Well, I missed the first big rush. One always does. The good bit is forever one generation back. But I’m not such a latecomer that I escaped the sense of being historical. Here I sit, writing in my little green book while I gnaw over whether or not I can afford a bowl of the monkfish soup to insulate my belly against the fact that I’ve (finally!) gotten a part in the new Stern flick but not been paid yet. I know, I just know, that my little diary will be read by somebody someday, and not just to divine how to get me in the sack. It’ll be read because I’m an actress in the early days of cinema and the somewhat later days of interplanetary immigration. I don’t have to do a thing to be interesting! Did she or did she not have the monkfish soup? Did the thyme taste like the thyme she knew back home? (Or the scrubbly stuff we call thyme even though it’s lunar native and in no sense of the word thyme. Though, for that matter, it wouldn’t be monkfish either, but we call our local long scaly bastards with their razor snouts and six vestigial legs monkfish because the Savoy, good sir, does not serve moon-monster soup!) Did the flavour make her think of innocent days in the manger of man?
Not especially, no.
But we all keep diaries. We all scribble and babble. Because we know the future is watching everything and taking its own notes. So I shall tell you, Mister Future, all about Conrad and Carlotta, just in case you get careless and misplace them along the way.
I was saying I missed the first big rush, wasn’t I, Mister Future? By the time I made my entrance, all the planets had their bustling baby shantytowns, each and every one with a flag slapped on it. You weren’t anybody at the imperial picnic if you didn’t have a planet. Moons, though lovely, just lovely, are consolation prizes. Sino-Russian Mars. Saturn split between Germany and Austria-Hungary. French Neptune. American Pluto. Spanish Mercury. Ottoman Jupiter. All present and accounted for—except Venus. Nobody owns that Bessie because everyone needs her. The path to the stars is paved with treaties. If I wanted to stay English, I had my pick of the Moon or Uranus or a sea of satellites. But I didn’t see it as a choice. Only the Moon for the likes of me! Who wants to freeze on Uranus where there’s no paparazzi at all?
I hoarded my little walnuts like a good squirrel, sitting for advertisements and doing the occasional shimmy on some appalling stage. I’ll have you know I was the face of Dr Goddard’s Premium Disinfectant and Little Diamond Brand Refined Sugar in the same fortnight. And that very fortnight I did my evening shifts at the Blue Elephant Theatre, playing Ariel in an all-female, mostly nude production of The Tempest. The glitter stuck to my nipples something vicious. Stained them green for a month after the coppers shut us down on indecency charges. Fair enough, I said then, and I say now. I drank too much and ate too little, got in a spell of trouble with a stage manager and had it taken care of; put something up my nose and something in a pipe, but that’s what was done. Preparations for a better role. I tried to get plum work. I did try. Turned out for Mr Wilde and Mr Ibsen’s affairs, lined up round the block to be seen for the opportunity to cough offstage in Chekhov. But the bold truth is that nothing on your person earns as well as tits earn, and only after I did a spell as a cheesecake bacchante (I got to carry Pentheus’s head three nights out of five—four if Susanna had a boyfriend that month) did I have my egg.
I lined up in Kensington Gardens with the crowds. Passed by the statue of Peter Pan and reached up my hand to pat him as thousands have done. Millions now, I suppose. Built but the year before and already his foot is near worn away. Second star to the right, my lad. Right-o. Carpetbags and cold-weather rags and the afternoon sun like a sickly porridge glooping over the lindens. The cannon towered over me. I went terribly quiet inside, as you do when you’re little and your father looms over you and you don’t know yet whether he means to praise or scold. I went up on a boat called the Topless Towers of Ilium, which made me smirk. I looked round and saw a sea of flappers—flappers!—heaps of girls with bleached hair and dance shoes and carmine lips. All of us piling in for a day’s flight in cramped quarters with a lot of men who will be happy to tell you they’re directors, kid, you just sit right here by me. It was like an audition. An audition for a whole world, to see if the Moon would accept us and let us in or turn us out after a spin as an extra in a crowd scene and a starring role on a hotel bed with a producer in a top hat testing your range with his prick.
Oh, the wide universe needs us all, great and small, to fill her up and make her good, make her ripe, make her full and teeming. There are no small stories, only short ones. But the Moon…the Moon is where they make movies. And the Moon is a heartless bitch. She only needs a few. She wants fewer than that. She sits up there, high and mighty as you please, on her starry director’s chair and she ticks off the weak on a clipboard stained with ingénues’ tears. The Moon cares nothing for our cute little troubles. She ate a thousand girls for lunch yesterday, and she was hungry again in an hour. She barely even looks at us.
But I only have eyes for her.
So here I am. I’ve a room—not at the Savoy, goodness, perish the thought! I’ve the room they assigned me at Princess Alice’s Landing, at the top of a three-floor boarding house on Endymion Road, back end of Grasshopper City. Five girls to a room. And our wardrobes count as a sixth tenant, for not a one of us earns her keep anywhere but before the lens and on the boards. Callista’s Virgin Queen getup takes the whole rear corner, and all our cats live under the skirt. But I save my little shillings for luncheons at the Savoy so that I can feel grand. So that I can feel like I’m somebody going somewhere. So I can read Algernon B dishing gossip and maybe spy with my little eye old Wadsy Shevchenko canoodling with a prop boy. So Søren Blom can find me if he’s scouring the cafes for an Ionian duchess who might just look like me, or if that dashing darling Percival Unck comes looking for a new heroine to drop into a bucket of ghosts. So I can watch the summer Earth at half-wax going down over the froth of Mare Nubium and the candy-coloured streetlights come on in a long bright wave over my city.
My city! Tithonus, jewel of the Moon, Queen Slattern of the Alleyways, Grasshopper City, my home! I stepped off the Topless Towers of Ilium and took in her round blueglass spires and filth-fat holes and opium gardens and botanical dens and the wicker-coral palaces barely keeping the moss at bay like I was taking the first breath of my whole life. I was in love. I was a new bride. If I’d had a penny left over I’d have grabbed the first whore I saw and had her right there against the side of the Actaeon, just to have the city inside me and my hands on its heat. Nickelodeons every four steps, but those four steps also hoisted up grand theatres like castles, studio gates like St. Peter’s, peep shows and brothels and dance halls coming up like posies in every which spot between. They even built a Globe, so achingly, throbbingly familiar out there on this new West End, looking like an ice queen’s personal gladiatorial arena, blueglass and silver and scrimshaw.
I am going to play them all.
Oh, I thought I’d be sensible about it. Don’t pan for gold, says the wise man. Sell pans. I’d learn cameras, I thought. Inside and out. I could do it. Find work as an assistant to an assistant to an assistant. As long as I could be near the movies, I’d’ve won. Maybe someone would catch a glimpse of me taking light readings, notice the way the Earthlight caught my profile. Maybe not. Manage your expectations, Mary! But oh, I took one look at Grasshopper City, at the Globe and the Actaeon and the Savoy, and I knew it would never do. I don’t give a fig how a camera works, just as long as it works on me.