Todd laughs. He actually laughs, a dry, sarcastic chuckle. ‘No, Daniel,’ he says. ‘I think you’ll find it was you.’
He slides sideways, away from me, then sets off down the pavement. He moves quickly, so quickly that his trouser-hems flap and catch around his legs. He breaks into a run and his gait is the same as it always was: bandy-legged, his arms stiff by his sides. He reaches a bus stop just as a bus is about to pull away. He boards and the door closes behind him. I get one more glimpse of him, moving down the aisle, searching for a seat, a place to put himself, before the bus pulls out into traffic and he is gone.
Oxidised Copper Exactly
Claudette, Goa, India, 1996
S
he is being held in an upright position by a chair. She can feel it pressing into the bones of her pelvis, the small of her back. Her feet are together on the metal rest, hands folded in her lap.
She avoids the eye of the woman in the mirror: she resembles her yet is not her. It is indeed a puzzling conundrum.
Air, artificially cool, passes back and forth between her teeth. Where the chair touches her bare skin – her elbows, the backs of her thighs – it draws out a sticky sweat. She is wearing clothes that don’t belong to her. Over them someone has put a beige robe, the kind that swathes the body and fastens behind the neck: an outsized bib. It must be polyester because she can feel her skin heating inside it, like a chicken in foil. She has told them she prefers natural fibres for this climate but they must have forgotten and it doesn’t seem worth making a fuss.
Two people stand over her. One of them is picking up sections of her hair and wrapping them around heated pincers, and it seems to her a lengthy and pointless act because it is doing nothing but make her hair look exactly as it did before. The other has the kind of belt sported by workmen but, instead of hammers and wrenches, this one is filled with pots and colours and powders. This person is dabbing at her face with tiny brushes and damp sponges.
Neither of these people addresses a word to her or even looks her in the eye. One smears her cheeks with a clay-like substance while the other suddenly seizes a brush and begins to backcomb her hair, spritzing clouds of foul-smelling spray in her direction. Murder by chemical attack.
Her head is tugged backwards and she has to steel herself not to cry out every time the brush makes a lunge for her face: what are you doing to me? Please let me be, please stop.
And all the while they continue a conversation above her head:
– He was like, whoah, and I was like, yeah.
– Totally, totally out of it. And I mean. Out. Of. It.
– Because she gave me this look and I was just, you know, hey.
Her script is on her lap, beneath the robe. She knows it’s there because she can feel the edges, paper-sharp, against her wrist. She knows it, she’s almost sure. When she gets there, the words will come, as they always have. But what if they don’t? What if today is the first day when the words clog and jam, like cogs in a faulty machine, refusing to emerge? What if Timou has made changes to the words she wrote for herself to deliver? What if he’s done that again, without telling her? She will have to challenge him, question these alterations, in front of the whole crew and she knows they will all stand there, motionless, listening, as she and Timou bat objections back and forth.
Already she feels that this is a bad day. She has the kind of headache where it hurts to turn her eyes, to move her jaw. She cannot tell yet whether it is an ordinary pain or if it will bloom into the kind that takes her over, replaces her with itself, consumes that part of her that is still her. It will insinuate itself into her body, like a dybbuk, and she will be forced to stand outside herself, watching. She has become prone – this is the term, she believes, it is what the doctors have said – to three-day-long attacks during which the world becomes filled with spikes and shards of light, so bright, so dazzling that she is unable to believe that no one else can see them. Quite usual objects will flare and glitter: the coffee machine, the bonnet-shaped head of a lamp, the latch of a window, a pair of sandals, the baby monitor. Everything becomes intolerable: the outlines of flowers on the mantelpiece, the circumference of a plate. People approach her and they carry with them unbearable flaring coronas, like prophets or devils.
Claudette suddenly becomes aware of her foot. It is jiggling at the end of her leg, spasmodically: up, down, up, down, like the freeze-frame on a VHS. She looks at it there, as if it is disconnected from her. How can it do that? How can it focus so beautifully on something so—
‘Look up, please,’ the make-up girl says.
Claudette looks up to the ceiling, where a fan circles its blades above their heads. The soupy air around the three of them yields the scent of deodorant, insect repellent, hairspray, the acrid taint of wet mascara, a chemical fabric conditioner, a whiff of marijuana – local, Claudette guesses.
With a gunfire of static, the robe is un-Velcroed from her. The two attendants take a step back in unison, their heads on one side. One darts forward with a comb to tease a strand of hair into place; the other screws up her face in what seems to be a dissatisfied grimace.
‘I’m not sure about the …’
‘Mmm,’ the other agrees.
They stare at her. Seconds jerk by on the clock up near the ceiling. Then they shrug.
The taller one looks, if not quite at then near her.
‘You’re done, Ms Wells,’ she says, with a smile that reveals pink, healthy gums.
Thank you, Claudette says, thank you.
She steps out of the door and it is as if she has entered an oven. The heat swarms in at her face, her neck; it finds its way, immediate, insistent, under her clothes. India, she tells herself, they are in India. She had forgotten this. Hard to remember when you are escorted – like a child, like a criminal – from hotel to set and back again, when each of your meals is delivered to you on a tray, before you even realise you are hungry, when the person at the end of the room-service telephone speaks impeccable English and already knows your likes and dislikes, your requirements, your date of birth, your taste in décor, sleepwear, thread-count, toiletries, beverages, reading matter, music.
Waiting for her at the trailer door is a person with a clipboard and headset. He doesn’t greet her but speaks about her into his microphone. ‘Ms Wells is leaving Make-up,’ he narrates, stepping in beside her. ‘We’re heading towards the set right now, ETA two minutes. Oh, she’s stopped to pick up something. No, we’re on our way again. Yes, hair and make-up finished. Yes.’
She walks through groups of people. They part as she approaches, like iron filings repelled by a magnet. They look at her, then away quickly, too quickly, as if she might be enraged by their gaze, as if looking upon her might turn them to stone. She puts up a hand and touches her hair. Stiff with lacquer, texture like candyfloss. It can’t be her hair, no, not at all.
Without warning, someone appears, stepping into her path, and lassoes her about the neck with something. A spotted scarf. Claudette stops, examines this person at close quarters. It is a woman in her twenties. She has black lines drawn in a beautiful arch on her eyelids, a wispy fringe, lips stained blackberry-purple, a brooch of a bird in flight pinned to her collar. She is tugging the scarf to the side, tying it, frowning, retying it.
‘I like your bird,’ Claudette says.
The girl starts, as if a statue has spoken. Her hand flies to the brooch.
‘Oh!’ she says, flushing deep crimson. ‘Well, thank you.’
‘It is the green of oxidised copper.’
The girl glances up at her and her expression is one of fear. Why, Claudette wants to say, why are you afraid of me?
‘Stopped for Wardrobe,’ the man with the clipboard mutters into his mouthpiece. ‘Shouldn’t take too long.’
The girl plucks at the scarf with trembling fingers, eyes lowered. Oxidised copper exactly, Claudette thinks, or absinthe or arsenic. Wasn’t arsenic once used as wallpaint? She imagines Victorian children running their fingertips along it, their clothes brushing up against it, lethal atoms adhering to the cloth, making their way to the skin, to the blood, where they spore and spin through the veins like—
‘That’s it,’ the girl whispers, and steps away, out of Claudette’s path. Claudette isn’t sure what else to do so she walks forward.
‘OK,’ the man with the clipboard says, ‘on the move again. Just about to pass Catering. Yeah, Ms Wells is all good for Wardrobe.’
Claudette stops.
‘We’ve stopped,’ the man says.
She turns her head one way: catering vans, the staff staring at her. She turns it the other way: a large lorry containing scaffolding, rigging.
‘I don’t know, she’s just looking around.’
She suddenly recognises the source of her trouble. She can pinpoint what she needs, why she has this bolus of unease in her abdomen. Of course.
She turns on her heel; she walks back the other way.
‘Er … we’re on the move but we’re going the wrong way … I don’t know …’ The man has to break into a trot to keep up with her. ‘I’ve no idea. Ms Wells? Er, Ms Wells? We need to go this way. They’re waiting for you. Ms Wells?’
It’s easy to step things up. Claudette spends thirty minutes every day on a running machine. Her limbs glide into a sprint. The backcombed hair bounces back and forth on top of her skull, the scarf unravels and streams behind her.
By the time she arrives at the trailer door, the man with the headset is far behind. She climbs the steps and yanks open the door.
‘Ari?’ Claudette says. ‘Where are you?’
She is listening for the rhythmic pad of his feet, the mellifluous rise in his voice, saying, Maman, Maman. She has to hold that small body in her arms, has to press her cheek to the silk of his hair, has to look into those grave hazel eyes, she has to. Just for a moment.
But the nanny is coming towards her: she has Ari’s sweatshirt in her hands; she is holding her finger to her lips and shaking her head. ‘He’s just this minute gone to sleep,’ she is saying.
The disappointment is physical: a plummet in the stomach, a clenching surge in her headache, a tensing in her forearms.
‘You just missed him.’
She has to gulp at the air in the trailer so as not to cry.
‘OK,’ she says. ‘It’s OK.’ She moves towards the door of the little bedroom. ‘I’ll just sit with him for a minute.’
Ari is lying on his side on top of the quilt, arms stretching out, as if seeking something. She can see that the nanny has given him the wrong blanket, not the one he likes, with the folded-over edges and the loose thread in the corner. And his velvet-faced fox is still on the shelf. She gets down the fox. She places it next to him on the bed. She dares to stretch out a hand and touch the tips of his hair but no more. She sits herself on the edge of the bed. She absorbs the breathing of her son. The room is clouded with his particular scent – citrus mixed with biscuit mixed with milk. She takes in the movement of eyes under lids, the shell-curl of his toes, the creases at his wrists. When she hears the trailer door slam open and a voice asking, where is she, she stands and tiptoes out of the room, shutting the door behind her.
There is a man standing by the door. He wears headphones slipped down around his neck. He is tanned, his hair clipped short; the muscles of his chest and arms stand up under the white cotton of his shirt.
‘What’s going on?’ he says.
This man is Timou. The idea seems stranger and stranger by the day. This is the man who once walked with her over the Thames and to a bar in Soho. A lifetime ago he met her at JFK airport, holding a sign with a picture of a cloud. They used to live together in Greenwich Village. He was the one who came into her hospital room after Ari was born and cried, his hand seeking hers, saying could she forgive him, could she ever forgive him, that she was his life, that he would do anything, anything at all, that he would never be so stupid again. She had been stunned, split, speechless, a tiny baby on her shoulder, her chest fizzing: it hurt to sit, it hurt to lie, it hurt to breathe. Even then, she had trouble convincing herself that he was this man and not a very close lookalike.
And now here he is again, the person purporting to be her partner, her man, her other half, her co-parent, in her trailer. Behind him, outside the door, she knows, four or five people will be waiting. They follow him around all day. She doesn’t know how he stands it.
‘Claudette?’ he is saying.
He is, she sees, expecting her to speak. So she does.
‘I had to see Ari,’ she says, and the words come out with relative ease and they sound, to her, reasonably normal. ‘Sorry.’
A tendon flexes in Timou’s jaw. There is, just for a moment, a flash of light just above his shoulder, like a camera going off, or a small firework. Did anyone else see that? she wants to ask.
‘Right.’ He passes the papers he is holding from one hand to the other. ‘Well, can you come to set now?’
Claudette considers this. She doesn’t think so. She doesn’t think she can. She feels her head shaking, no.
‘My darling,’ he says, coming forward and placing his arm about her shoulders, ‘there are one hundred and fifty people out there,’ he points with a pen that Claudette thinks he must have stolen from her desk as it’s the kind she likes, ‘all waiting for you to show up. You know that? One hundred and fifty people. And we can’t do a thing until you decide to grace us with your presence. We’re totally stuck without you.’ He attempts a smile. He is trying, Claudette can see this, he is being kind, but she can feel the tension radiating from him, feel the jitter of it in the bones and sinews of his arm about her neck.
‘Half an hour,’ is what she comes out with. ‘Give me half an hour.’
Timou sighs. He does his effortful grin again. The kind you might give to a recalcitrant child or a mentally deficient person. He steps back and presses the pen – she is convinced it’s one of hers – to his forehead. The outline of it crackles like lithium on water.
‘All right. Half an hour. You can have half an hour, if you need it, of course you can.’ He points at her with the pen. ‘But no more, OK?’