Georgio de Chirico suffered from Alice In Wonderland syndrome. That was what the Turin guide told her. Does that mean he disappeared through portals inside portals she wondered as she looked at the postcards in her hand?
From the cafe table in the arcade, Hope cast off words at speed, more additions to the Ariadne series, dispatches to Best, Junior, the Dream Cafe and the Waiting Room. She returned to the Red Room and had a strange dream that she was inside the photograph of her house on Bishops Rise (LAND ON LOCATION), the one which once housed a young Donovan Phillips Leitch. She had his room where he used to play Catch The Wind, it was there she had dreamt the Still Life lyrics, scribbled in the dark on the back of a postcard, the same postcard EchoBoy held in Regan House, when he sang the song a decade earlier Hope thought that playing the synth in a school band was part of the dream, 1981 was dead and gone. From that photograph the dream lens pulled back to reveal the Red Room, and pulled back again to reveal the location for the film, another red room inside a blue room with the Ariadne painting on the wall.
Postcards of the Ariadne series, those enigmatic fragments, continued their steady drift to Best and Junior, each tiny rectangle a whispered promise of her return to the familiar clatter and camaraderie of the Dream Cafe and the hushed intimacy of the Waiting Room. They adorned the walls there now, she imagined, a colourful archipelago charting her temporary exile. “Back soon, can’t wait to see you all, wish I was there right now,” she’d scribbled on each, the breezy sentiment that felt increasingly like a fragile fiction, her ship anchored to a dimly lit past she longed to flee.
Hope arrived back from Turin not long after the postcards, returning to shifts at the two very different establishments, the Waiting Room and the Dream Cafe, gazing at the portal postcards, longing to be transported back there, to reach out to the disembodied hand still writing the words on that cafe table, where someone else brought the coffee. At the Dream Cafe you’re never on your own, that’s how the song goes. Some days you just want to be alone to blast out Still Life by EchoBoy & The Minotaurs on the boombox to an empty cafe. She didn’t expect to be serving a black coffee without cream in her other cafe shift in the theatre of linoleum and Formica, nowhere to hide from the fluorescent glare, she wished to dive into the well inside the snow globe on the shelf, to melt through the glass to the world of dreams, where the promise still held water, the million to one shot of catching a glimpse of that lone star in the cellular firmament. Lights, camera… snow….
The reappearance of Veronica Swan in unfamiliar territory felt, to her, like the abrupt surfacing of something submerged, a glint of unwelcome metal in the water, a harbinger of the wreckage still yet to catch the light, the crescent shaped cut on the heel when the red shoe fell down the staircase well at two speeds, from number 58. The Turin role, however, was a different matter entirely, a silken bath of accolades in which she continued to soak like Lizzie Siddal, her look a like, according to Tarkovsky. “What’s with the Ariadne fixation?” Tarkovsky had murmured that afternoon, her homecoming balloons now sagging from the papier-mâché ceiling rose, his gaze, unsettlingly direct, tracked beyond her to the line of postcards on the Dream Cafe wall, a reminder of the cameras, a tangible thread to the other her, the one seen through a lens, so different from the Hope who poured lukewarm coffee in a transport cafe, different to how she was seen around town. Only Best seemed to glimpse that other Hope, perched as ever at the counter, nursing a bottomless coffee, staring into the inky depths, the way he stared into the stagnant pond below the electricity pylon, thinking of Hamlet’s ghost and his family history with the Russian. Occasionally he grunted a response to Tarkovsky’s soliloquies about the Pasternak translation, but now the lights moved back to Hope as he tugged on the thread once more.
“Come on Hope, you know why I’m asking, Ariadne? You’re perfect for it, but I need the story behind the postcards if I’m going to sell this to Swan.” Best had shot her a warning glance looking over the shoulder of Tarkovsky towards his Gulley Jimson concrete canvas, the subway running under the new A1 motorway. Hope had improvised some airy nonsense about the myth’s resonance, anything to avoid the stark truth: that she was, in some strange, subterranean way, inhaling and exhaling the very air that the painted image in the subway breathed, the figure that somehow might lead her to an escape route through the layers of Newtown subways and alleyways.
When Best revealed that she was his Elizabeth Siddal, she asked if that meant he wanted to drown her in paint and if the role came with a free supply of laudanum. Ophelia, Ariadne, Hope A1 or Hope A2?
On the day the moment imploded she was Hope A2. Good thing Best wasn’t there when Tarkovsky floated in with the caped figure attached to the target she had been pursuing. Now the tables were about to turn. The game was up. She didn’t expect to be serving a black coffee without even the offer of no cream, in this other, less glamorous theatre of her existence – the one far removed from the city’s glittering possibilities and the string of cattle call auditions, her presence reduced to a painted detail in one of the postcards into which she wished she could return to Turin, a swift pull on the thread she’d left in the red room in the blue hour, transported before she was caught, Alice through the cappuccino glass. It was all Tarkovsky’s fault, she should have just gone through her agent, this was about the blow up in her face.
Placing the coffee down before Swan, as if it was a wine goblet in on the set Mary Queen of Scots, the film director looked at her once, twice, and then Hope half smiled, the non smiling half scowled at Tarkovsky.
“Do you have a twin?” Swan’s voice held a note of cool appraisal.
“No it’s the other me.” Hope said, catching the icy scent of the Still Life perfume again.
“My own personal barista, everywhere I go. Something doesn’t smell quite right and I don’t mean his plate of bacon. Do I get the sense I’m being played here?”
Tarkovsky, ever the gambler, raised a placating hand and laid down his cards.
The moment, with his disarming candour, that Tarkovsky suggested they consider Hope for Ariadne, a crimson tide surged up Swan’s neck, spreading like a stain across her pale skin. Hope had already turned away, her delicate profile momentarily stark against the harsh studio lights which seemed to extinguish themselves one by one as she retreated from their table. It was over, she knew it. The fragile snow globe inside which the dream was posted had imploded.
Later, amidst the hushed murmur of their silent film argument, she was summoned, a silent witness now drawn into the drama.
“Did you take the job at the station,” Swan’s voice was sharp, edged with suspicion, “just to ambush me?”
A slow smile touched her lips. “If I did, it was a remarkably protracted ambush. I work there because it’s close to last minute stand in roles and auditions. Besides, I was there long before you finally graced us with your presence.”
“Finally?” A flicker of something akin to hurt crossed Swan’s features. “So you were waiting for me.”
“Yes.” A pause hung in the air.
“You have gumption, I’ll give you that.”
“You can talk.”
“What does that mean?” Swan’s crimson stain was spreading to her face.
“You stole my postcards off the Waiting Room wall and tore them into pieces.”
“Oh. You sent those? I did ask to look at them. You think I owe you something? That entitles you to ambush me?”
“It wasn’t my idea, did he tell you his role?”
“He did.” Swan’s gaze flickered towards Tarkovsky. “He hasn’t quite finished the explanation, but he admitted telling you where I write. He said you were already in the frame for Ophelia, but when that project fell through the floor, he thought you’d be ideal for Ariadne. And now,” a note of incredulity entered her voice, “he thinks you should come to scout the location. With your other half.”
“My other half?” Hope drifted back up those stairs in Turin back to the red room in the blue hour. Her fire escape in the de Chirico sky.
“The artist.”
A faint tremor ran through her. “He definitely won’t come. Not if you’re filming what I think you’re filming. A certain car exploding in nineteen seventy-three.”
“And would you allow his…obstinate stance to stand in your way?” Tarkovsky’s brow furrowed slightly.
“He would never ask me to do something he thought I wouldn’t want to do,” she said quietly, “and I would like to think I’d act the same way.”
“A code of honour,” Swan observed, a hint of grudging respect in her tone, “is to be commended in one so young. But all we want is to walk the site, get the lay of the land. Apparently, he knows it better than anyone.”
“Not quite.”
Swan’s eyes narrowed. “There’s someone else?”
“Yes. The singer of that song you liked. ‘Dying Flame’. It was written there, on that very spot.”
“And can he come?”
“He’s on tour. Paris, I think. I never quite know. We piece it together afterwards, by the postcard trail, you can rip them up as well if you like.”
“Ok, I apologise for the postcards. I didn’t realise they were that important.”
“They are portals to somewhere else. It’s ok for you, travelling the globe. Some of us are trapped in that Waiting Room longing for transportation.”
“I understand. Can your artist or the singer come another time?”
“The singer might. The artist will not.”
Swan hesitated. “May I ask why?”
“You can ask.”
Tarkovsky raised a hand, a gesture of quiet authority, as if to suggest that some questions were best left unasked, Swan assessed the gesture, and surmised the weight of some silences should remain unspoken. She refused to unlock eyes with Hope, but she did not expect the outburst to come.
“Haven’t you ever stood where I’m standing? I can lend you some Jean Rhys if it helps. Voyage In The Dark is on the shelf the next time you visit The Waiting Room.”
“Believe me, until I set up my own production company I stood there every single day. From your research no doubt you know damn well I’ve read Jean Rhys. What’s that look on your face? Ok, yes you do remind me of me and no, it’s not the time to quote that line from my film which I can sense is burning the tip of your tongue, as this man will tell you, if he hasn’t already, I struggle with compliments and praise, and if there is any element of gushing involved I positively seeeeeeeeeth.”
“I never gush and you won’t find me begging out of desperation, I have some dignity and if that position of power gives you any slither of entertainment I’ll remind you which one of us holds the hot jar of liquid. I played my hand with the box of matches, I didn’t expect to see you here and the deal is in to you. Your move.”
“Welcome to South Hatfield,” Tarkovsky added.
Swan finally smiled and said, “Is this the waitress or the player I see before me?”
Tarkovsky took hold of the jug. “She’s the real deal, she’s a player like all of us in here, and I’ll stake her hand any day of the week. She could have crumbled but look at that face. Look at the fearless gaze. She won’t freeze like the last one.”
“I sometimes look for the ones who freeze, there’s something to be said for Bresson’s blank expression.”
“She’ll give you ice. She even collects snow globes. Show her.”
Hope moved to the next table to pick up a newspaper, carrying it towards the window. The seated figure let his dog jump up to greet her as she topped up his black coffee.
“It’s yesterday’s paper,” Hope said, “old news, already out of time.”
“Depends on how you look at time,” the seated figure said. “Yesterday follows you.”
“That one of your sayings?”
“My paper boy once said it.”
“Hope you gave him an extra Christmas tip.”
Placing the paper down she picked up the dog for a cuddle, half watching the window mirror reflection for a black shadow fleeing the scene. The dog went to lick Hope’s face and dislodged her hairpin, sent spinning, on reflection she saw it bounce once on the table before disappearing into the black hole coffee cup.
“She prefers animals to people, Tarkovsky said, “now where have we heard that before.”
“You think you’re the Russian matchmaker don’t you? I don’t know why I put up with this.”
“Because you want that opening shot to be the best.”
“Best? The Best or The Very Best?”
THREAD CHOICES
Listen to Still Life by EchoBoy & The Minotaurs… recorded at Regan House 1981.
