The notebook had been wedged behind the boiler, spiral binding rusted orange and pages foxed.
Diana sat on the cellar floor, the thing in her lap. Her handwriting at 28 had been aggressive; an awful amount of words were underlined twice, the exclamation marks looked like little spears. Marcus MUST understand his mother’s silence is violence!!!
She laughed to herself. Maybe a bit at herself, too.
The show was Wolves at Rest, adapted from a novel no one even remembered anymore. She’d rented a studio theatre in Peckham for eight weeks. Marcus had been played by… what was his name? The one who kept showing up late, who she’d screamed at during week four. Jesse.
She flipped through the pages. Blocking diagrams, arrows pointing everywhere. A sketch of the set she’d wanted but couldn’t afford. Notes on a monologue she’d cut three days before they ran out of money.
The mother enters. She doesn’t speak. CRUCIAL—the daughter needs to crack here, not before.
The radiator clanked above her, then her phone buzzed. Her assistant director had texted about tomorrow’s run-through for The Seagull. Third time she directed it. She knew exactly where it sagged now.
Diana turned another page. We’re not listening to each other. I’m not listening to them.
She’d written that after midnight, probably drunk. Below: Maybe the mother should speak. Maybe I’m wrong about the silence.
She never found out. The theatre lost its lease. The company scattered. She’d taken a job at a college in Yorkshire, told herself it was temporary.
The phone buzzed again. She texted back: Start without me. 20 minutes.
At the back of the notebook, there was a list titled Next Projects. Seven ideas, each with a few frantic lines. Number four: Seagull. Honest, not pretty.
She’d directed it honest twice already. Pretty once. The pretty one had been her biggest success.
Diana closed the notebook. Her knees cracked as she stood. She thought about bringing it upstairs, maybe transcribing those diagrams, seeing if that blocking actually worked. But she left it on the shelf beside the boiler, spine out this time, where she could find it if she needed to.
In the car, she thought about Marcus’s mother. Whether silence had been right. She still didn’t know, but she knew better now what questions to ask the actors. How to wait through the not-knowing.
That was something…
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