there were dwarves in the play. Is it a fantasy? Or science fiction? I didn’t realise Tennessee Williams wrote that sort of thing as well.’
Gavin stops abruptly and looks at me, and I screech to a halt a couple of steps later and turn to face him.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘He’s an electrician …’
‘Oh …’
I see Gavin shaking his head as he starts walking again and I run a little to keep up, my heels clicking on the cold concrete of the floor, my back sweaty under my cashmere, my top lip prickling under my make-up, my hairspray starting to scratch at my head. I don’t think I have ever been this mortified. Gavin isn’t talking to me. Maybe he and the dwarf are really good friends, although they’d look ridiculous walking down the street together. In my mind I can only picture the smaller guy sitting on one of Gavin’s massive shoulders, perhaps in a jaunty hat and eating an apple … but I know that’s wrong. I decide to break the silence with a change of subject, terrified of how Gavin might choose to introduce me to the rest of the crew, especially if there are any more … electricians.
‘So Gavin, pretend you have a girlfriend …’
He stops and glares at me again.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘I do have a girlfriend,’ he says.
‘Oh. I didn’t mean anything by it, Gavin … Okay, well, moving on, what if you and your girlfriend were just sitting on the sofa one night, watching the TV, and she said to you, “Say something nice to me”?’
‘Why?’ he says, and I can’t decide if he is just irritated, or if he already hates me like Greenpeace hate Shell. Either way I carry on regardless – I can’t make it any worse.
‘Because she’s just had a miserable day, her feet really hurt because she’s been breaking in new sandals, she’s had a row with her dad about the importance of correctly filling out cheque-book stubs, and she needs somebody to say something wonderful. She needs to feel special …’
‘I mean,’ Gavin says, pushing a door open then turning back to address me, ‘why haven’t I said something nice anyway?’
‘Oh …’ That’s floored me.
He steps back to allow me to walk through the door before he does.
‘Exactly,’ I say. Exactly. I think my voice might have just broken.
The stage is in front of us, and all of the house lights are up. It is smaller than I anticipated, and apologetic without a spotlight.
‘I’m not having this conversation if you are going to cry again.’ Gavin talks over his shoulder at me as we stride along the aisle. ‘Plus, do you talk about anything else? Have you tried cracking a few jokes? Or is it just constant relationship angst over a mound of self-help books and copies of Cosmopolitan? Because if that’s the case I don’t think I blame this guy …’
I blink twice in quick succession. I am startled and affronted. I can talk about other things; I talk about other things all the time!
‘I can talk about other things …’ I say, sneering at him.
‘Well thank God for that,’ Gavin says, and stops walking abruptly behind a short Indian man who stands with his back to us while gesticulating wildly, his hands conducting an imaginary opera. Nobody appears to be paying him much attention, and a clove cigarette flashes wildly between the stubby fingers of his left hand, sprinkling ash and sparks onto his chocolate-brown suede loafers. He wears a dark grey suit and a black polo-neck, and has very thick and very high dark hair that seems to have been set in one of those old-lady hairdresser’s, an hour under the machine with a Woman’s Weekly and a word search, sucking on a boiled sweet, all clicking teeth and concentration.
Young people in jeans and Sergeant Pepper and Mr Brightside T-shirts mill around in front of him paying him no mind, while every couple of seconds somebody completely new appears and carries a large plank of wood precariously from one side of the stage to the other. Everything that could possibly be covered in material has been – a dark-red brushed velvet with a grey and brown pattern of twisted leaves. The stage needs sweeping. It is insulated with a thin layer of dust, broken up by discarded McDonald’s wrappers. I count at least five Starbucks cups that have toppled onto their sides like the drunks on Tottenham Court Road.
Gavin says, ‘Tristan’, but the little man in front of us doesn’t turn around. He is shouting in a low, thick theatrical voice that he has shoplifted from the men’s floor of a 1950s department store.
‘But fucking love! I can’t fucking make it work! It’s obviously too dark! It’s too heavy and shameful and dirty and depressed – it’s an old velvet whore hanging from its whore’s bed – it’s been used, it’s on the cheap, it’s dragging all of us down with it to its old rotten-toothed whore old age …’ His shoulders droop, and the clove cigarette burns close to his fingers. He takes a violent last drag and stubs it out on the aisle. I hear him whisper, ‘Now I’m depressed.’
When nobody says anything, he takes a huge breath and demands of the room, ‘Has anybody got any uppers?’
‘Tristan?’ Gavin repeats, but louder this time.
Tristan spins around to face us. He is wearing oversized black plastic sunglasses reminiscent of Jackie Onassis, although they are clearly very cheap. His suit is well cut but still appears to be a size too big for him. So this is Tristan Mitra. He tilts his head down to look at us above his plastic glasses and something devilish twinkles in his eyes as he flashes me a huge wide charming smile. I’ve read about him in the Standard. It was the opening night of his debut play as a director, an all-male version of The Sound of Music at the Brixton Art House, and the press were trying to track him down for a quote because of its rave reviews. They found him in the Charing Cross police station on Agar Road. He’d been arrested for being drunk in charge of a wheelchair on Old Compton Street. He’d run over the feet of twelve sets of tourists, but unlucky thirteen had been a policeman. They found the owner of the wheelchair in a pub at the bottom of Wardour Street with a bottle of vodka and a beef pie. He said that Tristan had offered him two hundred quid for the chair, plus the vodka, and he had just really fancied a drink. But now he couldn’t get home.
Tristan has appeared in the gossip columns as well – he’s rumoured to be having an affair with Phillipe Ellender, the set designer, and I read a thing last week that said he might be having a thing with Dolly Russell herself, which seems utterly bizarre. When they asked him for a quote he said, ‘Loving somebody and not telling them can hurt more than being rejected by them. It’s like rejecting yourself.’ And even though he has a reputation for being able to drink all night, he recently came home so appallingly trashed that he flew into a jealous rage directed at his mother’s chinchilla, Charlton, and tried to microwave it … The RSPCA got involved at some point, that’s why it was in the paper.
‘Gavin! Love! Mountain of a man! Giant Gavin! Ho, ho, ho, green giant!’ he sings and does a strange little dance, ‘Giant Gavin! Love! … Are you on any prescription medication? You’re not on codeine, are you?’
‘No,’ Gavin replies flatly, and Tristan stares at him still, but his smile begins to fade.
‘I had morphine once,’ I say, to try and cheer up this strange little man, this large-voiced
