This Must Be the Place (17 page)

‘So,
When the Rain Didn’t Fall
is your third film, Timou. Are you pleased with it? Is it what you wanted it to be?’

‘The finished film is never what you envisioned at the start,’ Timou says, leaning forward, elbows on knees, and she thinks, not for the first time, how good he is at this part of things. The chat, the sell, the promotion. He turns into someone she doesn’t know, someone edgeless, amenable, open. ‘The process is a dialogue between self and vision. As a film-maker you are constantly battling against your own personality, your own set of values, your own aspirations. You have to trust the film. You have to let it find its shape. I spent three months in the editing suite with this one –’

I? thinks Claudette.

‘– and it felt more like excavation than creation. More a sense of digging for what is already there …’

Claudette allows her attention to recede, to take wing. She looks around the apartment, their apartment, where they have lived now for almost a year, and she wonders what the journalist sees, what he will take from it. The coffee cups stacked on the shelves, the marble-topped table, the postcards tacked to a corkboard above the phone. Two of Paris, one of Stockholm, one of Sydney, one of a Cumbrian lake, several from the Modernist exhibition she and Timou went to the other week. The sea-green alcove and desk where, until recently, their assistant, a film student from Québec, sat. The abstract-design bag Claudette bought in Sweden suspended from a hook, Timou’s collection of scarab beetles trapped in resin, the paperweight with a dandelion clock inside.

What would people think of them, looking at all these things, these possessions? What do they tell of—

Timou is touching her arm. Claudette starts. They are both looking at her, Timou and the journalist, whose name, she now realises, she hadn’t quite caught. Justin or Gavin or Josh – something like that. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘What did you say?’

The journalist puts his head on one side, spectacles flashing. She has forgotten, too, whom he writes for. Is it a film magazine, a niche publication that preaches passionately to a small readership of the converted? Or is it a broadsheet that will detail what she is wearing, what wallpaper she has, what kind of nail polish she favours?

‘I was wondering how you found your first stab at directing?’

‘Me?’ Claudette says.

‘Yes. The on-set gossip …’ he puts the pen to his mouth, bites it with his small, pointed teeth and sits forward in his chair ‘… was that you spent as much time behind the camera as in front of it. I heard this from a reliable source. I was just wondering how you found it. Did you enjoy it? Is it something you’d want to do again, maybe on your own next time?’

‘Um …’ She casts a look at Timou, whose expression is unreadable, opaque. He is looking sideways but not quite at her; he appears to be transfixed by the edge of the table. His right ankle is making a small repeated motion – up, down, up, down, up.

They are, she sees, waiting for her to speak; the journalist is looking from her to Timou and back again, eyebrows raised, pen poised above pad.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘I’ve always enjoyed every … every aspect of film-making from … from … The thing is, Timou and I, we … we talk everything through and … and being with Timou has … well, I’ve learnt a lot from him and—’

‘This is a joint project,’ Timou says over her. He takes her hand in his, moves it so that it is caught between his palm and his thigh. ‘Claudette and me. The film will have a joint credit, both for direction and writing.’

Claudette blinks. She keeps her hand very still. The air-conditioning unit lets out a slight wheeze, a sigh. The journalist sits up in his chair and starts to write furiously on his pad, nodding as he goes.

‘What fascinates me,’ Timou continues, ‘about collaborating with Claudette is that it is impossible to tell where her vision ends and mine begins. It is a truly symbiotic, sympathetic partnership. Why should, we thought, the roles of actor, director, writer be so defined? Why not loosen things up and see what happens? Blur the boundaries, turn received hierarchies and structures on their heads. The only way to forge something new is to—’

Into Claudette’s mind comes a sudden incursion: the sight of the back of the Québécoise film student’s head and shoulders as she sat at her desk in the alcove. Claudette had painted it for her, in sea-green emulsion, so that she, the assistant, would have her own space, would feel that she had some territory, however small, in the apartment, which belonged to them. It had seemed important to Claudette, as she rollered on the paint, as she fixed the shelves to the wall, as she laid out a holder for pens, a wrist-rest for typing, a headset, so the girl wouldn’t have to cradle the phone between shoulder and ear thereby giving herself neck strain. The girl had been their first assistant – she and Timou hadn’t needed one before – and Claudette had wanted to make her feel welcome, taken care of, valued. But something – what could it have been? – must have been missing, something off-key, because after only two months, she had left, without giving notice, without saying why. There was just a note left stuck to the computer screen one morning:
I won’t be coming back
. No signature, no explanation, nothing. Claudette had peeled it off and stared at it for some minutes, baffled, surprised, because she thought she had been good to the girl, thought she had been kind, generous, a good employer. She had given her money for cabs, if the girl had worked late; she had never minded when the girl took a long lunch. If she, Claudette, was out of the apartment all day, scouting locations, at fittings or shoots or casting meetings, she had always made sure the fridge was stocked, that the heating was on. What could it have been?

Claudette feels the urge unfurl within her to stand, to move, to walk about, perhaps to leave. It rises from her heels, up her legs and snakes its tendrils around her middle, reaching up her back to her neck, her head. Timou seems to sense this change. Maybe her hand, beneath his, has twitched or trembled, because he grips it with a firm, steady pressure. Without looking at her and unseen by the journalist, he is giving her a message: hold tight, stay put, I know you hate this but it will soon be over. She finds the impulse to move hard to resist, always has done.
Claudette cannot sit still
, her school reports used to say.
Assieds-toi!
her mother would admonish at the dinner table. She is thinking how good it would be to walk down 86th Street, to stroll through the light spring air, to watch the people passing her, to feel the city roll beneath her soles, to glide past shop windows, diner tables, scaffolding, ice-cream parlours, deli counters, to let her bones be shaken by the rumble of subway trains, far beneath her feet, to let this conversation, this interview, this encounter spool out of her so that a small space can open inside her head and she can start to think.

Because to think is what she cannot manage, not here, not now, not with this man who is sucking words out of Timou, out of her, and feeding them into his notebook. This man, who is sitting in her apartment, in the chair her mother bought for her, in a flea-market downtown, a beautiful thing it is, with planed oak arms and woven strapping. Does this man see its beauty, its craftsmanship? Claudette doesn’t think so.

She cannot think – she cannot think at all. She wants to dwell on the final frames of the film they have edited because something is not quite right, something is unbalanced, and she cannot see what it might be. Is it the dialogue in the corridor, between her character and the man playing her husband? Does it go on a beat or so too long? Should they cut out the last exchange? Or is it that it needs more sense of time passing? An intervening frame or two of the street outside, devoid of people?

Claudette cannot decide. There is no deciding to be had when this man is talking, when Timou is talking, when there is no space, no rest, here in her own home, the very place she ought to be able to think best. How can she make this most important of decisions – the closing minutes of the film! – when her mind is filled with the back of the Québécoise assistant’s head?

Smooth, glossy hair she had, the colour of charred wood; she wore it up, mostly. Claudette can picture it now, how vulnerable the nape of her neck seemed, how the ponytail flicked between her shoulder-blades as she turned her head to answer the phone, to type something on her keyboard, to call through to Timou, if he was working in the bedroom. How sometimes, when Claudette returned to the apartment, the girl’s hair would be wet, as if newly washed, pulled through its band, the ends drying in the central heating, which Claudette had been so careful to turn on because it was such a cold winter they were having, so very cold. Strange, Claudette found herself thinking, to wash your hair in such cold, in the middle of the day.

Claudette cannot bear it any more. She has to move, has to activate her frame. She takes out her hand from under Timou’s and pushes herself from the sofa, causing Timou to shoot her an alarmed look, but she’s not going far. She steps across the carpet, across the floorboards and it feels good to be in motion, to have uncurled herself from that sofa, which can have the unpleasant habit of swallowing you whole, an upholstered Venus flytrap. She passes the window, reaching out to graze the white muslin curtain there, and she comes to a stop at the alcove.

The desk is neat, ordered. Which, Claudette reflects, it should be, since no one has sat there since the girl left, so abruptly, just under a month ago. Only this week Timou has been interviewing people to replace her. A keen but slightly frightening woman from Boston. A man, Lenny, who lives a few blocks east of here.

There are still a few notes in the girl’s handwriting sticking to the paint of the alcove wall.
Paul called for CW
, reads one.
TL to confirm dates
, reads another.

Claudette pulls this last one from the wall and holds it close to her face.
TL
, she sees.
TL to confirm
. The girl had narrow, closed-off handwriting. She favoured rollerball pens in bright primary colours and made her descenders markedly longer than the ascenders. Claudette runs a hand along the top of the computer, across the numberpad of the phone.

In a way that doesn’t feel like realising something, learning something, but instead like uncovering a fact you had known a long time ago, she knows why what Timou had said to her in the bathroom sounded familiar.

Strike while the eye is hot.

When the girl said it to her, Claudette had been standing right here, just behind where the girl was sitting – her hair caught up in a damp ponytail, the nape chalk-pale, a few stray strands reaching the collar of her maroon sweater – and they had been looking at details of nightclubs because, Timou said, they needed to shoot a scene in a basement restaurant: a nightclub could easily be mocked up to look like a restaurant and nightclubs were always empty during the day. The girl had been holding photocopied pictures of two basement nightclubs, one in each hand, and saying that she had heard back from one manager, who said it would be OK, and the other hadn’t returned her call.

‘What do you think we should do?’ Claudette had said, leaning over her shoulder to see the two images.

The girl had shrugged inside her maroon sweater and then she had said it: ‘We should strike while the eye is hot.’

Claudette, glancing from the images to the girl and back, had had to suppress a smile. The eye is hot: she rather liked it. Hot eyes. Flaming vision. She would never, in a million years, have corrected her. She wasn’t that kind of person and certainly didn’t want to be that kind of boss.

‘You’re probably right,’ she had said instead. ‘Why don’t you call them back now?’

She rests her hands on the edge of the desk. The room, the rug, the scarab beetles, the street outside, the journalist and Timou, especially Timou, seem to fade, as if someone somewhere has turned down a dial on the world. The sounds, the light, the colours all become dim. It is just Claudette, her breathing and the desk now. Nothing else. Just her and her mouth, which keeps itself open, drawing in air and pushing it out, over and over, because it doesn’t know what else to do.

Where Am I and What Am I Doing Here?

Daniel, New York, 2010

S
omebody is saying my name.

‘Danny?’

The word reaches its arm down whatever hole I am hiding in and gives me a sharp shake. My head jerks on its neck and the mumbling monologue that seems to have been going on in the background of my mind comes to an abrupt stop.

‘Danny?’

I find myself leaning – or is it lying? – on some forgiving, yielding surface, in a strangely uncomfortable position: legs twisted to the side, arms flung out. The position of someone who has fallen from a great height.

Have I been asleep? Was I sleeping? Where am I and what am I doing here?

‘Danny,’ the voice says again.

My head appears to be filled with smog, my vision wavering and pricked with vibrating points of light. I have come to in a place unfamiliar to me. I seem not to be in full command of my faculties. But, hey, I tell myself, screwing up my eyes against the glare, you’ve coped with worse. And: doesn’t this remind you of the bad old drug-taking days of your youth?

What materialises around me is a room. There is a high window to my right, a ceiling with meandering cracks above my head. Lace curtains make a hesitant advance into the air, then, held back by their pole, retreat. Advance, retreat, advance, retreat.

I know this room. I see where I am.

I am lying, unbelievably, on my parents’ bed in Brooklyn. The side that was my mother’s, next to the window, beside the painted nightstand, under her reading lamp. The very spot, ladies and gentlemen, where she died.

This takes me a moment to get my head around.

I am just straightening out my legs, pushing my hair back off my forehead, when I hear the person say my name again.

‘Danny?’

For a moment, and just for a moment, the notion enters my head that my mother is calling to me from the afterlife, from the wide blue yonder. Have I summoned her simply by lying here?