First Person and Other Stories (7 page)

Imagine, I say. Imagine conducting it in 1915 in the middle of the First World War. Then imagine the strangeness of conducting it in the 1960s, when every single scene must have reminded people of the different thing it meant, for a German conductor, the story of all the people starved and tyranted, buried alive, for being themselves, for saying the truth, for standing up to the status quo.

Tyranted’s not a word, you say in my ear.

You say it lovingly. You are holding me in your arms. We are both naked. You are warm behind me. You make my back feel blessed, the way you are holding me. I can feel the curve of your breasts at each of my shoulder blades.

Imagine all the things that Florestan must have meant, then, I say, to those people, in that audience in 1915, then 1961.

It’s an opera, you say. It’s nothing to do with history.

Yes, but it is, I say. It’s post-Napoleonic. That’s obvious. Imagine what it meant to its audience in 1814. Imagine watching the same moment in this opera at different times in history. Take the moment when Fidelio asks whether she can give the prisoner a piece of old bread. It’s the question of whether one starving man can have a piece of mercy. All the millions of war dead are in it there, crowding behind that one man. And the buried, unearthed truth. And the new day dawning, and all the old ghosts coming out of the ground.

Uh huh, you say.

What if Fidelio had been written by Mozart? I say.

It wasn’t, you say.

The knockabout there’d have been with Fidelio in her boy’s clothes, I say. The swagger Mozart would have given Rocco. The good joke the girl who’s ironing at the start would have become, and the boy too, who thinks he can just marry her because he’s made up his mind he wants to.

You yawn.

Though there’s something really interesting in
the way Beethoven doesn’t force those characters to be funny, I say. The ironing girl, what’s her name? There’s something humane, in the way they’re not just, you know, played for laughs.

You kiss the back of my neck. You use your teeth on my shoulder. It’s allowed, you biting me. I quite like to be gently bitten. I’m not allowed to bite you, though, in case it marks you.

I still have no idea whether you like being gently bitten or not.

Not long after we’d met, when I said I’d never heard much, didn’t know much about Beethoven, you played me some on your iPod. When I said I thought it sounded like Jane Austen crossed with Daniel Libeskind, you looked bemused, like I was a clever child. When I said that what I meant was that it was like different kinds of architecture, as if a classically eighteenth century room had suddenly morphed into a postmodern annexe, you shook your head and kissed me to make me stop talking. I closed my eyes into the kiss. I love your kiss. Everything’s sorted, and obvious, and understood, and civilised, your kiss says. It’s a shut-eye lie, I know it is, because the music I didn’t know before I knew you makes me open my eyes in a place of no sentimentality, where light itself is a kind of shadow, where everything is fragment-slanted. A couple of months later,
when I said I thought you could hear the whole of history in it, all history’s grandnesses and sadnesses, you’d looked a bit annoyed. You’d taken the iPod off my knee and disconnected its headphones from their socket. When I’d removed the dead headphones from my ears you’d rolled them up carefully and tucked them into the special little carrying-case you keep them in. You’d said you were getting a migraine. Impatience had crossed your face so firmly that I had known, in that instant, that now we were actually a kind of married, and that our marriedness was probably making your real relationship more palatable.

Sometimes a marriage needs three hearts beating as one.

I’ve met your partner. She’s nice. I can tell she’s quite a nice person. She knows who I am but she doesn’t know who I am. Her clothes smell overwhelmingly of the same washing powder as yours.

Ten days before Christmas, smelling of sex in a rented bed, with half an hour to go before you have to get the half past ten train home, I hold the new Fidelio in my hands. I think of the ironing girl, holding up the useless power of her own huge love to Fidelio in the first act like a chunk of dead stone she thinks is full of magic. I
think of Fidelio herself, insufferably righteous. I think about how she makes her first entrance laden with chains that aren’t actually binding her to anything.

I open the plastic box and I take out one of the shiny discs. I hold it up in front of us and we look at our reflection, our two heads together, in the spectrum-split plastic of the first half of the opera.

So is marriage a matter of chains? I say.

Eh? you say.

Or a matter of the kind of faithfulness that brings dead things back to life? I say.

I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, you say.

I lean my head back on your collarbone and turn it so that my mouth touches the top of your arm. I feel with my teeth the front of your shoulder.

Don’t bite me, you say.

Marzelline. That’s her name.

Gershwin wrote six prayers to be sung simultaneously, for the storm scene in Porgy and Bess. As an opera,
Porgy and Bess
did comparatively badly at the box office. So did the early versions of
Fidelio;
it wasn’t till 1814 that audiences were ready to acclaim it. At the end of
one, all the prisoners are free and all the self-delusion about love is irrelevant. At the end of the other, there’s nothing to do but go off round the world, on one good leg and one ruined leg, in search of the lost beloved. I guess you got me fo’ keeps, Porgy, Bess says, before she’s gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone.

Will I dress as a boy and stand outside your house, all its windows lit for your Christmas party, its music filtering out into the dark? Will I stand in the dark and take a pick or a spade to the hard surface of the turf of your midwinter back lawn? Will I dig till I’m covered in dust and earth, till I uncover the whole truth, the house of dust under the ground? Will I shake the soil off the long iron chain fixed to the slab of rock deep in the earth beneath the pretty lavenders, the annuals and perennials of your suburban garden?

It is Saturday night. It is summertime on a quiet hot street in a port town. A man plays a sleepy lament on a piano. Some men play dice. A woman married to a fisherman is rocking a baby to sleep. Her husband takes the baby out of her arms and sings it his own version of a lullaby. A woman is a some-time thing, he sings. The baby cries. Everybody laughs.

Porgy arrives home. He’s a cripple; he rides in a
cart pulled by a goat. He goes to join in the dice game. A man arrives with a woman in tow; the man is Crown and the woman is Bess. His job is the unloading and loading of cargo from ships. Her job is to be his, and to keep herself happy on happy dust, drugs. These dice, Porgy says shaking them, are my morning and my evening stars. An’ just you watch ‘em rise and shine for this poor beggar.

But Crown is high on drink and dust. When he loses at dice he starts a fight. He kills someone with a cotton hook. Get out of here, Bess tells him, the police will be here any minute. At the mention of the police, everybody on the street disappears except the dead man, the dead man’s mourning wife, and Bess, who finds all the doors of all the houses shut against her.

Then, unexpectedly, one door opens. It’s the door of Porgy, the cripple. She’s about to go in, but at the last moment she doesn’t. She turns and looks at the side of the stage instead. Everything on stage stops, holds its breath.

The orchestra stops.

A white girl has entered from the wings. She is standing, lost-looking, over by the edge of the set.

Bess stares at her. Porgy, still at his door, stares at her. Serena, the dead man’s wife, stares at her. The dead man, Robbins, opens his eyes and puts his head up and stares at her.

The doors of the other houses on the set open; the windows open. All the other residents of Catfish Row look out. They come out of the houses. They’re sweating, from the heat under the stage-lights, under the hot summer night. They stand at a distance, their sweat glistening, their eyes on the white girl with the iron in her hand.

The girl starts to sing.

A brother has come to seek her brothers, she sings. To help them if she can with all her heart.

Everybody on stage looks to Porgy, the cripple. He looks to Bess, who shrugs, then nods.

Porgy nods too. He opens his door wider.

My mother was sitting on the top stair with her arm round the neck of the dog, whose front paws were up on her knees. She was reading a Georgette Heyer book. There was no tea on. There was no sign of anything to do with tea in the kitchen. My father would be home in an hour.

I stood at the foot of the stairs for a while. The dog looked down at me, wagged her tail. My mother turned a page and yawned. I slung my schoolbag strap round the knob of the banister, opened the bag, took my books and pencil case out and went through to the living room. I had homework for tomorrow.
Write a newspaper report of the death of Mary Queen of Scots. Translate pages 31 – 33 of La Symphonie Pastoral by André Gide.
I hated La Symphonie Pastorale.

It was a load of sentimental rubbish about a blind girl. I called my father at his work from the living room phone. I lifted the receiver carefully so the hall phone wouldn’t make the little ting that would give away that someone was on the other phone.

You’ll need to bring chips, I said.

I can hear you, my mother called down the stairs. If you’re telling him to bring chips, tell him I want a haddock.

She wants a haddock, I said.

Couldn’t you put something in the oven? my father said. We’ve had chips three times this week.

Actually I can’t put something in the oven because there’s nothing in the house, I said over by the door, loud enough for her to hear me.

There’s people in the house, not nothing, my mother called down. And there’s a dog. That’s not nothing, people and a dog.

I can’t hear you, I said to my father. She’s shouting stuff.

I hung up and went back to the table and wrote up what we’d taken notes on in double history.

A hush came over the crowd as the doomed queen was led to the place of execution. She was dressed in black satin and velvet and she undressed, saying, ‘I have never put off my clothes before in front of such a company.’ Underneath
her clothes she was wearing red underclothes, and her handmaidens then put long red sleeves on her arms and pinned them to her underclothes. She smiled and prayed and said goodbye to those who had served her all her life. There was much crying in the room. Her handmaidens fastened a white cloth across her eyes and she stumbled forward to lay her head on the block. In fact she also put her hands on the block, but luckily someone noticed at the last minute or these would also have been cut off as well as her head. Then the executioner tried to cut her head off, but the first time he missed and only cut her head a bit open. The execution was properly executed the second time and when the executioner held her head up it fell out of his hands and all that was left in his hands was a wig, and the beautiful queen was revealed to everybody as an old lady with very short grey hair. Legend has it that her lips were still moving many minutes after her head was cut off and that her little dog, which was of the breed of Skye Terrier, hid in among her skirts and then curled itself round the place between her shoulders where her head had been, and then it later died as well, of sorrow.

It was only a first draft. The idea was that we were meant to make it as much like a real newspaper report as possible. I went through it
again and decided what was important and what wasn’t, if it was for a newspaper, and gave it suitable headings and columns.

VERY FASHIONABLE

The doomed queen was led to the place of execution. A hush came over the crowd when it saw her. She was dressed very fashionably in black satin and velvet. Many ladies nodded at her fashion taste.

EMBARRASSING

The crowd held its breath while she took off nearly all her clothes. All the people there could nearly see what she would look like with no clothes on. It was embarras-sing. She was wearing bright red underwear. Goodbye! she said to everyone. She smiled a queenly smile. The crowd burst into tears. She was the People’s Queen. Her hand-maidens fixed a white cloth on her eyes.

WEARING A WIG

When she came forward to the block, she stumbled. The crowd all went oooh! aaah! After two swipes of the axe, she was unfortunately dead. The executioner picked up her head. That’s when it was revealed to everyone that she had grey hair and wore a wig and was not at all as beautiful as people had thought, but much older in actuality.

NOBLE BREED

Legend has it that she spoke for a long time after being dead, though nobody has reported what it was she actually said. We at the DAILY NEWS believe she probably said ‘I am dead. Do not grieve for me. Please make sure my dog is fed properly after my demise.’

Her dog, a Skye Terrier, which is a noble breed, would not leave her side even when she was dead. Then it would not leave the place where her head once was. Then it died too. And that was the sad end of the noble breed herself, the Scottish queen of Scots, and also of her dog.

I heard something clattering on the stairs.

Christ almighty I hate these fucking books, my mother was shouting. They’re full of shit. I’m never going to read a single one of these again in my life.

She must have thrown the book down the stairs. That must have been what had made the clattering noise. Either that or she’d thrown the dog.

I had never heard her use language like that before.

I very much disapproved.

My mother’s gone mad, I told my friend Sandra the next day at school.