by D. P. Watt
The Usher
(a comedy, a farce, a Grand Guignol, an evening’s vaudeville,
or, a prayer to gods as yet unknown)
“HEROD: Neither at things nor at people should one look.
Only in mirrors should one look, for mirrors do but show us masks.
Oh! oh! bring wine! I thirst…”
Oscar Wilde, Salome
Scene I—A Desperate Olio
I was late for Emmanuel Golding’s play, and fully aware of how he would take it, and that he would know, however stealthily I might be able to creep into the auditorium. But I was not aware, then, how little any of that mattered; a tired and worn-out introduction, to a tired and worn-out story, I know; but, God help me, it is the truth—and you, my dear, unknown audience, should you have found this thing, in the place I have found myself in, God help you; if not, and you are lucky enough to still inhabit somewhere sane and just, then, I beseech you, believe me!
Scene II—Deuce Spot, or, The Pathetic Confession
Emmanuel had been talking about his “little coup” for months—how he’d managed to convince a local am-dram society that he should use their little one hundred and twenty seater venue—The Enterprise Theatre—for his special soiree. In the end they didn’t propose to charge him for hire of the place, just a take on the door, and even that was reduced to twenty percent. At a tenner each I thought the tickets were ludicrously priced and would be very surprised if he’d sell many, and certainly not to the stuffy, conservative crowd that ran the theatre like a minor mafia racket, staging the usual mediocre drivel to their gradually greying regulars.
But he’d managed to charm his way in somehow, and even convince them that a performance of Oskar Kokoschka’s Murderer, Hope of Women, would be suitable to stage in our forgotten little market town, alongside another provocative number—a little aperitif, shall we say—a burlesque scene, apparently of his own devising, Salome and the Veils, before the main billing. Perhaps Emmanuel thought I would never have heard of Oscar Wilde, and the fact he’d beaten Emmanuel to it, with another little scandal, quite a few years before. But that was one of those intriguing things about Emmanuel—the brazenness of his bullshit.
I’d read Wilde relentlessly during the first Christmas holiday of my English literature degree and loved every word. I’d never been much good at university (if that’s what you can call the aspirational old polytechnic I attended in the Midlands). I mean, I wasn’t very good at all the assessments and essays. More precisely, I wrote excellent essays—I really enjoyed doing them—but I could never plan my work properly and would often end up handing things in days late, sometimes weeks, or not at all. All of the marks I got back were high first class, but because I hadn’t submitted on time I’d often get a capped mark, or zero. I was lucky even to graduate in the end, with a third. My dad said he wasn’t surprised and he’d thought it was a waste of time anyway to go off and read books for three years, and was looking forward to me getting a job now I’d got that nonsense out of my system.
I never “got that nonsense out of my system”. Far from it. I just became an odd sort of autodidact, following my whims here and there with some neglected writers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then pursuing the work of obscure contemporary writers from the small press scene, when I could afford their expensive books. Mine was an eclectic sort of reading. I’d obsess about a writer for months, devouring everything I could in a short time, and then never return to them again. One advantage I had was an almost photographic memory; I could recall long passages of work I had read only once, and years before, and something in the way my brain worked allowed me to picture connections of literary movements and cultural influences almost like road maps. This gift, if it might be considered such, also gave me a wonderful means by which to avail myself of much free time to indulge my interest in literature—I did the horses. The kind of analysis of form that usually takes people years of study and cross-reference, I had been able to complete in a few weeks, and used it to enable myself to supplement that income with working a couple of days each week in a local wine merchants, serving overpriced Premier Cru Chablis to the kind of people that wouldn’t know it from three quid Liebfraumilch.
Funnily enough it was in the bookies that I met Emmanuel for the first time. Strange to have met such an “aesthete” there, but true. Unlike some of the things he’d told me then, such as his father owning ten racehorses and his grandfather having been a famous author who had since sunk into obscurity, but that he was on the verge of clinching a deal with a “BIG!” publisher to reprint his novels, the advance for which was to be a six figure sum. These—and much more, I later discovered—were lies. Other things, more strange and unbelievable, turned out to be true: he had a ring that once belonged to the Marquis de Sade; he had been shot through the ankle while trying to smuggle diamonds from Algeria to Gibraltar; and he had been crowned the King of an African tribe. It seemed that the bizarre and ludicrous were the waters in which Emmanuel Golding swam, and any attempt to break from them, into the mundane and ordinary, was doomed to failure.
Over the last few months his coterie of adoring hangers-on had agreed to be the cast for the show, and his occasional girlfriend, Sarah Willis—who’d done some ballet classes when she was ten, and wasn’t too averse to getting her clothes off (as we’d all seen on a number of evenings when Emmanuel invited everyone round for drinks and discussion of “culture”)—had enthusiastically put herself forward to play Salome.
And why was I late for it? I’d been buying vintage erotic stereography cards on an internet auction site. I’d secured the winning bid on quite a sought after collection of thirty-two cards by Guglielmo Plüschow, against my bidding rival “QwertyPerty77”—some guy in Tennessee, my online nemesis—who always seemed to go for the stuff I was interested in. If either of us every made it across the pond we’d probably have loved to pore over each other’s collection, but that was unlikely to happen. So, in celebration of my £220 bargain, I’d cracked open a bottle of Prosecco (another little vice of mine), and half a bottle later I was asleep on the sofa, and two hours after that I awoke to find I only had five minutes to get to the theatre. I certainly didn’t want to miss the fireworks.
Why am I telling you all of this? I don’t know. This is a garbled, and pointless, last testimony—do with it what you will.
Scene III—The Useless Comp
So I got to “The Enterprise” about fifteen minutes after curtain up. I’d got a taxi, as I had no hope of getting there on foot, even running, in time to charm my way in late. Thankfully, leaving the house, I just remembered to pick up the pretentious ticket, with red inked calligraphy, that Emmanuel had sent me in the post (in a black-bordered envelope).
It took a while to explain to the driver where the theatre was though. He’d never heard of the place, despite it being in the centre of town. Few people know where you’re talking about when you mention it, often saying, “I never knew we had a theatre in our little town.” This frequently left me quite relieved, as, given the fading value of theatre in our times, I did not want their first, and inevitably only, theatrical experience, to be delivered by these butchers. At that moment what I needed most though was someone who knew it well, whether they’d seen a show or not. After a few moments explaining I was on my way.
He double parked outside the theatre, as other vehicles raced by, making it difficult for me to get out. I gave him a fiver and said keep the change, to which he sniffed a grumpy “Ta!”
I slipped in through the double doors and came face to face with a chubby, balding man in his late fifties dressed in a DJ and burgundy bowtie.
“I’m afraid you’re too late, sir,” he said, merrily. “I was just going to slip the bolts. I’m afraid we went up over a quarter of an hour ago and I can’t let you in now.”
“I am so, so, sorry,” I said. “I had an awful job getting a taxi and I really must see this performance.”
I presented him with my ticket,
in the hope that he might let me in. He peered at it for a while, scrutinising every detail.
“But this ticket is for the matinee, sir,” he said, with a nasty little sneer. “I’m afraid we are now playing the evening performance, sir.” He had that arrogance of one whose role contains little power, but the little it had was able to ruin someone’s pleasure entirely.
“What do you mean, the matinee,” I said, loudly. “There isn’t a bloody matinee. Look, I know the director and he gave me this ticket…”
He cut me off with a shh!, accompanied by a finger to his lips, as though silencing a child in a tantrum.
“Now there’s no need to raise your voice, sir,” he said calmly, his pompous condescension beginning to infuriate me. “Nastiness won’t get us anywhere now will it? And it really doesn’t matter who we know now does it, sir; rather more important—as my beloved mother, God rest her soul, used to say—is what we know. Now, why don’t you have a look at your ticket again and you’ll see what I mean.”
He handed it back to me, with an affectatious and assured flourish. The ticket seemed smaller, and made of a thin shiny blue paper, rather than the opulent handwritten affair that Emmanuel had sent me a few days before. There, in a faded grey Arial font, spat out of some computerised ticketing machine, was “Golding Review—Matinee, 2.30pm, Row G, Seat 7.” He had to have used some sleight of hand to substitute my ticket for this one, although I was certain Emmanuel had never said anything to me about a matinee. Before I could launch into a tirade he spoke again.
“Now, sir, I can see how disappointed you are,” he said, soothingly. “And we really don’t want our guests to be upset. Here at The Central we pride ourselves on the happiness of all who come through our doors. I’ll see what we can do.”
He headed over to the auditorium doors and peered in, with an exaggerated lean. I couldn’t quite follow what he meant by “guests”, and why he’d referred to “The Central”. But before I could think any further on it he had tiptoed back to me and whispered, “I think we’ll be alright, sir, there’s nobody in G7 so I’ll show you to your seat.” He took my hand in his and showed me into the auditorium.
Scene IV—A Little Blue Ingénue, or, The Dumb Act
The show had already started, apparently, but the curtain hadn’t even been raised. There was discordant music playing in the gloom, and the house lights were on their lowest setting. The place seemed packed and the murmur of fidgeting bodies seemed to add another layer of strangeness to the irritating music. Surely they hadn’t all been listening to this drone on for the last twenty minutes?
The usher took me hurriedly to my row, three down from the central aisle, but he wasn’t content simply to show me my seat, which I could find easily enough—seven in. As I whispered my apologies to those who had to stand to allow me through I heard his voice behind me, doing the same. I turned and sat down and there he was, standing beside me, with the poor woman who had seat six having to hold that awkward half-stand that one has to effect for someone to squeeze by. Then I realised that she had her leg curled around the back of his, and their bodies were not only in an uncomfortable but necessary proximity, but rather in an embrace—her head nuzzling into the fat of his chin and her drunken eyes opening momentarily as she mumbled things into his lapel. His left hand was stroking her stomach slowly and I’m not quite sure what his right hand might have been up to. He leaned down to me, she giggled a little and pecked at his cheek in a dreamy fashion.
“There we are, sir, I do hope you enjoy the show,” he whispered. “The interval is in half an hour and we have a very well stocked bar, I can assure you.”
I nodded my thanks awkwardly, trying to sink into my seat and disappear, wondering what the people in the rows behind me must be thinking of this spectacle.
He unclasped the woman from him and slid her back into her seat, where her head lolled towards me in a stupor.
“Yes, you enjoy the show, dearie,” she cooed in my ear. “She’s a lovely little thing, and so flexible…”
I had little time to reflect on the peculiar, flirtatious behaviour of either the usher or the woman beside me for I was too astonished by the “lovely little flexible thing” on the stage before me.
During the fiasco of getting to the seat the curtain had been raised to reveal what appeared to be a set in mid construction; half-painted flats were propped against pieces of furniture and tabs were in the middle of being hung at various points, even a lighting bar was at three-quarter drop, its lanterns stacked below it, ready to be fixed. In front of this mess, which was lit with a yellow wash, as though it were part of the performance, there pranced an old woman in a purple tulle outfit that left little to the imagination. It jutted from her at odd angles, and then would deflate, almost like the wings of a strange insect. She seemed to be performing a dance—this was meant to be Salome, I presumed. She would have been better cast as an elderly Herodias—or even more appropriately Salome’s grandmother—than the supposedly irresistible temptress. The only people who were going to be shocked here were those who’d paid a tenner to see Sarah Willis get her kit off.
I say it was a dance, it was difficult to tell. The discordant music was still playing in the background, and how one might select anything from that on which to base any form of movement, even of the most radical dance theatre variety, I could not fathom. She seemed to be responding to some kind of internal rhythm though and the more I watched the more I seemed to understand.
This was not for us. This was not even the dance of Salome. This was the kind of thing a body enacts alone, trying to understand its boundaries, finding itself again after a long hibernation, opening out like a plant in a faltering spring light. I could not fault the deeply embedded grace she exhibited, hidden beneath the layers of age. Something within her seemed to glow and sing; of fading fires, now embers, and ancient songs, now whispers, moments her body had relished and celebrated.
My embarrassed scoffing at her aged body felt ridiculous and juvenile as I watched something miraculous. Her wrinkles seemed to vanish, the awkward twistedness of her limbs unfurled and a majestic creature emerged.
Then she collapsed like a dead swan upon the stage.
Scene V—Counting the House
Nobody clapped. I was unsure whether Emmanuel’s Salome and the Veils had ended, or was about to begin, this having been something else entirely. Two fat stage hands, in regulation black, wheeled on a large mirror, angled awkwardly down at the audience, as though it might topple at any moment. The house lights came up and applause started from either side of me. In the mirror I could see that the auditorium was empty, save for three of us, sat together in the middle of row G, and a full row at the front. But, as I focused on that row I noticed they were just cardboard figures, propped across it, and as their fixed faces became clearer suddenly they fell forwards as one.
The woman to my left had woken from her drunken slumber and was applauding enthusiastically, although she seemed to be looking off into the wings. The man to my right appeared to be rather out of place, dressed in oily, ripped jeans with a denim jacket covered in faded sewn patches of heavy metal bands popular in the 1980s. He’d taken his hands out of a packet of sherbet lemons long enough for a few desultory claps before taking another handful of the sweets and cramming them into his mouth. He turned and smiled, his cheeks bulging with them, as though his face were rippling with a nest of cockroaches. He offered me a sweet as I stood to go to the bar, utterly baffled by the dance, and by the mirror. I declined, pushing by him, desperate for a glass of something.
Rather than the usual horde at the theatre bar, as people scrabble to get their drink in before the interval is over, everything here was very relaxed. People had clearly left the performance of Salome and the Veils early and come through to get a drink. They were all standing in neat groups, glasses in hand, most half consumed, chatting and laughing together. Unlike the man I had left in the auditorium everyone in the bar was very well dressed, in evening dresses and DJs.
Perhaps they were a separate group that Emmanuel had invited to the main billing. They were in for a surprise, I thought! Then I noticed how old they all appeared to be. A quick scan of the groups found nobody that could pass for under seventy, yet the manner of their chat and their poses suggested a much younger crowd. It was a very odd audience.
The usher seemed to be doing everything, for he appeared to be the only member of staff behind the bar. I pulled up a threadbare stool, which might have been more at home in a country pub, and ordered a large red wine. Just as he was about to pour it I noticed the label.
“Oh, no Australian wine, please,” I said. “It gives me a thumping headache, I’m sorry to say. Do you have anything from Europe, preferably French?”
“Ah, you prefer some subtlety, sir,” he said, approvingly. “There is nothing like a little terroir, as my old mother—the Gods keep her—used to say. Would a claret be suitable?”
“Er, yes, claret will be fine, thank you,” I replied, very much doubting his “old mother” had had very much to say about terroir, or fine wine in general.
The wine wasn’t bad at all and I sat there a while as he stood looking at me, servile and combative in equal measure.
I felt awkward and couldn’t understand why he didn’t busy himself with other things behind the bar while I took the opportunity to think through the absurdity of what I’d seen. That clearly wasn’t going to happen.
“You’ve got a good house in tonight, shame they didn’t watch all of the first part,” I said, trying to rustle up some conversation. Come to think of it I wasn’t even sure how long the “first part” had been. I recalled that the usher had said the interval would be after half an hour, but it had seemed like a couple of minutes, or, maybe a couple of hours, I really couldn’t tell which.
“Oh, we always have a very good house, sir,” he said, as though someone had flicked a switch and reanimated him. “We are renowned for the quality of our houses. It is something we pride ourselves in, sir. We take great pride in our houses here.”