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- Herausgeber: Influx Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
'A novel of considerable power, its gritty drama of damage and disillusion well served by a hard-edged and often vigorously compelling prose style… an undeniably dark novel, yet its explorations move us towards a clearer view of the unsettling world we inhabit.' – Guardian 'A poet of misfits, outsiders and the forsaken, his empathy for their suffering ever poignant.' – Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual 'The reader of a Lane story can never escape the feeling of being located squarely in banal reality. It's this that makes any intrusion of the supernatural so shockingly effective – because the picture he creates is so palpable, and because we recognise some version of these lonely streets from our real lives.' – Sublime Horror Neil is a student at Birmingham University, living a typical life of gigs, clubs, politics, sex. One night, after a row with his lover, Neil follows a stranger onto a canal towpath. The stranger turns on him and attacks, viciously carving up Neil's face and leaving him mutilated beyond recognition. Neil's recovery is a journey through surgical reconstruction and sexual alienation. His attempt to track down his attacker becoming a search for his own hidden, destructive self; a search that leads him to question values he had always taken for granted. First published in 2003 and long out-of-print, The Blue Mask is a hardcore emotional trip exploring the trauma of change and the nature of violence and of love.. WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JOSEPH O'NEILL
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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JOEL LANE
THE BLUE MASK
Influx Press
London
What did you say to solitude
Did you fall down on your knees
That’s all right, you got blood in your eyes
It just won’t let you be
– Dan McAlister
CONTENTS
AN INTRODUCTION TO FROM BLUE TO BLACK
JOSEPH O’NEILL
This reissue of The Blue Mask (2003) marks the tenth anniversary of the death of its author Joel Lane (1963-2013), whose sudden passing never ceases to consternate those who knew him. A scattering of personal reminiscences, most of them published on the internet in blogs or comments platforms, record the profound affection, indeed reverence, that he inspired in those who read his fantasy fiction or who had the good fortune to know him in Birmingham, the city that was his home for almost the entirety of his adult life. But little has been written about Lane’s time at university, when he was a leading light in Cambridge’s most significant poetry group. Joel Lane was a poet before he was a writer of fiction, and he kept writing poetry for the rest of his life.
The group was called Virtue Without Terror – a wonderfully lurid name coined by its principal organizer Michael Diss, who derived it from one of Robespierre’s revolutionary pronouncements. It was founded in the autumn term of 1982 and held weekly workshops at Peterhouse, at that time an all-male college. Beginning in the spring of 1983, VWT annually published an eponymous magazine of poems. In retrospect, our little group of proto-poets, of which I was an early member, has a Bolañoesque charm and significance. But unlike our counterparts in Roberto Bolaño’s novels, we were not at risk of death or exile. The turbulence of Thatcher’s Britain rarely penetrated the walls of the student rooms in which we gathered to dissect our poems (and sometimes to dissect their authors). We did not think of ourselves as some kind of movement or avant-garde. On the contrary: if we solemnly agreed about anything, it was that we should not be prescriptive, either artistically or ideologically. We variously admired Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, and Homer. Everything hinged on the words on the page. We were, after all, in Cambridge, the home of practical criticism. Larkin and Eliot, it should be said, we viewed with grave suspicion. ‘We’, in this context, refers almost exclusively to young males. Joel David Mandela Lane was one of us.
Joel joined VWT in the autumn of 1983. He was capable of wry, twinkling observations about the poem at hand, but more often he offered careful, compassionate, almost agonized critiques, sometimes making clenched fists with which he would press on his thighs. (He wore tight-fitting trousers and shirts that were unusually professional-looking, as if he’d just come from the office.) Although alert to the ridiculous and mediocre, he refused the power to wound another with hurtful criticism, looking always for the (sometimes obscure) strengths of a piece of writing. His own poems were anguished and sure-footed. They precursively contained the tropes – silhouettes, strong similes, hauntings, the suffering of self and other, a distinctive atmosphere of dread – that fruitfully appeared in his subsequent fiction. In the autumn of 1985, from his rooms at Trinity College, Joel took on the responsibility of hosting the VWT workshops, a task he handled with egoless commitment and good humor. After he graduated, he maintained his dedication, as ethical as it was aesthetic, to the ideals of artistic community, and he naturally gravitated to the writing circles where those ideals were shared and put into practice.
It feels apt to reminisce about Virtue Without Terror not only because it offers a biographical glimpse of Joel Lane but because in The Blue Mask, his second novel, Lane goes to great lengths to situate, indeed maroon, a ‘little group’ of characters in circumstances in which young people, almost all of them men, navigate their early encounters with the intractable, apparently real world.
The setting, of course, is not gentle collegiate Cambridge but that merciless, relentlessly nocturnal Birmingham which Lane’s imagination insisted on: ‘Birmingham wasn’t the kindest of cities. When you phoned the Samaritans, you got a recorded message saying ‘Tough shit.’’ The protagonists, most prominently the gay couple Neil and Matt, are not very far removed from undergraduate life and its dramas of self-discovery. Their experiences, like students’, are strongly mediated by culture—rock music especially, but also plays and movies, reading political theory (Foucault, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and others), dancing in night clubs, drinking in pubs, participating in leftist electoral politics. Identity—that is, the experience of a happy sameness with others—seems beyond their reach, even in the act of sexual congress: ‘Their clothes were still scattered over Matt’s floor, like dried-out replicas of their bodies.’ The book abounds with signs of the inessential and the incompletely similar. The chief example of this, of course, is the mask of the title, and the act of horrible violence it refers to.
The Blue Mask is, among other things, an extraordinarily detailed, ultra-precise document of a very specific place at a very specific time in English history – the advent of Tony Blair and the concomitant replacement of leftist ideological concepts (‘working-class’, ‘feminist’) by neoliberal counterparts (‘middle-class’, ‘Girl Power’). But social and psychological realism, even if soaked in Marxist awareness, even if properly descriptive of suffering, alienation and class injustice, isn’t enough to get Lane where he ultimately wants to go: down to the deep, disturbing ocean floor of human experience. For that he needs a fantastic and grotesque submersible. For that he needs a protagonist who is disfigured by an acid attack.
It’s impossible, even as someone who knew the artist as a young man, to understand what drove Joel Lane to write his way, again and again, into the ‘room without a light.’ He too wore a mask, as everyone must. And yet, when I remember him, remember the face that was his to wear, what I see clearly is how different he was from the rest of us. He had an openness, a receptivity to the horror and delightfulness of things, that was entirely his own. He was, in the way of the savant or the unworldly one, touched by whatever the opposite of malice is, by whatever the opposite of carelessness is, by whatever opposes the false.
Joseph O’Neill’s novels include Netherland, which received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Kerry Fiction Prize; The Dog, which was nominated for the Booker Prize; and Godwin, forthcoming in 2024. He lives in New York.
CHAPTER 1
our little group
1
The queue on the staircase was like a line of silhouetted trees bent by the wind. Hairspray and lacquer held the twigs in place. The distant rumble of bass guitar vibrated the bare steps. Neil felt a draught as the door behind them opened, letting in more shadows. Beside him, Matt was shivering; Neil restrained the impulse to warm him up. In front of them, Stefan and Theresa stood impassively: Stefan already drunk, Theresa still locked in her own silent world. Neil wondered if seeing despair mimicked as a style would help to lift her mood. Slowly, they climbed towards the admission desk. Beyond it, a red light shone through an open doorway.
Because of the stairs, you reached the upper dance floor first. Neil remembered it as a gig venue. He’d seen Electrafixion here. Ash. Marion. A tiny stage, framed by speakers that poured out jagged noise. Now it was covered with swaying black-clad figures. The crowd at the bar was three or four deep. Something by the Sisters of Mercy was playing, a hollow vortex of brittle drums and synth-effect guitars. The lyrics were about drowning. Matt said something none of them could hear. He pointed to a doorway beyond the bar. The other three followed him.
The next room was quieter. It had low black tables, and a small bar selling bottled beer and spirits. There was a half-price offer on double vodka that Neil and Matt took advantage of. Theresa and Stefan selected beers. They sat around one of the tables, feeling the pulse of bass in their drinks. Goth Night at Edward’s No. 8 was on alternate Fridays. Matt had been trying to drag them along here since the end of last year. ‘You don’t have to be into the music,’ he’d said. ‘Just soak up the atmosphere.’ Grudgingly, Neil had to admit that he was right.
‘What’s it like downstairs?’ Stefan asked. ‘Don’t say more Gothy, ’cause I won’t believe you.’
Matt shook his head. ‘Nah. It’s more a metal, grunge, hardcore type thing. And kids snogging in the corners. Not much light. If we keep together we’ll be okay.’
‘What if we don’t?’ Theresa said quietly. ‘Might be interesting.’ Stefan looked at her, miming astonishment.
‘Down there you won’t know who or what you’re running into,’ Matt said. ‘One minute you’re in a slow dance, the next you’re carrying an alien-human hybrid embryo.’
‘I suppose so,’ Theresa said. ‘One baby Goth’s enough for any household.’ Matt looked away. Neil listened to the wordless roar of guitars coming through the wall.
As they went down the staircase at the back of the club, Neil was aware of drawing a few covetous glances from white-faced, hollow-eyed girls. Perhaps from boys too. The hair and clothing made it hard to tell the difference. He liked that. In terms of physical attraction, faces were more important to him than bodies. He couldn’t understand men who were fixated on breasts or cocks. What expression could a boneless organ have? And those size-queens he’d met were only too aware of the practical drawbacks of their fetish. The light changed from red to blue, and a raw blast of Soundgarden derailed his train of thought. The lower dance floor was wilder: lads in T-shirts, sweat glittering in their spiky hair, jerked and twisted as if the music were literally an electric charge. Plastic glasses scrunched under his feet. Beyond the bar was a darker, less crowded area where couples formed distorted sculptures against the walls. He thought of the Cure song ‘Siamese Twins’, which Matt made a point of playing whenever they’d had a row. Cohabitation had its drawbacks. But this place reminded him why it was worth it. The blue-lit faces on the dance floor made him feel a kind of panic. If a fight started, would anyone notice the difference?
After a while, the combined effect of alcohol and noise made him feel stunned. Midnight passed and the club was still filling up. Where had all these people come from? Where did they hide during the day? He and Matt went back to the upper floor, drank more vodka, danced to ‘Walk Away’ and ‘The Unforgiven’. They never danced at the Nightingale, because the music was shit. Stefan and Theresa had drifted off somewhere. Neil wondered if Theresa was serious about finding someone new. People often used one-night stands to try and get over someone. It never seemed to work.
In the quiet bar, Matt got into a long discussion about hair with two of his Goth friends from the University. Neil went for a piss. The Gents was a murky lake of beer, piss and thin vomit. He didn’t like using urinals, but the state of the cubicles left him no choice. The harsh smell of the soap reminded him of primary school. His image in the mirror was more a shadow than a reflection.
Feeling a little disorientated, he made his way back to the tables. A hand touched his arm. ‘Hi.’ A thin girl, sharp-featured, about nineteen. ‘Are you and your mate on the pull?’ she said.
‘No, actually we’re together.’
The girl shrugged. ‘Oh well. Can he spare you for a dance?’ When he hesitated, she grabbed his hand and led him out through the doorway. It was weird how many people seemed to find him attractive these days. Hardly anyone had bothered with him as a teenager. But then, he’d had longer hair and no social skills. If anyone had tried, he’d have been too wrapped up in himself to notice. Going out with Matt had given him more confidence.
They danced to a mid-tempo Siouxsie and the Banshees track. The voice sounded lost, terrified, its message impossible to decode. The girl was hammered; she wove her arms in the air between them, staring at Neil’s face. They moved closer together until they were almost touching. In the brief quiet between tracks, she grasped Neil’s shoulders and kissed him fiercely. Then she pressed her mouth to his ear, said ‘See you,’ and was gone.
Neil could feel the reality of this place slipping away. The girl’s loneliness had infected him; the crowd suddenly felt like a vast, hostile creature that could trap you, nudge you into a corner and drain the life from you. The floor was vibrating with a slow distant beat, like a bridge over a motorway. He needed to get home. The house in Moseley village. The four of them in the kitchen, sharing a late-night snack that was more of an early breakfast.
Matt was still talking with his friends around a black table that reflected the overhead light. ‘We’d better make a move,’ Neil said. ‘Night bus in twenty minutes.’ It was too cold outside for walking home, and they were too drunk.
They found Stefan drinking on the staircase, looking tired out. He’d worked some late shifts at the hospital recently, and never seemed to sleep. Theresa was harder to find. She was on the dark side of the lower floor, sitting alone. She didn’t notice the others until Matt touched her shoulder. ‘Are you okay?’ Neil asked her as they queued for their coats. She smiled vaguely. Stefan gripped her hand.
In John Bright Street, they saw a thin boy being held back by two friends. The lower half of his face was glossy with blood. The man he was trying to reach stood calmly in a doorway, weighing his fist in the palm of his left hand, ready to strike again. Drops of blood shone like coins on the pavement. The boy’s eyes were pale blue and wide open, as if he were staring at something too bright and terrible to look away from.
2
It was only warm when the sun was shining on you. Matt was glad of his fluffy black sweater, though he’d still have worn it in an August heatwave. He’d been outside all morning, leafleting in Sparkhill and buying vegetables from the cheap greengrocer’s along the Stratford Road where the window displays were on the outside: boxes piled high with chillies and root ginger. Three hours later, here he was in the Physiology lab, staring at a decerebrate rabbit.
The creature was, for all ethical purposes, dead. Its cerebral cortex had been removed through the front of its skull, leaving the sluglike cerebrum intact behind a red curtain of tissue. The heart and lungs would keep going for a few hours, which was the point of the exercise. Maybe the exposed back brain harboured some dim, atavistic longing for the chance to do what rabbits normally did in the springtime. But Matt doubted it. Even dreaming was a function of consciousness. Still, he could have done with some warning before today’s practical.
Fighting back nausea, he picked up the scalpel and inserted it into the warm sternum. You were supposed to peel back the ribs like an eggshell to get at the heart and lungs. The steady heartbeat shuddered through the stiff points of the creature’s bloodstained fur. At least there wasn’t a face looking back at him. Carlos, Matt’s partner in these practicals, stopped filling syringes and glanced anxiously at Matt. ‘Y’all right there?’
‘Suppose so.’ Matt swallowed a burning thread of bile. ‘I don’t know. It’s ironic. The only time I touch meat is in the lab. Except when I’m in bed with Neil.’
Carlos nodded philosophically. ‘Yeah. I worry sometimes, what this does to us. Did you hear about that med. student last year who stuck a dead rabbit up his arse?’ Matt stared at him. ‘It’s true. Exam fever, I guess. Just flipped. He couldn’t get it out again. Spent the night at the QE, having this rabbit removed with forceps. He quit after that, never took his Finals. You might have met him. His name’s Warren.’
‘Whaaat?’ Matt cracked up. ‘You bastard. Fuck!’ The laughter brought more bile into his mouth. Lucky it was cold in here. But time and the rabbit’s heart were ticking away. They’d better get on with it.
Afterwards, they had a fifteen-minute break. Matt went for a walk. A prickly light rain shadowed the campus, blurring its shades of grey. He knew Neil would be in the library, but there wasn’t time to look for him. Poplar trees shivered in the vast courtyard as if stepping out of the shower. He brushed droplets of water from his cardy, which was more resistant to penetration than its owner. A smear of light glistened from the wet sky.
The second practical was another heart-lung experiment; but this time, they were the subjects. You had to put on a plastic mask with a breathing-tube, then ride an exercise bike. It seemed pretty kinky to Matt. As usual, Carlos took care of the measuring and recording while he did the messy stuff. The mouthpiece tasted vile, rubber overlaid with chlorine. He shut his eyes and cycled down the long, tree-lined road from West Bromwich to Handsworth. Every two minutes, Carlos measured his heart rate and changed the airbag. Quite what this was meant to prove, Matt wasn’t sure. No doubt he’d make sense of it when revising for the exam.
To finish with, you had to keep cycling with the same airbag; then, when you started to feel dizzy, you stopped. The abnormal readings at that point would bring home the physiology of asphyxia. Matt grinned at Carlos. ‘Just like old times.’ But with the mask in place and the pedals going round as if driven by themselves, it seemed about as sexy as an operation. After a few minutes, the air in his mouth tasted stale; but he wasn’t tired. The rain must have stopped: sunlight was pouring through the long window, drifting past his face. He was swimming in it, his legs kicking behind him as he rose to the surface. But something was pulling him down.
‘Matt! Matt, are you okay? Jesus Christ!’ Matt felt the floor against his back. Carlos was crouching beside him, his hand on Matt’s chest. For a moment, Matt thought he was taking the heart rate. ‘You blacked out there, man. Got off the bike and just collapsed.’ His eyes searched Matt’s face with a mixture of concern and secret curiosity. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Fine.’ The dense sunlight had been replaced by the lab’s pale electric light. Matt’s face was wet. He took a deep breath, drinking the air.
Dr Finn was striding towards them, looking panicky. ‘Matthew, isn’t it? Are you all right, son?’
‘Mmm.’ Matt stood up, brushing the dust from his jeans. ‘Never got the warning signals.’
‘Don’t take up diving.’ The lecturer glanced at Carlos. ‘Is he always this pale?’ Carlos nodded. ‘Okay. Do you want to take him outside and get a cup of tea? I’ll clear up your stuff.’
‘Cheers.’ They walked together down the half-lit corridor to the exit. Matt felt hungover. Not only the last few minutes but the whole day seemed blurred, less than real. Outside, the rain had stopped but the sky was still dark with bruises. Worried-looking students, weighed down with shoulderbags full of books, scurried between the redbrick faculty buildings. At Derek’s Cafe in the Guild, Carlos bought Matt a black coffee with lots of sugar. I should get a tan, he thought. As long as I look like a Goth, everyone thinks I’m ill. I’ve only got to frown and they assume I’m suicidally depressed.
The cafe was rapidly filling up with students: bright-coloured sweaters, ethnic jewellery and unimaginative haircuts. A group of SWP members were agreeing with each other about the election. ‘If New Labour wins,’ one of them was saying, ‘all the anger will be forgotten. The only reason the ruling class will let things get any better is to stop the revolution evolving from a dream into a programme. It’s the good cop-bad cop strategy: first Labour, then the Tories, then Labour again. Same shit, different arse.’ Matt drank his coffee and tried not to listen. The hard left depressed him. Did they really think Thatcherism had brought the revolution closer? Neil had said once that any popular revolution in England would be fascist, not socialist.
‘Are you off home now?’ Carlos said.
‘No. I’m meeting Neil in a bit. Then I’m doing Nightline. Neil’s got a rehearsal. This play he’s written.’
‘What’s it about?’
Matt shrugged. He wasn’t really sure what Nights of Insult was about, though he knew what happened in it. ‘It’s about some tenants in a house. They’re in all kinds of trouble. It’s almost like the house is under siege. Then they work together and begin to sort things out.’
Carlos grinned at him. ‘You’re like a married couple, you two. I’m a bit jealous. Heterosexuality is so fucked up, men and women can’t even be friends. Still, I can’t change the way I am.’
‘I wouldn’t want you to. I mean, I really wouldn’t.’ Carlos raised a finger, laughing. ‘Sit and swivel.’
After he’d gone, Matt settled down with a horror anthology he’d found in the second-hand bookshop in Selly Oak. It was one of the Not at Night series, with blood-red covers and thick, dusty paper, dated 1932. He shared Neil’s love of old books, though their reading tastes diverged somewhat. ‘You don’t understand,’ he’d said to Neil that morning over breakfast. ‘This is the first time these stories had been published in Britain. Before that, they’d all appeared in the now-legendary Weird Tales magazine.’
Neil had perused the red jacketless cover, the heavy black print on the cheap paper. ‘Yes, but they’re shit.’
Arguments of this kind were more playful than the earnest mindfucks Matt was used to getting from older lovers. Indeed, one of the things he loved about Neil was his total lack of any compulsion to pass on wisdom. Most of his exes were mature men who’d lectured him on the meaning of love before sinking their world-weary cocks into his slightly plump arse. Neil didn’t try to mould him or use him to prove a theory. There were only six years between them, though in the student world that was like two generations. They took it in turns to do the housework: Matt was more domesticated, but Neil was at home more.
And despite his advanced years, Neil was stunning. His face combined the best features of Morrissey and Johnny Marr: dramatic eyebrows, gentle eyes, fine cheekbones, a soft mouth, a firm chin. His hair was red with black growing through, like a flame above charcoal. Theresa was so taken with Neil that Matt had threatened to break her arms if she fucked him. He didn’t quite trust her not to. Whether he trusted Neil, he didn’t like to think about. Matt himself looked like an adolescent Robert Smith: spiky black hair, a semi-skimmed milk complexion and a tendency towards flab.
Just after six o’clock, Neil’s crimson head passed through the doorway. Matt closed his book (part-way through ‘The Creeping Horror’) and waved across the crowded room. They kissed briefly – not so quickly as to be furtive, but not so slowly as to provoke a reaction. You had to be aware of these things. Matt told him about the decerebrate rabbit and the blackout. ‘Not one of my better days, so far. You?’
‘Been in the library, mostly. Reading Mein Kampf. They should print Now wash your hands on the back cover. It’s so obvious, from the book, what he’ll do if he gets into power. But the book was translated into English years before the war, and all those fucking American and English intellectuals were praising Hitler’s scientific insights. It’s like there were Nazis everywhere, but after the war they’d all magically disappeared.’
Neil had been writing this Ph.D on fascist ideology for more than three years now. At times, he seemed to talk about fascism as a universal human tendency, like murder; at other times, he saw it as an exceptionally warped and deceitful kind of political organisation. He couldn’t make up his mind whether the causes of fascism were in people or in the capitalist system. Anyone else would have chosen an explanation and then tried to justify it. That was what politics was all about. But being Neil, he couldn’t.
They walked together down the steep footpath that curved around the playing field, more for the view than for speed. In front of them, the sunset rusted the tall University gate; the field was a lake of shadow. Poplar trees swayed uneasily, waiting for the band to come on. It was cold out here. As they stood among the blacked-out shapes of trees, Neil put his arm around Matt. ‘Are you feeling OK now?’
‘Sure. Nothing a good curry won’t put right.’ Outside the gates, the Bristol Road was the curry equivalent of Sunset Boulevard. But this time, it let them down: the restaurant they chose served up two dilute, warmed-over kormas with pilau rice that was garishly multicoloured, like confetti. At least it was cheap, though not as cheap as better food in Sparkhill.
They walked back up to the Guild by the side road. Neil’s rehearsal was in the Muirhead Tower; Matt’s Nightline shift was in St Francis’ Hall, the chapel building. They kissed goodbye in the dark. There was something weirdly exposed about the University campus: the huge brick buildings, the blank sky in between, the bare ground. And the silence. It was like being upside down. As he rang the bell and waited to be let in through the locked entrance to the Nightline offices at the back, Matt couldn’t help feeling comforted by the stone crucifix and narrow stained-glass windows. Even though he’d not attended a church service since leaving school, he still thought of them as places of safety.
Comfort was important, because answering Nightline calls was a pretty weird experience. Like being stoned and listening to a Spacemen 3 album: you didn’t know what was coming next, but you knew it would sound lonely and fucked up. And it would be in your head for some time. Most of the female callers preferred to speak to a woman, so Matt ended up with lads who were drunk or drugged and losing their grip. Some were sexually confused, and he tried to reassure them that it was not only all right to be queer, it was all right to be confused.
But the one overwhelming problem was money. Debts, loans, jobs, evictions. When you got through the course, you’d spend the next ten years paying for it. Which meant a bad result really was the end of hope. One plaintive caller the other night had said: ‘Of course, it’ll be different when Labour get in. Won’t it?’ Yeah, right. It was a good job the Nightline volunteers weren’t expected to solve anyone’s problems. You just had to sit and listen, give out relevant information, be helpful without getting involved. Then walk or cycle out into the unexpectedly peaceful night, with the city’s lights spread around you like a distant galaxy viewed from a satellite.
3
The Studio Theatre was in the base of the Muirhead Tower, a shaky concrete and glass building that, like the Eiffel Tower, had long outlasted its planned demolition date. Unlike the Eiffel Tower, it housed three academic departments. Including Cultural Studies, where Neil spent quite a lot of time. Being up there on a windy day was like being inside the head of a schoolboy on his first encounter with Special Brew. The tower was fenced around with wooden platforms held together by scaffolding, preventing anyone from getting close enough to be hit by falling windows. To get inside, you had to go through a concrete-roofed tunnel with scaffolding walls. The tower was rumoured to have been the point of departure for a number of suicides, though in reality it was hard to see how anyone could get far enough out to hit the ground. Working in the Studio Theatre, you had a constant sense of social and economic structures being about to collapse around you.
Gary and Tim were already in the rehearsal room when Neil arrived. Tim unrolled a sheath of pencil sketches for sets and lighting plans. He wanted the basic scenery to be three walls, a bed and a chair. No windows. Rachel’s room had a small dressing-table with a mirror and a cot in one corner; Corin’s room had an exercise machine; Dave’s room had a collection of videos and framed pictures. Mr Y would be in a blue spotlight; the other characters would be lit by a floor lamp or a fixed overhead light.
‘That looks good,’ Neil said. ‘I’d actually meant the set to stay the same, with all the different props there at once. Afterall, the broken glass and other rubbish stays around from scene to scene.’
‘That reminds me,’ Tim said, ‘we’ll have problems using real glass. Let alone razor blades. Too many risks. Anyone gets hurt, there’ll be hell to pay.’
‘Isn’t Theresa doing most of her scenes barefoot?’ Gary asked. ‘And then Sean and Michael rolling around in every other scene. Could take the Theatre of Cruelty to a new level.’
‘Smart one,’ Neil remarked wearily. The coolly ironic tone that Gary brought to his nameless role was fairly tiresome in real life. ‘Look, we’ll put down rugs or something, mark off no-go areas on the stage.’
Gary lit a cigarette with an air of frosty detachment. At that point, the opening and closing of several doors announced the arrival of Sean and Michael. That was the whole cast apart from Theresa, who wasn’t coming tonight. Sean played Corin, a bruiser hiding from his former criminal associates. Michael played his boyfriend, Dave: a petty thief and full time fantasist. They’d met in prison. Theresa played a stripper, Rachel, who was still mourning the loss of a child a year before. Gary played the narrator, a phantom figure who stalked the other characters and spied on them. He was never entirely offstage. Neil had started calling him Mr X in rehearsal, but Gary had changed it to Mr Y. ‘After the chromosome. And the lack of motivation.’
Tonight they were rehearsing two of Dave’s scenes, with Sean playing both Corin and another thug. Tim dimmed the lights in the rehearsal room, creating a sense of imprisonment. The distant chime of the University clock was an appropriate touch. Gary started reading from his crumpled copy of the script. On an early morning in January, someone knocked on the house door. It was the agent Dave had been waiting for. But the part he was offering wasn’t one that Dave wanted to play. Michael backed into the room. Sean walked in slowly after him and closed the door, his face completely expressionless.
The visitor was an associate of Corin’s who was anxious to contact him. At that time, Dave really didn’t know where he was.Robbed of the opportunity to betray his friend, he improvised a grief too perfect to be convincing.Sprawled on the floor, face tilted downward, Michael told the story of how Corin had been found hanging in an allotment shed.There was no funeral service. The body was cremated. I kept the ashes. Scattered them in the Sandwell Valley on Christmas Day. He used to cruise there. The ashes were a black frost on the grass. They didn’t blow away. They probably still haven’t.
Without saying anything, the visitor began to smash up Dave’s room. The idea was that Sean would break some framed pictures and lamps, scattering broken glass over the stage. The only light remaining would be a faint red glow from behind the audience, representing the dawn. Then the visitor pinned Dave to the wall and beat the shit out of him. I don’t know where he is! I don’t know if he’s still alive. If he comes back, I’ll tell you – I’ll set him up for you - I’ll give the cunt to you, I swear. The visitor tossed a card on to the floor and walked out. Dave huddled in the corner, shaking. The narrator moved to centre stage. In the dim light, Gary was hardly more than a silhouette.
This was a speech Neil was quite proud of, though Gary was still pushing too hard, hiding behind bits of arch mime. Keep still, Neil jotted on his copy of the script. It had been Gary’s idea to play these scenes cold, with no visible emotion; but then he’d got bored. I thought he was going to kill the boy. Another picture for my winter archive, my extended family of the dead. But that would have been too easy. It would have made no difference. The daylight flickered on bloodstained fragments of glass, like rose petals. Stooping over the boy’s frozen body, I saw a pale cloud of breath leave his mouth like cigarette smoke. Every breath he took was a final breath. Gary stood for a few seconds with his eyes shut. Then he looked straight at Neil. There was something hostile and questioning in his face.
They broke off for a beer from their little store in the backstage fridge. Sean, who’d been even more wooden than usual, emptied his bottle in a few aggressive gulps. ‘I know you don’t think so,’ he said to Neil, ‘but this play is a party political broadcast for New Labour. Crime is bad, families are good, the working class are mindless thugs.’
Neil bit his lip. They’d been over this ground before. ‘It’s not about the family you’re born into, it’s about the family you make. A family that has whatever meaning you bring to it. The criminals represent the ethos of capitalist society.’
‘You can’t rise above class by ignoring it, you know.’
‘I’m not trying to rise above it,’ Neil said. ‘I’m trying to say something about domination.’ Gary cocked an ear, feigning interest. Neil ignored him. ‘What happens between Dave and Corin… I’m trying to suggest that relations of power can be subverted, played with. Exposed as social constructs. And ultimately, changed.’
Sean crouched in his chair, looking unimpressed. Being in this play was difficult for him, of course, now that he and Theresa had split up. Even if she wasn’t here tonight. And he was obviously finding the Blair circus a bit hard to stomach. Even Neil was getting rather sickened by it all.
‘I don’t know which of you has less of a clue,’ Gary said in a tone of mock boredom. ‘What do you know about domination? S&M isn’t some kind of clever political thesis. It’s not about fucking semiotics. It’s about giving up control, or taking control. In a world where pain is the only currency. But you’ – he glanced at Sean - ‘wouldn’t have the first idea about that, and you’ – that look again, directed at Neil – ‘just try to sentimentalise it. You think relationships are the great answer. Going home every night to play mummies and daddies with that little boyfriend of yours. You think you live on the edge, but you know fuck all. Vanilla’s too dangerous for you.’
Sean flushed with a mixture of anger and embarrassment. ‘Tell me something,’ he said quietly to Gary. ‘Since you’re explaining the mysteries of the universe, maybe you could explain to me something I’ve been wondering ever since we started working on this play. Why are you such a cunt? I mean, what is your problem with everyone?’
Neil stood up and walked to the door. ‘Here’s an idea,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we save the amateur dramatics for the fucking rehearsal?’ Rather awkwardly, the others followed him back into the half-lit room. But as they took up their positions, Neil wondered if Gary had been winding them up in order to inject some tension into the acting. He was one devious queen.
The next scene they were working on involved sex between Dave and Corin. They were both staying in to avoid the gang who’d threatened Dave. It was meant to be a fairly brutal scene, with the narrator doing most of the talking. Tim lit a cigarette and blew dry smoke across the room. Michael lay on the bed, while Sean paced tensely up and down. Gary began to read: Night and day were becoming hard to tell apart. While the boy took refuge in his celluloid dreams, Corin tried to think of a way to escape. The gaps on Dave’s shelves, where pictures had been broken, showed Corin the shadowy, patient faces of his past. A strange tone had crept into his voice, somewhere between disgust and compassion.
I’m going to leave, Michael said. I don’t belong here. He made for the door. Sean took hold of him, gently at first, then cruelly. They fell on to the narrow bed. In performance, Sean would tear off Michael’s shirt. Gary’s voice became deeper, breathy, a monotone breaking the silence of the strug-gling bodies. As Corin’s fear and rage spent itself in Dave’s body, it gave way to a strange tenderness. They lay in the dark for a long time, holding on. He clearly didn’t need the script for this scene. The words seemed to be drawn out of him in a long, painful string. Then he snapped out of it, waving a hand to dismiss the still figures. Sean backed off, doing up his belt. Michael stayed on the bed, curled up on his side, like a child.
Neil felt at once part of the scene and cut off from it – more like a voyeur than an audience member. Somewhere at the back of his mind, he knew that this was pants. It had no dramatic tension, no real life to it. But somehow, the contrast between Gary’s obsessive narration and the awkwardly nonerotic movements of Sean and Michael was exciting. It was like the contrast between the profane dialogue in a Fassbinder film and the demure subtitles – Ich habe ihn im Arsch gefickt, und ich habe sein Scheiss noch aufmeinem Schwanz being represented as ‘I’ve had him.’ Maybe you had to be English to find that not only funny but profound.
‘Time for a swift pint down the Gun Barrels?’ Tim suggested as they locked up, closing the door on a darkness that looked infinite. Sean and Michael agreed; Gary shrugged. It was quarter to eleven; they’d have to run.
Neil put his script down on the reception desk. ‘I’ve got some points from this evening to think about. See you Monday, lads.’ Michael took off down the walkway between two dark buildings; Sean and Tim raced after. Neil looked at the script for Scene 9, the beating. It needed more reaction, less commentary. He didn’t immediately notice that Gary was still there. A thin hand brushed across the paper, making him look up.
‘You can’t write what you don’t feel.’ Close up, Gary’s narrow face was a mask of tension. ‘Try it some day. A walk on the secret side. The wrong side. Or you’ll go on thinking you know, but knowing nothing.’ Neil stared at him. ‘What have you got to lose?’ Gary almost whispered. ‘I mean really got to lose? Apart from your cosy game of happy families?’
If that was meant as a pass, it fell flat. Neil smiled, then looked back at his script. ‘Save it for the rehearsals,’ he said wearily. Gary slammed the front door of the Studio Theatre behind him. Neil settled to a few minutes of quiet work: jotting points in the margin of the script, crossing out lines of text, inserting pauses and silent movements on the narrator’s part. He no longer had a sense of the character as someone distinct from Gary.
In a way, this had all started with Gary’s seminar on Jean Genet the previous autumn. Gary had focused on the themes of death and faith in Genet’s novels. You have to take the titles literally. They really are about miracles, roses, funerals. Genet’s writing breaks down the walls between the sacred and the profane. Sean had argued that Genet’s work was secretly fascist, an endorsement of power and oppression. Neil had wondered then what it would be like to get the two of them on stage together.
Nights of Insult
