Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  [ 12 ]

  The next morning, Miss Cooper has gone from Minetowns.

  The moment he has verified it, Balthazar feels relieved. He had little stomach for turning her in. By midday it has become a rumour, by evening it is a truth. Miss Cooper has left after a lovers’ tiff. Miss Cooper has gone to find her missing brother. Miss Cooper has remembered her aristocratic roots and gone to join the enemy; “good riddance to bad rubbish.” People are upset: grim faces around the dovecot, a weepy-eyed Meister Lukas screwing up his lighting cues. But life goes on.

  Nobody connects Balthazar to Miss Cooper’s departure. Or so Balthazar thinks until he receives a summons. Downtown wants him: Livia. It’s the same boy delivering the message as the first time Balthazar was fetched, although this time he also serves as guide; an unresponsive fellow, if lively and imaginative in the Smoke that wells out of him when Balthazar tells him to stop picking his nose.

  They take the elevator, descend into the cool of the mineshafts. A long, confusing trek through semidarkness, passing costermongers, workers, councilmen heading to a meeting. Then: Ekklesia, that giant hollow in the ground. Balthazar has clamoured for access for days but none has been given. Now he is surprised to find some of his stage props have already been transported here. Livia sits in the stalls, near the stage, and rises when he enters. Again, that same wonder: how short she is, how haughty.

  How pleasing it would be to make her smile.

  She is irked, though, the “Little Mother of the Smoke,” and sees no need to hide it. Not from Balthazar at any rate.

  “I am told you scared off Teddy,” she greets him, sending the boy away with a wave of her hand. “Whatever for?”

  Balthazar matches her for sourness. “I merely asked if she was a spy. I think her disappearance has answered that question. For all you know, I might have saved your republic. If I were you I would have a talk with the pigeon fanciers. She was sending messages.”

  “Of course she was sending messages, Balthazar. She’s with the Company. The pigeons are how she conducts business.”

  Minetowns has no truck with the Company. Balthazar swallows the words before he can speak them. Why make an even bigger fool of himself?

  Livia, meanwhile, has descended and joined him on the stage.

  “She was an ‘unofficial liaison.’ The Coopers have been involved in the East Indian trade for generations. They lost their hold in the revolution, but she has managed to carve out a new stake.”

  She pauses, holds Balthazar’s gaze.

  “You disapprove.”

  “You are lying to your own people.”

  “And what would you have us do? Minetowns needs sugar, saltpetre, salt. Our hospital needs morphine. Last winter we were short on grain. So we deal with the Company and they, of course, spy on us. And yes, I expect they will be selling their information to Renfrew.” She grows quieter, makes fists of her hands; looks bitter, weary, wise. “It has its uses, this indiscretion. It’s a way of talking to him; a line of communication, indirect, deniable. It’s not good for us, being so very sundered. North and South.”

  “What if I tell the people? Put it right here, on the stage, where everyone can see. Lady Livia, whispering secrets across the big divide. I’ll stage it in a big old bed, you and Renfrew, pillow talking, your naked feet poking out from under the bedding.”

  She snorts at the image. “Do! They won’t believe you. Or maybe they will and throw me out of town. Exile. It doesn’t sound so bad.”

  Her weariness leeches the anger out of him, disarms it like a sweet. He wants to do something: touch her, vow that he will keep her secret, share a secret of his own. But she has already turned away from him, is studying the tiered and sloping walls of the crude amphitheatre; shivers, then retches up a little puff of Smoke and watches it rise towards the sky.

  “Do you know why the decision was taken that the Council meet in the coal, rather than Topside? We didn’t start down here. In the beginning we met on shop floors, or on the village green, a ring of people around an empty centre, speakers rising, addressing each other above the din of too many voices, speaking their minds. Most just came to listen. Some few put themselves forward. To lead. Sometimes it felt like every village bully saw his chance.

  “But here is the thing. The bullies soon learned that the Smoke gave them away. The tactics of before didn’t work anymore. Big words, shouting, waving your fists and strutting like a cock—it all comes to naught if your Smoke is thin and empty. The Second Smoke opened our eyes, taught us nuance. People learned to taste the depth of you; swished you in their mouths like a sip of wine. And so the bullies got together and decided that it was better to hold the meetings in a place where the old rules apply. Down in the coal it’s like it was before. He who shouts loudest wins.”

  Balthazar listens to this, thinks about the rules of his theatre, and of that strange sense of awakening that came with the Second Smoke.

  “Strong Smoke does not make someone a leader,” he objects. “You might just be angry. Or an arsehole.”

  “Yes. But an arsehole with presence.” Livia laughs, a startling sound, lovely and young. “Thomas would like that—he’d say it’s like a summary of his soul. But it’s not all anger, is it? Or lust, or domination? That’s what we learned, if we learned anything at all. And why we are here.” She points upwards, towards the town. “But you are right, Balthazar. Maybe the Smoke is just another kind of shouting: one person imposing himself on others. Perhaps democracy would work best if nobody talked to each other at all. Let’s build small huts a dozen miles apart and communicate by letter.”

  Balthazar listens and says nothing. He is thinking of Eleanor; wondering what would happen if she took it in her mind to shout. Not democracy, no. Epiphany perhaps, or maybe slavery.

  It is hard to say.

  [ 13 ]

  And thus they make friends, Livia and he, or seem to for a moment: stand in comfortable silence, here, at the bottom of this well.

  Then Livia asks: “Are you ready with the play?”

  Immediately, he is irritated. “Ready? We only just got started rehearsing. We need another week at least.”

  “Oh, we need it earlier than that. Things are difficult at the moment. Minetowns needs something—to bring us together. This coming Smokeday, when everyone’s off work. That gives you three more days.”

  She waves away his protest, won’t even consider it. Instead she asks: “When can you send me a copy of the script?”

  He bristles at that. “Why, so you can censor it and ensure it’s patriotic?”

  “So I know what it is about. I want to have flyers printed, distribute them in the factories.”

  He frowns, still suspicious. “It’s about a people trying to adjust to their own revolution. Many fail. A comedy, naturally.”

  “Fail to adjust? You should stage Mother! When the Smoke turned volatile, she was triumphant. And, of course, she must be the only person in the world who actually made money on the Second Smoke. But then, after a few years of things not working, and all decorum going to the dogs, she got tired of the squalor and—”

  But Livia stops herself short when she sees Francis rushing through the entrance to Ekklesia. He is flushed and carrying a letter.

  “There you are, Livia! This just arrived for you. I thought you’d want it at once. It’s from him.”

  “From whom?” she asks, running to him, suddenly girlish, and rips it open. Her face lights up as she reads it, utterly disarmed.

  “How did we get this?” she begins to ask. Then she remembers Balthazar is there. “That will be all. Come back whenever you like and bring your players. Three days. I will see to the flyers. Only excuse us now, we have work to do.”

  “I am not your servant, Lady Naylor.”

  This stops her short, her joy spoiling on her face. Lik
e milk. It should soften Balthazar. Pride eggs him on instead.

  “I heard you are talking to a rock. Cuddling up to it even. A black rock. You lied about it to your Council.”

  She stiffens. Haughtiness is a posture: a toss of the hair, an angle of the head.

  A chill in the voice.

  “What a little busybody you turn out to be, Mr. Black. Remember that you are a guest here. Useful, for the moment. Until you are not.”

  “You were mouthing off about your mother, just now. What a bitch, a hypocrite, she is,” he counters, trying to hurt her. “I thought I would like you, Livia. No, not like. Admire. But you are just…” He trails off, unsure where he is going

  “Ordinary? Petty? Full of bile? I was a schoolgirl who happened to change history. Ordinary people. I thought that was what your theatre was all about. But I don’t suppose that means you actually have to like them. At night you dream of heroes. Just like everybody else.”

  [ 14 ]

  They work day and night, trying to get ready. In a sense it helps to heal the rift with his players. He hears them say, “He’s always been pissy before a show.” Making excuses for him. Welcoming him back.

  On their first trip Downtown, Balthazar tries to gauge the players’ reaction to this world cut out of coal. Most of them are too busy with the play to pay it much attention, other than Ada who complains that she is suffocating down there. Balthazar assumes she is claustrophobic until she tells him she cannot tolerate the thought of being unable to reach others with her Smoke.

  “Like being alone in the world,” she says, “like loving someone without kissing,” all the while touching him, confiding, daughter to mother, niece to uncle, vulnerable and shy.

  They get it done, or most of it anyway. Ekklesia is transformed. At the back, near the entrance, something like a living room: an armchair, a sofa and carpet, a clothes rack full of costumes. They could wall this off, turn it into backstage, a secret place where props can be prepared and costume changes can take place. But Balthazar wants this performance to be transparent, the tricks of theatre visible to all; the line between actor and role porous like a sieve. Onstage, near the seating, they have installed a ring of mechanical ventilators alongside a ring of lights. “We won’t be able to light faces,” Meister Lukas complains, and, “The wiring won’t cope,” but there is no way to update the electrical system nor any place amongst the stalls to anchor lights. A clear evening will help them. Balthazar is unsure how the show will work in heavy rain.

  Then another complication. Livia sends word that they have to share the stage: the evening will start with wrestling matches, as is traditional. Balthazar rages at this, fears that he will lose the daylight hours and that the audience’s energy will be spent before his actors take the stage. Livia ignores his tantrum, and, anyway, the flyers have been distributed, are crudely printed but illustrated with a rare sense of energy. Shovel’s work. On the morn of Smokeday, the whole town is abuzz with expectation. Balthazar frets, rehearses, shouts at actors; has an upset stomach; swears and mutters prayers; prunes his face and underneath it all is happy, for he loves the theatre like nothing else in life.

  [ 15 ]

  Dusk. Too many people, filling a hole in the ground: tier by tier, standing in rows three or four deep, their feet in kicking distance of the necks and heads beneath them, boots at the base of their skulls. Balthazar sees Ekklesia fill up, this inverted tower built into the earth, and feels its danger. A density like this, already smouldering a little wherever a foot treads onto foot, or a shoulder pushes into shoulder; where a handsome youth cocks an eyebrow at a wife or daughter; where flesh presses onto flesh. Each tier has ushers, holding buckets full of coal dust to douse sudden fires. Balthazar’s job will be to set them: the right ones in the right order, controlling their spread and reach.

  “It’s crazy,” he says to Etta May. “It’ll be a riot. Blood on our hands.”

  “You want to cancel?”

  “No.”

  “Then shut up and watch the wrestling, hon. You are making me nervous with your pacing.”

  The wrestling starts without announcement or ceremony. There is a man who manages the pairings. He has set up a blackboard and is taking names down in chalk. Most of the combatants come in pairs: they have long agreed to fight, for fun or to settle grudges; from the simple need to see which of them will win. There are factory workers who fight in their work coveralls and shopkeepers who strip down to their underwear, darned and splattered in Soot; potato farmers who wear home-made gym shorts and colourful jerseys, their faces adorned in Soot and paint. Masks are popular, as are pictures painted on chest or back, showing Charlie or the stylised figure of Thomas, boxing gloves weighing down his arms; or the husk of a blackened Julius, thorn-crowned like Jesus, and nailed to a charred cross. A woman welder fights masked but otherwise stark naked, her bulky body covered in a thick layer of grease; a middle-aged schoolteacher who has been blind from birth jams the blacked-out goggles of a Smoke mask down over his face before climbing in the ring.

  The last of the bouts is fought by torchlight: two scrawny brothers, made timid by the fear of hurting one another until one suddenly charges and slams the other hard into the ground before hugging him fiercely in tearful apology. There are whistles and jibes; then a small commotion as, from the entrance behind the stage, Livia enters and finds a space within the lower stalls where people scoot apart for her.

  Then the torches are doused and the roar of cheers and whistles stops. Silence falls, eerie in the company of thousands, the hush of expectation. Everyone’s waiting.

  Smoke Theatre is next.

  [ 16 ]

  They open with a simple two-person scene. A living room, suggested by a chair and a table; man and wife. Ada plays the husband: Balthazar needed a face and skin that suggested aristocracy, the pampered softness of a life of ease. She carries it well: has slicked down her short hair and changed her posture. When she speaks, the words carry the slurry, nasal vowels of the gentry. “Minetowns,” she declares, making it sound like she is at a club dinner, sharing a witticism from the Times, “is the very seat of culture.” She is wearing a shirt and waistcoat as she says it, workingman’s garb if somewhat too clean, and no trousers. The tight cotton of her long johns are Soot-blackened on her too-round rump.

  The person she is addressing—the wife—is an amateur player, a brickyard worker much older and broader than Ada. Balthazar cast her for her physicality only to find that she has talent. She is standing at the table, ironing her husband’s trousers, pockmarks painted onto her face. In the corner, uncommented on, unconnected to the scene, stands a sofa with two Commissars on it, sitting stiffly, watching, taking notes.

  And so it goes: Ada stands, makes speeches, espousing the virtues of Minetowns, her “patria late acquired, but all the more loved. I wish Papa could see how well I’m getting on.” Every line or so, she interrupts herself to curtly instruct the wife how she wants them, the trousers, pleated crisp and turned up at the bottom (the wife is not doing it right). Mostly, Ada picks at her underwear: at the arse, principally, or at the front where a sock forms a generous bulge: peels the cotton back an inch to shake herself loose. She would be a happy man, her movements make it clear, an idealist even, a Shock Worker and leader of the Council—if only her linen were not so damn itchy from the Soot.

  The scene ends with the wife helping her husband into his trousers, buttoning his fly; Ada looking down at her, eyebrow cocked and naughty. And all of a sudden—as the wife is kneeling there before her slender handsome lord, her fingers on his crotch—an erotic charge transforms the little farce. The brickyard worker responds to Ada’s playful twist of Smoke with a sudden plume of raw desire. It jumps out of her at mouth and lap; is unscripted, real, at once moving and joyously frisky. The two Commissars who have been scowling at each other on the sofa catch it at once. In a moment of lovely improvisation, the
y drop their notebooks and lean in to kiss. The mechanical ventilator spreads their joy up into the stalls. A riot of laughter follows, of smooching and giggles and lust, as roving hands are slapped and encouraged; flesh is squeezed and held. The ushers have hardly any work to do.

  “We got lucky,” Balthazar mutters to Etta May. “Saved by a workingwoman’s marvel at lily-white skin.”

  “Stop griping, old man, and listen to the laughter! You’ve just put a pulse in a whole city’s loins.”

  [ 17 ]

  Things go downhill from here. The reformed aristocrat with itchy undies is followed by the two Commissars trying to outbid each other with their ideological purity while throwing fistfuls of coal dust at an old miner every time “Granddad” tries to open his mouth; by the wife who berates her burgher husband for not smoking enough in public, all the while fending off his lewd advances and telling him to behave. It is not that the audience is not alert to the ironies depicted, or fails to recognise the types. But they do not enter into communion, sit fragmented, smoking different colours in different parts of the stalls, passing on not the emotion of the play but Chinese whispers, echoes and distortions without rhythm or coherence. Perhaps the space is quite simply too big, the audience too divided into camps; their own smoking too habitual to surrender to the show.

  “Excuses,” Balthazar rages at himself. “The material is no good.”

  He watches it all with dispassionate horror. His plays have never failed before.

  When the players arrive at the scene that exposes Minetowns’ fear of its own children, fights break out high in the tiers and boos become audible (though there are cheers, too, and laughter, and some Smoke so expressive it wafts back onstage and transforms the play). Balthazar signals to end the scene and axes three others, skipping forward to the final piece.