Lullaby

by Bernard Beckett

  I’ve always done that, slipped too easily into nostalgia, one small step from bad poetry. But if you can’t be a bad poet at seventeen, with your brother dying just down the corridor, what hope is there for poetry?

  I wondered how much of the time Maggie charged for consisted of waiting in silence.

  ‘How am I doing?’ I asked her.

  ‘You haven’t answered the question,’ she said.

  ‘What question?’

  ‘How does a top science student end up in drama school?’

  One step left. One small step. My problem was I wanted Maggie to like me and I needed her to hear the story. I couldn’t have both.

  ‘After the group broke up, Theo started to come apart too. There was a thing with a break in, and then a stolen car and a joy ride through the school. He came within a governor’s blink of being sent to an industrial training centre, but somehow he came out of the interview with an eleventh second chance. I say somehow: it was the smile, the handshake, his way of making people believe he was sincere, by believing it himself. I shouldn’t have been surprised when he came home one day and announced he had the lead role in the school drama production.

  ‘From the very first rehearsal, he changed. Changed back, I mean. The joker again, maker of plans, boy with a future. As if the awkward years had simply been deleted. Mrs Struthers reverse-aged in front of our eyes. The wrinkles I’d thought were age turned out to be ground-in worry, and her arthritis began responding to treatment. I remember one afternoon walking in on her and Theo practising a dance from the show. I watched them moving together around the room, and for a moment I could imagine what she was like when she was young. It was possible to believe she had once laughed and danced and felt beautiful. I wondered then what had happened to her, how she’d ended up with us. I didn’t ask.

  ‘Acting provided what athletics hadn’t. It made Theo whole again, by making him better than everybody else in the room. Somewhere in the past, Mum and Dad had managed to convince us we were special. I suppose they were trying to establish our confidence. They didn’t guess they were feeding us a belief that would become our addiction.

  ‘The show was about a boy who’d created an imaginary friend. That was Theo, co-starring with a hologram of himself. That’s probably how he got the part. Mr Watts was the sort of drama teacher who had all the theory but no feel for the actual art of it. He could produce quotes out of the air from plays no one else had heard of, but when it came down to watching an actor on stage, and telling them what to change, he had no flair. So the possibility of working with an actor with an identical twin (he preferred to say doppelganger) was very attractive. Theo wouldn’t need to be directed, he could simply live out a version of his own experience on stage. Except that was all bullshit. What Theo brought was charisma, and the ability to imagine a character into existence. He’d been preparing for the role all his life.

  ‘It was Theo’s idea to include me in the show. There was a problem with the ending. It was a big musical number, designed to rise above all that had gone before and bring the audience to its feet. In reality, it was just a lot of people singing and dancing, for no apparent reason other than the time was up: an unearned moment, destined to fall flat. I imagine Mr Watts saw that, he wasn’t totally useless, but he didn’t know what to do about it. He hoped a bit more volume from the band and finding a way to drift the hologram out over the crowd would be enough to cover up the deficiencies. By then Theo was effectively operating as an assistant director and he suggested they write a new final scene, where the hologram came to life. A cheap trick too, but he wrote a beautiful little dialogue between the two characters and Mr Watts bought it. And that’s how, three weeks from opening, I was welcomed into the ample bosom of the Cook High Theatrical Company.

  ‘I’d never been involved with anything like that before. I’d been in debating club, played chess for the school; there was athletics, and I was once co-organiser for a charity drive, but drama’s different. I don’t know how to describe it, a sort of mass delusion: a group of people holding hands and running full tilt to the edge of a clifftop, convinced they can fly. Obviously, that’s not quite it, because in the cliff scenario everybody falls to the ground and dies a hideous death. On stage, there’s always the tantalising possibility of success.

  There’s a certain type of person who needs to perform, and there’s a certain type of energy they bring, a sort of desperate confidence. Between you all, you construct the illusion of significance. From the outside, I’m sure it’s nauseating, but from the inside, it’s a room full of boys and girls and hugs and wishes. It’s seductive.

  ‘I said Theo was the lead, but you don’t get a school musical without a love interest: in our case Emily Watts, the drama teacher’s daughter. And it won’t surprise you to hear that by my third rehearsal I’d fallen in love with her. Theo hadn’t. I asked him, just to be sure. He doesn’t lie about those things.’

  I could feel myself doing it, slipping back into the present tense. The closer the story got to the interview room, the easier it was to do. Or the harder it was not to. The seven-year-old playmate—he’s gone forever either way. But the guy I stood on stage with, only thirteen months before—death, not time, was stealing him away. And death, you deny.

  ‘Emily expected a certain level of attention. And the fact that Theo wasn’t offering it unsettled her. There was nothing dignified about what I did, offering myself up as a substitute. But if you could see her on stage, the way she has of making every last person in the auditorium believe she’s performing just for them—dignity wasn’t a big part of the equation. I fell in love with Harriet because she was there. I fell in love with Emily because I knew, as long as I lived, I’d never find another like her.

  ‘I checked again with Theo, before I made my move.

  Are you sure there isn’t anything between you and Emily?

  There’s nothing, he said, and if he’d been lying I would have known.

  Why? Are you interested?

  Maybe.

  ‘That was a first for me, admitting it so easily. Hearts do actually skip a beat, by the way. I suppose you know that. I felt it, kicking back in with excitement.

  ‘Theo offered to help me, as if the camping trip had never happened. Reinvention is an easy trick—all you need’s an accomplice.

  ‘I loved those next three weeks, maybe more than any other time in my life. Theo was happy again, motivated and invincible. The two of us were working side by side, the way it was meant to be. And the whole time, slowly, carefully, I was edging closer to Emily. We were all of us caught inside the same bubble and the world couldn’t touch us. If you could have seen Theo, when he’s like that, everything revolving about his axis…

  ‘But bubbles burst.’

  9

  It was no good. Just when I was sure I’d managed to push it out of my mind, it came back, shocking in its power. The earth still spun, the heavens still pulled, the tide of him sloshed backwards and forwards.

  Him, Theo. Dying. Or dead? Which word to use? There was pressure at the back of my throat: a physical reminder of that thing I couldn’t swallow. I tried to cough it away, but produced only the gurgling of a drowning man. No, a drowning boy. The woman watched, waited. Doing her job.

 
‘So what happened?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘I did what you do. Found excuses to spend time with Emily. She made it easy for me, told me she wanted someone to help her learn her lines, even though her lines were fine. One time they needed someone to pick up the food for a cast lunch, and that was us, and then we both volunteered to help out when the crew doing the backdrop got behind with their painting. It was obvious she was waiting for me to say something, but it still took me another week to find the courage.’

  ‘What did Emily say?’

  ‘She said, not until the show is over. I took that as a yes. I floated through the entire season. I’ve never been so high. And then he fucked her.’

  ‘Or she fucked him,’ Maggie said. Cruel, and fair.

  ‘If we’re going to be accurate about it,’ I said, ‘they both fucked me. That’s what really happened.’

  ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘The two of them on stage together. The school had seen nothing like it. Probably it never will again. By the end of the fortnight we were turning people away at the door. The last curtain call, we were all in tears. And it was straight from there to a party. I lost track of them, there was a lot happening. They were both high, on canisters and adulation.

  ‘I think of it like this. You never want a show to end. You cling to it, and sometimes that means you cling to each other.’

  ‘That’s a very generous assessment.’

  ‘Now. At the time I would have been happy to see them both dead.’

  The sourness came back into my mouth. Maybe it had never completely gone away.

  ‘But they weren’t thinking of me, they weren’t thinking of how it would hurt me. They knew, of course, but there’s more to decisions than the things we know, right?’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I wallowed in hatred. First Harriet and now Emily, that’s how it seemed. If I’d been a better person, I might have found another way of looking at it. I might even have been pleased for him, noticed that the person I loved more than anybody in the world was happy again, maybe for the first time since our parents died. I might have worked out that the only way forward was to forgive him.’

  ‘That’s an awful lot to expect of a fifteen year old.’

  ‘Sixteen, by then. It was our last year.’

  ‘Still a lot,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Either you forgive them, or you end up having to forgive yourself. That’s the way it goes isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, it probably is,’ Maggie said.

  What about you, I wanted to ask her. Who haven’t you forgiven? There’d be someone. There’s always someone.

  ‘Angry’s a tight-fitting, ugly little place to make your home. It infects everything, even travels backwards through time. He’s pushed you around your whole life, it told me. You’ve got to stand up for yourself. You’ve got to make it stop. So when the year ended and he applied for drama school, and Emily applied too, I did the same. Just to piss him off. Just to show him he couldn’t have it all. Which was stupid. He didn’t have it all, not by a long shot. Drama school was his only fucking option.’

  ‘Were they together?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘No, it was a one-time thing. They both apologised to me. They wanted to make it all right. I wouldn’t let them.

  ‘The drama school’s an elite establishment. They only take twenty students each year, that’s from the whole country. Even though Emily and Theo were head and shoulders the most impressive performers in our school, it would have been remarkable if they’d both got through. And I was never a chance. I was just being an arsehole.

  ‘Other people understood my application was a petty act of emotional vandalism. It was the only time I remember Mrs Struthers getting properly angry. I walked into the kitchen while she was making pastry. She shook when she spoke. I thought she might hit me with the rolling pin.

  ‘Just imagine how Theo will feel, if you get selected and he doesn’t.

  ‘But I was angry too.

  ‘So, because I have a brother who’s a fuck up, I don’t get to do the things I love? I replied.

  ‘If I thought for one moment you loved acting, Mrs Struthers said, I would never have mentioned it.

  ‘I still don’t love it. And every time some eating disorder with a goatee tells me to feel the energy flowing into my body, it becomes a little less likely I ever will. But there you go, it’s done now.’

  ‘Is it?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Well, if you know how to turn back time, I’d be very fucking grateful if you’d share that. I’d take today back, to start with. Can I take it back for Theo too, is that how it works?’

  ‘You’ve still got your life ahead of you. There are still choices,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t know anything about my life,’ I told her.

  ‘I’m trying to find out,’ Maggie replied.

  I was angry, close to collapsing. Push me hard enough and I don’t push back. I crumple and cry.

  ‘So, what about school, what did your teachers say when you applied?’

  ‘They told me I was throwing my life away. You could be anything you want to be, they liked to say. They meant Doctor or Physicist or Engineer, any job with money and a title worthy of a capital letter. I don’t know if that would be me either, to be honest. Does it make you happy, being a psychologist? Or do you wish you’d run away to the circus?’

  ‘I’m scared of clowns,’ Maggie answered.

  There were moments, when it was as almost as if we were talking to each other. All part of her method, I imagine.

  ‘But you applied anyway,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t think I’d get in. I just knew that my applying annoyed him, and that was enough. I didn’t cheat. I didn’t try to mess with him, or give his name instead of mine at the audition. I did the only thing I knew how to do. I worked hard. I researched, spoke to people who made it through in the years before, rehearsed the two pieces I’d chosen until they felt part of me.

  ‘Emily struggles when people think badly of her. So when I suggested we prepare for the audition together, she agreed. That got inside Theo’s head. I knew it would. He came out of his audition fuming, said he’d blown it, but I didn’t believe him. I thought he was just being hard on himself. Later I talked to somebody who was in Theo’s audition group, and apparently he blew up at one of the examiners, just went nuts at him. My audition was better, obviously. I’d ground the roles into myself, and when they started directing, and asking me to do it different ways, it felt strangely natural. I’m good at exams, at being tested. That’s my environment. So I managed to convince them I was someone I’m not: an actor.’

  ‘Doesn’t that make you an actor?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘It was a fluke, a one-off. That’s the risk of auditions. Emily got accepted too.’

  I looked down. My ears burned with shame.

  ‘And now you feel guilty,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Some people would look at what you did and they wouldn’t see anything wrong with it.’

  ‘Some people are good at
seeing what they want to see.’

  ‘What if that’s what you’re doing?’ she asked. ‘What if you need to feel responsible for your brother? What if you’ve always needed that?’

  ‘I am responsible for him,’ I said. ‘It’s how it is.’

  ‘Why?’

  I wanted to swear at her. I wanted to stamp and throw things and tell her that had nothing to do with it, but I couldn’t. Because then she’d know how much I needed her to sign me off as competent, and from there she was easily smart enough to guess why. And once she knew that, she couldn’t sign me off. It was an impossible game.

  ‘He’s responsible for me, too.’

  ‘Is that how he’s behaved?’

  ‘He went looking for me in the bush. He might have died.’

  ‘He was a child then.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ I was sitting on my hands, digging my fingernails into my legs.

  ‘You’re only responsible for your own actions, Rene. No one can blame you for things Theo chose to do. You can’t blame yourself for them.’

  ‘Is this a condition of you finding me competent?’ I asked. ‘Do I have to stop caring about him?’

  ‘No.’

  Just the one word. It could have meant anything. Mostly it meant, I’m not going to push this. I think it also meant, I shouldn’t have pushed this. Twice now, she’d seen my anger, and the tank still felt brim full.

  ‘Your story isn’t finished,’ Maggie said.

  ‘It feels finished to me.’

  ‘Tell me about Emily. Tell me how it was that Theo and Emily came to be together today.’

  ‘Do I have to?’