All The World’s A Stage

Photo by Rob Laughter on Unsplash

“I’m a person,” I said as I lifted myself on to my tiptoes and wished I’d worn stilettos instead of block-heeled boots. The two men were taller than me and I wanted to look them both in the eye and now they were both looking at me as if I’d lost the plot. And maybe I had. “This is my wife,” my husband had said as I joined their conversation.

“That colour suits you,” he said later when his thoughts weren’t elsewhere on a trading statement that had to be finalised and on one particular word that made all the difference to the messaging. I realised he would never understand the trouble I had gone to, how much I’d deliberated over my outfit, that I knew the colour suited me, that I’d settled on an emerald-green silk blouse I could tuck vaguely into my skirt, that didn’t cling, that had a neck which hid my sagging jowls. He wouldn’t know I’d selected a handbag which would slide casually over my wrist rather than truncate my body, and that my footwear was supposed to make me interesting and fashionable and youthful, and how I’d focused on my makeup and chosen an eyeshadow that wouldn’t crease and a blush that made me look less tired and smeared a shiny stick all over my face so I glowed. We were going to an event, and I didn’t often go to events, and I might bump into people I used to know when I had my professional identity, and I didn’t want them to think I’d put on weight or aged badly or completely fallen apart. I wanted them to see I was still intact.

I didn’t want them to know that most days I alternated between a grey sweatshirt and a blue jumper and threw them over my around-the-house clothes because I was mainly around the house. I didn’t wash my hair until I had to because I didn’t see many people and my metabolism had slowed down so I exercised regularly, and put off washing it because it would only get sweaty again. I was trying to find ways to save time because I was writing a book, you see. And the two men who had competitive titles were doing that chitty-chatty networking thing that I hate because I doubt I’ll ever see the person ever again and we’re not trying to have a relationship and I don’t carry business cards and I’m no use to them anyway. The two men were kind and they tried to bring me into their conversation and moved on to their weekend plans and I learned that the man I’d never met before was having an Indian as he did every Friday and he better head on because it wouldn’t order itself and I thought what he was having for his dinner and his dedication to a Friday routine was the most revealing thing about him but he was hardly going to stand up and make a speech about that.

And the whole time I was there I felt like I was playing a part.

I read an essay. It was called ‘The Snarling Girl’¹ and it was long and angry and about the author’s mother and ambition and I felt a bit like a snarling girl because I was happy to be kept and coddle my creative rights and indulge in writing a book until my ugly feminist reared her self-righteous head.

²She practiced law for a total of about a year before she gave it up, married my dad, had kids and settled into the kind of furious, bored, soul-eating misery that is the hallmark of thwarted women everywhere, from kitchens and gardens to boardrooms and private jets and absolutely everywhere in-between. To this day, if a stranger at a party asks her what she does, she’ll lift her chin in a gesture I intimately recognize as Don’t-Fuck-With-Me³, and say, with cement grit and dirt and bone shard in her voice: “I’m an attorney”.

I kind of wished I’d lifted my chin and said, “I’m a writer” and then I remembered I did because the man who was looking forward to pilau rice said, “Are you in tech too?” and I said, “I write,” and he said, “What do you write about?” and I said, “life” and he had nothing to say after that. Then I talked to a woman I used to work with about how dull the sky was in April because we had nothing else in common now. And when we left, we went straight to a bar so I could breathe, and I had a dirty martini and I decided I didn’t like dirty martinis anymore and that was the problem with me, I liked things and then I didn’t. But I relaxed into my husband’s company and went back to my normal persona and was very careful eating my steak until I wasn’t, and I put grease stains all down the front of my emerald-green silk blouse.

“I wasn’t at granny’s funeral,” I said. It was Saturday and today, I would be a niece and my husband with the title would take on the identity of a nephew-in-law and we were meeting my 88-year-old uncle and his 85-year-old wife. There had been a shooting in a carpark and there were men, and I didn’t know why I presumed they were men, dressed head-to-toe in white suits, trawling for forensic evidence. “Lucy would love this,” said my husband. The sat nav directed us into a housing estate which was the story of my life following directions that led me nowhere, but we found the hotel, and I noticed that the Rotary Club was meeting there next Tuesday. We hadn’t seen each other for about a year-and-a-half so there was lots to catch up on and I discovered that my cousin who was only eight months older than me had been to my granny’s funeral in 1981 and I hadn’t. And I wondered had that early introduction to death made him fear it less than me and where was I that day and did I just go to school and skip in the playground while they sang hymns and carried her coffin and eulogised her? She had dropped dead behind the kitchen door and no one had told me this either. Florence had found her, and it was all a bit of a shock, and I thought who was Florence? I had a vague memory of being bitten by a dog at a friend’s house, that it was a Wednesday, that my parents picked me up, that there was a strange mood in the car, that they seemed unconcerned that I might turn septic, and I wondered was that when they told me she was dead. But they didn’t labour on it.

And I kept thinking about Shakespeare.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing⁴.

And the conversation with my aunt and uncle was mostly about death. They’d put a lot of planning into theirs, but they were glad to be alive and they were finding younger friends because most of the ones they used to have were no longer here. They’d been to three funerals in one week. They’d bought a couple of graves, but my uncle was pleased because he’d paid for them with a credit card and earned airmiles. He’d applied for an Irish passport and was good to travel for another ten years and they were looked forward to the Chelsea Flower Show and they hoped to make it as it was in May, and they’d book their airport parking soon. My aunt was a writer too only she wrote about specific things like folklore, and she’d once been writer-in-residence at the University of South Carolina. She’d been confused about my writing because I seemed confused about me. I had two voices, she said, the young, struggling mother and the older, established lady of means who could afford personal trainers and health clubs. I hated the sound of this older lady, but I said I was both, and neither, and that I was currently in transition. She said she preferred the authenticity of the young, struggling mother.

But I ignored her advice because I wasn’t young anymore and my identity as her wasn’t enough. When I talked to my children now, it was as if we were speaking a different language. “I lowkey slayed my orals,” said a daughter. Her teacher was proud of her. “Me and Miss T are the same person, different fonts,” she said.

And there were parts I didn’t play anymore.

And I had to ask my aunt and uncle where they were getting their car insurance from in 2024 as my dad’s renewal was extortionate. My mother had sent me numerous texts about it, as if it was my fault. She was thinking they could give up their Toyota, but I didn’t like the idea of driving them about for cups of tea and to get their shopping at Sainsburys. And my identity as a daughter was only ever one of guilt and shame.

And I thought of Shakespeare again.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts⁵.

And there were parts I didn’t want to play.

On Sunday, I went to church and we stood up and sat down when we were told and we recited a creed together that didn’t include me because through the Father, all things were made for us men and our salvation and I looked around and thought that religion wants us all to believe the same things, to be a collective made up of men and their ways of thinking and I felt like I was playing a part there too, like I could have been performing in a theatre following a script.

But I put on my glasses, and I looked around again and I focused on individuals, like really homed in on them, and I felt this thing which was like a rush of love and I knew I didn’t want the restrictive identity the church wanted to force on to me because I was more alive than that and so were they and I thought God saw all that he had made, and it was very good, and I wanted them to know that they were enough.

I have started to write the book. I have a list of titles. I’ve finished the first one about in the beginning and almost the second about once upon a time and I’ve got headings like leaving the child and leaving the familiar and leaving the compound and leaving the earth and I’m covering all sorts of massive topics like idols and image and validation and judgment but what I want to get to is the one on identity but I keep moving it down the list because I’m not sure what I want to say or who I am and I haven’t got it all figured out just yet and I’ve got one hand in my pocket and the other one’s giving a high five.   

And the snarling girl said she would teach her daughter to beware anything standardised, and conventional notions of ambition, that she was a unique flower, and not to confuse her worth with anyone else’s definition of success, and that real work is often invisible and sacred, and that her mother who is in her seventies now is at Oxford studying Shakespeare, and that you may have made a million dollars and have a hundred thousand followers and have shattered a glass ceiling but this is what impresses her.

“What kind of person are you? What kind of craft have you honed? What is my experience of looking into your eyes, being around you? Are you at home in your body? Can you sit still? Do you make me laugh? Can you give and receive affection? Do you know yourself?”⁶  

1. The Snarling Girl

2. The Snarling Girl

3. Sorry, she said it.

4. The Scottish Play

5. As You Like It

6. The Snarling Girl