I began to recall my own experience when I was Mercutio’s age (late teens I decided, a year or two older than Romeo) as a pupil at a public school called Christ’s Hospital. This school is situated in the idyllic countryside of the Sussex Weald, just outside Horsham. I recalled the strange blend of raucousness and intellect amongst the cloisters, the fighting, the sport, and general sense of rebelliousness, of not wishing to seem conventional (this was the sixties); in the sixth form (we were called Grecians) the rarefied atmosphere, the assumption that of course we would go to Oxford or Cambridge; the adoption of an ascetic style, of Zen Buddhism, of baroque opera, the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, and Mahler; of Pound, Eliot and e. e. cummings. We perceived the world completely through art and culture. We were very young, very wise, and possessed of a kind of innocent cynicism. We wore yellow stockings, knee breeches, and an ankle length dark blue coat, with silver buttons. We had read Proust, we had read Evelyn Waugh, we knew what was what. There was a sense, fostered by us and by many teachers, that we were already up there with Lamb, Coleridge, and all the other great men who had been educated there. We certainly thought that we soared ‘above a common bound’. I suppose it is a process of constant mythologizing that is attempted at any public school. Tom Brown’s Schooldays is a good example. Girls were objects of both romantic and purely sexual, fantasy; beautiful, distant, mysterious, unobtainable, and, quite simply, not there. The real vessel for emotional exchange, whether sexually expressed or not, were our own intense friendships with each other. The process of my perceptions of Mercutio intermingling with my emotional memory continued intermittently, up to and including rehearsals. I am now aware that that possibly I re-constructed my memory somewhat, mythologised it even, excising what was irrelevant, emphasising what was useful, to accord with how I was beginning to see the part, and what I wanted to express with it. What I was seeing in Mercutio was his grief and pain at impending separation from Romeo, so I suppose I sensitised myself to that period of my life when male bonding was at its strongest for me.
Avalon is full of desperate people.’ She bites at her lower lip this time, fumbling her hands, knitting her fingers into the bundle of plastic coin bags in her grasp. ‘Are you implying that I’m desperate?’ I say, one eyebrow tilting.‘You don’t need to be desperate… you can have anyone... I…’ she trails off. Looking up and trying to search the line of shops for the bank. I repulse her, I make her want to run. Why is this so hard? I need to get inside of her, I need to know what she is thinking, what she is wanting.It surely isn’t me she wants. Not to the extent that I… want her.‘You?’ I entice her to finish her sentence but she doesn’t, she stares off into the bustling crowds, memory flashing her eyes with a darkness.‘Madi wouldn’t fumble like this.’Oh, she would fumble, but not in the way you are, Elli.‘You’re not her, Elli.’ I entice her again, trying to force the dark memory, the sadness from her.‘No, if I was, you wouldn’t have wanted anyone else.’A breath hitches in her throat, she puts a hand over her mouth and says something else, her cheeks dance a shade of red that brightens and brightens until she apologises and quickens her pace. I chuckle, pulling at her arm and encircling one around her waist, pulling her back to me. Beneath my touch, her body trembles. When I raise my hand, my palm touching her cheek, I am sure she isn’t breathing.‘I don’t want anyone, Elli.’ My eyes burn, consuming her with my gaze. She is like a frightful deer, struggling beneath me with a gaze that cannot quite meet mine. When she does, it is only for a brief second before falling down and all I see is the gentle flutter of her raven flashes.‘I told you. I want someone I cannot have.’‘That is a really harsh way of telling someone you’re not interested.