The Silence - Joss Stirling

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briefly unattended in a café, the house full of students where they’d each have a couple of grand of electrical goods, the neighbourhoods where no one bothered to watch for strangers as they didn’t even know what the people downstairs looked like. You could jimmy a back door or window, grab whatever your contacts on the black market would fence, and be gone before anyone knew you’d been there. The police hardly bothered to investigate that kind of crime.

      Jonah began to feel more at ease, more anonymous by the time he got to the train. There were a few people like him on the London Bridge service: scruffy, hungry-looking men, all watching each other to see where the trouble would start. Not with me, mate, he thought, keeping his eyes down on the free newspaper. The passengers would probably be gobsmacked to find out that the dangerous-looking guy with the tats was actually heading for afternoon classes in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts Gower Street studios. How fucking posh was that? He wanted to laugh at the preposterous sound of it: him at RADA! But laughing suddenly was another thing that didn’t go down well in public.

      His class would be immediately followed by his call at six for the night shoot: hair, makeup and wardrobe in a trailer parked in the backstreets of Hackney. Yeah, filming was so glamorous. He only had one line – ‘Don’t worry, love, we’ll find out’, spoken to some road traffic accident victim as they stretchered her into the ambulance – so he didn’t need much time to prepare despite what he’d said to Bridget. It wasn’t exactly Shakespeare this hospital soap, but the money was good.

      The train rounded a curve and the Shard slid into view, the icy heart of the city. If he knew that more work like the soap was in the pipeline then he’d be in a financial position to move to somewhere more central where his presence would go unnoticed. The ugly truth was that he was stuck for now because his credit history was crap and his past unlikely to make him anyone’s first choice of tenant. Gallant House was his best of bad options. To stay all he had to do was curb his language and fall in with Bridget’s pretence they were a family.

      Jonah wondered what the new tenant made of him. Kris had treated him like a younger brother, the wet-behind-the-ears squaddie in Bridget’s brigade, Kris the NCO. Nothing Jonah said or did shocked him as he’d seen worse. Jenny’s silence was interesting, by contrast, a challenge even. She wasn’t really quiet though, was she? Her instrument was a means of expression, and so was her body language. At college, they were taught to think about what a character said with all of his or her faculties, not just speech. It was a useful training. For so much of his life others had told him what he thought or felt. Now he was able to return the favour and read that Billy fancied Rose even though he was supposedly in a steady cohabiting relationship; that Norman was intensely lonely, regretted most of his life choices and probably gay; that Bridget … well Bridget was something else entirely, a kind of elegant disaster confined by her own neuroses to that house. He sometimes thought she was like a whirlpool, dragging what she needed to her.

      But what about Jenny? What did she need? When she’d pulled him into her room the night before, he’d hoped for a second that it was an invitation to tumble on the bed. She was an appealing armful: masses of soft black hair, caramel skin, and as many curves as her violin. Out of his league though unless his luck changed. He was used to well brought up girls choosing him as their one walk on the wild side, quick shags at parties or in their bedsits. He’d long ago decided that he could be insulted or appreciate the benefits. Guess which door he’d chosen? It didn’t make him popular with the guys on his course, unless they also hankered after a bit of rough. He’d been known to oblige if he was interested enough. Sex didn’t mean that much to him. Means to an end.

      He’d been wrong about Jenny though, as he should’ve anticipated from her hesitancy in the snug. Sex hadn’t been on her agenda. She was just spooked, like a kid scared of things that went bump in the night. It was the first time that he could remember ever being the one to show another person that there weren’t monsters under the bed, that noises were just the meaningless sounds of an old house.

      And anyway, there was only one monster in the house – a tame one – and she’d been holding his hand.

      Jonah slid in at the back of the movement class. He was coming to the view that it may have been a mistake to enroll on the full time BA Hons course as he was very behind with his assignments, not up to the mark academically, and the other students were complaining about him not pulling his weight in group projects. The little shits took everything so seriously. As if perfect scores were going to get them cast. If he made a second season of the hospital drama, he’d jack it in.

      How much of the moaning was envy that he had an acting job, and how much it was genuine, he couldn’t tell. He had little in common with the nice kids who joined this course at eighteen and nineteen, fresh from nice schools and nice families. He was ten years older and a lifetime apart from them. Only coming across an idealistic admissions tutor who wanted to bring a wider cross section of society into the Academy had gained him his place. Yet he also knew, and so did his classmates, that his very difference was what made him more employable. He could act and he wasn’t identikit youth. Look at their head shots and you could swap many of them for the other with no one noticing. His ugly mugshot looked like he was posing for a police photographer at three a.m. – and it got him cast. He’d even heard one TV producer saying to the director of a film how refreshing it was that Jonah’s looks hadn’t been just for show but turned out to be genuine. He was gaining a reputation as a kind of mascot to any project that needed grit or a hard edge. His name, according to his agent, Carol, had been mentioned to the top casting directors. These sheltered people in the industry deferred to him as an expert. Jonah, what kind of weapons would gang members carry? Where would they get their drugs? How would they fight? It was fucking weird to be treated as someone special. He could take them to a part of town where he was the norm, not the exception; but they probably wouldn’t last long there.

      ‘Today, class,’ began Maurice, the movement instructor, strutting like the boss screw in front of the prisoners, ‘we’re going to build on our mask work that we were exploring last week. You’ll remember the clip of Medea I showed you?’

      Fuck, yes. If he’d remembered what was on the schedule, he would’ve cut class. Jonah felt in his pocket, wondering if he could dip out for a quick smoke.

      ‘We’re going to act out the central event – Medea’s slaughter of her children – not with words but movement.’ Maurice sounded so reasonable, full of nothing-can-shock-a-real-actor bullshit, convinced by his own conviction that they had to plumb the depths and scale the heights. ‘The incident happens offstage so it’s up to the chorus to express the horror with our bodies. We react to the screams. Here, I’ll play you a clip of the soundtrack we’ll be using.’

      Cries of ‘no, Mummy, no!’ and childish screams rent the air. Voices ripped the room apart into tattered lumps like flesh. Fuck, the sound engineer was good. In his mind’s eye, Jonah could see great gashes on the walls and ceiling as blood seeped, darkness encroached. He slumped against the skirting and leaned his head back. One … and two … and three.

      Maurice switched off the recording. ‘Remember, this is the only murder of children in Greek drama to happen in cold blood rather than through temporary madness, and with the perpetrator – the mother – going unpunished at the end. It is meant to shock in every way, so nothing is too much here.’

      Everyone but Jonah seemed to relish the idea of reacting to infanticide. Fucking pathetic. Anger was better than panic. Arseholes. He watched them cynically from the side as they limbered and stretched. A couple laughed nervously as they held up Greek masks to their face. It was at times like this that he felt a million miles away from them.

      ‘Jonah, are you going to join us?’ Maurice offered him a mask.

      He shook his head. If he stretched out an arm, they’d see his hand wasn’t steady.

      ‘You need to complete the course to gain the credit – and that means joining in.’

      Jonah could feel the rage building at the patronising tone. The tutor was the king turd of these little shits.

      Maurice was now watching him warily, instincts picking up that an explosion was close. ‘Jonah,

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