Tom Houghton (24 page)

I did not acknowledge any of the missiles. I figured if I made moves to avoid them, or remove them from my hair, I would only egg the boys on further. By now there must have been fifteen or twenty spitballs stuck in my hair. I sat bolt upright, trying desperately to concentrate on the basic algebra Mrs Nguyen was teaching. Thomas Houghton would act his way out of this, wouldn't give them the satisfaction of a reaction.
Never show your tic
.

At lunch I lingered in the classroom until I was hurried on by Mrs Nguyen and in the hat room I removed the balls from my hair with disgust, shaking them into the bin. I found my usual hiding place and tried my best to concentrate on the latest movie magazines Mum had brought home. But when that bell tolled, it called me back to face another round from the firing line. If I just let it all wash over me without reaction, surely they would soon give up?

The more I ignored, however, the harder things were thrown, and the more things were spat. I morphed the scene once again into celluloid: I was the victimised smart kid and two scenes into the film I would graduate from school and while the thugs struggled to make ends meet with their small-town minds and laborious jobs, I'd be a success, wealthy and famous. These visions were the only things that got me through the day.

I advised Mrs Nguyen that I would not be coming to class tomorrow. My mother and her new boyfriend were taking me away for the weekend. I said sorry that I had forgotten my note, but promised to bring it to her on Monday. She was flippant, and wished me a happy weekend.

At home I showered the teasing from my hair and skin, scrubbed away until my scalp and flesh hurt. I raced about completing my chores, plucking unripe fruit from the citrus trees, pulling under-grown carrots from the sanctuary of their beds. I barely tidied the chicken coop at all, scraping up their shit and scattering it over the vegetable garden with none of my usual methodical precision. I pelted the angry bird with one of its eggs, narrowly missing her. Her would-be baby chick exploded against the wall of the garage. I filled three more bags with rubbish, barely giving any thought to what was being kept or discarded. I was void of sentiment; it was just another chore begging to be completed. I called in to Mrs B's, who informed me that she needed nothing today, thank you, so I returned home and pulled the salad plate from the fridge to pick at over dinner. As soon as I cleared up after myself, I went to my room and shut the door, put on a cassette of the soundtrack to a movie and threw myself into my cards.

Busy, that was it. I needed to keep busy to distance myself from the day, and what I would be returning to on Monday. Not long now until the end of term and then I would be free for weeks, back to just me and Mum . . . and now Mal as well. I worked quickly and efficiently, adding notes and titles, clipping and pasting portraits from waiting piles of magazines. My fingers were sticky with glue, my forefinger had developed a temporary callus from where the pencils had pressed, my eyesight was getting blurry from too much concentration. But on I worked, creating a new card for another actor showing promise: Joan Cusack, sister of John. I added another: Holly Hunter. Every movie ad was scoured for names; every list of credits was picked over for another piece of meat. In this task, I could think of little else.

I
was nervous to be seeing my daughter for the first time in eighteen months. Would we have anything to say? The scariest thing for me was fearing how she would judge me. I wanted to be liked by Lexi, I wanted us to be friends and, I suppose, above and beyond all of that, I was desperate for forgiveness. Her words echoed around my head as I walked the streets of Edinburgh: that my rants about her mother only served to negatively impact Lexi's feelings towards me. This was indicative, wasn't it, of so many facets of my life. How many others were ignoring the substance of what I said and peering beneath to try to make sense of the man spewing forth? Damon, certainly. Hanna no doubt felt she knew me better than I knew myself. I was scared, I had to face it. Not only of the play and this Scottish audience robbed of a native star, but scared for my future. Funny how a foreign environment can sometimes make one shit one's pants, proverbially speaking.

I was ill-prepared for a Scottish winter and unimpressed by the number of daylight hours. A last-minute change meant I was forced to fly out of Sydney three days earlier than originally agreed, abandoning plans to spend two days with Lexi in London. I was coerced instead to spend them hobnobbing with the production and festival companies. Victor knew I hated doing it, and had often commented on how badly I executed it, but nevertheless had insisted because
they
had. Lexi showed no disappointment at all, probably because it meant no longer having her father crash on the couch in the lounge room of her shared house – Lexi and a bunch of straight muscle boys she'd befriended at the local gym.

Victor knew I liked my privacy, so found me a room in a hotel that was a converted mansion on the Royal Mile. It was a ten-minute walk from the small theatre we were playing at and about the same distance from the hotel where some of the other cast and crew were staying. I spent my first few hours in the gloomy city searching for more suitable winter wear, the few warm clothes I'd brought proving unsuitable both because they were intended for a Sydney winter, and had fitted me better last year. I spent the equivalent of my first two weeks' pay on a jacket, undergarments, thick woolly socks and a new pair of shiny black boots that I did not need but had to have. Throw in a few scarves, gloves and beanies and before you knew it, the entire run was nearly accounted for. Hey ho.

The schmoozing of the powers that be went just as I'd expected, and feared. A lot of jokes about convicts and being upside down, and questions about the gay scene and theatre world in Sydney, mutual applause for Victor's visionary uniqueness and extreme gratitude, humbling, fall-at-your-feet indebtedness for recognising it, and agreeing to allow me to come all this way to star in the thing when it would have been easier and more politically viable to get a local. Wine helped make me sound more genuine, English beers on top teetered me over the edge towards facetiousness. Victor always managed to find me before I turned into a devil, making excuses about a diva's beauty sleep and morning rituals, et cetera, et cetera.

One week of rehearsals was all he'd allowed, given that I was (or should have been) entirely familiar with every line, the set was largely the same and the rest of the cast had been rehearsing for three weeks without me – Victor salivating to step in and read Martha in my absence – so actually the six days we were given were more about my bonding with Grace, the fierce Invernesian who'd reached local notoriety for walking out of the highest paid job in television, a stupidly popular Scottish soap opera. This, we all recognised, was entirely responsible for our near sellout. I warmed to Grace immediately. She was one of those deeply wrinkled, yellow-skinned, foul-mouthed living legends – rough as bags, as Lana would have said. Grace had done an abysmal tour of Australia in the 1970s and had loathed every second of it, so we spent most of our bonding time taking the piss out of my country. She wanted to play George, she said, wholly unlike a Richard Burton type, insisting on losing weight for the role and dressing him as a dweeb, a wiry pencil dick of a geek (as she put it) who Martha could physically dominate more easily, allowing her to intellectually tower over me. It was never ‘Martha' when she referred to my character, it was always ‘you', as in: ‘I will demean you as much as I can within the bounds of the script.' She took the role very seriously, it being her chance to shed the garb of her housewife screen role and besides, she loved a wine as much as I, so most evenings we method acted, as it were, and went on stage half cut.

The rest of the cast was rounded out by Charlie Sumner, a rough and tumble lad who'd achieved some international exposure in one of those mega-books turned mega-films turned amusement park ride (‘hundreds of American girls line up to ride me every day', as he so eloquently put it) and er, whatshername from Europe, who none but the most devout indie film devotees would have the foggiest idea about. No understudies, so any absenteeism would result in a cancelled performance, and no pay for anyone, cast or crew. I'd quickly sized up the crew and knew I'd be risking my life if I was the cause of lost pay – no pressure at all.

Despite my initial impressions, I liked Edinburgh and its gothic eeriness. I explored it by day in a way I never did my own city, forcing myself out of bed in the darkness of early morning, enjoying cold toast and thick soupy tea in the communal dining room before pulling on what felt like twelve layers to stroll the streets and strip off ten after the first fifteen minutes. The sensation of having snow fall on my face for the first time was one of the more surreal moments, one of those
This shouldn't really be happening to me of all people
realisations.

Lexi caught the train up to see me on the first Saturday of the run. We'd chatted several times on the phone but always as I was coming and she was going, or vice versa, and it felt ridiculous that we were in the same continent, the same
country
(kingdom, as she rightly corrected me) and yet had not actually laid eyes upon each other. She sounded wholly grown up; leading a life I knew only millimetres of, a woman – woman! – whose humour and forthrightness I had naught to do with but was abundantly proud of, nonetheless.

Her train was getting her in at six, which meant we were still unable to catch each other, as Victor insisted on a cast meal each night, and no backstage visits before the show began. Knowing my daughter was in the audience changed how I felt about the entire caper, made me inject more humility into the performance, imbuing what I could of actual life into Martha and steering clear of anything resembling theatrics. For some, that kind of delivery seemed lazy, a phoning in, as it were, but to me it created an honesty I felt I owed my daughter. Grace hated it, which added more of a spark to our exchanges and this, in turn, charged the audience like never before.

At curtain I knew I had done something to be proud of, or more proud of than anything Lexi had seen me in before. She came into my dressing room carrying an original signed edition of the play and three yellow roses, knowing they were my favourite.

‘Commendable job, Tommy,' she said. I was removing my make-up and cleansing my face. ‘A step up from the high camp dud I'd been envisioning.'

Here she was, my beautiful daughter. And my, how stunning she looked. Her face was angular, her exposed arms toned to the point of remarkability. She had her hair cut in a boyish,
I'm gonna fuck you up,
model kind of way. She exuded confidence, but I knew her well enough to see just beneath the surface even though it'd been so long since I'd seen her. Undeniably, she bore facets of both her mother and me, and a vulnerability just behind the eyes that betrayed her outer bravado. I couldn't help it – seeing her, I began to tremble, though I liked to think I kept that hidden well enough. She was my greatest achievement. How foolish I'd been to turn my back on her. Lexi was everything I wanted to be, and then some.

‘Hiya beautiful,' I said to her reflection in the mirror. ‘I'm so pleased you approve.'

She bent down to kiss me on the top of the head and handed me her gifts. I hated that I had neglected to bring her anything, not even a jar of Vegemite, which was token, but seemed appropriately warm. Edward Albee had inscribed his name in the inside cover of the play she'd bought for me, and made notes throughout about Martha, as though he was intending to rewrite the role. I flicked through in amazement.

‘Lexi, this must have cost you a bomb.'

‘Add in train fares, drinks and hotel room, and I'd say you at least owe me dinner, old man. Please don't tell me you've made other plans.'

‘I was hoping you would be free, actually,' I said, rising from my chair to give her a peck on the cheek.

I hadn't seen her in what felt like an eternity. In the intervening years I'd survived a multitude of horribly constructed plays, reviews that could have obliterated careers, boys who should have never been mine, men who never were. And what of Lexi? I knew of so little. I wondered about her loves and losses, her chemical highs and emotional lows. Oh, but how she had a swagger, a cockiness I just could have wept for. I loved her for it, I wanted to be in her inner circle like I'd never wanted anything before. Talking on the phone these past two years since she'd moved to London had proved to be entirely inadequate. Listening to just her voice, I still pictured Lexi as a little naive girl, ill-equipped to deal with the temptations and stresses that a life in a city like London could serve up. But face to face it was clear I knew her less than I assumed, that she'd somehow crept into adulthood without me even realising.

We stood looking at each other, unsure of what to say next. I'd been hoping against one of those moments that usually sent me into a spiral of over-the-top giddiness, anything to fill the void. A stranger intervened.