Thirty-nine
A few days later, I leave for rehearsal and Daniel leaves for the airport. It’s strange to think that when I come back that night, Daniel will be gone. Though I won’t have the flat to myself for long. Broodje has been in The Hague for most of the summer on an internship, and now he’s in Turkey visiting Candace, who’s on a two-week trip there with her grandparents. When he comes back, he’ll stay here with me until he and Henk move into their new flat in Utrecht in the fall.
Rehearsal today is frenzied and frenetic. The set is being broken down, transported to the park for tomorrow’s tech, and the lack of scenery seems to have unhinged everyone. Petra is a whirlwind of terror, yelling at the actors, yelling at the tech guys, yelling at Linus, who looks like he would like to take cover under his clipboard.
“Poor Flunky,” Max says. “For someone menopausal, Petra seems like she’s on the rag. She smashed Nikki’s mobile.”
“Really?” I ask Max, sliding into our usual seats.
“Well you know how she is if you put your phone on in the ‘sacred rehearsal room.’ But I heard she’s extra uppity because Geert said ‘Mackers’ in the theater earlier.”
“Mackers?”
“The Scottish Play,” she says. When I fail to understand she mouths Macbeth. “Very bad mojo to say it in a theater.”
“You believe that?”
“I believe you don’t mess with Petra the day before the first tech.”
Jeroen walks by. He looks at me and feigns a cough.
“That the best you can do?” Max calls after him. She turns to me. “And he calls himself an actor.”
Linus has the cast do an entire run-through. It’s a mess. Lines are forgotten. Cues are missed. Blocking is flubbed. “The curse of Mackers,” Max whispers.
By six o’clock, Petra is in such a state that Linus lets us all go early. “Get a good night’s sleep,” he says. “Tomorrow is a long day. Call is at ten.”
“It’s too early to go to the bar,” Max says. “Let’s go eat and then go dancing or hear a band play. We can see who’s on at Paradiso or Melkweg.”
We ride over to the Leidseplein. Max is beside herself because some musician who was once in a famous band is playing solo tonight at the Paradiso and there’s still tickets left. We buy a pair. Then we wander around the square, which this time of year is ground zero for tourists. There’s a crowd of them surrounding some street performers.
“It’s probably just those bloody Peruvian musicians,” Max says. “Do you know, when I was little, I thought it was the same troupe, following me. Took me ages to work out they were clones.” She laughs and knocks her head with her knuckles. “I can be right thick sometimes.”
It’s not the Peruvians. It’s a group of jugglers. They’re not bad, juggling all kinds of typically spiked flaming things. We watch for a while, and when the hat passes, I toss in a handful of coins.
We turn to leave and Max pokes me in the side. “Now’s the real show,” she says. I turn around and see who she’s talking about: a woman has her legs wrapped around one of the jugglers’ hips, her arms tangled in his hair. “Get a room,” Max jokes.
I watch them a moment longer than I ought to. And then the girl drops down and turns around. She spots me and I spot her, and we do a double take.
“Wills?” she calls
“Bex?” I call.
“Wills?” Max repeats.
Dragging the juggler behind her, Bex comes up to me and gives me a big theatrical hug and kiss. It’s quite a change since the last time I saw her when she would barely shake my hand. She introduces me to Matthias. I introduce her to Max. “Your girlfriend?” Bex asks, sending Max into a theatrical howl of protestation.
After a bit of chit-chat, we run out of things to say, because we never really did have that much to say even when we were sleeping together. “We should go. Matthias needs lots of rest before so he can perform.” Bex gives an obvious wink in case anyone wasn’t clear about what kind of resting and what kind of performing she was referring to.
“Okay then.” We kiss, kiss, kiss good-bye.
We’re walking away when Bex calls out. “Hey, did Tor ever find you?”
I stop. “Tor was looking for me?”
“She was trying to track you down. Apparently some letter came for you at Headingley.”
It’s like a switch is thrown, the way my body surges. “At Headingley?”
“Tor’s place in Leeds,” Bex says.
I know where Headingley is. But I rarely gave anyone a mailing address at all, and I don’t remember ever giving anyone Tor’s home address, which was the occasional Guerrilla Will headquarters, where we’d go to rehearse or recuperate. There’s no reason on earth to think she’d send me a letter there, that she’d know to send me a letter there. But still, I walk back toward Bex. “A letter? From whom?”
“Dunno. But Tor was quite keen to get it to you. She said she tried emailing you but you were unresponsive. Imagine that?”
I ignore the dig. “When?”
She scratches her brow, trying to dislodge the memory. “I can’t remember. It was a bit ago. Wait, when were we in Belfast?” she asks Matthias.
He shrugs. “Around Easter, wasn’t it?”
“No. I think it was earlier. Around Shrove Tuesday,” Bex says. She throws up her hands. “Some time around February. I remember pancakes. Or March. Or maybe it was April. Tor said she tried emailing you and got no reply so she wanted to know if I knew how to reach you.” She widens her eyes, to show the absurdity of such a notion.
March. April. When I was in India, traveling, and my email account got infected with that virus. I switched to a new address after that. I haven’t checked the old account in months. Maybe it’s right there. Maybe it’s been there all along.
“Don’t suppose you know who the letter was from?”
Bex looks peeved, bringing back a bunch of memories. When it didn’t last between us, and Bex had been nasty the rest of the season, Skev had made fun of me: “Didn’t you ever hear? Don’t shit where you eat, man.”
“No idea,” Bex tells me in a bored tone that seems practiced, so I’m unsure whether she doesn’t know or does but won’t say. “If you’re so interested, you can just ask Tor.” She laughs then. It’s not friendly. “Though good luck getting her before fall.”
Part of Tor’s “method” was to try to live as close to Shakespearian times as possible while she was on the road. She refused to use a computer or a phone, though she would sometimes borrow someone else’s to send an email or make a call if it was important. She didn’t watch TV or listen to an iPod. And though she obsessively checked the weather reports, which seemed a rather modern innovation, she checked them in the newspapers, which somehow made it fair game because newspapers were around in seventeenth-century England, so she said.
“Don’t suppose you have any idea what she did with it?” My heart has sped up, as if I’ve been running, and I feel breathless, but I force myself to sound as bored as Bex, for fear that if I make the letter sound important, she won’t tell me anything.
“She might’ve sent it to the boat.”
“The boat?”
“The one you used to live on.”
“How’d she even know about the boat?”
“Good Christ, Wills, how should I know? Presumably you told someone about it. You did live with everyone for a year, more or less.”
I told one person about the boat. Skev. He was going to Amsterdam and asked if I could hook him up with any free places to stay. I mentioned a few squats and also said if the key was still in its hiding place, and no one else was there, he could camp on the boat.
“Yeah, but I haven’t lived on that boat for years.”
“Well it’s obviously not that important,” Bex says. “Otherwise whoever wrote it would have known where to find you.”
Bex is wrong but she’s also right. Because Lulu should’ve known where to find me. And then I stop myself. Lulu. After all this time? The letter’s more likely from a tax collector.
“What was all that about?” Max asks after Bex and Matthias have gone.
I shake my head. “I’m not sure.” I look across the square. “Do you mind? I need to duck into an Internet café for a second.”
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll grab a coffee.”
I log onto my old email account. There’s not much there but junk. I go back to the spring, when it got infected with that virus, and there’s a pocket of nothing. Four weeks of messages that have just vanished. I try the bulk bin. Nothing there. Out of habit before I sign off, I scroll back for the emails from Bram and Saba, relieved to find them still there. Tomorrow, I’m going to print them out and also forward them to my new account. In the meantime, I change the settings on my old account to forward all new mail to my current address.
I check my current email account, even though Tor wouldn’t have known about it because I only told a handful of people the new address. I search the inbox, the junk mail. There’s nothing.
I send Skev a quick note, asking him to ring me. Then I send a note to Tor as well, asking about the letter, what it said, where she sent it. Knowing Tor, I won’t get a response until the fall. By that point, it’ll have been more than a year since I met Lulu. Any sane person would say it’s too late. It already felt too late that first day, when I woke up in the hospital. But even so, I’ve kept looking.
I’m still looking.