Page 115 of We All Live Here
“You don’t have to feel foolish, Bill,” says Mum, her voice weird and sort of dull. “It was an easy misunderstanding to make.”
Bill says again: “She didn’t sleep with him.”
Penelope is smiling at him in the gooey way she does. “Of course she didn’t, darling. Of course there was an explanation for it.”
Mum is staring at Gene. Bill is still in shock. “Oh, goodness,” he says. “Oh, goodness. I seem to have caused a bit of a fuss.”
No, they’re telling him. No, no fuss. Not at all.
Someone has turned the overhead lights down. The school hall hushes. Jensen continues, whispering loudly as if nobody can hear him: “He says he’s sorry for the misunderstanding and he realizes now he should have told you she’d visited Dublin but it was honestly such a small thing he didn’t think anything of it at the time.”
The orchestra has lifted their instruments. There is a music teacher Celie doesn’t recognize standing in front of them, her hands raised like an actual conductor.
Bill looks at Gene. “Tell him thank you. Thank you for clearing that up. That’s…very decent of him.”
People have started to hiss around them now, telling them to be quiet, to please for goodness’ sake stop talking. There are now about eight hundred reasons Celie wants to die. Jensen sits down beside Mum, leaning forward so that he can keep talking to Bill. “He says that’s very decent of you…And he says any time you want to hang, he’s down for it.”
“Dear God.” Bill rolls his eyes. “He never stops.”
And then the music starts. Celie looks over but Gene has disappeared into the darkness. And when she turns back to her mother, Celie sees—with some surprise—that she looks like she’s about tocry.
Chapter Forty
Lila
Lila cannot focus on the first few minutes of the performance. She is struggling to take in what has just happened, the way that Gene just lied to Bill. She keeps thinking about what Jane had said:Infidelity I could have forgiven, the degree to which he was in love with her I could not. There must be some ulterior reason Gene did what he’d done, she keeps telling herself. There always is with Gene.
Jensen, perhaps detecting her distance from proceedings, leans into her. “You okay?” he murmurs.
“That was so weird,” she whispers back. “Because he definitely slept with Mum.”
Jensen looks at her. “But why would he lie about it?”
“I have no idea.” And then someone mutters, “Do you mind?” in an exasperated voice behind them, and Jensen shifts back toward his ownseat. Violet has appeared on the stage. Violet, who is wearing an ill-fitting silver dress and is filled with the preternatural confidence she seems to have been born with, steps out without a moment’s hesitation into the spotlight and begins narrating from a large paper scroll. The Darling children are in their bedrooms, their parents about to go out for the evening.
Lila lets out a breath, tries to push the last few minutes from her head, and settles into her hard wooden seat, just as she has settled into dozens of such school performances, braced for their odd mixture of poignancy and boredom, the way as a parent you can want these moments to last five minutes and a lifetime all at once. As Violet describes the scene before them, Lila’s gaze flickers around the rest of the audience. Two rows in front, to the left, sits Philippa Graham, beside a balding man in a business suit, clearly just back from work. He has put an extra glass of red wine under his seat. She can just make out Gabriel Mallory down toward the front, seated beside his mother. He runs a hand through his floppy hair, checks his phone briefly, and then, perhaps aware he is being looked at, glances behind him. Lila makes sure her face is turned away. She feels almost nothing toward him now, oddly, except vague irritation that she will have to see him at the school gates for the next few years, like a bad meal repeating on you. A reminder of her vanity and stupidity, perhaps.
“He said I have to grow up and I don’t want to grow up, Mother!” Wendy exclaims, on stage, scratching at her leg distractedly.
“Nobody wants to grow up, Wendy,” says Mrs. Darling, in the exaggerated voice of a period-drama housekeeper. There is a low murmur of laughter in the audience.
And then, moments later, through a gap in the painted scenery, Peter Pan enters. Except Peter is not wearing green tights and a tunic. He is wearing…a burgundy two-piece uniform with silver epaulets and what looks like a ring of Saturn over his left breast. A low hum of surpriseripples across the audience. The uniform is oddly familiar. Lila stares at it. And then she realizes: it is aStar Squadron Zerocostume. It is one her father used to wear on the television show. A few minutes later the Lost Boys appear, and they are inStar Squadron Zerocostumes too.
When Captain Hook comes on he is an alien, wearing a scaly head with a green elephant-like trunk. Lila knows it immediately: this was a television alien that terrified her during her childhood. It was the point at which Francesca insisted she stopped watching her father’s show, blaming it for nightmares that lasted until Lila was almost ten. The entire production, she grasps now, is inStar Squadron Zerocostumes. The script has been altered slightly—Captain Hook is an interplanetary villain, and the crocodile is a space lizard. The pirate ship is a space pirate ship and Neverland is now a planet, its backdrop one of those old-fashioned pictures of the moon’s surface, with craters and a flag.
Around them the audience of parents laugh as the Lost Boys, in their oversized uniforms (if one looked closely it was just possible to make out the safety pins and rudimentary stitching holding them up), fight back against the space pirates. Tinkerbell is a flying astronaut, her hair a silver beehive similar to Troy Strang’s once-recurrent love interest Vuleva.
Hugo is playing Michael, the youngest of the Darling children. Lila’s heart always gives a reflexive lurch when she sees Hugo, as if he is the symbol of so much she has lost. He has no lines—or if he has he has forgotten them. His role seems to be to be propelled gently from one end of the stage to the other while the children declaim their lines around him, or are prompted by Mrs. Tugendhat from the side. Occasionally someone whispers in his ear but he seems utterly frozen.
The production staggers forward, through Neverland, the death by space lizard of Hook (which prompts good natured cheers from the audience), a slightly shambolic dance with what had been American Indians but are now space crew from another ship (their uniforms are gold Lurex with a definite seventies flare). There are songs, “You Can Fly!”and “Following the Leader,” taken from the film, the musical accompaniment comically raggle-taggle and only occasionally in tune, the tiny musicians shifting in their seats and periodically breaking off to wave surreptitiously at their parents. Beside her, Jensen keeps laughing, collapsing into giggles, apparently enjoying the chaos on the stage. He was so ready to come along and be part of it, happy to shape himself into her world, instead of expecting her to orbit around him. She finds herself sneaking glances at him, wondering that she had ever found him less attractive than Gabriel Mallory. She can barely sit beside him now without wanting to touch him, and as they watch, she reaches her hand across in the dark and slides it into his. His fingers close around hers unthinkingly, and he glances briefly toward her and smiles, as if this has surprised them both.
Around her Lila listens to the parents coo, or murmur to each other, the proud exclamations of grandparents as their child appears on cue, the soft mentions of names and surreptitious holding up of phones to take photographs, and feels something in her soften, some long-held tension start to evaporate, replaced instead by a sense of wonder, of the impermanence of things and how that, too, can be blissful and heartbreaking at the same time. Lila watches Violet as she emerges repeatedly from the wings to explain what is about to happen or to fill in some gap in the narrative, her voice clear and unwavering, and wonders what kind of young woman she will become. Will she hang on to that confidence? Or is life going to batter it out of her, squeeze her into a role she never asked for, in the way it does so many of us?Stay the same, my darling, she tells her silently.Just stay who you are, fart jokes, inappropriate rap music and all.
In the final scene Wendy, back in her nightie, is telling her mother about their adventures. “Look, Mother, see how well he sails the spaceship? Off to another galaxy!”
For once, it seems, “Michael” must speak. He turns and gazes out atthe audience. The girl playing Wendy turns to Hugo. “Tell Mother—didn’t we have an amazing adventure, Michael?” Mother waits attentively, Father hovering at her side, periodically adjusting his false mustache, which keeps slipping down the left of his face.
Nothing happens.
