An understudy’s job is to become someone else without ever being allowed to be her.
I learned Hanna Wróbel the way you learn a language you’re desperate to speak. Six weeks of rehearsals for Macbeth at a theatre in Warsaw with peeling gold boxes and red velvet seats worn shiny by a hundred years of other people’s backsides, and I sat in the dark of row twelve with a notebook and watched her. Not the lines — I had those by the end of the first week. Her.
The way she took a breath before a big speech: not in the chest, low down, in the belly, so the costume moved at the waist. The way she touched her own throat when she lied on stage. How on the line unsex me here she ran both hands slowly down her body from the collarbones to the hips, pressing, as if she were wiping something off, and the whole house went quiet as a church.
I practised it at home in front of my bathroom mirror. Both hands down. Collarbones to hips. Pressing. I did it until my skin was red and hot under my palms, and I didn’t know anymore whose body I was touching.
* * *
Her husband directed it. Marek. Big man, grey beard, loud, brilliant, the kind of director who throws chairs and gets standing ovations. He called her “my Lady” in rehearsals, even when he was screaming at her, and he kissed her on the back of the neck in front of everyone at the end of each day, like a man signing his name.
I hated the back of his neck. I hated his beard. I hated the way she leaned into him for that kiss, one second, a reflex, like a plant to a window.
I sat in row twelve and wrote her blocking in my notebook in tiny, careful letters and imagined putting my own mouth exactly where his had been. Just there. The little soft dip at the top of her spine, under the knot of dark hair.
* * *
She knew. Of course she knew. Actors always know who’s watching.
Three weeks into the run she called me into her dressing room before the half. She was sitting at the mirror in her slip, the crimson velvet gown on its hanger behind her like a second woman waiting. The bulbs round the mirror made her skin gold.
“Zip me,” she said.
I took the gown off its hanger. Heavy, warm from the lights, smelling of her perfume and old theatres. She stood and stepped into it, and I drew it up over her hips, her waist, and she held her hair up off her neck with one hand and waited.
The zip was long. I did it very slowly. Her back appeared and disappeared under my hands, notch by notch, the long valley of her spine, the shoulder blades, a small brown mole I had not known about. I had not known about it. I had watched her for nine weeks and I had not known about it, and I felt a stab of jealousy so sharp I almost said ow out loud. Marek knew about that mole. Marek had known it for eleven years.
At the top I stopped. The soft dip under her hair, right there in front of me.
“Go on,” she said to the mirror, very quietly. “You’ve been thinking about it since the first week.”
I put my mouth there. Just my lips, just warm, just for a breath. Her whole body shivered under the velvet. In the mirror she closed her eyes.
Then the tannoy crackled — Beginners, please, Act One beginners — and she opened her eyes and stepped away from me and was Lady Macbeth.
* * *
After that it was the dressing room before every show. Ten minutes. Sometimes fifteen, if she cut her warm-up.
I learned the rest of her the way I’d learned her lines: in pieces, out of order, desperate to get it right. The taste of her neck under the stage powder. How she bit her own lip to keep quiet, because Marek’s office was two doors down. How she liked my hands in her hair, pulling a little, and the sound she made when I did, low, a note I’ve never heard her make on stage. How fast she could be dressed again when the tannoy called. We never had time for more than that. We were always being called. That made it worse. That made it unbearable, in the best way.
She never said she loved me. She’d press her forehead to mine with her eyes shut and say, “You know my part better than I do.” That was all. That was everything.
And every night I sat in the wings in my black clothes with my script on my knees, and watched her walk out under the lights in the gown I’d zipped, and run her hands down her body from the collarbones to the hips — and every night now, I swear, she found me in the dark of the wings with her eyes on that line. Just for a second. Just me.
And every night after the curtain call Marek came backstage and kissed the back of her neck. Where I’d been. Signing his name over mine.
* * *
In February, on a Thursday, her voice went.
Laryngitis. The doctor came at five o’clock. Total rest. Not a word for a week. Marek stormed around the green room throwing his phone at sofas, and then he stopped in front of me, red-faced, and looked at me as if seeing me for the first time.
“Well,” he said. “Do you know it?”
I knew it.
I zipped myself into the crimson velvet. It was still warm from her body; she’d tried it on at four, before the doctor, out of habit. It smelled of her. I stood in front of her mirror in her gold light and I was terrified and I have never been so happy in my whole life.
I went out. I ran my hands down my body from the collarbones to the hips. Pressing. The house went quiet as a church.
* * *
She was waiting in the dressing room afterwards. She’d watched from the back of the stalls in a headscarf. She couldn’t speak; she wrote on the back of a programme with my eyeliner pencil and held it up to me.
You were me. Better.
Then she unzipped me. Slowly. Notch by notch. Her mouth on every inch of my spine on the way down. When she got to the bottom she turned me round and pushed me back against the mirror, and the bulbs were hot on my shoulders, and her mouth was on mine and couldn’t make a sound, so I made all the sounds for both of us. Marek’s door two rooms down. I didn’t care. I wanted him to hear. I’ll leave it there, in the gold light, with the crimson gown on the floor round my ankles like something spilled.
* * *
Her voice is coming back. The doctor says Monday.
Tonight is my sixth performance. The reviews came out this morning: one of them said I was “a revelation”. Marek called me “my Lady” at the notes session. Without thinking. Then he stopped, and looked at me, and something went across his face that I don’t think he understood.
Hanna’s honey-and-ginger tea is sitting on the dressing-room table, the big flask she drinks for her throat, the one she’ll drink all weekend so she can be back on Monday. Her lipstick’s on the rim of the cup.
I’m sitting here in her gown, in front of her mirror, with the tannoy about to call beginners. And I’m looking at that tea.
I’m not going to do anything. I want to say that clearly.
I only want you to know that I’ve thought about it. Just once. Just a second. The way she touches her throat on stage when she lies.
Beginners, please. Act One beginners.
I pour the tea out into the sink. All of it. I rinse the flask and make her a fresh one, with extra honey, the way she likes it.
Then I zip myself up, alone. It’s harder without her. I manage.
