18 June
Last night was our last night and the opening of the reversed version. We all felt something. It felt right. And knowing this, we felt exhausted. After a few drinks, we said our goodbyes until Oxford next week and slipped off separately into the night. A hot night in Edinburgh, damp heat off bare skin and the smell of sweat mixing in with reefer and patchouli. Got a bit stirred up by all that and found myself wandering down a cobbled side-street when someone grips my elbow.
It’s her. That bird. Evie.
You’re better as the boy, she said. When she smiled it threw me a bit. A real freak when she smiles. Nothing wrong with the smile itself except it doesn’t belong to her face. It’s like one of those children’s flip-books where the pages are cut into top, middle and bottom sections which you match randomly. The top half of her face does not go with the bottom half.
I’ve been to every one of your shows, she said. This did not surprise me.
We ducked into a bar, to a tiny table in the corner where the walls were all pasted over with playbills and covering those a slight sheen of condensation from the heat of the summer bodies pressed in together, and we ordered some red wine, and I said, How’s your Dad? Mad, she says, and we both laugh, surprised. That’s where you get it from then, I say, and she doesn’t smile at this but says, What do you mean? And I chuck her under the chin. Last time I saw you you were more of a statue than I was myself! An experiment, she mumbles. I don’t know if the mumbling is her being embarrassed about admitting this or because I just touched her face. Both, I realize. What kind of experiment? An experiment in (mumbles). In what? I cup my ear, miming, Pardon? I still can’t hear. I lean closer. She can see down my shirt. No bra as usual. She jumps back like she’s been burned. An experiment in what? SILENCE she says, louder than she meant. Asked her to explain. The essence of mime is silence. She says this quietly. The essence of mime is imitation, I say. And I tell her where the word comes from. It’s how we learn. How we learn to do anything. By copying. And then I notice that we are both in the same pose, elbows up on the table, chin in hands, and when she clocks that I’ve clocked this I look straight at her. She drops her gaze. You are a vessel of silence. She is mumbling again. I am a mirror, I say. What you see is what you see. So I tell her what he said in our first ever rehearsal, in his little speech about mime (a contradiction in terms): ‘The fire which I see flames in me. I can know that fire only when I identify with it, and play at being fire. I give my fire to the fire.’
I reach out my fingers as though to stroke her face. Again, she jumps back, fearing to be burned. I reach for my cigarettes instead. After the wine came whisky. She asked me about the statue thing. Why I did it. So I told her. I like being looked at. I’d imagine you get looked at anyway. It’s very zen, I said, just emptying yourself out like that.
I told her a joke. This couple, two statues in Hyde Park, are granted a wish by a fairy who feels sorry for them. They wish to be human for the day. They spend it touring London, seeing the sights, going to a fancy restaurant and so on. At midnight the fairy comes back to meet them in Hyde Park to reverse the spell, as agreed, but the statues are not there. Then the fairy hears rustling in the bushes and goes to investigate. The fairy finds one of the statues clutching a pigeon, while the other one says, Quick, hold him still while I shit on his head.
Then Evie told me the story of the Happy Prince. Who wasn’t really, in the end. The whole time she tells the story, she’s not looking at me. She’s smoothing over the same patch of wax which has dripped from the candle on to the table. She smooths away at it and tells me the story of a young prince who has all that he desires, and lives a decadent, pampered life until he dies. Once he is dead, he is turned into a statue. A statue as beautiful as he was in real life, Evie says, with skin made of pure gold, and eyes of sapphires. His statue is set up high over the city, where he can see all the misery that was hidden from him during his life of luxury. The poor seamstress with the feverish child who cries for oranges she cannot afford. The young writer, freezing in his garret, unable to complete his work of genius for he is too cold. The prince sees all this, Evie says, now scratching at the wax with her little finger. And it kills him. As a statue, he is powerless. He can’t move. It’s only now, as I’m writing, that I realize what a sweet, sad story this is. One day, Evie says, a swallow comes to shelter under the statue of the prince, on his way to join his friends in Egypt for the winter. The prince asks the swallow to delay his journey by a day, and to deliver the jewels in his scabbard to the poor people he sees. The swallow obliges and delays his journey to help the prince. The next day, the prince makes a similar request, asking the swallow to delay his departure by another day to deliver valuable bits of himself — gold leaf from his skin, sapphires from his eyes — to the poor. And now that the prince has given away the jewels in his eyes, he is blind. So the swallow stays with him, and tells him stories of the misery he sees, stripping the rest of the gold leaf from the prince at his direction and distributing it to all these unfortunates. In the end the swallow decides to abandon his journey to Egypt and stay with the prince, because he loves him. The swallow dies from the cold. The prince’s lead heart cracks. And the prince — now stripped of his jewels and his gold leaf — is considered shabby and unsightly by the town councillors so he is taken down from his pedestal and scrapped.
When Evie reaches the end of her story she is crying. And then she says, Do you know why the swallow fell behind his friends on their way to Egypt, why he delayed his journey in the first place? No, I said. You must read the story then, Evie said. Oscar Wilde.
We must have been pretty drunk by the time we left the bar cos she had one of my smokes and she doesn’t. She snatched it out of the pack as we were leaving the bar, and when I went to light it for her she grabbed my wrist to look at the matchbox. It was a souvenir one from the play. She asked to keep it.
19 June
A strange and sad and funny day. Woke this morning to a note left by Evie. She’d obviously stayed the night. Don’t remember her being there. Would you meet me today at 3 p.m. by the cemetery gates?
Which fucking cemetery? Too hungover to think of how I might start asking so I leave it to chance and walk around the b’n’b in circles — bigger and bigger circles — till I hit one. It’s after 3 p.m. She’s not there. That’s how I know it’s the wrong one. I continue circling. I hit another one. It’s 4 p.m.-ish. She’s not there either. I carry on. A third — Edinburgh’s full of cemeteries! — a fourth, and she’s there, waiting. I asked if she wanted to show me a grave. Said she was taking me to visit Mr Rafferty. Her grandfather. He was quite mad, and we would be visiting him at the institution where he lived.
To someone else it might have looked like a country house. Walked into the building and felt small with something sad and familiar. That smell. The convent came back in a rush. Evie warned me that Mr Rafferty might mistake me for someone else and if so, would I mind playing along? Of course, I make my living doing just that!
He’s in his seventies with a face like a soft felt hat, one that has been sat on, with its hollows and bulges. Hair a deep blue black and obviously dyed, giving him a sort of surprised look. Gave me the most delighted smile, Evie’s smile. But on his face, it fit.