Listen To The Voice. Iain Crichton Smith
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Название: Listen To The Voice

Автор: Iain Crichton Smith

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Контркультура

Серия: Canongate Classics

isbn: 9781847675644

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ stood up. ‘I am not that kind of girl,’ she said.

      ‘What kind of girl?’

      ‘That kind of girl.’

      But Annie was insistent. ‘You’ll not get anything if you don’t play along with me,’ she said, and Mark could have sworn that there was an American tone to her voice.

      ‘Well, I’m not playing along with you,’ said Tracy. She swayed a little on her feet, almost falling against the blackboard. ‘I’m bloody well not playing along with you,’ she said. ‘And that’s final.’ With a shock of recognition Mark heard her father’s voice behind her own as one might see behind a similar painting the first original strokes.

      And then she collapsed on the floor and Annie was bending over her.

      ‘I didn’t mean it,’ she was saying. ‘I really didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.’

      But Tracy lay there motionless and pale. She was like the Lady of Shalott in her boat. The girls in the class were staring at her. Look what they have done to me, Tracy was implying. Will they not be sorry now? There was a profound silence in the room and Mark was aware of the power of drama, even here in this bare classroom with the green peeling walls, the window-pole in the corner like a disused spear. There was nothing here but the hopeless emotion of the young.

      Annie raised Tracy to her feet and sat her down in a chair.

      ‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘it’s true that I know this man.’ He went over to the wall and pretended to dial on a phantom ’phone. And at that moment Tracy turned to the class and winked at them. It was a bold outrageous thing to do, thought Mark, it was as if she was saying, That faint was of course a trick, a feint, that is the sort of thing people like us have to do in order to survive: he thought he was tricking me but all the time I was tricking him. I am alive, fighting, I know exactly what I am doing. All of us are in conspiracy against this Mark. So much, thought Mark, was conveyed by that wink, so much that was essentially dramatic. It was pure instinct of genius.

      The stage Mark turned away from the ’phone and said, ‘He says he wants to see you. He’ll give you an audition. His usual girl’s sick. She’s got …’ Annie paused and tried to say ‘laryngitis’, but it came out as not quite right, and it was as if the word poked through the drama like a real error, and Mark thought of the Miracle plays in which ordinary people played Christ and Noah and Abraham with such unconscious style, as if there was no oddity in Abraham being a joiner or a miller.

      ‘Look, I’ll call you,’ said the stage Mark and the bell rang and the finale was postponed. In the noise and chatter in which desks and chairs were replaced Mark was again aware of the movement of life, and he was happy. Absurdly he began to see them as if for the first time, their faces real and interested, and recognized the paradox that only in the drama had he begun to know them, as if only behind such a protection, a screen, were they willing to reveal themselves. And he began to wonder whether he himself had broken through the persona of the teacher and begun to ‘act’ in the real world. Their faces were more individual, sad or happy, private, extrovert, determined, yet vulnerable. It seemed to him that he had failed to see what Shakespeare was really about, he had taken the wrong road to find him.

      ‘A babble of green fields,’ he thought with a smile. So that was what it meant, that Wooden O, that resonator of the transient, of the real, beyond all the marble of their books, the white In Memoriams which they could not read.

      How extraordinarily curious it all was.

      The final part of the play was to take place on the following day.

      ‘Please sir,’ said Lorna to him, as he was about to leave.

      ‘What is it?’

      But she couldn’t put into words what she wanted to say. And it took him a long time to decipher from her broken language what it was she wanted. She and the other actresses wanted an audience. Of course, why had he not thought of that before? How could he not have realized that an audience was essential? And he promised her that he would find one.

      By the next day he had found an audience which was composed of a 3a class which Miss Stewart next door was taking. She grumbled a little about the Interpretation they were missing but eventually agreed. Additional seats were taken into Mark’s room from her room and Miss Stewart sat at the back, her spectacles glittering.

      Tracy pretended to knock on a door which was in fact the blackboard and then a voice invited her in. The manager of the night club pointed to a chair which stood on the ‘stage’.

      ‘What do you want?’

      ‘I want to sing, sir.’

      ‘I see. Many girls want to sing. I get girls in here every day. They all want to sing.’

      Mark heard titters of laughter from some of the boys in 3a and fixed a ferocious glare on them. They settled down again.

      ‘But I know I can sing, sir,’ said Tracy. ‘I know I can.’

      ‘They all say that too.’ His voice suddenly rose, ‘They all bloody well say that.’

      Mark saw Miss Stewart sitting straight up in her seat and then glancing at him disapprovingly. Shades of Pygmalion, he thought to himself, smiling. You would expect it from Shaw, inside inverted commas.

      ‘Give it to them, sock it to them,’ he pleaded silently. The virginal Miss Stewart looked sternly on.

      ‘Only five minutes then,’ said the night club manager, glancing at his watch. Actually there was no watch on his hand at all. ‘What song do you want to sing?’

      Mark saw Lorna pushing a desk out to the floor and sitting in it. This was to be the piano, then. The absence of props bothered him and he wondered whether imagination had first begun among the poor, since they had such few material possessions. Lorna waited, her hands poised above the desk. He heard more sniggerings from the boys and this time he looked so angry that he saw one of them turning a dirty white.

      The hands hovered above the desk. Then Tracy began to sing. She chose the song ‘Heartache’.

      My heart, dear, is aching;

      I’m feeling so blue.

      Don’t give me more heartaches,

      I’m pleading with you.

      It seemed to him that at that moment, as she stood there pale and thin, she was putting all her experience and desires into her song. It was a moment he thought such as it is given to few to experience. She was in fact auditioning before a phantom audience, she and the heroine of the play were the same, she was searching for recognition on the streets of London, in a school. She stood up in her vulnerability, in her purity, on a bare stage where there was no furniture of any value, of any price: on just such a stage had actors and actresses acted many years before, before the full flood of Shakespearean drama. Behind her on the blackboard were written notes about the Tragic Hero, a concept which he had been discussing with the Sixth Year.

      ‘The hero has a weakness and the plot of the play attacks this specific weakness.’

      ‘We feel a sense of waste.’

      ‘And yet triumph.’

      Tracy’s СКАЧАТЬ