Oddjobs 5: The Long Bad Friday

by Heide Goody

  “Right. But you could put in a good word for us.”

  Prudence shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Don’t make any promises to these creatures,” said Steve.

  “I can ask my mum,” she said.

  Yang lowered her rifle and took a little red plastic wallet from her blazer. She slipped a rectangular card from it.

  “They gave us those when they came to do an assembly,” she said and passed it to Prudence. “The consular mission think they’re like ChildLine, or something.”

  The card simply read Day or Night, Any Time followed by a long number.

  Yang passed her a coin. “For your call.”

  Prudence nodded, not fully understanding.

  Ayesha unclipped one of the phosphorus grenades from her belt.

  “Give it to me!” commanded Steve in his most booming voice (which was not booming at all).

  “It’s twice your size,” said Prudence.

  “Only physically,” said Steve.

  Prudence took it from Ayesha on his behalf.

  Yang gestured to the others. Ayesha and Elon picked up the dropped sweetie bags, Yang took ammo clips from Prester’s corpse and checked his pockets for anything of value. Then they made off down the road. They didn’t look back.

  Prudence went to the phone box, lifted the handle and put it to her ear. “Hello?”

  “You have to put in the number,” said Steve.

  Prudence read the instructions on the box, inserted the coin, tapped in the numbers and waited as it rang. The woman who answered was not her mum.

  “I want to speak to my mum,” said Prudence. When the woman didn’t seem to understand, she added, “I’m Prudence Murray.”

  The woman told her to “Hang on” in a suddenly alarmed voice, as though Prudence was in imminent danger of doing something else.

  Steve was up on her shoulder now, trying to listen in.

  “I’m hanging on,” she informed him.

  There was a scrape on the line and then her mum’s voice. “Prudence?”

  “Hi mum.”

  “Prudence? Prudence, is that you?”

  “Yes, mum. It’s me.”

  Her mum made a very strange noise on the phone, a sort of wheezing sigh, as though she had forgotten to breathe for the past two hours and was only now remembering. “Oh, God. Where are you? Are you okay?”

  Prudence nodded. “I’m fine. I was nearly shot, but then there was an argument about KFC – but I’ve never had KFC – and so we were fine in the end. I gave Mr Angry Shell away. I hope that’s okay.”

  “What? Where are you?”

  “I’m at a phone box next to a Co-op.”

  “Which Co-op? Where?”

  Prudence looked around. “Near a green bit where some people are worshipping a blobby jellyfish thing.”

  “It’s a sholog’ai frei,” said Steve.

  “Steve thinks it’s a sholog’ai frei,” said Prudence.

  “Steve? Steve is with you?”

  “Yes, mum.”

  There were mutters on the line and then her mum said, possibly to someone else, “I’m going to kill him when I get my hands on him.”

  “See how she blames me!” said Steve with righteous annoyance. “Steve does not take well to persecution!”

  “I need to work out where you are. Hang on. We’ve got the number up. Acocks Green.”

  “Yes?” said Prudence who had no idea.

  “That’s five miles away at least. How the fuck did you get that far out?”

  “Mum, you used a bad word.”

  “I’m about to use a lot more.”

  “You’re angry with me,” said Prudence and felt something crumple miserably inside her.

  “I’m not angry with you.” Her mum’s tone was abruptly and deliberately light and did not fool Prudence one jot.

  Tears trickled down Prudence’s cheeks. “We just wanted to go out and see things while they were still there and…” She had to stop to sniffle and rub her eyes. “Flowers,” she managed to say.

  “And burn things,” said Steve.

  “Flowers and burn things,” Prudence spluttered as she cried. “But then the soldiers tried to shoot us and we had to run and then we made some friends—”

  “No friends of mine,” said Steve.

  “Okay, okay,” said her mum. “Okay, it’s going to be fine.”

  “I didn’t mean to—” Prudence didn’t know how that sentence ended, so stopped.

  “We’re coming to get you right now.” There were conversations elsewhere and then raised voices. “Someone. Someone is coming to get you. I’m coming to get you. You need to get out of sight and stay hidden.”

  Prudence sniffed snot noisily and nodded.

  “You hear me, Prudence Murray?”

  “I can hear you, mum,” she said.

  “Get out of sight, now.”

  “I tried the walkie-talkie but it didn’t work.”

  There was another noise from her mum and Prudence couldn’t tell if it was laughter or crying. “Go. Hide. I love you.”

  Prudence nodded and hung up the phone.

  Carcosa

  The whole bloody theatre was empty. Up in the boxes it was impossible to tell where the ruined drapes ended and the sheets of dusty cobwebs began.

  “You said there were other patrons.” said Rod, but the usher had withdrawn, and now the gas lights around the theatre walls were dimming as the stage curtain lifted. It creaked alarmingly, threatening to fall apart and crash to the stage at any moment.

  The backdrop was a faded and mildewed painting of a city not entirely unlike the one outside. Tall spires, buildings of glass, wide squares marked by fountains and statues. The backdrop was torn, great hanging flaps of fabric revealing the darkness behind, but this only added to the effect of a decadent city, clinging to faded glory as its veneer of civilisation rotted.

  Actors took to the stage. Their costumes were old and shabby, like everything else, but Rod could see they had made some effort to highlight the significance of their costumes and characters. The severe wig and dark outfit of one woman marked her out instantly as some witch or evil stepmother figure. The narrow suit, large spectacles and surely prosthetic nose of one man presented him as a dusty scholar. The long, pointed beard and overly tailored jacket of another spoke of a more sinister form of academia; magic even.

  And then the actors spoke and Rod held back a groan. Memories of Miss Pringle’s English Lit GCSE lessons at Wickersley Comprehensive, and enforced school trips to plays at Rotherham Civic Theatre sprang uncalled to mind. It wasn’t that Rod specifically hated Shakespeare or Shakespearean language. He was a Yorkshireman: he at least had an advantage over most people in that ‘thee’s, ‘thou’s and ‘thy’s came easily to him. He was sure that old Billy Shakespeare had some cracking stories. But it felt to Rod that he had only ever been exposed to one type of Shakespearean performance: the kind in which the actors strode meaninglessly and self-importantly about the stage and, in lieu of acting, just shouted the lines at the audience in the hope they could convey meaning by sheer volume.

  To Rod’s ear (and he was sure he wasn’t alone) the shouted delivery of a string of “verily”s, “i’ faith”s and “anon”s prevented him from gleaning any natural meaning. By the time he’d deciphered one line, the actors had moved on five more and he was lost.

  The witch, the scholar and the magician strode about declaiming this and that, speaking of some sort of great terror. Rod didn’t have a clue what was going on until a Venislarn god took to the stage.

  “Ah, right,” he said, much happier. You knew where you stood with a Venislarn.

  There wasn’t actually a god on stage. That would have been alarming and quite impractical. The amorphous and tentacled thing appeared as a cardboard shadow puppet, projected against the backdrop from somewhere up above. It approached from stage right and proceeded to menace the human actors. There was then a great deal more declaiming and shouty prose.

 
Rod frowned and hunched forward in his seat, trying to make sense of it. The characters were arguing. The magician was all for one course of action and the witch was clearly opposed. There was a brief volley of convoluted abuse. If this had been an English Lit lesson, Miss Pringle would have stopped here to explain the wonderfully clever and surprisingly filthy jokes which had been encoded in the text, but Rod just accepted the magician and the witch weren’t right happy with one another and were having it out on stage.

  From nowhere, the magician had hold of a baby, dangling from his hand by one leg. Of course, it was not an actual baby – just a cloth and stuffing thing – but he wiggled it with such ferocity that its dangling limbs danced with unnerving realism. The magician held a knife high to stab the infant. There was the flash and sharp bang of stage pyrotechnics, and the magician had magically acquired a horse’s head, in true Midsummer Night’s Dream fashion. The magician fled and the other actors left the stage. It was the end of the scene. Rod automatically started clapping, then hearing how hollow it sounded in the empty space, stopped almost immediately. The sound of one man clapping in a theatre sounded downright disrespectful, sarcastic even.

  Fresh characters entered the stage: two young women in white dresses and a silent, swaggering warrior with an empty sword scabbard and shiny helmet that had lost all but two feathers from its plumed crest. More impassioned but impenetrable speeches followed. All Rod could work out was that the taller, red-headed woman was generally angry and driven about something or other, and the shorter dark woman was happy to throw in the odd quip and toss an occasional saucy wink at the front rows of the audience. The front rows were still empty, but maybe it was hard to cast a saucy wink further into the auditorium. Rod wasn’t a theatre type. He didn’t know.

  “Peanuts, sir?” The usher was back, with a tray held by a strap around his neck.

  “I don’t have any money,” said Rod, trying to maintain focus on the play.

  “It is not a problem, patron,” he said. “They are complimentary.” The lad picked up the edge of a brown paper bag from his tray and did a squeaky voice. “‘Oh, Mr Rod, you are the nicest man we ever did meet.’ See? Complimentary.” The usher had the grace to not laugh at his own joke.

  “Sure, peanuts,” said Rods.

  The lad rustled through his tray. “I’m sorry, sir, we’re out of nuts. Can I offer you some candies instead?”

  “Aye, whatever.”

  On stage the young trio, occasionally accompanied by the witch from the prologue, encountered other walk-on characters and various Venislarn projected into the stage area through numerous effects. Rod, despite his struggles with the dense language, found himself getting drawn into the narrative. The theatre company might have seen better days, and the actors lacked much in the way of skill or nuance but, by ruddy heck, they threw themselves into it with enthusiasm and hard work.

  The usher leaned closer. “I’m afraid to report that we have no candies either. Perhaps sir would care to order in advance next time.”

  Rod waved the irritating man away. The usher sat down two seats along and watched the play along with Rod.

  There was a fight with sinister fish men with wobbly papier-mâché heads. There were horrible spider women on stilts. And there was a peculiarly delicate but brief romance between the tall lass and a willowy chap, maybe some sort of fire sprite, who flitted around the stage in a toga-loin cloth thing and not much else.

  Despite the impenetrable script and the negligible production values there was something undeniably familiar about the play. Rod wondered if its themes were somehow universal and that it presented tropes and clichés that sparked half-recollections in his mind. The truth came to him in a horrid rush during a later scene in which the lewdly winking dark girl and the mostly dumb warrior protector had met the scholar from the prologue in his arcane lair. The scholar had refused to assist the two in their unclear quest unless the warrior engaged the scholar in a challenge of wits. This caused the warrior some consternation.

  “Thy stratagem is that I commit a bawdy ode to memory and pray that I might playeth some of its component words?” he said to the short woman.

  “’Tis so,” she replied sweetly.

  The scholar and the warrior took it in turns to lay down large tablets on a table, each with a letter inscribed on it.

  “Wait a minute…” muttered Rod, entranced.

  “What word art thou composing?” demanded the scholar.

  “A grave word indeed,” said the warrior. “I know all the words of man. Maid, ready thyself to consult thy dictionary.”

  The short woman was shaking her head. “No bestiary canst hold a word such as that. ’Tis the final word of unmaking!”

  Rod looked from the warrior to the woman to the scholar, from each to each to each. The warrior picked up a tile with overexaggerated motions. Backstage, there was the rumble of thunder. Brief explosions puffed on stage.

  Rod stood up, pointed at the musclebound warrior and said loudly, “Is that supposed to be me?”

  The cast on stage glanced his way momentarily. The scholar froze in his dramatic pose. The warrior coughed.

  “Er, ’tis the final word of unmaking!” said the woman, repeating her previous line.

  “Mayhap it is. Mayhap ’tis not,” said the warrior. “Mayhap I do not have the making of it. How many letters doth it have?”

  “Eleven,” said the woman.

  “That’s me, playing Venislarn Scrabble,” said Rod.

  The usher reached across and pulled him down into his seat. “Dear patron, I must ask you to stay seated for the full performance.”

  Rod turned to him. “That’s me – meant to be me – and Nina on the day when we went to see Professor Omar. We needed his help to stop Zildovar Fruity Loops destroying the city.”

  “The King in Crimson is a work of fiction,” insisted the usher. “Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.”

  “And that looks nothing like me,” continued Rod, waving angrily at the stage. “What’s with the silly helmet?”

  “As a playwright, I reject all accusations of plagiarism. A homage or two, here and there perhaps…”

  Rod continued to watch. The action had leapt forward. The white-clad Nina character (who had never worn anything as modest and innocent in Rod’s recollection) was trading sharp insults with a wild-eyed priestess while the red-haired woman, obviously meant to be Morag, battled with a shadow monster projected onto the stage.

  “The play is not perfect,” said the usher, who Rod now abruptly realised was the King in Crimson and had been all along. “Truth be told, it is more than a little … derivative.”

  “It’s a bloody rip-off is what it is,” said Rod. “Of my life.”

  “Oh, it goes back way further than that. My own sources of, um, inspiration are quite apparent, but I like to think I’ve covered that up with some light jokes and self-referential asides.”

  The battles on stage concluded with the death of priestess Ingrid Spence and the placating of the shadow monster with a rousing song. The debris of the titanic struggle was swept off stage and a twisted and scarred figure hobbled on, cast in the green-filtered limelight of a pantomime villain. A jigsaw of lines had been drawn on the actor’s face in red make-up. The youth affected a hunched back and swung a long arm about as he launched into a loud soliloquy.

  “Jeffney Ray?” said Rod, recalling the human door-to-door salesman who had traded souls for cash with the Mammonites and did not care how much chaos or pain it caused. Rod shook his head. “This is like having my annual appraisal in play form. I’m not right sure I’m enjoying it.”

  “Speak kindly,” said the King. “It is the only play we have left.”

  Rod half-recalled something from a conversation with either Nina or Vivian, memories of an item stored in the Vault. The King in Crimson, a play.

  “Is this the play that drives folks mad?” he said.

  “It was not my intention when I penned it,
” said the King. “I can’t be held responsible for how audiences respond to my art.”

  “You, the King in Crimson, wrote a play called The King in Crimson? That’s a bit … isn’t it?”

  “I told you it was more than a little self-referential. Ah! Here’s my first appearance. Even if it is merely a dream.”

  A white curtain and a wrought iron bed were sufficient to represent a hospital ward on stage. The warrior Rod sat in bed, delivering a hand-wringing and emotional speech to the imperious and buxom actress portraying Kathy Kaur. As he did, a portion of the stage darkened and a fancy-dress mummy in wine-soaked rags prowled around behind Rod, performing a bit of what looked like interpretive dance.

  “Not exactly true to life, is it?” muttered Rod as the scene concluded.

  “Everyone’s a critic,” said the King next to him. “Best not peer too closely. Nothing survives close scrutiny. Take our fiery heroine.”

  In a fresh scene, the red-haired woman strode on and challenged the disfigured Jeffney character.

  “Here we have a woman employed as a diplomat,” said the King. “A go-between the mortal world and the em-shadt Venislarn. Yet her primary trait is that of anger. She is like a dog tied to a stake. It defies logic.”

  “Don’t be telling Morag that,” said Rod and wondered where she was now, what she was doing. He pictured her in the Vault with her impossible child. He did not know how long they could stay safe down there. He wasn’t even certain how much time had passed here in Carcosa. A creeping fear came over him.

  “Where are we?” he asked the King. “Are we in another dimension? Is this a different planet?”

  “What do you think?”

  Rod thought of the ruined city and the silent lifeless people. “Is this Earth’s future? Is it hell?”

  “All will become apparent by the end.” The King extended a bony finger towards the stage. “Or not.”

  A full choir in dark robes and lopsided theatre masks chanted a portentous choral while Nina and Rod contended with imaginatively realised horrors on stage. The severe witch figure – Vivian, Rod realised with a jolt – stepped through a cardboard portal into the red-lit realms of hell. She carried an oversized book with her. Sheets of parchment fell from its pages, and Rod saw the sheets were threaded along a length of string so that she carried a trail of handwritten papers wherever she went.