‘Does it feel like that to you?’
‘It’s started to.’
‘Because you think you can help Iris.’ She phrases it as a statement rather than a question.
It doesn’t surprise me.
I realised she’d worked that much out from the moment she told me I couldn’t change the past.
‘You can’t,’ she repeats now. ‘Or certainly no more than this version of you might have already intervened. It’s all already happened, my dear. However infinite a theatre we might be a part of, however many acts we might yet have to play, in thispresent, inourpresent, the past is sealed … ’
‘But … ’
‘No, Claudia. Don’t forget, I was there, physically there. Whatever you hope you might yet do to reverse what’s gone, my memories aren’t going to rewrite themselves. You do not have that power.’
‘Then why does Iris keep pulling me back into her?’
‘I don’t believe it’s that way round.’
‘I do, though. She needs me … ’
‘It’s you who needs her.’
‘No.’ I all but shout it. ‘From the moment I arrived here,my lanterns started flickering off, I know now it happened when I was a child too, only it’s notmyother stages I keep finding myself on. It’s Iris’s. Even when I’m not in her, I hear her world.That bird. Those planes. The hammering. I followherinstincts. Then, when I slip into her, I see …everything.It’s not false. It’s not imagined. It’s as though we’re the same person … ’
‘You are absolutely not the same person. You are you. Solely you.’
‘But … ’
‘No, listen to me now. You areyou.’
‘Then why is this happening?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Ellen, and I can hear how much it perplexes her. ‘I did consider, when you were a child, that you might have an old soul. Incredulous as it makes me to say this, I’m wondering now if we all might carry some essence of those who are gone, with traces of other existences behind us, and in front of us, even if most of us don’t realise it.’ She frowns, turning it over. ‘Maybe you and your father are right, too. Maybe we’re all ever-present, with our souls, and fragments of souls, living eternally in parallel, doing better, finding our way back to those we’ve loved, so we can love them again. I hope so. It’s a wonderfully comforting idea. But, Claudia –’ her unblinking eyes hold mine – ‘this is your existence. You belong onthisstage.’ She shakes her head. ‘Nowhere else.’
I don’t try again to argue.
A sudden pelt of rain lashes the window, distracting me.
It’s really pouring now.
Absolutely sheeting.
Emma will be acting Clare’s last scene.
I want to stop it.
I want, so fiercely, to do that.
But whatever Iris was doing, in this crucial moment of her friend’s life, I’ve never had any sight of it.
Was there anything anyone could do?I asked Ellen.
Countless things, she said,but no one did them.
‘You can’t seriously want to go out in this,’ said Iris as Clare stood, pulling on her jacket.
The rain outside was getting heavier.
