by Jayne Tuttle
I slump in the chair like an old curmudgeon, beyond caring.
‘So, Jayne, tell me what’s been happening in your life.’
I have nothing to lose, so I tell him. Everything. About Mum, about us trying to go on like nothing has happened, about the guilt, the exhaustion, the desire for oblivion. Trying to mother my brothers and sister, their repulsion. How bullshit reiki is. Magdalena’s bullshit. How bullshit everything is. About how my heart seems to have died but I don’t have the guts to tell Jack, or the decency to let him go. My selfishness, weakness, how so many people in the world have it so bad. How I’ve fantasised about moving into a convent, or prison even, somewhere I could hide away and not exist anymore. Death, Paris, the Lecoq school —
‘Paris?’ he interrupts.
Weeks ago, on a whim, I’d asked the director of the French theatre for a contact at the embassy, and emailed them to ask about scholarships. I heard nothing back. Paris felt further away than death itself.
‘You are going to Paris,’ he says, before I tell him any of this.
‘Yeah right. I have no money, and I don’t know how I’d —’
‘You’re going,’ he repeats, face still as ever. ‘When you said the word “Paris”, your guides came rushing up around your head saying, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” You are going to Paris. I have no doubt about it.’
Reiki John is on crack.
‘Now, I’ll just get you to take off your shoes and socks and lie up here.’
The room smells like a faraway land. He puts a warm rug over me. The distant sound of harps is interrupted by the rushing of a train.
‘Close your eyes and try to relax,’ he says. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’
Just go with it, I tell myself.
When he returns he stands with his hands hovering above my head for a very, very long time. More trains go by. The string music changes to pipes, then flutes, then piano. Someone else comes quietly into the room, perhaps Reiki John’s assistant. They stand together near my head and then they move down towards my right shoulder. Both have their hands hovering over my arm; hers are smaller than his, but just as warm. I feel like opening my eyes to see what the assistant looks like but my lids are too heavy. The two of them stand for a while by my legs, then move down to my feet, staying there for a long time, his hands over my left foot, hers over my right. Hers tremble a bit and feel light and youthful; I have the sense that she’s giggly. They swap sides. It’s odd, her presence in the room keeps changing. I can almost feel her giggling now. I imagine she has long blond hair. They keep moving around and arrive back at my shoulder. Then the strangest thing happens. I feel the girl lean in, right over me, and for some unknown reason I know it’s Mum. She puts her hand on my chest and says three things. I love you. I’m proud of you. You’re doing good.
And then everything is quiet.
Reiki John leaves the room. I don’t want to open my eyes. I lie for a long time waiting to see if the Mum-girl will come back. Come back!
The door opens and Reiki John taps me on the shoulder. His eyes are wide as I open my own.
‘Stay there a moment,’ he says.
Face incontinence washes my cheeks.
‘I know!’ he says. ‘Honestly, I think she did come to you at Magdalena’s, but you weren’t ready. This time she took a form you wouldn’t be scared of, perhaps someone a bit like you. And when she was able to get close she passed on her message.’
The fact that Reiki John had felt it without me mentioning it makes me deeply curious. But more than anything, I feel relieved. Those were the exact three sentences I needed to hear. I hadn’t known how much I’d needed to hear them.
I walk back up Maryville Street feeling that a great weight has lifted from my shoulders. Kate looks at me strangely as I recount the story – I am desperate that she see John herself and receive her own message. But she isn’t interested. She has her dreams. I want Dad to go too, but he just laughs. ‘So glad that happened for you, Jaynie.’
A week later I rush back to Reiki John, excited at the thought of seeing Mum again. She doesn’t come, but afterwards he tells me she’s given him a message. ‘She told me to tell you she’s fine, and not to worry. And that she’s working with the light.’
This makes me happy, though I’m sure he made it up.
Nothing happens the next time I see him either, and I realise I don’t need to go again. I am done. Things feel better. I am on the other side. Of course I know it was just my deepest psyche coming up to rescue me. Whatever it is, I don’t care. I don’t feel the urge to die anymore. I feel like eating things.
A few weeks later, I receive an email from the French embassy in Canberra saying that I’m being considered for a two-year government grant to attend the Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School. This includes payment of the school fees, a monthly allowance, and accommodation at the Centre des Récollets, an ancient monastery close to the school that has been recently restored as a residence for international artists and scientists. Will I please fill in the attached form.
I’m sure I’m dreaming.
But four months later, I’m on a plane to Paris.
Everything Moves
I THINK I’VE BEEN scammed. The address for the Jacques Lecoq school is clearly printed on my letter as 57, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, Paris 75010. But where’s the old boxing hall from his book The Moving Body that I’ve gazed at for so long? Where’s the grand brick façade, the gabled rooftops, the tall windows and skylights? This is just a blue-painted door beneath a shabby, pollution-stained building in the weirdest, wildest Paris street I’ve ever walked down.
My head spins. Where am I? Through the gaps in the door all I can see is a narrow pathway between two apartment blocks. The street thumps and whirrs behind me. As I take a step backwards I notice beside the door a small plaque that reads École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq.
This is it.
Beside the sign is a keypad. On my letter is a code. I punch it in and the door clicks open. I follow the pathway past the letterboxes and pot plants to a doorway right down the back that stands ajar. It’s quiet here, as though the noise and bustle of the street were just in my mind. I push open the door and enter a room with a chequered floor and a wall plastered in colourful theatre posters. Good sign. The chequered floor leads to a narrow corridor, which I follow until I reach a small foyer. A lady in a neat suit and a tight bun is sitting behind a desk.
‘Bienvenüe,’ she smiles at me. ‘You are here for the enrolment?’
I hand her my paper and she smiles again. ‘Hello Jayne. Venez.’
I follow her through a door and down a corridor with worn linoleum floors to a large foyer with lots of doors and a staircase coming from it.
‘Madame Lecoq is running a little late. Please wait here,’ says the lady, leaving me in the centre of the room.
There are photos on the walls of actors in masks, doing acrobatics, wearing red noses and strange padded costumes. On one wall is an oversized photo of Jacques Lecoq in a black leotard, thrusting his body forward in a lunging pose, his young face calm and serious. Tout bouge, he said. Everything moves. What about corpses? I wondered when I read his book. There is a particular stillness to a corpse. I would have liked to ask him the question but he has been dead five years now, his disciples carrying on his teaching in what some say is an even more powerful and essentialised way.
‘Jayne?’ calls a woman’s voice from upstairs. I walk up and up the old wood stairs, drinking in the ancient smell, to arrive at a very high wraparound balcony looking down over a vast room – the one from my book! The vaulted ceilings and industrial lamps hanging from ropes, the iconic round window, the skylights. La Grande Salle. The Big Room. In the early 1900s it was a popular boxing ring where Édith Piaf would come and watch her boyfriend. From where I’m sitting I can imagine looking down on two beefcakes pounding it out to the shouts and slurs of the crowd. It makes sense that in the 1970s Lecoq found it the perfect place for his sch
ool, not only because of his love for sport, but because of its wide, wooden floors, high ceilings and upstairs viewing gallery.
A small group of people wearing black leotards are moving around in the space below, stopping suddenly and throwing their arms up in the air, bringing them back down to their sides, then doing it all over again. A muscly Asian man calls directions to them, shouting, clapping.
‘Jayne?’ calls the voice again. Madame Lecoq, Jacques’ wife, is a statuesque woman in her seventies with cropped grey hair and painted lips. She speaks perfect English because she is English. She asks me to fill in some forms, and I linger over the question ‘mother’s occupation’. Am I reading it right? What should I put? Midwife? Disappeared? Light-worker?
‘Don’t worry about those, they’re not important,’ she says, too busy to put up with my pause.
She asks how I got the grant and I don’t know what to say – it seemed to fall from the sky. I tell her about the French theatre company in Melbourne and the embassy and how it just sort of happened.
‘Well, your fees are taken care of,’ she says. ‘How long do you intend to study here?’
‘For the two years,’ I say. ‘At least, that’s what I hope.’
‘You will need to work very hard,’ she says, voice grim. ‘Having a scholarship doesn’t guarantee you’ll be allowed to complete the entire course. We only take thirty out of the hundred students through to second year.’
I nod, biting the inside of my mouth.
‘I hope you feel strong,’ she says.
I don’t.
I step tentatively back out into the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. The street is another planet – a far cry from the clean, ordered Paris I knew before. A thousand worlds, each with its own colour and smell and sound, bash up against each other in a crazy harmony: African hair salons next to Middle Eastern delicatessens next to Indian dress shops and Chinese grocery stores and old French brasseries and old-man bars and rundown tabacs and pharmacies and gypsy jewellers and supermarkets and flower shops and tribal instrument shops … Turkish, Indian, Italian, Czech – with every step a different culture; happy people, sad people, eating, shouting, singing, shopping and smoking together, the footpaths jammed with tables and chairs and bikes, the road a steady, bumping mess of scooters and cars and vans and trucks and animals. The air is thick with exhaust and curry and cream and tobacco and cheese and barbecued meat and fresh fish and spiced bread, the fragrant fumes of a hookah pipe, the stench of a sewer. Cars honk, bikes ding, people laugh, a homeless man cries into a can of Despérados. A teenage boy in dusty clothes sells ripped DVDs on a rug. A six-foot model sashays past and through a doorway into a hidden courtyard atelier.
The mismatched buildings above the shopfronts – some dilapidated, some renovated – seem to lean over the street as if to observe the flurry, curious but exhausted by the never-ending buzz. The buildings are rough, smooth, crafted, golden, graffitied, filthy, pristine. Men in suits, men at tables, a man outside a halal butcher with a stump for a leg. Cigarette butts and balls of hair blowing in the drains. Overflowing bins. Dogs under tables, cats in windows. I make my way through it all to the top of the street, past the imposing Gare de l’Est to the beautiful white monastery with its belltower and arcades. The Récollets. After five days it already feels like home.
A group of acrobats are rehearsing on the front lawn, shouting to each other, in Portuguese, I think. The building behind them is so beautiful I’m still in shock that I get to live here. The Récollets were a group of Franciscan monks who wore grey pointed hoods and devoted their lives to community service and spiritual reflection. Henry IV had authorised them to construct the monastery in 1603. The building was used as a military hospital in the 1800s and through the two world wars and the Algerian war, then in the 1980s it was an artists’ squat for a group who called themselves the Angels of the Récollets; then, only a year ago, it was restored for its current purpose. The original white stone monastery walls have been retained, along with the towers and arcades and windows and sloping roof. To me, it doesn’t look like much has changed since the 1600s, and I can feel a lot of old, kind spirits in the walls.
I drift past the acrobats and up to my studio on the second floor. My Studio of Good. It’s small, but has tall white windows, a high ceiling with ancient wooden beams, and pylons between them and the cement floor. There’s a kitchen, a bathroom, a living area, and a mezzanine for sleeping – a real one, with a floor you can walk around on. The windows reach as high as the mezzanine, which looks out over an expansive park and a children’s playground with its steady soundtrack of chatter and squeals. The view is mostly blocked by a giant chestnut tree with lush green leaves, just starting to thin. Birds hop through the boughs and I watch them and feel gloriously alone.
But I do have friends. On the ancient beam above my bed, new characters reveal themselves night after night in the natural gnarls and flecks, old nails and the remnants of paint left by the Angels of the Récollets. The first I noticed, right in the centre, was E.T., the Extra Terrestrial, his triangular skull, and his beady eyes glaring at me. A few nights later I saw the row of baby ducks, then a woman from a hair commercial. Then a shark’s head. Then the anatomical diagram of a vagina, with a little knot clit.
I spend the weeks before school begins exploring the neighbourhood – the designer shops and cafés of the Canal Saint-Martin, the markets and brasseries around the Gare de l’Est, the long, solemn boulevard de Magenta. But mostly I find myself back in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. Nothing makes sense there. Which makes me comfortable because nothing makes sense inside of me either. I spend entire days lost in its different worlds, the spice shops and delicatessens and Asian supermarkets; the fruit market with its shouting men offering tastes of peach and strawberry and cherry; the parapharmacie with its pills to suppress your appetite, drain your fat and make your tan last longer. Although vegetarian, I nevertheless marvel at the meats: halal, kosher, tripe, liver, head cheese, lips and ears and tongues, foie gras frais. I nibble on sandwiches called swedishes, and Pakistani samosas and Russian pirojkis, somehow losing my fastidiousness over whether they have any trace of meat products in them.
After surveying the dozen boulangeries around the Récollets, I decide that the one halfway down the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, with its glorious Art Nouveau frontage, has the best bread, and seems to cost the same as anywhere else. The snooty man behind the counter sniffs my blood of an Englishman and does not approve of me one little bit, but I make it immediately clear that I know the game and will not be taking any shit. We develop an unspoken agreement: I will accept him turning his nose up at me (to show the locals his disapproval of an Anglaise like me, thus maintaining the social order), in exchange for him giving me the bread I want.
My favourite place on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis is the Festi Bazar, a dilapidated discount store wedged between the fruit market and the Sancak Turkish sandwich shop. I spend hours amongst the piled-up plastic homewares, the wrapping papers and scented candles and powdery incense, the keyrings and necklaces and mirrors and tinsel and toilet brushes. Like the street outside, the Festi Bazar is constantly changing, and there is no rhyme or reason to it. Goods are piled on top of each other, and when something new comes in, it’s simply pushed in amongst the rest. If you pull a product out from a shelf a whole stack of things fall. There is so much stuff in the Festi Bazar, my brain overloads and I forget almost instantly what I’ve come in for, and also who and where I am. Which feels nice, and I find myself returning to the bazaar just to stand there and look. The mangy store cat with cancer-bitten ears doesn’t mind. Nor does the shopkeeper in her sari. She watches her little TV without looking up, as if I’m not even there. I get the feeling such behaviour is not unusual to her.
At the bottom of the street is a majestic archway, similar to the Arc de Triomphe, with the words Ludovico Magno in big gold writing. I read that in the 1300s it was a gateway to Paris, then it was rebuilt as a triumphal arch in t
he 1600s by Louis XIV to celebrate his military victories. The archway is covered in pigeon shit and rubbish but stands like a proud footnote to all the life going on before it on a daily basis. Its sculpted façade depicts ancient men on horses riding towards people begging not to be killed. Angels blow their trumpets and a lion hangs its head from the top of the arch, tongue out, as though exhausted and thirsty. This is how I feel after too long on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, when I must return to the Récollets, draw the curtains and sleep for several hours, even in the middle of the day.
The first day of school finally arrives. The blue door is propped open and people gather around it, talking, chaining up bikes, smoking. I follow a group speaking a Scandinavian language down the pathway and through the corridors into the big room with the photos. Bodies in all different colours and shapes and sizes, each wearing the same stretchy black material, move around me, getting closer as the room slowly fills up. To hide my terror I stand for a long time staring at the photo of Jacques Lecoq. Help me, Jacques.
There is a clap and everyone sits down. Madame Lecoq gives a welcome speech that I can generally understand and introduces five teachers: a sinewy, grey-haired Frenchman called Claude; a small, cropped-haired Italian woman called Angela; a tall Belgian man called Boris; a short Korean man called Ju-Yong; and a stocky young English guy called Sam. Then she asks us to stand up, one by one, say our names and a sentence about ourselves in French. I make a joke about riding a kangaroo to school, which nobody laughs at, including the three other Australians. Either my joke or my French is bad, likely both.
No time is wasted with get-to-know-you games or trust exercises. We have already been placed into three groups of thirty-five: I am in group A. Each day is split into three classes: autocours, movement and acting. Our group starts with autocours, the legendary Lecoq practice in which actors create their own theatre according to a weekly theme, to be presented each Friday to the rest of the school. After the uprisings of May ’68, the students approached Jacques Lecoq and asked why they didn’t make their own theatre rather than just being taught. Jacques thought it was a brilliant idea, and so the autocours was born. The first week’s theme is ‘A Place, an Event’.