Nadia is an award-winning playwright as well as filmmaker and actor who trained at Drama Centre London. Her second stage play, Subject Mater, received rave reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2019, and won a Scotsman’s Fringe First Award for innovation and outstanding new writing. Her debut short film, Lascivious Grace, received nominations for the Best Screenwriter and Best Actor Awards at the BAFTA-qualifying Underwire Festival and was selected for the BFI Flare and the Oscar-qualifying BIFF 2018. Nadia is currently developing a short film with EMU Films as well as two feature film scripts, one of which is a commission, with Academy member Ilene Starger on board to exec produce and cast. Prior to her career in the arts, she studied English, French and Comparative Literature at the University of Zurich, and worked in both the entertainment and publishing industries in the UK and Switzerland. 

Twitter @NadiaCavelle 

Email: nadia.cavelle@gmail.com 

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The Other Woman

(Moi, cette autre femme)

‘There are of course ugly women, but I prefer those who are pretty.’

Jean-Paul Sartre

There I am, lying on the floor of a stranger’s house, living in a city that isn’t my own because no city has ever been. Other strangers lie beside me, and though their sleeping bodies are immobile, they feel to me like my own – hollow bottles lost at sea, full of hopes that aren’t theirs. 

Obviously, I’m a little drunk. The Plumber bought me two (or was it three?) vodka lemonades and they’ve travelled fast. I don’t enjoy the usual lubricants – beer, wine, champagne – so when I do go for the spirits, I pick up speed quicker than most. As I decelerate into the morning hours, my mind wanders to distant corners where I encounter all sorts of names with faces. Last time, it was Mrs Mendoza who came bearing the chipmunk book with which she taught me English. This time, it’s Barthes – le Roland Barthes. He appears to me so distinctly, which surprises me because I have no idea what he actually looks like. 

Like most people, I don’t know what philosophers look like. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre are the only two I can picture. Probably because they were pictured a lot. They met at university, where a fellow student nicknamed her ‘le Castor’ because its English equivalent, ‘the Beaver’, sounded just like her last name. While she and the animal also shared a reputation for hard work, it’s amusing to think of Sartre calling her that his entire life when he was the ugly one – that type of ugly painters like to paint. Yet, it was she whom Art Shay chose to capture in a series in 1952. He photographed her at her bathroom mirror, wearing only heels. In one shot, she pins her hair up into a chignon; in another, slips on her high waisted underwear. My favourite is the one where she stands confidently, her foot on the bathtub rim. She had a sizeable ass, Simone de Beauvoir, dimpled in places, with a softness and a firmness to it, and further south, where the inside thigh met the lower leg, a little bit of chub, like an afterthought or a semicolon. When I first set eyes on it scrolling through Facebook, for a split second, I thought it was mine and, realising it wasn’t, took pride in it because it looked like hers. But when I read what was below – outrage following a recent ban by several French organisations, including the Parisian metro, of a poster featuring said ass – I felt a loss as if I were a child again and a balloon had just escaped my grip, seconds after it was handed to me. 

            ‘Oh!’ says Barthes, demanding my attention. I focus, determined to appear knowledgeable. He begins to question me about his theories. I panic and think of another French guy’s theories instead. 

            ‘Is Ronald McDonald an example of Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal?’ I ask. 

            ‘How the hell would I know?’ he answers, turning his heels on me. 

As he walks off, vexed, it dawns on me that it’s only been three months since I graduated and already I remember so little. Six years spent studying English and French, picking up linguistic terms like ‘taxonomy’ and literary concepts like ‘mise-en-abyme’, while my twin gnawed through her medical studies like a hungry rat. She once told me that the brain ultimately destroys most of what it stocks up, otherwise it’d explode – like, literally explode. It only remembers what it needs to remember. 

Does my brain not need Barthes anymore? Has he been expelled like a bad student? And if so, how come he’s just shown up? Who decides on what the brain needs anyway? Surely not the brain itself? Where does the garbage go? Does it disappear into thin air or is it buried like nuclear waste, somewhere deep within ourse—

There comes a buzz and my heart leaps up to the back of my throat. I stretch my arm out into the darkness and pat the floor, searching. Finally, I come into contact with my phone. I pick it up like a builder would a brick, so used to its weight it almost feels light. The keypad is a real bitch who can’t stand being smaller than the oversized screen. To use it in the presence of others is a true act of bravery, an affront to embarrassment and, I come to realise, a blind allegiance to my father. It had briefly been his work phone and he handed it to me after my latest one – yet another shiny, purply thing – drowned in toilet water on a night out. His lacked shine but was coated instead with an invisible layer of disapproval that continues to spread through me – a slow and steady cancer – as I desperately try to type out a life of my own. 

I stepped out into the night without case or solution, so my contact lenses are still in. To sleep in a stranger’s house was never the plan, for all I dream about is sleeping in the Actor’s house. I first saw the Actor as Silvius, a few months before graduating, in a grand production of As You Like It. His smile sprang up from his face and hit me like a catapulted rubber band. Later, in the pub, he chatted me up. I’d never met a Welshman before. His name was pronounced very differently to how it was spelt and for weeks I butchered it, telling my friends about the night we’d had as if fresh out of a movie. He sent me a letter with CDs by artists I’d never heard of, reminding me of the one wrong note we hit on our otherwise perfect encounter. He’d asked me what music I liked, a question that always fills me with dread as I hunt the corners of my thin repertoire for someone I hope is original enough. When I blurted out Damien Rice, he looked disappointed, explaining that having popular taste isn’t a cool thing in this country. Worst reaction imaginable. 

So, what was this gift? An initiation? An education? An attempt to diversify, deepen my superficial taste? As an expat kid, I was fed the commercial stuff that made it to Asia via MTV. I didn’t have the impulse to dig deeper. I wasn’t encouraged to. I wouldn’t have known where to start. Finally, here was someone ready to draw me a path. This was why I’d wanted to move to this city, a place where the arts are serious business, as serious as the business of gas turbines, the engines of my uprooting that turned my father into a rich man. 

Yet, while I wouldn’t compromise on place, I compromised on vocation. That I aspired to work in the arts at all was preposterous.

          ‘Of course, I won’t be an actor, Papa. I’ll just deal with actors. You can make a ton of money doing that.’ 

          ‘Really?’ 

          ‘Yeah, really.’ 

I had already shocked him with my decision to read English. With disgust, he’d asked me if I wanted to become a teacher. 

To be fair, my choice of studies had surprised me too. It came out of the dark. The gap of my first year out of school was a vicious thing that kept beckoning me. I don’t know with what strength I didn’t jump. I felt like an empty vessel lost in space, coming from everywhere, going nowhere. At school, I’d stood out for my writing and little else, so I went the way of words, of books. They led me to Shakespeare, Shakespeare to the stage, a craft that knocked the wind out of me in a ‘this might be your thing’ kind of way. But, at the same time, I couldn’t even imagine it. Talent seemed unoccupiable to me, like a piece of clothing you know won’t fit just from looking at it. My mother’s daughter, I didn’t even try. She’d made it as far as the steps of the music conservatory, her piano score in hand, pivoting around at the last moment to follow my father instead. When she plays Debussy deep into the night, he closes his office door.  

After I finally moved to this city, it took me a couple of weeks to find an internship, which eventually led to a permanent position at a talent agency. The Actor was impressed, but also disoriented. I am not what he projected. My exoticism, which drew him at first, has left an odd taste in his mouth. He can’t decide whether he likes it or not, so he strings me along and I let him. Strings, after all, look a lot like roots. 

I bring the phone to my face, hoping it’ll be a Welsh name on the screen. My eyes tell me otherwise and, instantly, my heart drops back down to my chest. Strangely, though, I’m not disappointed. Somehow, I expected the Plumber’s name to appear instead, I felt it in my skin. Perhaps particles of him are still there from us dancing too close. The Actor is somewhere Shakespearean, but the Plumber is there with me in the stranger’s house, in one of the rooms with a bed. All he wrote was ‘Oi’. I know to resist it – I don’t. 

The Plumber belongs to my Greek friend, Ari, short for Ariadne. She speaks to me in her second language, German, which to me is a third. She has a way with anecdotes that makes you laugh that kind of laughter that sends your head back. We always kiss on the mouth to say hello and when we hug, her ear sometimes presses up against my chest and rests there a moment, as if to listen to that part of me I can’t articulate. 

It was Carmen – half Swiss, but mostly Spanish to me – who’d introduced us. The two knew each other from childhood (the notion of a childhood friend is as foreign to me as I will forever be to others). I’d met Carmen in my early twenties, at the opening ceremony of an airport’s new wing we were catering as students. The works were behind schedule so we served saffron risotto to a chic crowd covered in dust. ‘What beautiful, blue eyes you have’ was the first thing she ever said to me. To this day, I have never met somebody who gains sympathies like she does. It’s the way she listens, I think. 

Ari told me about how she got together with the Plumber, slowly, revelling in the detail so that I could too. It was a last-minute decision to fly out for the weekend to visit Carmen, who’d moved to this city a few years prior and met him through his girlfriend at the time, a colleague of hers. Carmen had a last-minute work thing she couldn’t get out of, so he took Ari out as a favour. They went clubbing and everything was too loud and thrilling and they kissed late into the night and then under his sheets, where he ate her out like no one had before, she said. They started a chapter of long distance, with endless calls that improved her English. She went to see him, he came to see her and soon they said I love you.  

It was a strange time when he was in town because Ari seemed to like watching us dance together, encouraged it even – our chemistry playing out before her eyes, maybe because that way she could control it. Or perhaps it simply aroused her. I could never tell. All I could tell was that he aroused me too. His shortness. The smile under his Portuguese nose. His body to music and the thought of him with tools. He has an occupation, a trade, and this has made an impression on me. My father painted the world like so many fathers before him, where only money can bind the men who service and the women who are serviced. His expectation was for me to study law or economics and meet the husband on a university bench. ‘I’m paying for your education so that if you marry a good for nothing, you’ll have a Plan B’, he used to ‘joke’. 

My similarity with de Beauvoir extends beyond the rear end, into father figure territory. Though hers was a lawyer and not a physicist turned businessman, he too admired her mind but encouraged the pursuit of husband over career. Her relationship with Sartre – the greatest achievement of her life, she said – took root in her need to escape the conformism of her family. In 1929, they formed a pact: to never marry each other, to have lovers not children (though each adopted a lover who would become their heir), to tell each other everything. He lost his appetite for her quicky, but their love spanned decades, travelled in and out of triangles they formed with others, the stuff of letters they exchanged in place of fluids. She played with women and men, he lost interest as soon as he seduced, they lied to faces and laughed behind backs. Theirs was a cruel kind of radical living, loving. 

I step over bodies deep in sleep, spanning dreamworlds I will never know, and up the staircase. There is a long hallway of bedrooms and I peek into one or two before I find his. The moon lights up the room enough that I can tell it’s him. I don’t knock. I just walk in and, facing his bed, stop, my toes at the edge of the precipice. He props himself up on his elbow. I can just about make out his features, that nose protruding.

            ‘Hey.’

            ‘You texted.’ 

            ‘I know.’ 

            ‘Why?’, I ask as if I don’t know. 

He takes my arm and pulls me into bed. I land on the other side of him, flanking the wall with my right shoulder, a block of ice now. Whatever fire urged me to my feet is gone, and I feel the terror of guilt so acutely I can no longer move. He bends over me, his breath on my lips, alcohol mixed in with a thirst for something new that seems familiar. With his hand, he unclenches my jaw and it opens like a shell. Inside he slips what can only be all of his tongue. Never does a kiss feel so much like too, too solid flesh. Around it goes, forcing mine to play along. I don’t know if I reciprocate, only that soon he enters elsewhere with his hand, the other one. I am wild and wiry and worried about what that says about me. I don’t hope or even expect it to deter him – there is no future at stake here, so I just know it won’t. Seconds, minutes go by and pleasure never comes. Am I waiting for it? 

Finally, something calls me to action and with my arms I shove him off. ‘We can’t be doing this,’ I say. The ‘we’ feels strange in my mouth. Not wrong for a ‘we’ there is in this moment, but not right either. As if I am both part of it and outside it. I straddle him like he wants me to, but to me it is only a necessary transition into something other than this situation. I get out of bed and rush out of the room. 

My thoughts speed down so many dead-end tracks as I hurry back to my space on the floor, amongst the sleeping strangers, my phone a stone I’ve left behind to remind me of where I was before this. Here with them and not there with him. Here with them and not there with him, I repeat. I lay back down and for a moment it feels like nothing has changed. Something has happened, but nothing has changed, I tell myself. Or nothing needs to, I correct. I can still be here alone, trying to tame this city I know will eat me alive. I can still have breakfast and think about how to get through the day. But for that I must leave now. The longer I stay, the more indelible this will become. And I can’t face him in the morning and pretend nothing happened like he will. So I’m up again, grabbing my things when the thought hits me. I have no money, not a bank card nor a dime, and I don’t know where I am. 

I can’t bring myself to do it. I cannot wake a stranger to ask them for money. I have been raised with money never being a problem (only the problem), I can’t ask for what I have too much of. I think of the bank card I forgot on my desk, how far it lives from a cash point, how much more it would cost to have the cab wait, then drive me to money and back again. None of this is unaffordable and yet it feels like it, or maybe I just want it to be. Maybe I am reasoning myself out of a choice, surrendering to the need to understand, or perhaps to the very possible impossibility of more. Up the stairs I go again. 

He is still awake and I have no idea how long it’s been, only that it is lighter now. He props himself up again, and I can’t quite tell if it’s intrigue on his face or just plain indifference.

            ‘I need money for a cab.’ 

            ‘How much?’

            ‘I don’t know. How much to get to where I live?’

            ‘Here’s twenty.’ 

He gives me the note, and now something transactional pollutes us even more. He is someone I like, liked – what I know of him at least, beyond the outer shell. But what will become of that fondness, that human connection? It will not survive this – in fact, it is already dead. His himness is a place now barred to me, a lost place, another one. 

            ‘I will pay you back.’

            ‘Or you could just stay…’ 

            ‘…’

            ‘Come on, stay.’ 

            ‘No. I’m going. I have to go.’

I didn’t think an eye roll could make a sound, but it does – marbles looping down some sort of metal spiral, like a game from childhood I can’t quite picture anymore. 

I’m outside now and dawn is here, purple and still like a new-born who refuses to cry. I am walking quickly, as quickly as I can without running. I have no reason to run. The danger is behind me now, behind the door I’ve just closed, where I left it. 

I call my twin on my ride home. Miraculously, she picks up – she never does on a night shift.  

            ‘I’m sorry this happened to you,’ she says. 

Her silence sounds a little bit like compassion. 

            ‘But I went up those stairs…’ 

            ‘I know, you said. Why?’ 

            ‘His text – it called for me.’ 

            ‘It just said ‘Oi’. And even if it had said ‘come up’, what are you? His dog?’ 

            ‘I have to tell her, don’t I?’ 

            ‘No, don’t. Don’t tell anyone. Ever. It would just cause unnecessary pain and you don’t want to cause unnecessary pain.’ 

            ‘But she needs to know who he really is. It is my responsibility to tell her, as her friend.’     

            ‘A friend who went up those stairs.’ 

            ‘A friend who stopped it going too far.’ 

            ‘She won’t see it like that, trust me. I have to get back to work. I’ll call you later.’ 

She doesn’t, but I follow her advice anyway. I keep my mouth shut.

*

Weeks go by, and I move in with Carmen, in a postcode neither our salaries can afford. I finally see the Actor again, still wild and wiry, so he doesn’t go below the waist. Days later, I am crying down the phone to him and with his stage voice he says, ‘I am not your saviour!’ Nothing ever rings more painful and more – true. 

I am wobbly at work, on the cusp of getting fired, so I beat them to it and quit. This city is licking my bones now, full-bellied, and on what is almost my last day, I try to argue myself out of rent. Carmen is in the kitchen, wiping the counter. She stops to stare at me with such anger in her eyes, it feels like right before a summer storm though the leaves have started falling with me. 

            ‘You have been impossible to live with.’ 

She whips the counter with the damp cloth, leaving it there to think about the mess it’s been through. 

            ‘I know… I’m sorry, I’ve been so unhappy.’ 

            ‘Why? You had everything you dreamed of! The city of your dreams, the job of your dreams! Is this really all because of that Actor? You’re so beautiful, you have so many options!’

I blurt it out. All of it, as if it were the root of my malaise, when really it was ‘just’ a mistake. A cataclysmic one, it turns out. 

           ‘Fuck you,’ Ari texts. It’s the last I ever hear from her. 

           ‘You are a very seductive woman, you have to be more careful than the rest of us.’ 

I picture Carmen ironing when she tells me this, her phone stuck between ear and shoulder. It’s been two weeks since I moved out and a life devoid of her everydayness still feels like a clock without hands. 

           ‘What are you saying? That his desire is my responsibility?’

‘The effect you have on people is your responsibility. You have to learn how to reign it in.’ 

            ‘What about him?’

            ‘You can’t trust men with reigning anything in. That’s not how they’re wired.’ She hangs up and a two-year silence follows. 

            ‘Why did you come to my room?’ the Plumber writes, after he’s been forgiven and taken back.  

            ‘Why did you text me?’ I type back. 

            ‘I didn’t.’

Carmen couldn’t not tell Ari. Would it have been better to speak sooner, immediately? Would it have made me a more forgivable friend, or does ‘forgivable’ only apply to men who give good head? Was my friendship with them always a tightrope only I had to walk because of its recentness, because of my beauty? 

*

I have returned to the place my father calls home, though he spent my childhood running away from it. This so-called home is a place of mountains, of cold and punctual people who stare you down if you wear purple-coloured tights. I am out of tears and ideas, so I send my CV to random companies, including one that makes prosthetic legs. Eventually, I get a job in a small publishing house close to where my twin lives, only she’s doing a placement elsewhere for a year. I live in her things and wear some of them too.

My new boss has King Lear-esque qualities, born and bred to rule a kingdom lost to arrogance. He calls himself an IT expert, but he doesn’t know how to turn on a computer, so I spend most of my time typing up what he writes on paper in illegible letters. Sometimes, at the end of a sentence, there is earwax instead of a full stop because to him pencils are also cotton buds. In his heyday, he knew de Beauvoir and Sartre personally. She was a real pain in the ass, he tells me, and that I remind him of her – ‘with my feminism’. Without meaning to, he’s paid me one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received and, in it, somehow, I find a dimple of hope.