‘I’m going to be a pop star,’ said Tracy.
‘What’s that you said?’ – her father, laying down the paper.
‘That’s what I want to do,’ said Tracy, ‘other people have done it.’
‘What nonsense,’ said the father. ‘I thought you were going in for hairdressing.’
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ said Tracy.
‘You won’t stay in this house if you’re going to be a pop star,’ said the father. ‘I’ll tell you that for free.’
‘I don’t care whether I do or not,’ said Tracy.
‘And how are you going to be a pop star?’ said her mother.
‘I’ll go to London,’ said Tracy.
‘London. And where are you going to get your fare from?’ said the father, mockingly, picking up the paper again.
Mark could see that Tracy was thinking this over: it was a real objection. Where was her fare going to come from? She paused, her mind grappling with the problem.
‘I’ll sell my records,’ she said at last.
Her father burst out laughing. ‘You’re the first one who starts out as a pop star by selling all your records.’ And then in a sudden rage in which Mark could hear echoes of reality he shouted,
‘All right then. Bloody well go then.’
Helen glanced at Mark, but his expression remained benevolent and unchanged.
Tracy, turning at the door, said, ‘Well then, I’m going. And I’m taking the records with me.’ She suddenly seemed very thin and pale and scrawny.
‘Go on then,’ said her father.
‘That’s what I’m doing. I’m going.’ Her mother glanced from daughter to father and then back again but said nothing.
‘I’m going then,’ said Tracy, pretending to go to another room and then taking the phantom records in her arms. The father’s face was fixed and determined and then Tracy looked at the two of them for the last time and left the room. The father and mother were left alone.
‘She’ll come back soon enough,’ said the father but the mother still remained silent. Now and again the father would look at a phantom clock on a phantom mantelpiece but still Tracy did not return. The father pretended to go and lock a door and then said to his wife,
‘I think we’d better go to bed.’
And then Lorna and Helen went back to their seats while Mark thought, this was exactly how dramas began in their bareness and naivety, through which at the same time an innocent genuine feeling coursed or peered as between ragged curtains.
When the bell rang after the first scene was over he found himself thinking about Tracy wandering the streets of London, as if she were a real waif sheltering in transient doss-houses or under bridges dripping with rain. The girls became real to him in their rôles whereas they had not been real before, nor even individualistic behind their wall of apathy. That day in the staffroom he heard about Tracy’s saga and was proud and non-committal.
The next day the story continued. Tracy paced up and down the bare boards of the classroom, now and again stopping to look at ghostly billboards, advertisements. The girls had clearly been considering the next development during the interval they had been away from him, and had decided on the direction of the plot. The next scene was in fact an Attempted Seduction Scene.
Tracy was sitting disconsolately at a desk which he presumed was a table in what he presumed was a café.
‘Hello, Mark,’ she said to the man who came over to sit beside her. At this point Tracy glanced wickedly at the real Mark. The Mark in the play was the dark-haired girl who had asked for the records and whose name was Annie.
‘Hello,’ said Annie. And then, ‘I could get you a spot, you know.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s a night club where they have a singer and she’s sick. I could get you to take her place.’ He put his hands on hers and she quickly withdrew her own.
‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘If you come to my place I can introduce you to the man who owns the night club.’
Tracy searched his face with forlorn longing.
Was this another lie like the many she had experienced before? Should she, shouldn’t she? She looked tired, her shoulders were slumped.
Finally she rose from the table and said, ‘All right then.’ Together they walked about the room in search of his luxurious flat.
They found it. Willing hands dragged another desk out and set the two desks at a slight distance from each other.
The Mark of the play went over to the window-sill on which there was a large bottle which had once contained ink but was now empty. He poured wine into two phantom glasses and brought them over.
‘Where is this man then?’ said Tracy.
‘He won’t be long,’ said Mark.
Tracy accepted the drink and Annie drank as well.
After a while Annie tried to put her hand around Tracy’s waist. Mark the teacher glanced at the class: he thought that at this turn of events they would be convulsed with raucous laughter. But in fact they were staring enraptured at the two, enthralled by their performance. It occurred to him that he would never be as unselfconscious as Annie and Tracy in a million years. Such a shorn abject thing, such dialogue borrowed from television, and yet it was early drama that what he was seeing reminded him of. He had a quick vision of a flag gracing the roof of the ‘theatre’, as if the school now belonged to the early age of Elizabethanism. His poor wooden O was in fact echoing with real emotions and real situations, borrowed from the pages of subterraneous pop magazines.
Tracy stood up. ‘I am not that kind of girl,’ she said.
‘What kind of girl?’
‘That kind of girl.’
But Annie was insistent. ‘You’ll not get anything if you don’t play along with me,’ she said, and Mark could have sworn that there was an American tone to her voice.
‘Well, I’m not playing along with you,’ said Tracy. She swayed a little on her feet, almost falling against the blackboard. ‘I’m bloody well not playing along with you,’ she said. ‘And that’s final.’ With a shock of recognition Mark heard her father’s voice behind her own as one might see behind a similar painting the first original strokes.
And then she collapsed on the floor and Annie was bending over her.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ she was saying. ‘I really didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.’
But Tracy lay there motionless and pale. She was like the Lady of Shalott in her boat. The girls in the class were staring at her. Look what they have done to me, Tracy was implying. Will they not be sorry now? There was a profound silence in the room and Mark was aware of the power of drama, even here in this bare classroom with the green peeling walls, the window-pole in the corner like a disused spear. There was nothing here but the hopeless emotion of the young.
Annie raised Tracy to her feet and sat her down in a chair.
‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘it’s true that I know this man.’ He went over to the wall and pretended to dial on a phantom phone. And at that moment Tracy turned to the class and winked at them. It was a bold outrageous thing to do, thought Mark, it was as if she was saying, That faint was of course a trick, a feint, that is the sort of thing people like us have to do in order to survive: he thought he was tricking me but all the time I was tricking him. I am alive, fighting, I know exactly what I am doing. All of us are in conspiracy against this Mark. So much, thought Mark, was conveyed by that wink, so much that was essentially dramatic. It was pure instinct of genius.
The stage Mark turned away from the phone and said, ‘He says he wants to see you. He’ll give you an audition. His usual girl’s sick. She’s got . . . ’ Annie paused and tried to say ‘laryngitis’, but it came out as not quite right, and it was as if the word poked through the drama like a real error, and Mark thought of the Miracle plays in which ordinary people played Christ and Noah and Abraham with such unconscious style, as if there was no oddity in Abraham being a joiner or a miller.
‘Look, I’ll call you,’ said the stage
Mark and the bell rang and the finale was postponed. In the noise and chatter in which desks and chairs were replaced Mark was again aware of the movement of life, and he was happy. Absurdly he began to see them as if for the first time, their faces real and interested, and recognised the paradox that only in the drama had he begun to know them, as if only behind such a protection, a screen, were they willing to reveal themselves. And he began to wonder whether he himself had broken through the persona of the teacher and begun to ‘act’ in the real world. Their faces were more individual, sad or happy, private, extrovert, determined, yet vulnerable. It seemed to him that he had failed to see what Shakespeare was really about, he had taken the wrong road to find him.
‘A babble of green fields,’ he thought with a smile. So that was what it meant, that Wooden O, that resonator of the transient, of the real, beyond all the marble of their books, the white In Memoriams which they could not read.
How extraordinarily curious it all was.
The final part of the play was to take place on the following day.
‘Please sir,’ said Lorna to him, as he was about to leave.
‘What is it?’
But she couldn’t put into words what she wanted to say. And it took him a long time to decipher from her broken language what it was she wanted. She and the other actresses wanted an audience. Of course, why had he not thought of that before? How could he not have realised that an audience was essential? And he promised her that he would find one.
By the next day he had found an audience which was composed of a 3a class which Miss Stewart next door was taking. She grumbled a little about the Interpretation they were missing but eventually agreed. Additional seats were taken into Mark’s room from her room and Miss Stewart sat at the back, her spectacles glittering.
Tracy pretended to knock on a door which was in fact the blackboard and then a voice invited her in. The manager of the night club pointed to a chair which stood on the ‘stage’.
‘What do you want?’
‘I want to sing, sir.’
‘I see. Many girls want to sing. I get girls in here every day. They all want to sing.’
Mark heard titters of laughter from some of the boys in 3a and fixed a ferocious glare on them. They settled down again.
‘But I know I can sing, sir,’ said Tracy. ‘I know I can.’
‘They all say that too.’ His voice suddenly rose, ‘They all bloody well say that.’
Mark saw Miss Stewart sitting straight up in her seat and then glancing at him disapprovingly. Shades of Pygmalion, he thought to himself, smiling. You would expect it from Shaw, inside inverted commas.
‘Give it to them, sock it to them,’ he pleaded silently. The virginal Miss Stewart looked sternly on.
‘Only five minutes then,’ said the night club manager, glancing at his watch. Actually there was no watch on his hand at all. ‘What song do you want to sing?’
Mark saw Lorna pushing a desk out to the floor and sitting in it. This was to be the piano, then. The absence of props bothered him and he wondered whether imagination had first begun among the poor, since they had such few material possessions. Lorna waited, her hands poised above the desk. He heard more sniggerings from the boys and this time he looked so angry that he saw one of them turning a dirty white.
The hands hovered above the desk. Then Tracy began to sing. She chose the song ‘Heartache’.
My heart, dear, is aching;
I’m feeling so blue.
Don’t give me more heartaches,
I’m pleading with you.
It seemed to him that at that moment, as she stood there pale and thin, she was putting all her experience and desires into her song. It was a moment he thought such as it is given to few to experience. She was in fact auditioning before a phantom audience, she and the heroine of the play were the same, she was searching for recognition on the streets of London, in a school. She stood up in her vulnerability, in her purity, on a bare stage where there was no furniture of any value, of any price: on just such a stage had actors and actresses acted many years before, before the full flood of Shakespearean drama. Behind her on the blackboard were written notes about the Tragic Hero, a concept which he had been discussing with the Sixth Year.
‘The hero has a weakness and the plot of the play attacks this specific weakness.’
‘We feel a sense of waste.’
‘And yet triumph.’
Tracy’s voice, youthful and yearning and vulnerable, soared to the cracked ceiling. It was as if her frustrations were released in the song.
Don’t give me more heartaches,
I’m pleading with you.
The voice soared on and then after a long silence the bell rang.
The boys from 3a began to chatter and he thought, ‘You don’t even try. You wouldn’t have the nerve to sing like that, to be so naked.’ But another voice said to him, ‘You’re wrong. They’re the same. It is we who have made them different.’ But were they in fact the same, those who had been reduced to the nakedness, and those others who were the protected ones. He stood there trembling as if visited by a revelation which was only broken when Miss Stewart said,
‘Not quite Old Vic standard.’ And then she was gone with her own superior brood. You stupid bitch, he muttered under his breath, you Observer-Magazine-reading bitch who never liked anything in your life till some critic made it respectable, who wouldn’t recognise a good line of poetry or prose till sanctified by the voice of London, who would never have arrived at Shakespeare on your own till you were given the crutches.
And he knew as he watched her walking, so seemingly self-sufficient, in her black gown across the hall that she was as he had been and would be no longer. He had taken a journey with his class, a pilgrimage across the wooden boards, the poor abject furnitureless room which was like their vision of life, and from that journey he and they had learned in spite of everything. In spite of everything, he shouted in his mind, we have put a flag out there and it is there even during the plague, even if Miss Stewart visits it. It is there in spite of Miss Stewart, in spite of her shelter and her glasses, in spite of her very vulnerable armour, in spite of her, in spite of everything.
In the School
They came in to the school through a window, Terry handing the can of petrol to the other two who were waiting on the floor of the boiler-room down below. It was the evening of a fine summer’s day, and the school was empty, for it was the holidays.
Terry, the mad one, walked along the corridor first, the other two behind him as they always did, and always had done. Usually Terry was shouting and playing about but tonight he was quiet, at least at first. It had been his plan, for he hated the school, he hated it with a bitter hatred and he wanted to destroy it. He hated the teachers, he hated his parents, he hated the whole world. He was a burning simmering fire of hatred, always on the edge of explosion, and it seemed to him that fire was the only answer to the fire inside him. Time and time again he had been belted, for he was either fighting other boys in the school – when the force inside him demanded violence, as if it were a demon from hell – or he was demanding money with menaces, for he was poor, or he was creating some novel or ancient kind of trouble in the classroom. The very last day of term he had fought a boy in the cloakroom and had broken his nose. The boy had looked at him that second too long, but it was enough. Terry hated anyone staring at him, as if he were a freak or something. He had been given six of the belt and that had been his farewell to the school, the headmaster standing at the door shaking his dim wormy head, the belt in his hand.
Terry hated the school because he didn’t want to be there in the first place, especially after getting up in the morning to the interminable quarrels between his father and mother (‘Get off my back,’ his mother would shout. ‘Why don’t you shove off?’), the crowded house where the other three children would fight each other as well. He never had any money or if he had it was money he had screwed out of pupils, usually first year one
s, who did not dare to report him to their parents, and usually said that they had lost it. He had a job in Woolworth’s for three weeks before he was found carrying a hundred cigarettes home, concealed beneath his jersey. Sometimes he would go into insane rages and beat his fists against a stone wall till the blood came.
He walked on, swinging his can, and suddenly out of the quietness began to shout obscenities, completely forgetting where he was or what the dangers might be: or maybe it was, thought Roddy, that he didn’t care, that he wanted teachers to appear so that he could fight them.
The other two, Roddy and Frankie, followed him as they had always done, Frankie indeed imitating Terry’s walk. Frankie was like a small cinder, ginger-haired and pale, without Terry’s flamboyant madness but with hard deep cold eyes. The two of them admired Terry because he didn’t care for anyone, and if he was belted he never cried, he held his hand out disdainfully as if belting were an awful bore which he despised. Nothing mattered to Terry, he was a spark of hatred, he was the king. Time and time again they had seen him do things that they themselves would never have dared to do. They had seen him square up to Baney, the Chemistry teacher, and Baney had backed down, only saying weakly that he would send Terry to the headmaster, but he never did. They had seen him break calmly in half the ruler the Mathematics teacher had given him and sit back in his seat arms folded. They had seen him setting fire to a girl’s hair at the back of the Assembly when the headmaster had been going on about Jesus and the disciples who had been ordinary men. They knew very well what the headmaster had been really saying, they were the ordinary fishermen and the headmaster was one of the top ones like Jesus. They weren’t stupid, they knew what was going on all right, they could read between the lines though they couldn’t read the lines themselves very well. And that guff at the prize-giving by that fat git that there were some people who didn’t win prizes but that didn’t make them any worse than the ones who did: they knew just the same what would happen if their mothers or fathers tried to get on to the platform where the women with the flowered hats sat, and the men with the bald heads and blue suits.
The Black Halo Page 33