‘Jeremy,’ I said, ‘I think I’d better tell you something.’
We went into the communal lavatory, the only private space backstage, and I broke the news to him. Shadwell nodded and said gently, ‘You’re being ungrateful, Karim. You shouldn’t just bugger off, you know, it’s not right. We all love you here, OK?’
‘Please understand, Jeremy – Pyke’s a big man. Very important. Surely there’s a tide in the affairs of men which taken – ’
Shadshit’s voice suddenly rose to rehearsal pitch and he walked out of the toilet and into the dressing room. Behind us in the auditorium the show was about to begin, and the audience were in their seats. They could hear every syllable. I felt particularly ridiculous hurrying along behind him in my loin-cloth.
‘What tide, you drowning prick?’ he said. ‘You haven’t the experience to deal with Pyke. You’ll be mincemeat within three days. You’ve got no idea what a tough fucking bastard Pyke is. He’s charming, all right. All interesting people have charm. But he’ll crucify you!’
‘Why would he want to crucify a little person like me?’ I said weakly. Boyd smirked and mouthed ‘exactly’ at Terry, who ignored him but seemed to be nodding in agreement with Shotbolt.
‘For fun, you idiot! Because that’s how people like that operate! They pretend they’re democrats but they’re little Lenins –’
Terry took offence at this. He glared at Shadwell and said, ‘They should be so lucky!’ But Shoddy was not to be deterred now he was going.
‘They’re cultural fascists and élitists who think they know better than anyone else how it is! They’re paranoid, frightened people!’
Some of the others in the cast were laughing behind their hands like schoolkids when one of them is being castigated by Teacher. I walked towards the stage on my red carpet.
‘I don’t care what you say. I can look after myself.’
‘Ha!’ he shouted. ‘We’ll fucking see – you little parvenu!’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Spring. Some time after I’d said goodbye to Bagheera, Baloo and the others, and get fucked to Shadwell, and didn’t go to the last-night party, I was in a clean, bright rehearsal room with a polished wooden floor (so we could run around barefoot) in a church hall by the river, near Chelsea Bridge. There were six actors in Pyke’s group, three men and three women. Two of us were officially ‘black’ (though truly I was more beige than anything). None of us was over thirty. Only one woman, pinched-face Carol, also from the suburbs (so I had her ambitious little number right away), had worked with Pyke before. There was a red-haired woman called Eleanor, in her early twenties, who seemed experienced and sensible, and unlike Carol didn’t fancy herself as a bit of a star. And there was a nineteen-year-old black actress, Tracey, with firm but peculiar views. The other two men, Richard (gay) and Jon, were those solid, cynical, jobbing actors who’d been around the London fringe for years, acting in rooms above pubs for a share of the box-office, in basements, at festivals and in street theatre. They required little but a good part, a director who wasn’t a fool or a dictator, and a comfortable pub near the venue with authentic beer. There was also a writer in the group, Louise Lawrence, an earnest and self-satisfied northern woman with thick glasses who said little but wrote down everything you said, especially if it was stupid.
At ten every morning I cycled into Chelsea, with Eva’s mushrooms-on-toast fuelling me, and rode around the hall with no hands – in celebration of life. I’d never been so enthusiastic about anything. This was my big chance, in more ways than one.
Pyke, in his shiny blue tracksuit, with his athletic body and greying hair, usually sat at a table with his feet on a chair. He was surrounded by laughing actors and the two stage-managers, adoring young women who were like his personal servants. The stage-managers looked after his newspapers, his orange juice, and planned his trips to New York. One of them carried his diary, the other his pencils and sharpener. His car (which Richard referred to as ‘Pyke’s Penis’, as in ‘Pyke’s Penis is blocking the drive’ or ‘Pyke’s Penis can do nought to sixty in thirty seconds’) was a priority for them. And they spent many mornings on the phone arranging his dates with women.
The atmosphere Pyke created was in contrast to Shadwell’s tense and chaotic rehearsals, which were essentially an imitation of how Shadwell thought geniuses worked. Pyke’s morning began with breakfast and essential gossip around the table, the cruelty and extremity of which I’d never experienced before. My mother would never have let us talk about anyone like that. Pyke attacked other directors (‘He couldn’t direct air out of a puncture’); writers he didn’t like (‘I would gladly have handed him over to Stalin for re-education’); and critics (‘His face would make pregnant women abort on sight’). After this we’d get up and play tag, or have piggyback races, or play ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’
None of this seemed like work to me, and I loved to think of what the suburban commuters in our street, who were paying for us through their taxes, would have made of a gang of grown-ups being pop-up toasters, surfboards and typewriters.
After lunch, to warm up again, Pyke had us play ‘feely’ games where we stood in the centre of a circle with our feet together and eyes closed and just let ourselves fall. Weak and relaxed, we’d be passed around the group. Everyone touched us; we embraced and kissed. This was how Pyke fused the group. It seemed to me during one of these games that Eleanor remained in my arms just that little bit longer than necessary.
On the fourth day, sitting there at ten in the morning with all of us gathered around him, Pyke played a game which disturbed me, which made me think there was a shadow side to him. Looking slyly around the group he said he would predict which of us would sleep together. He inspected each of us in turn and said, ‘I think I know which way pleasure’s course will run. I’ll write down my predictions, and on the last night of the show I’ll read them out. OK?’
During the second week the sun shone and we opened the doors. I wore an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt which I sometimes knotted on my stomach. One of the stage-managers almost stopped breathing when she saw me, I’m not kidding. We each sat in what Pyke called ‘the hot seat’ with the group arranged in a staring semi-circle around us. Each of us had to tell the rest of the group the story of our life. ‘Concentrate on the way you think your position in society has been fixed,’ said Pyke.
Being sceptical and suspicious, the English sort to be embarrassed by such a Californian display of self, I found the life-stories – accounts of contradiction and wretchedness, confusion and intermittent happiness – oddly affecting. I giggled all through Lawrence’s account of working in a San Francisco massage parlour (when she was stranded there), where the women were not allowed to proposition men directly in case they were cops. They had to say, ‘Is there any other muscle you’d like relaxed, sir?’ This was where Lawrence discovered socialism, for here, in a forest of pricks and pond of semen, ‘I soon realized that nothing human was alien to me,’ as she put it.
Richard talked about wanting to fuck only black men, and the clubs he cruised constantly in order to acquire them. And to Pyke’s delight and my surprise Eleanor told of how she’d worked with a woman performance artist who persuaded her to extract the texts of poems – ‘Cows’ teeth like snowdrops bite the garlic grass’ – from her vagina before reading them. The performance artist herself meanwhile had a microphone up her vagina and relayed the gurglings of her cunt to the audience. This was enough for me. I was hot on Eleanor’s trail. For the time being I gave up on Terry.