by Gavin McCrea
—Look, if you cooperate, no one will get hurt. These kids are the future, man. It’s your duty to give them the space to protest. Do you really want to prevent them from doing that? It’d be easier for everyone if you just let them.
—Out of the bloody question, the head usher was saying. You need to leave right away. The London Carlton is private property. People have paid good money to see the show that’s in the programme. Who are you to barge in and ruin their evening?
Eva peeked through the central doors of the auditorium. The stalls were full enough. On stage, Eric Humphries had just taken her mother round the waist and was trying to kiss her. Her mother slapped him:
—Stop it!
—Are you joking or serious?
—Serious.
—You play games too seriously, and that’s dangerous.
The open door was letting light into the stalls and attracting stares and whispered remarks from the people seated there, so Eva withdrew. By her calculation, there were about five minutes to go before the group’s cue to enter.
In the foyer, the children were becoming increasingly agitated. Pushing and pinching each other. Pointing into space and yelping. Crawling on their hands and knees. Eva put this down to the strangeness of the environment. The pomegranate-patterned wallpaper. The Moorish-style vases and urns. The plush armchairs and decorative plants. The panelling and carved moulding of walnut and sycamore. Midway between a posh sitting room and a brothel: who knew how to behave here?
Glen and Eggie were working hard to keep the children in their respective lines and to stop them dropping their lanterns on the floor. Most of the lanterns had gone out. Eva signalled to Per that he should get them going again using his lighter, but Per, basically a child himself, had taken to mimicking the children in their nervous jerkings.
—It’s like I’m tripping, he was saying as he rotated his open hands in front of his face.
Son of a bitch. Is he on drugs?
Eva felt she should be angry about this. She had told Iris that no one was to be given drugs of any sort until the happening was over. Yet Eva found she could not summon any ire. All of a sudden it was like she was watching a fire from a distance. She felt great and did not give a shit any more.
The ticket seller had locked herself into the booth and was hiding under the desk. Barbara was failing to coax her out.
—All right, fuck you, said Barbara. Stay where you are.
Eva went into the adjoining bar, took a high stool from the counter and brought it out to Barbara. Together they wedged it under the handle of the booth door so that it could not be opened from the inside.
The barman had followed Eva out into the foyer:
—Hey, where are you going with that?
Barbara pointed her toy gun at him.
—Blooming heck, he said.
—Get the fuck back inside, Barbara said.
—I don’t want any trouble, he said, retreating, I’m only new here.
Eva closed the bar doors behind him, inserted one of the lantern poles into the handle cavities, and slid it across to create a lock.
As she was doing this, a deep sound, a boom, like a timber plank being dropped onto the ground, resonated through the building. This caused time to stop, as the Wherehouse members glanced at each other questioningly.
One of the ushers used this moment of suspension to try to free himself from the circle. A scuffle broke out, and within seconds the two male ushers were face down in the carpet, several pairs of knees pressing down on their necks. Joshua taped their mouths, while Jay and Stewie tied their hands.
—We didn’t want to do this, but you left us no choice.
In the affray, the female usher managed to crawl out under Joshua’s legs. Once free, she staggered to her feet and, with the skirt of her uniform bunched up around her thighs, lumbered towards the stairwell. Eva — light-headed, happy — relieved Eggie of his lantern pole, and detached the lantern from it, leaving her with a mean-looking weapon with a metal hook at its tip. Wielding this, she went after the usher.
Violence or non-violence? Now that the east wind was blowing, the drums of war were beating: which side was Eva on? Mere thoughts could not tell her what she was going to be. She was not daunted. She would proceed. Let good or evil come as a surprise. Foretold, she would not believe it anyway.
When she reached the stairs, the fleeing usher paused to check if she was being pursued. Seeing Eva advance towards her, she hesitated.
Who in this world is afraid of whom?
Eva tightened her grip on the pole — her arms taut in preparation for a hard swing — and quickened her pace.
The woman, defiant, waited until Eva was only a couple of feet away before turning again to go up. It was almost like she wanted Eva to hit her. Obliging, Eva swung the pole; it caught the woman’s ankle, tripping her up. The woman fell forward onto the stairs. Eva knelt on the second step in order to reach up and grab her foot. The woman pulled on her leg to free it. Her bones stretched in Eva’s grip like an elastic. A jerk, then, and the woman, like water, came falling down.
Liquid light cascading.
Colours washing over Eva’s skin.
Running off her clothes.
Pooling at her feet.
How beautiful.
When she touched the puddle with her boot, its surface rippled in all directions. By stamping in it, she created bubbles that floated up and burst on her face.
She felt elated, free of the things that had been bothering her before. What things? Nothing mattered in the world. Everything was wonderful, and everything remained wonderful until some people started pulling her back by the arms.
—Leave her be, thing, they were saying, That’s enough, ay.
She turned to see who these people were and recognised them as Glen and Eggie, yet all the same she felt the need to ask herself, Who are they?
Automatically she said to them:
—Do you see the toilet? Tie her up and put her in there.
Then to Joshua and the others, she said:
—Did you hear that? Tie them all together and put them in that toilet.
And they obeyed her, just like that. As if she had a special power. Which would certainly explain the numb feeling in her joints. She looked at her hands and they were shaking. But that was all right because they were not hers. Then the illusion failed, and they became hers, and that felt like death.
As the men were dragging the ushers across the foyer towards the toilet, the central auditorium doors opened a crack and an audience member peeped out and said:
—For goodness sake, shh!
And then, taking in the scene:
—What the ff—
At this point the door opened wider and a second man appeared:
—Good grief.
Again, for Eva, the world went watery. As she ran towards these men, she saw the air part before her.
—We’re part of the show, she said. Don’t interfere. Go back inside.
But her special power seemed not to work on these particular specimens, they were resistant to it, which required her to hit them with the pole: one then the other, in the soft parts of their bellies. They keeled over but came back up, so she poled them again, and they came back up again, like buoys bobbing in the sea. This left her no choice but to keep going, caning, staving, which they seemed to enjoy, for they were laughing like the plaster cherubs that decorated the foyer ceiling. When finally they fell and did not come back up, in the places where their bodies struck the carpet, bursts of colour were thrown up, and everything turned cloudy.
When the dust cleared, she saw Stewie gagging them with underpants; then she saw Joshua pulling them away towards the toilet; then she saw the pole lying broken on the floor.
What matter?
The cameraman followed Stewie and Joshua to t
he toilet. When Joshua opened the toilet door with his back and dragged the audience members after him, the cameraman stuck his camera inside to capture the interior view. That done, he came running back to Eva. Jammed the camera into her face.
—You’re hurting people, he said. Why? Why are you doing this? What can you possibly hope to achieve?
Eva could see her own image mirrored in the lens, but upside down. She thought about what would happen if she and the cameraman were to change places. Then he would be her image, and she instead would be real.
Done with this, Eva pushed the camera away. She felt her eyes go fuzzy and saw rainbows in the room, light breaking apart into hundreds of glittering particles. Then her vision returned with double clarity, and she could see the beauty that lived on the surface of ordinary things. The pomegranates on the wallpaper, for instance: they were dropping from their branches and breaking on the ground, their juices oozing out. Red, blood red. Lakes and lakes of it, a red so pure, so genuine, it seemed extracted from the centre of the earth, and so deep, besides, that the other Wherehouse members were wading around in it, the children splashing and swimming, everyone in a daze of pleasure. The cameraman had wandered off, which was a pity because Eva had just thought of something really interesting to say: about red, the colour red, redness.
She opened the central auditorium door for a second time. Bad smells came rushing out. Feet and mould and gin. Then, overlaying that, lavender. Spiced wine. Cloves. The smells had significance, as did the sounds, which were like echoes. On the stage, her mother was saying:
—I know these people, and I love them, as I know they love me. Let them come here, and I’ll prove it to you.
To which Eric Humphries was saying:
—No, Miss Julie, they don’t love you. They take your food, but once you’ve turned your back they spit at you. Believe me!
It was almost time to go in.
Eva closed the door and called the Wherehouse members to her by whistling through her teeth and beckoning with her arms.
—It’s our moment, she said. Organise the children.
The collective got to work picking the children off the ground, and pulling their trousers up, and getting the lanterns back into their hands. Barbara tried to assuage the crying ones with kind words; Álvaro’s approach was to take them by the shoulders and shake them:
—Shut up! Shut the fuck up!
Eva empathised with him. In a way she hated these children too. Their useless little lives, which she thought ought to be swept away. There could never be a movement that belonged to them. But right now they had their purpose. She needed the monkeys to disrupt the palace.
The procession, divided into three, made its way down the aisles towards the stage. The children, though they were walking on dry carpet and breathing in smoky air, appeared to believe themselves to be underwater, drowning, for they were staggering about making swimming motions. The surviving lanterns hovered around them, a mad dance of golden lights, like comets spinning around each other. The light picked out faces in the audience and made them brighter by making everything else darker. Amid the sadness and spiritual blackness and depression, a pair of eyes would catch fire, and that person — Eva saw — would have the sensation of being alive for a brief moment. He would hear noises in his ears and feel tremors in his hands and feet. His insides would turn right over. He would become conscious of a desire to stand up and call out. To stamp his feet. To say, No! This cannot be! I object! But then the light would pass on, the sensation would end, and he would be in the dark again, where he would oblige himself to scorn what he had just felt, in order to reduce its terrifying power, its strange mystery, wherein he would be lost.
The procession reached the stage having been subject to little else than silence from the crowd; the few hisses and groans that did reach them merely worked to emphasise the volume and density of what was unexpressed. Eva helped the younger children onto the stage, then climbed up herself, feeling an irresistible urge to assault the audience, to fight every one of those people: her words and her body against theirs, until they had learned to put aside practicality and reasonableness and any notion of measure; until at last they learned to scream.
THE PEASANTS were chasing each other around the stage, incorporating parodies of classical ballet moves into their movements, stopping every so often to assume semi-pornographic poses in groups of twos and threes. Glen, Eggie, and Per did not hold back; they plunged straight into the melee, dancing about with THE PEASANTS, being vulgar and making a mess of the set. The children dropped their lanterns and sat down, or lay down, or rolled about; about half of them walked straight off into the wings. Rolo, Stewie, and Jay were overcome with a sense of absurdity, unable both to forget where they were and to remember why; they, too, disappeared offstage. Álvaro wandered around, taking his photos, apparently randomly, not always bringing the viewfinder to his eye but shooting from the level of his chest. As Barbara tried to unfurl the banner, she was shaking in an effort to keep control. She only managed to reveal half of the text — IT IS RIGHT — before becoming overly aware of the artificiality infused in her actions, rendering her incapable of bringing them to a conclusion. Joshua, who arrived at the stage last, having made a detour to the spot box to disable the lighting technician, was clapping his hands and shouting a slogan:
—The East is red, the sun is rising, long live Mao Zedong; the East is red, the sun is—
All of this: captured in closeup by the cameraman in the aisle directly below, and by the press photographers flashing pictures from the wings.
Eva was leaning on one of the kitchen counters that made up the scenery. Her limbs had gone cold and numb from below upwards. She had the vertiginous sensation of objects on stage — the cooker, the kettle, the Kenwood Chef, the pattern on the fake wall tiles — moving closer and further from her. There were spheres like little planets in her vision, and she was sure she was about to faint. She dropped the bell, creating a black chasm in the floor that spread outwards before collapsing back in on itself.
It was the lights, she thought. The lights were too hot. She had to get out from under them.
She looked into the wings stage left, and saw Iris: No.
Stage right, between the central flats, amongst the spinning and slumping Wherehouse members, was her mother: Yes.
It was cooler there, with her.
—Mama? Eva said, seeing now that the woman she had recognised as her mother really was her mother. Mama, thank God. I don’t feel well.
Her mother looked pale herself.
—Don’t worry, Mama, Eva said. It’s nothing serious. I just feel queasy, like I’m coming down with a bug. Maybe you caught it too? Anyway I’m glad you’re here. I hate to be alone when I’m ill.
In that instant, a shocking applause reached them from the house, rhythmic and taunting. Out of the noise sprang colours; colours louder than the noise from which they sprang. Explosions of sparks. Extreme blue. Yellow sizzling. Luminous bursts of black.
Eva threw off her helmet and closed her eyes and blocked her ears. She felt her mother’s hand on her shoulder. Oh Mama. She rubbed her cheek against her mother’s fingers as a request for her mother to rub her head like she used to when Eva was sick as a child.
—Maa—
Without warning the floor had begun to tilt, as if they were aboard a ship in rough waters. She grasped her mother’s arm in order to steady herself.
—Mama! Mama!
She opened her eyes: her mother was the only unmovable thing in the world; everything else was losing its balance. To her right, Keith and Sunny were clinging to the flats to stay upright. Behind them, the other Wherehouse members were leaning forwards against the rising boards so as not to keel over. There were too many people here, Eva reasoned. That was the problem. Stupidly, like sheep, the entire collective had come off the stage into this wing, none of them had gone the other way, whic
h had put too much weight onto one side, causing the imbalance.
To create some counterweight, she would have to take her mother across to the other wing, where only Iris and the second cameraman were. The stage had emptied out. THE PEASANTS had come off. Of the collective, only Glen, Eggie, Per, and a few children had stayed on, and they were now exhausted after their gambolling, and were sprawled about.
So the coast was clear.
Escape was by a straight line across the boards.
But wait. The lights. The lights were hot, burning. And her mother, who was famous for never wearing make-up on stage, would be unprotected. Eva wiped some black off her face and made to rub it on her mother’s cheek. Her mother struck her hand away. Eva tried again: surely her mother understood that this was for her own good? This time, her mother caught her wrist and flung it back at her. Which, in itself, was perplexing, but then her mother made a solo lunge for the stage, a sort of kamikaze dive to the left, which was completely incomprehensible, and forced Eva to grab the back of her blouse to save her. No. What on earth was she thinking? It’s dangerous out there. You’ll get scorched.
Her mother struggled against her hold. Eva held on in spite of her mother’s wild thrashings until the seam of the blouse tore, all the way from the underarm to the waist, creating a large aperture that revealed a white bodice underneath. The sound of the material ripping went to Eva’s gums, right to the roots of her teeth. Wincing, she released her grip, and her mother stumbled forwards, tripped over her own left shoe as it came off, and landed on all fours centre stage.
At once, the world flattened out. The applause ceased. Eva sucked a breath in, as did the audience, and everyone held it; pulses pounded in a thousand necks.
—Help me! her mother said then and started crawling towards the stage edge. Someone please!
It was the lights, Eva thought. She needed to get out of the lights. Someone should help her. But who? Why was no one stepping in?
From the other wing, Iris — oh praise little Iris — came onstage. Raised a gun to the lighting rig. Shot out a lamp. The explosion produced a great quiet in Eva’s mind; the raining metal and glass, a deep tranquillity. She did not think to think about why or how Iris came to possess a real gun. It was natural that she should have one, and that she should use it to help their mother, who was in such need. You’re a wonder, sis. An exception to everything. A true renegade. Work your magic. Get rid of this daylight in the night, so we can just be here without having to see so much.