by Gavin McCrea
Still behind the counter, Simon gave Doris a searching look, which she pretended not to see.
In the foyer, Doris lit the lantern and hooked it onto its pole before giving it to Alissa. Once she had found the right grip and had steadied the lantern, which was dangling in the air above her head, Alissa positioned herself in front of the auditorium door like a queen poised to enter her court. Doris lifted the back of her robes, walked back a bit, then let them drop, in order to straighten them out and give them extra volume. Then she went to the door. Held the handle. Waited for the signal.
Suffusing the passing seconds, there was silence, there was solitude, there was shame.
Keeping her ear close to the door, Doris watched Alissa only halfway, out of the sides of her eyes.
Alissa kicked out the bottom hem of the robes and looked down left and right to see if they were falling evenly.
Through the door, the audience quietened, which told Doris that the auditorium lights had been brought down. She waved to Simon, and he turned off the foyer lights.
Alissa’s aspect in the glow of the lantern was serious, set in purpose.
—Whenever you’re ready, Doris whispered.
Alissa made some last adjustments to her stance, her posture, her grip. Finding stillness now, she exhaled loudly once, as a sign, and Doris opened the door.
The inside atmosphere wafted out. The dark beckoned, and Alissa — the bearer of a fiery red sun — crossed in. Doris watched her progress through the slightly open door. In the stalls, black danced as it was swallowed up by the encroaching light. The swish of robes dominated the silence, until, halfway down the aisle, Alissa’s voice rose up into an incantation whose involuted modulations caused the crowd to murmur and sigh.
Doris closed the door and made her way backstage in the dark. Most of the actors were in the wings watching Alissa perform. Doris weaved through them in search of Eva, whose entrance came next. Unable to find her, she went to the dressing room that Eva shared with some of the other women. The door was locked.
—Eva? she said. Are you in there?
A muffled voice replied, yes.
—You’re not supposed to lock this door. Where did you get the key?
Doris put her ear to the door. She could hear movement inside.
—Eva? Can you hear me? This is your call. Five minutes.
Doris went back to the wings but stayed close to the dressing-room corridor, into which she found herself glancing continuously. In rehearsals Eva had always been prompt to the stage, for she liked to have her costume thoroughly checked and to be on her mark well in advance of her entrance. This delay, the locked door, they were atypical. Doris could not help thinking that something was wrong.
By now, Alissa had climbed onstage and fixed the lantern into its place in the set. The stage floor was divided into three distinct locations. To the right was an interior space with a faintly Chinese feel; to the left an exterior; in the middle an intermediate site like a corridor or a terrace, neither fully inside nor fully out. Built over the stage was a large scaffold onto which were attached signs and advertisements in Chinese, English and French, giving the impression of a neon Shanghai streetscape. On top of that was a second structure with panels depicting clouds in an oriental style, from which emerged THE JUDGE’s bench, as if suspended in the air. In this way, the stage was also divided vertically into three: ground, elevation, heavens.
Alissa began to climb the scaffolding ladder to the heavens. She had switched from chanting to speech and was delivering one of her long monologues. The Shanghai lights were illuminating in horizontal rows, from bottom to top, at the same rate as her ascent. It was one of Eva’s favourite moments; it was the build-up to her own entrance; she had never missed it before.
Again Doris went to bang on the dressing-room door:
—Eva! You’re going to miss your cue!
Doris stood there for a few beats, tapping her foot, then ran back to the wings, checked the stage, then came back to the door, rapped on it with both fists, then went back to the wings once more, willed the action onstage to slow down, please not so fast, then turned to look into the corridor and saw, now, coming this way, Eva, at last, in full costume.
—You want to give me a heart attack? Doris said, grabbing the girl’s wrist.
Doris rushed Eva to her mark. There, she had just a few seconds to check that Eva’s mask was properly tied and her costume sitting right before sending her on with a customary little push.
Simultaneously, from the opposite wing, William, the actor playing the adult LIXIN, came on. He and Eva walked towards each other downstage, met in the middle and embraced.
Doris went cold.
Eva moved differently than in rehearsals. And she looked shorter and slighter than usual in William’s arms. Her hair, visible between the mask straps at the back, was lighter and cut higher on the neck.
The colour of blood, the sound of bells, the feeling of incontinence, the memory of failure, the thought of death all suddenly converged in Doris’s mind: it was not Eva at all, it was Iris.
Iris and William began to dance together, and to sing. Iris knew the movements, she knew the words. Her voice was strong, her acting good and light. She did not mumble into the mask. Did not snivel on account of the heat. Did not pause, as Eva tended to do, but rather moved, moved, always forward, the thread unbroken. Her transitions from singing to speech were smooth, and her responses, now to William, now to Alissa, were clean and measured. William and Alissa had not failed to recognise her: Iris sensed their shock about this and was taking advantage of it.
It was a nightmare.
Doris rushed to the dressing room and tried the handle, but Iris must have locked it again on her way out.
—Eva, are you in there?
Doris cupped her hands on the door and put her ear into the space between them, in an effort to amplify any sounds on the other side. She heard nothing and at the same time definitely heard something: a silence in which menace was gathering.
—Eva? It’s me, Doris. Answer me if you’s in there. Whatever you’ve done, I won’t be mad, I swear.
Nothing. Something.
The actors had gathered around the corridor entrance.
—What’s going on? Where’s Eva? Why’s Iris playing her part?
Doris pushed through them on the way back to front of house:
—Calm down, nothing’s going on. Iris is covering for her sister, is all. Just play your bits as normal.
In the bar, Simon was sitting on a stool at a counter, drinking a beer and smoking.
—The master key, she said. Where is it?
—Why?
—Just tell me.
Simon went behind the bar and checked the hook.
—It’s not here, he said. Come to think of it, Iris was asking for it earlier. She said she’d put it back when she was finished.
—Jesus Christ.
Doris spun round in search of an object that might be of use.
—D’you have a crowbar or something?
—Has Iris locked herself in somewhere?
—Iris is fine. I think Eva might be—. Simon, you’ve got to help me.
—There might be something in the storage room in the back.
—Get it, please. It’s serious.
Simon padded off to the storage room and came back, two long minutes later, with a hammer and a large screwdriver under his bad arm.
—Will this do?
—I hope so.
Doris ran back through the corridors with Simon trundling behind her. She banged on the dressing-room door:
—Eva?
Simon leaned against the wall to catch his breath:
—Eva’s in there?
Doris kicked the door a couple of times, uselessly. Then crouched down and put her hands to her face and fel
t her heart pound against the corridor’s narrow walls.
The actors hovered around.
—We need to open this door, Simon.
—What’s going on?
—Simon, just trust me.
—All right. I’ll hold the screwdriver, and you do the hammering, yeah?
Together they started to attack the wood around the lock and the hinges. The noise was easily loud enough to be heard in the auditorium, but Doris did not care; she went harder and harder. There was a loud splitting sound as the screwdriver went right through the door. Simon had to pull on it hard to get it back out.
—Put the screwdriver on the bottom hinge there.
The final hinge sprang off, and the door shifted on its axis and came loose on one side.
Doris pushed Simon out of the way and kicked it. And then again.
—Let me, said Simon, pulling on her arm.
She shook him off:
—I’ve got it.
One more kick and the wood chip split in the bottom right corner. Simon tore away the broken piece, creating a space large enough for her to crawl through.
Inside, the room was bathed in the clear light emitted from the bare bulbs that framed the mirrors on the left-hand side. The first thing Doris noticed was a shadow that stretched along the floor and up the righthand wall. Then she made out Eva at the shadow’s base. She was lying on her side on the floor, naked apart from her bra and knickers. Her limbs were tied with rope and belts to a chair. Her skin was red and raw from fighting against the bind, though she was absolutely still now. The impression she gave was of a chess piece that had been flicked over on a board. Her head was resting on the ground. Her mouth, stuffed with underpants and sealed with masking tape, gave no sound; she had given up trying to scream. Her nostrils were pinching in and flaring out with her breath, which was slow and even. Her eyes blinked deliberately once: no more struggle, just relief and exhaustion.
Doris — on her front, halfway through the door, her torso in, her legs out — was at the same level as Eva, close enough to remove her gag, to release her, to caress her. But she did not do so immediately. Rather, for another moment, she stayed where she was, wedged between here and there, and looked. And looked. And, unconscious that she was doing so, kept on looking. For this was horror, which, if withstood, was the only beauty left, and she had intruded upon it. Pristine. Irrepressible. A discovery more necessary than that of love. Now fading in front of her eyes, irrecoverable. Always almost gone. A vision that looked forward to the past. In search of neither audience nor reward. Without a script. Resistant to direction. No goal. Movement within the impossibility of movement; the fleeting shapes that avoided terror’s grip. An antidote to the perishing of the truth. Dangerous, vital, exquisite feminine beauty: history had created this. And history, in its mystical way, had also created the violence that went into its creation. Would it be possible to emulate? To replay with equal cruelty but without causing the same harm? An artist capable of such a feat, how would she be? And who?
The next line in Miss Julie was her mother’s: You promise. Everyone in the London Carlton was waiting for her to say these two words. The action could not continue without them. They were the cue for her mother and Eric to run offstage, and for THE PEASANTS to enter by the back door, and for the Wherehouse procession to storm the auditorium. The words could not be skipped. They were essential. Pivotal. But she was refusing to say them.
The audience — that mysterious black space to Iris’s left side and to her mother’s right — had become restless. Seats were creaking. Old men were coughing. The atmosphere was bad. Already those in the front rows would have heard the gunshot coming from backstage; those in the lateral seats would have noticed the commotion in the wings; now the whole house was tense, everyone had sensed that something was wrong; the only reason they were not reacting was because they were waiting to see how everyone else was going to react.
The magic words — You promise — still unforthcoming, and unable to hold back any longer, Eric broke free of her mother’s hold, and stood up. He turned, loosely, out of character, to see what had seized her mother’s attention. Catching sight of Iris in the wings, he flinched, then dashed off stage right, where he was tripped up and bound, and — only because he fought back so fiercely — was slapped and kicked until blood poured from his face. His cries, released in the seconds before his mouth was taped, reached as far as the cheap seats, where they were transformed into whistles and catcalls. These in turn were drowned out by the shouting and singing of THE PEASANTS, who now burst onstage through the rear door.
Almost simultaneously, the auditorium doors opened, and there was a letting in of light, and the Wherehouse procession came down the aisles. Iris’s view was limited, but she could hear the children moaning. Some of them were crying. Their lanterns were knocking off the corners of the seats. Eva, barely bothering to whisper, was ringing the bell and giving panicked orders. In the audience there were gasps. A sharp laugh broke out. Some loud talking. Boos. Waves of tension.
Her mother, finally falling out of her paralysis and switching back into herself, whirled round and ran off. Once out of the audience’s sight, however, she was brought to a halt by Keith and Sunny, who were blocking her exit from the space between the flats. She threw her arms up: she was not going to resist, she did not want any violence. Keith made a circle in the air with his finger, as a signal for her to turn back round.
—You’re not going anywhere, MISS JULIE. You have a part to play. You’re going back on.
Iris watched her mother turn back round to face her. Their eyes locked again. On stage, THE PEASANTS were doing a drunken set dance whose steps mimicked the strenuous lovemaking which MISS JULIE and JEAN were supposed to be engaging in offstage. The line connecting Iris and her mother was hard and taut; it did not break even when THE PEASANTS charged through it. When Iris blinked, her gaze went straight back to the source; her mother did not seem to blink at all.
When the procession reached the stage, Eva and the other collective members lifted the younger children onto the boards. The older ones climbed up themselves. Entering this pristine Formica world, some began to scream; some to giggle; some wandered around in a daze; some — those that had had to be carried through the stalls — lay on the floor in a catatonic state. The adults were not in much better shape. Only a minority, the freaks Glen, Eggie, and Per, had come to understand that they had been drugged, and had decided to enjoy the ride, dancing with the actors and chasing after the objects flying around their heads. The rest, judging from their noises, were confused, and afraid, and suffering. Unable to stand being in the bright lights, they retreated into the wings to sit with their heads in their hands, or, in the case of Álvaro, to turn around and around in circles like a dog chasing its own tail. The cameraman stayed in the stalls, at the base of the stage, moving this way and that in search of faces to zoom in on: no one looked like they were acting, yet no one was acting as normal either, he had never seen anything like it, it was delirious but not happy, it would make for disturbing viewing. Doris was nowhere to be seen.
Eva had intended to stay on the stage with the actors and the children, but, clearly overwhelmed by an experience she did not understand, she dropped the bell onto the boards — clang! — and went off, joining their mother in her little prison between the central flats. Eva did not look well. She pushed off her red helmet, which was making her feel hot, and that too fell onto the floor with a loud crack. She adopted a wide-legged stance and stretched her arms out sideways, as if steadying herself on a moving train. Perhaps thinking she was going to fall, she took hold of their mother’s arm, and with the other hand began to wipe her forehead, over and over, as if to take some invisible hair out of her eyes. Their mother, although frightened by this strange behaviour, allowed herself to be held on to. Her eyes darted between her two daughters: the agitated one beside her and the motionless one in the other wing.
Iris could almost see the calculations taking place in her mother’s mind as to which was worse: humiliating herself in front of her public by appealing to her daughters or humiliating her daughters by appealing to her public.
A minute more, and THE PEASANTS finished their dance and went back out through the rear door. Without them, Glen, Eggie, and Per lost some of their verve, which they tried to regain by feeding off the children. Of the eight children remaining on stage, four were running around, laughing and playing; Glen, Eggie and Per found it difficult to join in their games, however, for they were games born of bewilderment and disorientation, and had no order; they curled and twisted along axes visible only to the children. Of the other four children, one was rolling around perilously close to the stage edge. A couple were lying dead still on the boards; judging from the twitching of their eyelids they were experiencing inner movement. Another looked plain psychotic, grimacing and pulling at himself and biting his tongue and wailing. One kept approaching Iris in the wings and trying to embrace her and talk to her, but Iris thought it was too dangerous to have a tripping child near a gun, so she shook him off and pushed him back onstage every time. All but two of the children had discarded their lanterns, which lay around, broken and extinguished.
Before leaving Wherehouse, Iris had prepared the children for the unexpected.
We’re going to a magic theatre, she had told them. Once inside, you might see things, colours and sounds you’ve never seen before, like fairies in the air, or sprites. You might also feel special senses. Experience new emotions. If this happens, you mustn’t be frightened. They won’t teach you this at school, but the truth is there exist worlds which we don’t touch in our ordinary lives. What enters our consciousness on a normal day is not all that can possibly enter it. The universe is kind. The visions are your friends. There are, in fact, no enemies in this life. We have too much aggression inside us. We must learn to be as meek as newborn children, and welcome everything in as a gift. The belligerent, the defensive are always the first to fall.