This was scheduled to be seen at the close of the spring term - a fact that was already causing him considerable anxiety. Although the group undoubtedly had a great relish for dramatic expression (once they got going) and threw themselves with vigour and imaginative energy into all the improvisations, they were simply not interested in learning lines. In vain would Brian take home his rehearsal tape, extract the obscenities, massage the rest into some sort of coherent shape and transfer it to Mandy’s Amstrad. The group would accept the thin, perforated sheets, stuff them into the pockets of their jeans with discouraging nonchalance and ignore them thereafter.
Now Brian asked if anyone had had time to look over the results of the previous week’s work. Denzil, lowering himself slowly, said, ‘Yeah.’
‘How did it feel?’
‘Absorbent, man. Really absorbent.’
He hung an inch from the floor exciting deltoids which bulged like coconuts beneath grey, unhealthy skin, then dropped. Noiselessly. The others applauded. Denzil put a hand mockingly on his chest and dipped his shaven skull. A spider crouched in the very centre, the navy-blue threads of its web woven over his skull and disappearing down the neck of his Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. The words ‘CUT HERE’ were tattooed around the base of his throat. He strolled over to join the others, taking his time. ‘I reckon I could’ve been a trapeze artist - given the luck.’
‘Right! Warm-up time, you lot,’ cried Brian in a rushy, foolish voice. He started running on the spot, shaking his arms and legs about and rolling his head.
Denzil stood in front of Edie Carter, straddled his legs and mimed playing a guitar, rhythmically thrusting his pelvis into her face. Sluggishly two of the others got up. Collar, so called because he could not bear anything touching his neck, started shadow boxing. Little Boreham, weedily hopeless but dressed like an Olympic athlete, did a few shallow and uncertain press-ups.
Edie and her brother continued to sit, back to back, like a pair of exquisitely carved, beautifully decorated bookends. In profile their faces appeared almost identical (they were born on the same day) but Tom’s jaw was a little more prominent and heavier. They had long, thick, curling hair the colour of marmalade, exquisitely shaped noses and high, marbly-white foreheads like the children in Tudor paintings.
Brian looked forward eagerly each day to his first sighting of the Carter twins, for they constantly re-styled and re-invented themselves and never looked the same twice. Their dazzling skins, thick and smooth like cream, seemed, like blank canvases, to be crying out for decoration. They dressed, as small children would if left to themselves, in an assortment of unrelated finery. Today Edie wore a foamy scarlet RaRa topped with shreds of silk and lace and a banana-coloured sweat shirt full of holes. Tom was in jeans resembling pale blue shredded wheat and an American Repro jacket stencilled with midnight hags and burning cities and comic-book expletives.
‘Come on you two,’ called Brian.
Edie parted her rich carnation lips, flickered out her tongue, drew it in again. And smiled. Brian turned quickly away and began shadow boxing with Collar, much to the latter’s resentment.
When the group had first been formed Brian, very heavily into non-verbal communication, had encouraged everyone to sit around in a circle holding hands with their eyes closed. Next had come various physical exercises leading to a full class workout. These had been discontinued when Brian, wrestling on the floor with Collar, had accidentally touched his neck, receiving in return a clout across the ear that had made his head fizz for a week.
‘OK. Gather round, earthlings.’
Brian sat down in a single but rapidly accelerating movement. The twins turned towards him and smiled. Brian, faint with excitement and desire, smiled back. He could never decide which was the more beautiful, for he was equally besotted with them both.
‘Now,’ he said briskly, ‘where had we got to last week?’
No one remembered. Brian held the pause, nodding interrogatively at them all in turn for all the world, as Collar said afterwards, like the daft dog in the back of his mum’s Escort.
‘Was it . . .’ Boreham puckered his brow, ‘the bit where Denzil went down the Social and got in that fight with a Paki?’
‘No,’ said Brian shortly. He was keenly aware of the ethnic imbalance in his group and had tried in vain to remedy the matter. No non-white person was interested in joining, possibly because of Denzil, who could be seen every Saturday in Causton High Street enthusiastically selling the British Nationalist Magazine on behalf of the BNP.
‘That were good. We could do that one again.’
‘No, we couldn’t.’ Brian was beginning to feel depressed. All the improvisations, no matter how pacific their inception, quickly became confrontational. Everyone it seemed loved rows and while there was no doubt that they were good theatre even Brian, inexperienced director/devisor that he was, could see that each violent highlight needed to be cushioned by a tranquil low light if the whole thing wasn’t going to explode in everyone’s faces.