and see what she’d sunk to. Because I still care about her, you see.”
He hadn’t expected this. He’d just stared at her.
“Here she is, an exile from her home, because of what people there would say, living in a ghetto—”
“She came to New York for Broadway—!”
“An excuse for when you’ve lost a life of comfort and ease, and have been reduced to scraping a living by performing as a freak in a circus.”
“She is not a freak!”
“And neither are you.”
“No!”
“And that’s why you lied to me. When you told me you were normal.”
And suddenly Croyd was trying, and failing, to hold a dozen full cups of coffee. Like a clown. It burst all over the table. It stained the cloth, it covered his clothes, it burnt him. It missed Mum completely.
“Tell me everything,” she said. “I might be sympathetic to your plight.”
That’s all he told me of the conversation. It was only later I learned there was more to it. I stood there beside the ring with my phone in my hand, shaking. “I thought … she was proud of me,” I said. I managed to swallow down the end of that sentence. And then I hated myself almost as much as I hated her. “Where is she now?”
“Shopping. We’re still going to come to the show together. I don’t know why I said yes. I kept thinking about you—”
I hate being angry. I hate rows. I hate people grandstanding like that. I hate disruption. I hate that my mum drags me into all that. “I don’t want her here. I don’t want to see her—”
“Absolutely. You want it, I can get some of the guys to put her in the back of a cab and make sure she gets on a plane.”
“Yes. Yes, that’s great, do it!”
“Some of those guys I know. Who make sure of things. And you know she’s not going to make it easy, she’s going to push them. And then they might … reciprocate.”
“Fine.”
He gave up with that. He was just about yelling at me now. As if he was scared that neither of us could seem to find a way to stop the inevitability of all this. The inevitability. It only seems like that now. “And then, what, you’re estranged from her? Cut off? You don’t have a family no more?”
“I don’t now!”
* * *
I went backstage for costume and makeup. Alice, the makeup lady, had to ask me to relax my face, because she wasn’t going to be able to fill in the frown lines otherwise. I managed not to have her have to cope with tears. It was just basic stage makeup, and my costume was a deliberately ordinary frock and dark glasses. Covering up the tats hadn’t just been for my mother’s benefit.
Radha, in her colorful, loose-fitting stage costume, was waiting for me outside. She looked at me, understood something, and took my hands in hers. “Breathe,” she said.
I breathed.
“We’re doing this for the audience. We owe them our best performance.”
I managed to nod.
“Whatever this new crisis is, you have to put it behind you. For your own sake.”
I managed to share a smile with her. I was already there, actually. Or I thought it was. Performing is my home, and I was deciding it was also going to be my family. It and Croyd.
“But most important of all, remember this: If you don’t manage to put it out of your mind, and mess up up there, I will fucking kill you.”
And that was said with such an enormous grin on her face, and such steely eyes, that I was right back to being overawed again. And that took something serious in my brain and fixed it there for the future. Because that was professionalism. There it was. “Understudy,” I said, helplessly.
She shook her head. “No. Oh well. I’ll just have to name you.”
I couldn’t find anything to say.
I hurried out toward the side door to join the queue.
* * *
That was the plan, you see, for me to head into the venue with the rest of the audience, anonymously. I’d been provided with a ticket that would place me in just the right seat. I hesitated on the corner, looking at the line, worried that I’d join it at just the point Croyd and Mother did. But no, there they were, Croyd rolling his head to try and ease the tension, Mum looking pointedly at him and then all around, as if she was worried to be seen with him. As if the scales of right and wrong there were the other wa
y round. Neither of them knew what the details of the act were going to be.
I joined the back of the queue and, desperately trying to put everything else out of mind, headed in with everyone else.
* * *
I took care to sense, as the four sides of bleachers around the ring filled up, if anyone else with, you know, powers, had entered. There were two, both deuces. That is, they had useless powers. One of them could turn her hands different colors, the other one had complete control over the style of his moustache. I relaxed, let my power harmlessly flirt with theirs. My palms ran through a range of hues, my top lip itched, but I didn’t let it sprout. If one of the audience had turned out to have a major power I couldn’t deal with the presence of, I had a number ready to call on my mobile, and they’d have been led out, with gifts and a refund, before Radha’s act. The circus authorities had obviously heard about my earliest experiences in professional theater.
I sat through the clowns, who were a fast-moving bundle of acrobatic sight gags that made the children and a lot of the adults in the audience squeal with laughter. None from me. My gaze, in the moments when the lights were up, had found Croyd and my mother in the crowd. She was looking prim, her mouth a line, suggesting a smile but not being one. I sat through a joker high wire act, the Flying Crustaceans, who used their pincers to snap from trapeze to trapeze. And I thought about me and, you know, love.
When I was in my teens, I’d been too focused on getting away from Dorset and the weight of history there to have much in the way of romance. By which I mean there was, you know, stuff, of the usual kind, involving cider and boys who drove tractors. But I always had one hand reaching out ready to extricate myself. I’d fallen in with Croyd like it was going to be the obvious, central relationship of my entire life, not, like these things seemed to be with some of my classmates at the School, a test drive, the first of maybe many. Maybe I was a bit old-fashioned like that. Made by my Mum. There was a terrible thought. I absolutely did not want to be. Had she been right that I’d run here not to something but from something? I thought about the times when my family had met other families from my parents’ class, what their looks had meant, what the lack of party invitations had meant, why I’d ended up only with boys who drove tractors and never those who bought them.
Well. Maybe the bitch was right about some things.
The lights went up on the ring once more, revealing Radha standing there. “Ladies and gentlemen!” she called out. And the audience was silent. And she didn’t need a mike. “You may have heard of me. You may think you know everything about me. You know I can do … this!” The lights flickered as the back-up generators kicked in, helping the grid handle the sudden demand for power. This was why the show had that sign outside saying no audience members with pacemakers allowed. The BAC had had to rent some serious megawattage to avoid blacking out whole city blocks. With a dramatic gesture, Radha’s body suddenly contorted and the space around her did too, like reality had just done a magic trick with a folded handkerchief. Her garment burst from her in a moment which managed to be (and I’m told you can see it slowed down to individual frames on YouTube) both alluring and modest at the same time. She spun to a halt on the spot, taking up much of the ring, in her new form, that of a full-sized Asiatic elephant.
“And,” continued her voice, now a recording being played over the speakers, “you probably know I can do … this!” And with an impossibly graceful upward leap, and a single flap of her enormous ears, the elephant that was Radha took to the air. She soared straight up, to the top of the big top, then managed, the band striking up a boisterous tune with shrieking electric guitar as she did so, to turn that into an elegant spiral, flashing over the audience, heading down and down, faster and faster. They started to applaud wildly, because most of them, being tourists, although they had probably heard of Radha’s power, wouldn’t have seen it live before. I didn’t applaud, though. Playing my part, I folded my arms over my chest, looking glum. This was not hard.
“But did you know,” the recording continued, “that I can also do … this!” And as she swung her third turn down toward me, she tensed her trunk, raised it above her head, and then straightened it suddenly in my direction.
The blast of water hit me right in the face.
At that same moment I let down my guard and let her power take me.
We’d practiced this move for weeks, with dummies in the seats around me. (Which had, actually, each been moved an inch farther away from mine.) I took the flight power a tiny instant before I took the transformation. My human feet sprang upward a moment before my body above them burst into its new elephantine shape. My carefully weakened clothes sprang apart, to reveal nothing much in that nanosecond, I really hoped, because I didn’t want that to become, you know, my signature move. To the audience, especially to those screaming in horror and glee nearby, it seemed that one of their number had suddenly exploded into being a flying elephant—
—who spiralled up to join, exactly as we’d rehearsed ten times a day, Radha, the two of us flying around the ring equidistantly. She was waving her trunk playfully, suggesting she could do it to many more of the audience too, and the clowns were running about putting up umbrellas over people. “No,” cried out the recording, “you’re quite safe. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Abigail Baker, The Actor!” And there was applause as, perhaps with some relief, the audience remembered that I was that girl they’d heard about and, oh yes, they’d wondered what I was going to be doing in the show.
And she’d named me in that instant. Like something out of The Jungle Book. In the recording she’d made just before we went on. But I only really paid attention to that later.
Because as I sped above them, I kept looking at Croyd and Mother. Looking and looking. Round and round. Spiralling gradually downward. He was applauding, yelling, bellowing, loving me. Though he’d never used that word.
She was nodding, sighing, acknowledging that this was the best I could do in these sad circumstances. I was such a disappointment to her.
I couldn’t help it. I say that, but I know I could have. What was meant to happen now was that Radha and I were supposed to spiral in toward each other, clasp trunks, spin around until the moment it looked like we were going to fly up and hit the ceiling, then change back and fall, naked in the moment before the lights went out, into the net. Costumes would be thrown to us, and donned in the moment before we somersaulted out of the net and onto the sawdust to take our bows.
That’s what should have happened.
I got that expression of my mother’s locked into my head, bigger and bigger, on every circuit of the room. All her condescension, and all my guilt and anger, always in my way, time after time. And here I was doing this incredible, beautiful thing, here I was, strong and famous and adult, and it was never going to be acknowledged, not from this woman whose acknowledgment would have meant everything. To her, all this was shameful. My love was shameful. And so in the end was I.
And I proved her right.
I swear, I just wanted to knock that stupid hat off her head.
I swung deliberately an inch lower. I extended one of my enormous elephant feet as I saw her turning to look up toward me as I approached, looking perhaps a little bored now. Croyd realized a second before she did. He started to yell no.
Him looking scared in that second … him starting to cry out in horror, the sudden expression of the fear that had been hanging over us, the things we weren’t talking about … I think I must have instinctively reached out to him in that second, mentally. I think I must have connected us. For the last time. Because what his power really is, like he said … It’s sleeping.
I suddenly found a terrible shuddering fatigue grabbing my body. I realized, as the audience before me became a screaming dreamscape of surreal clowns, that I was somehow—
Falling asleep.
With my last conscious thought, I managed to use the power of flight that was about to leave me to throw myself sideways.
I could feel myself spinning as time slowed down to a crawl. It was half a dream, half adrenaline trying desperately to keep me awake as I spun toward those hard bleachers and the flesh and bone of anyone I might connect with in a high-speed crash.
Something grabbed me from behind. And threw me with the strength of an elephant.
And there was Croyd throwing himself forward out of the seats, heaving clowns out of the way, and diving for the safety net. For so much more safety net. Than there had been. In a different place. And he was right underneath me now! If I was still an elephant when I landed—!
* * *
I woke up in a hospital. I scrambled up, shouting, demanding to know if everyone was all right—! And standing there at the end of my bed wasn’t Croyd or my mother … just Radha.
“Nobody got hurt,” she said. “You included.”
After a moment I was able to talk again. “That was sheer luck,” I said finally. “It was all my fault.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Understudy,” I said, starting to cry. Because it hadn’t been Croyd who had nearly hurt someone in a careless rage.
“Yes,” she said. And it turned out that had been all she’d been there to say. Because she headed for the door. A moment later, Croyd and Mum entered. Like she’d told them I’d said it was okay. They both looked horribly caring and fearful at me. I felt like I was twelve or something.
“My darling,” said Mum, and meant it. “My darling, thank God.”
The look on Croyd’s face said he hadn’t told her what I’d been trying to do. He looked more tired than I’d ever seen him.