Saturday 27 August 2011

What a difference a name makes

Marie does a great breakfast and we get into conversation about her family. Turns out her son has a very rare disorder which means he has suffered from chronic fatigue, has missed loads of school, it sounds pretty bad, as well as other bizarre symptoms: hyperflexibility, doughy, soft, stretchy skin.

What has prompted this is a flyer for our show – the family were online last night having a look to see if I really am the sister of the murdered journalist, Kate Peyton. Marie talks about the effects of the murder, the effects of the show, her own mother's death, our landlady in Bolton whose husband had died only a few weeks before we stayed with her, how life is not easy.

First the tripod and now this excellent conversation: s'gonna be a good day, me thinks. Although she has lots of cleaning to do to get ready for the next guests, she says not to worry about rushing off. So we don't. I have to buy us some new tickets to Manchester for next week – the really exciting news is that I have an audition for what looks to be a fascinating one-woman show for the Edinburgh Fringe this year. The company concerned have kindly fitted me in at the beginning of their day so that I can get off in time to tech for the Bury show. Little did I know that the day was about to... veer off in an entirely unexpected way, a vital digression.

We take our time leaving and, as I put stuff in the car, Marie says she's ready to clean our room now. Martin asks if her son is coming to the show – she'd told us he wanted to. Marie is not sure and we talk about the effects of his condition on what he can and can't do any given day. I talk about Martin's arthritis, which I often do, and make him show her his hands – they are so expressive, changed as they are by his arthritis – of his illness. She mentions the EDS, the disease from which her 17-year-old son suffers and which was only diagnosed last year, by chance, when he dislocated his knee.

And suddenly my mind is racing. Martin's skin, Martin's skin, Martin's skin! His skin has always felt odd to me, softer than other people, cushiony. It feels intrusive, but I say “Let Marie feel your skin,” as I pull back his sleeve. She touches it, she pulls it away from the bone, their eyes meet: we all know. 17 years on from his original diagnosis of polyarthritis, which has never made sense to Martin, so many problems, procedures and resuscitations later, all three of us know that Martin is one in 20,000: he has EDS as well.

They start talking about digestive problems, exhaustion, his heart valve, he shows her his stretch marks, he talks about putting both his feet behind his head whilst watching telly as a kid, he does that thing with his fingers where he bends them every which-way, and for once I can watch – usually it turns my stomach – but he is not mucking around this time. This time he is serious, still Martin, a lightness of touch not taking himself seriously, but he knows now what is wrong with him. There is no cure she says, but maybe it will help to know. We are standing outside the rooms of the guest house, by the open hire car, I take a picture of The Diagnosis, from the specialist-mother – maybe the best kind of specialist – Martin knows why he has all these strange symptoms which for years have just been him being odd, but now have a name: Ehlers-Danlos Sydrome.

"Do you have heart problems?"
Bartelt and I laugh hard and probably a bit too long to be polite.
"I had my valve replaced."
"The Mitral?"
"Yes," I say.
"How did the operation go?"
"Oh, I died and they couldn't understand why it went so badly."
"Yes. They shouldn't really operate on people with EDS."

As we drive off to the Drill Hall I am in shock, I should probably not be driving. I cannot imagine how Martin is feeling, marooned, as he is, on his own island of ill-health. This EDS explains why Martin died on the table last year, lost half his blood, needed the valve replaced in the first place.

It has a name. He has a diagnosis.

Thursday 25 August 2011

Double & Large

We got back in the hire car to travel to Lincoln. Of course the only time I've ever been to Lincoln before was while Kate was in a choir at school and mother and I travelled there to hear them sing at the cathedral, and back, in one day. Dedication.

When we've found our B&B, which has a double and single in the room – no need to wonder who had which – we walk into town for some over-priced food. Afterwards we go to find our friend Hazel. We met Hazel last year at the Edinburgh Fringe and she is studying in Lincoln. She is a high-octane kind of a person and lovely. She takes us to a bar which would, normally, be heaving with students, but it's holiday time, so it's pretty empty. I buy the drinks, a double vodka and tonic for Bartelt, a large red wine for Hazel and a pint of soda and cranberry for the person who has got to do some work tomorrow.

There is an embarrassment of choice about where to sit, but more embarrassing is my lightweight collaborator and Hazel, who giggle, drink, giggle, gurn, drink, ask for more drinks, drink, and become the tedious, drunken monsters, Double and Large. I don't want to sound mean-spirited, but I am a mean-spirit person, so it's hard for me not to. I was tired, we had to walk home, it was getting cold out there and I'm stuck here with these two teenage girls, oggling boys and laughing uncontrollably at everything and nothing.

We make our way home via Hazel's place – Lincoln, it turns out, is pretty walkable, and return to our lovely B&B. She promises she's going to do her best to find us a tripod for the video camera so we can record the show. I loathe the idea, but we need it. As we walk home we talk about how bleeding cold it is, which it ought to be at this time of year, but Martin is not at all happy about it. Oh, how I hope the electric radiator in our room works or I am never going to hear the end of it.

In the morning there is great news: Hazel texts us to say she has found us a tripod. We have had a good night's sleep at our B&B, which began with much hilarity as Martin, my pet lizard, the coldest man in the world, requested that the heating be turned down as he would get to warm in the night. His comfort zone, I declared, is about two centimetres long. Mine, on the other hand, is about two feet. I'm pretty flexible, but Martin cannot stand to be overwarm or overcold, too rushed or too slow, too tidy or too untidy.... princess and the pea is a name I have thrown at him in moments of frustration, but yesterday we just lay in our beds laughing, as we did when Marie, our landlady, took one look at us and worried that she had prepared a twin rather than a double room. We are a dysfunctional couple, clearly, and deserve to have to share a bed.

We are gong to be Marie's last breakfasts of the day - her other guests are people who start work at 9am; we are people who consider that a bit early for brekky. Well, one of us is, anyway. I pick a book off Marie's shelves - military-nautical warfare, one of my faves - and we settle down in the companionable silence of those who have been in a relationship for a long time. Little do we know it, but Martin's life is about to be thrown into context in a way which would have seemed impossible before we sat down at this table, one of those mundane life-changing moments which will have considerable repercussions, and all before we even get to the Lincoln Drill Hall to tech.

Tuesday 23 August 2011

Macbeth!

We were meant to be having a nice day off in the country with mother, but then I actually got called for an audition, so I had to go back to London for one day on the Wednesday whilst Bartelt and mother just hung out and had fun. The audition was for Macbeth, not for the part, sadly, but for a witch and some other roles: probably the undead and men in drag, my specialities. Macbeth nonetheless: one of my favourite Shakespeares. This necessitated buying the exorbitantly-priced return to London, but then it was an audition, or, as I call it, a hen's tooth. And it was worth every penny, not because I got the part or even a recall, but because it provided me with one of those excellent auditioning stories.

There are many great things about auditioning, the greatest of them all being that you get to perform... that's it. Most actors spend so little time actually doing it, that even an audition is a performance. But today's audition was to provide a corker of an experience. I mean, I got to speak Spanish with the woman who was getting us to write our details down on a piece of paper outside the audition room itself, and I bumped in to a lovely bloke I had workshopped with recently, but the real gem was the rudeness and unkindness I experienced in the audition room. It is rare you get to experience genuine rudeness and unkindness in the audition room itself. For all our failings, folk in this industry, in my experience, and kind and respectful no matter how risible we think your work to be.

They wanted two pieces of Shakespeare. I had those with me in my head: no flies on me. As I went into the audition I noticed a door out to, well, not a roof terrace, but some roof space, and as one of my speeches had an entrance and an exit I thought I'd use the door from the terrace for this purpose: I'm very, very bright, you see, and work in harmony with my surroundings, yeah?. So I chatted with them a bit, did the entrance, did the scene (they were looking for physical performers, so it was lots of grovelling, up and downish type stuff, etc) and exited.

After leaving a moment for them to compose themselves after my brilliance, I went back into the room. Much to my... surprise? I found them giggling to one another. I had to presume it was due to my greatness as a performer, but there was actually no denying that whatever they were laughing about, and they never did tell me, it was pretty rude not to let me in on the joke. I just stood there why they tried to compose themselves, concluding that I was the joke.
It was useful because, as it became clear that they were, well, just laughing at me, that I, on balance, would probably not want to work with them, and so I was able to really enjoy the rest of the audition - there's nothing like the escape of failure to enjoy letting your hair down. If they already think you're absurd and you think they're tossers, well, you don't need to stand on ceremony.

Of course, I had gone to expense and time to audition, but it's often instructive, and, what's more, I received a text later in the day from my mate Shane asking if I'd auditioned for them and if so, what did I think of them. I told him... well, I told him I was not very impressed, and he said he'd auditioned for them and he'd.... not been impressed either. Shane can make me look retiring in the forth-rightness department.

It was a real pleasure to get on the train back to Suffolk, to Bartelt, to my mother. We had a lovely evening – high summer in April – and discussed how I would probably be offered the part as I didn't want it. We actors say this a lot. Turns out I didn't even get a recall, a bit hurtful regardless of the fact I'd not've gone to it. But I seem to have got over it okay.

Saturday 20 August 2011

On the intertrack for the intermittent

Blimey: what a scorcher! I get up late and Bartelt is there, outside the front door, sitting in a deckchair in the sun reading in German. Luckily the book is written in German, so it's going well. There is an empty coffee cup beside him. It would seem that everything is in order.

Caroline is marking homework – she's a maths teacher these days. I think, when we were teenagers, she would have considered this to be a singular failure - the last thing she wanted to do - despite us both being taught maths by the inestimable Mrs Troth.

Oh, but I was a fan of Mrs Troth. One of the best teachers I've ever encountered, and I've encountered many teachers, and several of them have been good. I am an enormous fan of maths, there is such a beauty, fluidity, pure communication in it, and so much of this was shown to me, gently but with directness, by Mrs Troth. She was one of those teachers for whom I had the utmost respect. In fact, when I ended up with a different maths teacher for my A levels I actually called Mrs Troth and had a long conversation with her about wanting to move down a set to her set, and not stay here in what was being referred to as the X set – one above the A set. I came to see they had called it the X set because it was undefinably appalling. Merv, as we called our teacher, once uttered the line which is written on my soul: “Rebecca and Jamie, you're both wasters.”

Now, this was true of Jamie, but not of me. Jamie was clever, but he was disruptive and almost literally too cool for school, which, looking back, was not difficult given how uncool our school was. I, on the other hand, have never been too cool for anything. I was a swat and, well, craven, desperate, eager to please. Yeuch. The idea that I was a waster was, well, I guess, in wilder moments I might have aspired to wasterdom, but even now with my actor/writer lifestyle, I'm just not a waster. I had, in fact, had my considerable mathematical confidence destroyed by Merv. I went from being one of the best mathematicians in the school to crying over my homework and feeling pure terror in the lessons - like any other normal mortal. To this day, one of my most repetitive anxiety dreams is of sitting a maths exam and realising that I've forgotten everything I need to know for it. A common enough dream, but I adored maths and retained it really easily... before Merv.

Jamie, on the other hand, was just a bit of trouble. I liked him, in fact I saw him a few years ago at a wedding – he's married with two children I think, now - still a lovely guy. Oh, and despite being a waster, Merv, Jamie went on to get a first class maths degree, so put that in your pipe and etc.

Caroline and I talk and enjoy one another while she marks. A bit later we all go for a walk and a bit later still Martin and I go for tea and cake in a nearby town and attempt to work. As usual, the internet is intermittent, which I personally think the internet should be called, from this tour on. And the search for working wireless could be called the intertrack.... for which you need a search engine, obviously. Yes, not being able to get on line when you're producing and managing a tour is as funny as these 'jokes'.

As well as being Easter Monday it is also the last day one can apply for Olympics tickets in the first ballot. I feel rather conflicted about it because of the way it has been organised (you can only use a VISA card, you need to be able to bet a lot of money etc) but apply for some anyway: I'm not one to let my principals get in the way of me having a good time an an historical event. Caroline and I will go to the gymnastics if she wins any in the lottery.

The next morning is a school day for everyone, except Phil, for whom it is a work day. Caroline's mum comes by and she, Martin and I talk about her husband's last 35-years enduring multiple sclerosis. He has only recently died. The disease had taken his life, tiny piece by tiny piece, and also hers. The consultant on the ward where Lionel spent the last of his days has told her that he knows of no one who has cared for an MS sufferer on their own for 35 years. We ask Sally if she'd be willing to be interviewed for a show we want to make about health, caring, illness, pain etc. She is more than willing she says, while at the same time intimating that talking to her wouldn't be that interesting. She's lovely and marvelous and has no idea quite how marvelous, clearly. Exactly, in fact, the Sally I remember of more than 20 years ago when Caroline and I were teenagers.

We drive south. We have to head for London on Tuesday as I have an audition. I've had to buy an expensive day-return to London. I am aware that our transport costs are going over budget... but I'm also aware that it's only money: as far as I know, neither I nor any of my nearest and dearest are dying of a degenerative disease, and so the cost of train tickets can go hang.

Friday 19 August 2011

Marsh, marsh and more marsh

We have another excellent meal and Bill and Thelma's AND we manage not to do one another any permanent damage in the tiny, yet slightly too high for our proper safety bed. There is some cloud-scudding going on. It's all rather beautiful, if not exactly the ideal weather for taking my lizard for a walk.

I'd bought a Norfolk walks book in a sale back in Derby and I am de-ter-mined to use it. It takes us a while and – ahem – a bit of negotiation before we manage to get on the right track. Marshy, green, lots of birds, plenty of silence. It makes us content. We walk along the edge of the marshland and then inland, across fields, down roads. There is one moment where Bartelt snaps at me. The very fact that this is worth remarking upon demonstrates to me that we have a special thing going on: I'm sure most people would have murdered me to death by now, stuck in my company like this. It's a place for us to remember, safely, how lonely we both are, I guess I mean the human condition, but also our awareness that... romantically, well, we're just not what men seem to be looking for. It's a matter of enormous hilarity to us, sometimes it makes us frustrated and then there are those occasions when we feel sad. Out here, in the empty and beautiful Norfolk contryside, we both feel together, but alone, sad... there is potential for us, but what it might amount to is a mystery. We share the sense of already having messed up all we could have been and often a sense of utter hopelessness and loss.

Thank the lord we are going to Caroline and Phil's for the night, or we might just stride out into the marsh, marsh, more marsh and finally the waves, never to return.I knew Phil and Caroline had a nice place in the countryside, but I didn't realise how gorgeous the countryside would be.

Caroline's daughter was born just days after Kate died and I have never met her. She and her brother both look like amazing mixtures of their parents, and they are utterly lovely children. Bartelt and I, as I am sure I have mentioned before, are not programmed to want children, but these two are interesting and funny and clever and well behaved. AND they go to bed before our supper so we can enjoy ourselves as adults: ALLELUJAH!

And we do enjoy ourselves, Phil loves to cook and they are both very generous hosts. Caroline and I are the last to go to bed. We talk about how we are. I could lie I could tell her things are okay, but what would the point be?

Kate, Charles, Caroline and I travelled Zimbabwe together, Caroline and I were mugged together in Peru. We were terribly close as friends. Life has seen us drift apart, but at 2.30am and several glasses down, I am not really able to tell any story, other than the desolation and misery Kate's death has brought me. Yes, Bartelt and I have made a show, I've inherited Kate's half of our flat, I've flown BA first class... but I fear I will never recover from this.

The kids had shown us our beds earlier on and I had gallantly given the double to Bartelt. Not only are we in different beds, but different rooms and, different parts of the landing. It's quiet and dark, country-dark, which is fantastic. I think I'm going to sleep long and hard, and I'm right.

Tuesday 2 August 2011

Eng-er-land Next The Sea

It is incredibly hot and sunny again today, high summer, and as it's Easter Saturday there are lots of tourists. Thelma cooks us a great breakfast while Bill weeds the lawn. I've never seen someone weeding a lawn before, but now I understand how people have such great lawns: an apple corer and graft: weeding the lawn is the open-cast coal mining end of the gardening enterprise.

Thelma and Bill are having us to stay out of simple kindness. They are part of the Friends of Wells-Next-The-Sea Granary Theatre. It strikes me that they work very hard to keep the theatre open and as we walk past it, wandering through town on this gorgeous day, before I actually get to see the inside of the theatre, I'm thinking how glad I am that they do.

Martin experiences a little altercation with a woman in a grocery shop. She does not appreciate all these incomers with their buggies and backpacks and wheelchairs. The place is full of tourists, but I wonder how the economy would fair without them. It's a sunny day so Bartelt takes it on the chin.

Wells appears to be the main street down to the front and the road along the front. That's it. Well, there are pubs and houses and other roads, but it's a little place. We go to see my friend Nicky. She runs a coffee-sandwich-tea-cake place with her husband Howard on the main road down to the sea.

The cafe is also a tiny little place, with just a couple of stools at a bar at the window, a couple of little tables outside and a queue which seems to be keeping three people pretty busy serving. The sandwiches and cake look great. Nicky's so pleased to see us that she treats us to coffee. It's a difficult coffee for Bartelt to swallow as there is one chair in the sunshine outside the shop and this chair – his chair! – is being sat upon by someone other than him.

Nicky and I used to work together in a gift-cum-cookware shop. I was 17, Nicky was... older than me. Mum worked there for ten years as well, and both my brother and sister did some time there. It was called Serendipity and was owned by Paul and Pam, a couple of the best salespersons I have ever met. They insisted on selling what they thought the customer needed, which was often not what the customer thought they needed and was often cheaper than what the customer thought they needed, to boot. They had an absurdly loyal clientele and the kind of patience I only experience if I am actually asleep.

I've never been very good straight after lunch, even if I don't have any lunch, I have an often overwhelming desire to go to sleep. I've been to sleep standing up, I'll have you know. There were a good couple of very long hours, often, in the shop after lunch. We would entertain ourselves however we could. Amongst other things I used to talk about wanting to act; Nicky used to joke about me being on Eastenders. The first thing she had said, then, when I'd contacted her to tell her we were coming to Wells was “I told you you'd be on Eastenders.”

She is right, I have been on Eastenders now, but only in the briefest of possible ways. I had one line earlier this year. The filming was great fun and everyone was lovely, but the most extraordinary thing for me was that, when I came to watch the episode, I actually look alright. It's not that I think I'm hideous, but, well, I am striking rather than... anything else, blessed with a character face, prone to being cast as older, scarier, maler, deader than I really am. Yet, as I open the door and deliver my line “Veronica, is it?” I actually look... okay, verging on... character-actress-who-plays-ordinary-looking-non-vengeful-/-deranged-/-undead-everyday-women. It's quite a shock, but a pleasant one. Great make-up artists, lighting people, camera operators, directors etc have my thanks. Nicky is still a big Eastenders fan and so she was very pleased to see me on the show.

As Bartelt and I wander along the high street we cannot help but marvel at all of the all the Eng-er-land stuff in the shops: a royal wedding is nearly up on us and Wells is clearly captalising on this fact. It's just too good to be true and we have, as ever, trouble getting down the streets, and not just because it's Easter Saturday in a lovely little holiday town in mid-summer in April. We have trouble because Bartelt wants to take pictures of all the Union Jack memorabilia which is jammed everywhere.

We're not teching until two so we decide to walk to the sea. We do kind of look at a map, but it turns out the sea is further away than you'd think. And everyone's at it. Of course we are stopping endlessly to take photos, of the views, of the flowers of each other taking photos of the views and the flowers.

When we get to the beach its muddy! Not silty, or rocky, or shingled, it's muddy. Horrible, brown, slimy mud. Bartelt is in an ecstasy of enjoyment. It turns out he loves the slimy. I guess it was going to be a passion in one direction or the other, and I suppose if I had been pressed, I'd've gone for love it rather than hate it, but, oh my, he loves it a lot. It reminds him of having been two mud baths in the past... and I guess that's it: basically anything which reminds him of having been warm is a winner. We take photos of our feet in the mud. I'm not so sad that we have to head back for something to eat as there is quite a wind on the beach. When the sun's out it's really warm, but when it goes, less so: it's April again.

We sit and eat fish and chips on the front, next to a bin, surrounded by people and seagulls. Blinking marvellous fish and chips. This is such a nice place to be, and I know it will be lovely to do the show tonight, but it is really gorgeous sitting here, soaking up the sun, watching people queuing up in the fish and chip shop. Overeating has to be one of my favourite things... but it's not very good for me.

A fantastic group of people are running the theatre tonight and they look after us very well. It's a shame for us that the sea shanty singers are singing in the space next to the theatre. And it's a shame the weather is so fantastic. The theatre staff feel these will both reduce our audience numbers.

And then my school friend Caroline and her mother Sally turn up. Caroline and her family all live in north Norfolk now and we barely see one another. In fact, the last time I saw Caroline was at a mutual friend's wedding, six months after Kate died. Caroline had had her second child four days after Kate's death. I remember talking to her from her hospital bed – I was at Johannesburg Airport – we were both in tears. My BBC 'minders' couldn't find me, and I'm not sure who we were waiting for... maybe my aunts. Caroline, the mutual friend and I shared a house together in London back in the 90s, before that she and I travelled south America and southern Africa together, before that we got drunk in the countryside, and way before that we became friends at school, good friends, best friends. It's strange to wonder where all that went. So much went when my sister died, and in so many ways for me; I have no idea where or how it went and nothing has come to replace it.

Caroline laughs a lot through the show and we have a great time talking to the audience afterwards, one of whom is in his 90s and tells us it's the most moving piece of theatre he's ever seen. He also worked in Africa and... the show chimes for him.

We go to the pub with Caroline and Sally, we talk a bit about Lionel, Caroline's dad, who died recently after 35 years of multiple sclerosis. They, but especially Sally, are enduring the terrible early days of loss. In fact, of course, I'm wrong. It wasn't at the mutual friend's wedding that I last saw Caroline. The last time I saw Caroline was at her father's funeral.

Bartelt and I are going to stay with Caroline and her family tomorrow – Easter Sunday – but for most of the day we intend to walk and walk and walk, to nowhere in particular. I'm hoping for plenty of silence, and I'm sure he is too. Silence and escape. That part of the north Norfolk coast reminds me of... utter desolation, basically. It feels a bit like the edge – the end? - of the world. I can't wait.