Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (49 page)

As I watch Liam scurry off up the street in a huff, my mouth in an O shape, I dimly recall Joanna saying something like ‘Be gentle with him’ the last time I saw her. She knows me only too well. I’d better sort this out or the film isn’t going to happen. I run after Liam and try to placate him; I explain that I was only teasing and I really like him. I put my hand on his arm, he shakes it off like I’m a leper and hisses, ‘Don’t touch me.’ He looks disgusted by me. Wow. I go back to the house and watch him pack. He’s still snarling and hissing, ‘You’re not smart enough to play my wife,’ and, ‘You’re lazy and unprofessional.’ (Because I haven’t Googled him yet.) ‘I don’t want to be in this bourgeois film anyway.’ It seems to matter very much to him how he is perceived in the ‘art world’. On and on he rants. I give up trying to pacify him and say, ‘I understand if you think the film’s not right for you and I’m not the right person to play your wife, you have to do what’s best for you and your image.’ His expression softens, he stops packing, says he’s not going to leave the film after all, he’s going back to the pub and he’ll see me later.

When I hear the front door close, I sit down on the top step of the spiral staircase and cry. Then I get angry.
I’m not going to be bullied and told I’m not good enough by any more men. I’ve had enough of it. I’m not doing the film, it’s not worth having a nervous breakdown over
. I pick up my guitar and my bags, call a cab and go home to mother.

34 FEELING THE WEIRD

2012

Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth.

Albert Camus

‘Never mind, dear. Didn’t they think you were very good?’ Mum isn’t being mean, it’s just that to be asked to play the lead in a feature film is so far out of her life experience, she can’t imagine how I could possibly do it. She assumes I’ve been sent home because I was crap.

In the morning I talk to my daughter: she wants me to go back and do the film. She’s so proud and excited about it, and Joanna’s promised her she can be an extra in a scene with Tom Hiddleston. She doesn’t want to give that up.

I go back to the house in Kensington and come across Liam in the kitchen. I give him a hug. We get on with the job. I make a pact with myself to commit to the challenge ahead and give it everything I’ve got, I’ll deal with the consequences later. It’s very
very
important I get this right, more important than my pride.

The crew are friendly and easy to get along with. You’d think doing something as huge as being the lead in a film would be overwhelming. It isn’t. I’ve been a director and an editor, I understand the language, how to start and end scenes, how it might edit, how to repeat movements and dialogue. Even if none of this knowledge is relevant in this particular film, knowing it stops me feeling out of my depth. I’m not sure I could be in an ordinary film and learn lines, but I can improvise, I’m confident about that. What I’m not confident about is my body, or my face. Joanna doesn’t want me to wear any makeup, and here’s the camera inches from my face (and thighs), god knows what kind of lens Ed Rutherford, the director of photography, is using. I have absolutely no control over what I look like. I feel like Blanche Dubois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, when Stanley Kowalski grabs her face and holds it under a bare light bulb to see how old she really is (Vivien Leigh said that was the most painful scene she had ever filmed). On the first day of shooting I’m acutely aware of my age and the rarity of a movie camera lingering over an older woman’s face in films. Usually it’s a young woman’s face the camera loves, it almost caresses her:
isn’t she beautiful, isn’t she perfect
.

At first I think portraying the character ‘D’ in the film isn’t that big a leap for me: I know Joanna well, I know her films and her aesthetic, but the challenge reveals itself stealthily; D is a slightly out-of-sync reflection of myself, it’s disturbing and unsettling that I’m so close to her – but not her. The events I’m portraying in her life have just happened in mine: moving away from the family home, trying to create within a relationship, fear of change – although I’m much feistier than D. I start to lose track of where she ends and I begin.

One of the references Joanna mentions to me for my performance is the film
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quaidu Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
(1975) by Chantal Akerman. I saw it at film school and loved the naturalism and thought how revolutionary it was to show such ordinary everyday chores as peeling a potato in real time in a feature film. Joanna also gives me Robert Bresson’s book
Notes on the Cinematographer
(1975) and it helps me trust my own judgement. ‘Prefer what intuition whispers in your ear to what you have done and redone ten times in your head,’ Bresson writes.

The role is physically very demanding. I’m in almost every scene, working every day, six days a week, running up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, around the local streets, on my feet all the time, thinking, remembering, calculating, improvising, and I’m pleased that I kept myself fit in those dark times when there seemed no point, especially as I’m naked in five scenes.

Still from the film
Exhibition

I couldn’t do the sex scenes if I had a boyfriend, it would be a betrayal. Just before the first one, Joanna and I discuss what sort of knickers I should wear. Not sexy black ones, this is a long-term marriage; I try a pair of white ones but we agree they’re ‘too Bridget Jones’: we settle for a plain flesh-coloured pair from American Apparel. The crew are nearly ready, Liam’s on the bed, I’m wearing nothing but the knickers and a white towelling robe, when my body gives me the signal, a clutching feeling in my stomach, that diarrhoea is imminent. I rush down to the ground-floor loo, the most private one in the house, although even this one isn’t very private, it’s right next to the front door, which is open and a bunch of the crew are sitting outside drinking tea and eating biscuits.

I wash myself about a million times and go back upstairs, I feel weak and fragile as I climb onto the bed.
How glamorous, if only the audience knew
. This is the first time I’m going to be touched by Liam (playing ‘H’), he’s just woken up and was drinking again last night. I think he’s nervous, cold, clammy, alcohol-scented sweat oozes out of his pores. I’ve showered twice, cleaned my teeth twice, washed my hair and down below, I’m spotless. Joanna tells us the shape of the scene – which boils down to H wants sex, D doesn’t – and off we go. I haven’t been touched by a man for over a year, this is so strange, a man I don’t know touching me intimately, with another group of men I don’t know watching me, the microphone dangling over our heads and the blank shark eye of the camera lens recording it all. I’m half appalled and half aroused. To cope with the situation I employ the same trick I used throughout the IVF and cancer investigations, I float outside my body and watch what’s happening from above.

Later during filming I realise I’m acting two people all the time: one is the repressed character D, and the other is the free-spirited actress Viv, who takes her clothes off and isn’t fazed by emotional or sexual scenes with a man she doesn’t know, in front of a group of strangers.

By the time we get to the last sex scene, towards the end of the six-week shoot, I have to make a huge effort to get into it. I’m exhausted, all wrung out, I’ve given every last drop of myself. I talk to Tom Hiddleston about readjusting to normal life, tell him I don’t know what’s real and what’s the character any more. Tom says, ‘You’re feeling the weird, that’s a good thing, good for your performance.’ I also receive good advice about de-roling from the actress Mary Roscoe, who has worked with Mike Leigh. Mary says that Leigh advises his actors to make contact with family and friends at the end of each day, to change clothes, go to the pub, do things that remind you who you are.

One of the last scenes we shoot takes place in a country house. The room is cold and completely dark, there’s no bed, just a mattress in the middle of the floor. Joanna tells Liam and me to curl up together under a blanket. I put my head on Liam’s shoulder, he wraps his arm around me. I start sobbing uncontrollably. Joanna asks me what she should do, I say, ‘Keep filming, I’m not going to be able to stop.’ It’s the position we’re in that’s affected me so deeply. Just how Husband and I used to snuggle up together when we were happy. I cry continuously for the next four hours, the first time I’ve cried since the break-up of my marriage.

35 ALONENESS

2013

Silence is so accurate.

Mark Rothko

I’m sitting at my dad’s ugly, dark brown, chunky-legged dining table, the sort of substantial piece of furniture Victorians would have appreciated. I’m wearing an old black vest with big armholes showing a bit of side boob, not in a good way, more in an ‘I look like my old man’ sort of way. I point out to my daughter how many butterflies are flitting around the lavender bush outside the French doors, just like my father did to me. The warm air and the sound of cicadas rattling their feet makes me feel good. Every time I visit Toulon, I buy a naïve painting by a local artist from the flea market – rough bold strokes suggesting pine trees, waves, the rocky coast – they hang on the whitewashed walls in dark brown frames.

I used to think my father was so selfish and uncompromising, not making the effort it takes to find new friends. I was sociable back then, turning up every summer with a boyfriend or a couple of girlfriends, but now I’m too outspoken for most people, they think you’re rude if you tell the truth. ‘Punk’ was the only time I fitted in. Just one tiny sliver of time where it was acceptable to say what you thought. Perhaps I was lucky to have that. After a divorce friends seem to just melt away, like they’re frightened they’ll catch it off you. Or maybe it’s just that your face doesn’t fit at dinner parties any more. Anyway, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a decree absolute must be in want of a few good mates.

I hear children across the road splashing in a swimming pool. I can smell lavender and pine. Citroëns putter past the front gate. My wooden shutters, painted eau de nil, bang in the breeze: is the mistral coming? It often comes in August, it can last three days or three and three and three days, that’s what the French say. I get up and wedge an old red towel between the shutter and the sill. Everything I imagined when I used to visit my father, how I would change the flat, paint it white, retile the floor, make it look clean and simple, I’ve done, and now I stay here for two weeks every summer.

I walk along the streets lined with fading villas; there’s the raspberry villa, the vanilla villa, the pistachio villa – and dog shit everywhere. The French love their dogs. I’m always suspicious of people who adore animals, they often don’t care much for humans.

As I near the flat, I imagine how it would feel if I had a boyfriend, holding his hand, brushing past the purple blooms of the overhanging bougainvillea. How nice it would be. Or would he be in a bad mood? How would he feel about me having a quick swim in the morning, strolling home to eat goat’s cheese with fresh tomato on a baguette, then writing all afternoon? Would there be arguments about how I spend my time?

Maybe I’m better off without a boyfriend, no matter how much I’d like one. I find what I do difficult; if I could avoid it, I would. I’d much rather be sitting on the sofa cuddled up to a guy watching box sets, cooking a meal for him when he comes back from work, telling myself love is more important than anything in the world, worth neglecting my music and writing for, than be self-disciplined and write songs on my own all day. It’s scary standing in front of audiences singing and playing, struggling to keep a band together, hustling for gigs and money. If happy domesticity came my way, I’d probably grab hold of it and never let it go. I think of what my mum said to me when I was lamenting my loneliness to her last week: ‘Do you really want to be owned again?’

I’m invited to lunch with two French women, they’re ten or fifteen years older than me. One is in a relationship, the other is alone. One is annoyed by and resentful of her partner and embarrassed to be seen with him, the other comes and goes when she pleases. Here it is, laid out in front of me, the two options: with someone and irritated by them (I think most people in long marriages have a touch of Stockholm Syndrome) or alone and free. Neither appeals. There’s got to be a third way.

Bored, bored, bored if you’re in a relationship, lonely, lonely, lonely if you’re not; Ari told me that when we were in Spain together. I remember feeling her lump. Should have taken control, done more to help her.

36 AN ORANGE

2013

I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.