Radiance

So here I am. I’ve a room—not at the Savoy, goodness, perish the thought! I’ve the room they assigned me at Princess Alice’s Landing, at the top of a three-floor boarding house on Endymion Road, back end of Grasshopper City. Five girls to a room. And our wardrobes count as a sixth tenant, for not a one of us earns her keep anywhere but before the lens and on the boards. Callista’s Virgin Queen getup takes the whole rear corner, and all our cats live under the skirt. But I save my little shillings for luncheons at the Savoy so that I can feel grand. So that I can feel like I’m somebody going somewhere. So I can read Algernon B dishing gossip and maybe spy with my little eye old Wadsy Shevchenko canoodling with a prop boy. So Søren Blom can find me if he’s scouring the cafes for an Ionian duchess who might just look like me, or if that dashing darling Percival Unck comes looking for a new heroine to drop into a bucket of ghosts. So I can watch the summer Earth at half-wax going down over the froth of Mare Nubium and the candy-coloured streetlights come on in a long bright wave over my city.

My city! Tithonus, jewel of the Moon, Queen Slattern of the Alleyways, Grasshopper City, my home! I stepped off the Topless Towers of Ilium and took in her round blueglass spires and filth-fat holes and opium gardens and botanical dens and the wicker-coral palaces barely keeping the moss at bay like I was taking the first breath of my whole life. I was in love. I was a new bride. If I’d had a penny left over I’d have grabbed the first whore I saw and had her right there against the side of the Actaeon, just to have the city inside me and my hands on its heat. Nickelodeons every four steps, but those four steps also hoisted up grand theatres like castles, studio gates like St. Peter’s, peep shows and brothels and dance halls coming up like posies in every which spot between. They even built a Globe, so achingly, throbbingly familiar out there on this new West End, looking like an ice queen’s personal gladiatorial arena, blueglass and silver and scrimshaw.

I am going to play them all.

Oh, I thought I’d be sensible about it. Don’t pan for gold, says the wise man. Sell pans. I’d learn cameras, I thought. Inside and out. I could do it. Find work as an assistant to an assistant to an assistant. As long as I could be near the movies, I’d’ve won. Maybe someone would catch a glimpse of me taking light readings, notice the way the Earthlight caught my profile. Maybe not. Manage your expectations, Mary! But oh, I took one look at Grasshopper City, at the Globe and the Actaeon and the Savoy, and I knew it would never do. I don’t give a fig how a camera works, just as long as it works on me.

No, I am going to play them all. I intend to step on-stage as Ariel with my dress on. I shall pose just so at the Actaeon’s emerald double door at my own premiere, name above the title, all in lights, all in red, like a rose, like a mouth, all in. I shall absolutely murder Wilde and Ibsen and Chekhov; I shall eat Claudius’s heart in the marketplace, I shall pine for the love of Robin Hood. All of them, all of them. Men’s parts, too. Hamlet in high heels, and don’t you dare forget my name! I will hunch my back as Dickie III until I am quite literally blue in the face. I will make the Moon love me if I have to spike her drink and knock her on the head to do it.

And I am turning blue. It thrills me to my toes! I would say I’m a shade between powder and sky so far. I shall be quite sapphire by Christmas, I expect.

Granted, it’s not going so well on the working front. I ran around like a perfect fool during the slaughter of the suitors in Dorian Blister’s Odyssey last year. My bathwater ran pink with fake blood. Even after I seemed squeakingly clean, the bubbles said I still had a bit of Telemachus on me somewhere. But the camera lingered on me for a half second longer than the other handmaids, and I had a particularly good expression of horror on. Then, I was a dead body in The Mercury Equation. Strangled in a short dress. Big black finger marks on my neck. (Pssst: The prodigal son did it). And a fairy in The Fair Folk Abroad, which if you ask my opinion was an absolute coke-addled mess. Just a great wad of big paper flowers and suspension wires and pukingly sweet orchestral nonsense, along with half a circus’s worth of animals that’d had rum poured in their water bowls the morning before their scenes so they’d stagger docilely across the soundstage instead of ripping Titania’s face off. You can see a panther passed out cold on the horn of plenty in the second scene.