A disagreement over the order of entry ceased at the sight of him. Some of the diners were scarcely able to locate their places for gazing at him rather more intently than he cared to reciprocate. Several of them were so inflated that he was unable to determine their gender except by their clothes, and not even thus in the case of the most generously trousered of them, whose face appeared to be sinking into a nest of flesh. Contrast was provided by a man so emaciated his handless wristwatch kept sliding down to his knuckles. Unity and Amelia sat facing Shone, and then, to his dismay, the last of the eighteen seats was occupied by the woman he’d found in the bath, presently covered from neck to ankles in a black sweater and slacks. When she regarded him with an expression of never having seen him before and delight at doing so now he tried to feel some relief, but he was mostly experiencing how all the diners seemed to be awaiting some action from him. Their attention had started to paralyze him when Daph and Mr. Snell reappeared through a door Shone hadn’t noticed beside the Welsh dresser.
The manager set about serving the left-hand table with bowls of soup while Daph hurried over, brandishing an especially capacious pair of the white cloth slippers Shone saw all the residents were wearing. “We’ve only these,” she said, dropping them at his feet. “They’re dry, that’s the main thing. See how they feel.”
Shone could almost have inserted both feet into either of them. “I’ll feel a bit of a clown, to tell you the truth.”
“Never mind, you won’t be going anywhere.”
Shone poked his feet into the slippers and lifted them to discover whether the footwear had any chance of staying on. At once all the residents burst out laughing. Some of them stamped as a form of applause, and even Snell produced a fleeting grateful smile as he and Daph retreated to the kitchen. Shone let his feet drop, which was apparently worth another round of merriment. It faded as Daph and Snell came out with more soup, a bowl of which the manager brought Shone, lowering it over the guest’s shoulder before spreading his fingers on either side of him. “Here’s Tommy Thomson for you,” he announced, and leaned down to murmur in Shone’s ear. “That’ll be all right, won’t it? Sounds better.”
At that moment Shone’s name was among his lesser concerns. Instead he gestured at the plastic cutlery. “Do you think I could—”
Before he had time to ask for metal utensils with a knife among them, Snell moved away as though the applause and the coos of joy his announcement had drawn were propelling him. “Just be yourself,” he mouthed at Shone.
The spoon was the size Shone would have used to stir tea if the doctor hadn’t recently forbidden him sugar. As he picked it up there was instant silence. He lowered it into the thin broth, where he failed to find anything solid, and raised it to his lips. The brownish liquid tasted of some unidentifiable meat with a rusty undertaste. He was too old to be finicky about food that had been served to everyone. He swallowed, and when his body raised to protest he set about spooning the broth into himself as fast as he could without spilling it, to finish the task.
He’d barely signaled his intentions when the residents began to cheer and stamp. Some of them imitated his style with the broth while others demonstrated how much more theatrically they could drink theirs; those closest to the hall emitted so much noise that he could have thought part of the slurping came from outside the room. When he frowned in that direction, the residents chortled as though he’d made another of the jokes he couldn’t avoid making.
He dropped the spoon in the bowl at last, only to have Daph return it to the table with a briskness not far short of a rebuke. While she and Snell were in the kitchen everyone else gazed at Shone, who felt compelled to raise his eyebrows and hold out his hands. One of the expanded people nudged another, and both of them wobbled gleefully, and then all the residents were overcome by laughter that continued during the arrival of the main course, as if this was a joke they were eager for him to see. His plate proved to bear three heaps of mush, white and pale green and a glistening brown. “What is it?” he dared to ask Daph.
“What we always have,” she said as if to a child or to someone who’d reverted to that state. “It’s what we need to keep us going.”
The heaps were of potatoes and vegetables and some kind of mince with an increased flavor of the broth. He did his utmost to eat naturally, despite the round of applause this brought him. Once his innards began to feel heavy he lined up the utensils on his by no means clear plate, attracting Daph to stoop vigorously at him. “I’ve finished,” he said.
“Not yet.”
When she stuck out her hands he thought she was going to return the fork and spoon to either side of his plate. Instead she removed it and began to clear the next table. While he’d been concentrating on hiding his reaction to his food the residents had gobbled theirs, he saw. The plates were borne off to the kitchen, leaving an expectant silence broken only by a restless shuffling. Wherever he glanced, he could see nobody’s feet moving, and he told himself the sounds had been Daph’s as she emerged from the kitchen with a large cake iced white as a memorial. “Daph’s done it again,” the hugest resident piped.
Shone took that to refer to the portrait in icing of a clown on top of the cake. He couldn’t share the general enthusiasm for it; the clown looked undernourished and blotchily red-faced, and not at all certain what shape his wide twisted gaping lips should form. Snell brought in a pile of plates on which Daph placed slices of cake, having cut it in half and removed the clown’s head from his shoulders in the process, but the distribution of slices caused some debate. “Give Tommy Thomson my eye,” a man with bleary bloodshot eyeballs said.
“He can have my nose,” offered the woman he’d seen in the bath.
“I’m giving him the hat,” Daph said, which met with hoots of approval. The piece of cake she gave him followed the outline almost precisely of the clown’s sagging pointed cap. At least it would bring dinner to an end, he thought, and nothing much could be wrong with a cake. He didn’t expect it to taste faintly of the flavor of the rest of the meal. Perhaps that was why, provoking a tumult of jollity, he began to cough and then choke on a crumb. Far too eventually Daph brought him a glass of water in which he thought he detected the same taste. “Thanks,” he gasped anyway, and as his coughs and the applause subsided, managed to say, “Thanks. All over now. If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll take myself off to bed.”
The noise the residents had made so far was nothing to the uproar with which they greeted this. “We haven’t had the entertainment yet,” Unity protested, jumping to her feet and looking more than ready to dart the length of the room. “Got to sing for your supper, Tommy Thomson.”
“We don’t want any songs and we don’t want any speeches,” Amelia declared. “We always have the show.”
“The show,” all the diners began to chant, and clapped and stamped in time with it, led by the thumping of Amelia’s stick. “The show. The show.”
The manager leaned across Shone’s table. His eyes were pinker than ever, and blinking several times a second. “Better put it on for them or you’ll get no rest,” he muttered. “You won’t need to be anything special.”
Perhaps it was the way Snell was leaning down to him that let Shone see why he seemed familiar. Could he really have run the hotel where Shone had stayed with his parents nearly fifty years ago? How old would he have to be? Shone had no chance to wonder while the question was “What are you asking me to do?”
“Nothing much. Nothing someone of your age can’t cope with. Come on and I’ll show you before they start wanting to play their games.”
It wasn’t clear how much of a threat this was meant to be. Just now Shone was mostly grateful to be ushered away from the stamping and the chant. Retreating upstairs had ceased to tempt him, and fleeing to his car made no sense when he could hardly shuffle across the carpet for trying to keep his feet in the slippers. Instead he shambled after the manager to the doorway of the television lounge. “Go in there,” Snell urged, and ga
ve him a wincing smile. “Just stand in it. Here they come.”
The room had been more than rearranged. The number of seats had been increased to eighteen by the addition of several folding chairs. All the seats faced the television, in front of which a small portable theater not unlike the site of a Punch and Judy show had been erected. Above the deserted ledge of a stage rose a tall pointed roof that reminded Shone of the clown’s hat. Whatever words had been inscribed across the base of the gable were as faded as the many colors of the frontage. He’d managed to decipher only ENTER HERE when he found himself hobbling towards the theater, driven by the chanting that had emerged into the hall.
The rear of the theater was a heavy velvet curtain, black where it wasn’t greenish. A slit had been cut in it up to a height of about four feet. As he ducked underneath, the moldy velvet clung to the nape of his neck. A smell of damp and staleness enclosed him when he straightened up. His elbows knocked against the sides of the box, disturbing the two figures that lay on a shelf under the stage, their empty bodies sprawling, their faces nestling together upside down as though they had dragged themselves close for companionship. He turned the faces upwards and saw that the figures, whose fixed grins and eyes were almost too wide for amusement, were supposed to be a man and a woman, although only a few tufts of gray hair clung to each dusty skull. He was nerving himself to insert his hands in the gloves of the bodies when the residents stamped chanting into the room.
Unity ran to a chair and then, restless with excitement, to another. Amelia dumped herself in the middle of a sofa and inched groaning to one end. Several of the jumbo residents lowered themselves onto folding chairs that looked immediately endangered. At least the seating of the audience put an end to the chant, but everyone’s gaze fastened on Shone until he seemed to feel it clinging to the nerves of his face. Beyond the residents, Snell mouthed, “Just slip them on.”
Shone pulled the open ends of the puppets towards him and poked them gingerly wider, dreading the emergence of some denizen from inside one or both. They appeared to be uninhabited, however, and so he thrust his hands in, trying to think which of his kindergarten stories he might adapt for the occasion. The brownish material fitted itself easily over his hands, almost as snug as the skin it resembled, and before he was ready each thumb was a puppet’s arm, the little fingers too, and three fingers were shakily raising each head as if the performers were being roused from sleep. The spectators were already cheering, a response that seemed to entice the tufted skulls above the stage. Their entrance was welcomed by a clamor in which requests gradually became audible. “Let’s see them knock each other about like the young lot do these days.”
“Football with the baby.”
“Make them go like animals.”
“Smash their heads together.”
They must be thinking of Punch and Judy, Shone told himself—and then a wish succeeded in quelling the rest. “Let’s have Old Ruthless.”
“Old Ruthless” was the chant as the stamping renewed itself—as his hands sprang onto the stage to wag the puppets at each other. All at once everything he’d been through that day seemed to have concentrated itself in his hands, and perhaps that was the only way he could be rid of it. He nodded the man that was his right hand at the balding female and uttered a petulant croak. “What do you mean, it’s not my day?”
He shook the woman and gave her a squeaky voice. “What day do you think it is?”
“It’s Wednesday, isn’t it? Thursday, rather. Hang on, it’s Friday, of course. Saturday, I mean.”
“It’s Sunday. Can’t you hear the bells?”
“I thought they were for us to be married. Hey, what are you hiding there? I didn’t know you had a baby yet.”
“That’s no baby, that’s my boyfriend.”
Shone twisted the figures to face the audience. The puppets might have been waiting for guffaws or even groans at the echo of an old joke; certainly he was. The residents were staring at him with, at best, bemusement. Since he’d begun the performance the only noise had been the sidling of the puppets along the stage and the voices that caught harshly in his throat. The manager and Daph were gazing at him over the heads of the residents; both of them seemed to have forgotten how to blink or grin. Shone turned the puppets away from the spectators as he would have liked to turn himself. “What’s up with us?” he squeaked, wagging the woman’s head. “We aren’t going down very well.”
“Never mind, I still love you. Give us a kiss,” he croaked, and made the other puppet totter a couple of steps before it fell on its face. The loud crack of the fall took him off guard, as did the way the impact trapped his fingers in the puppet’s head. The figure’s ungainly attempts to stand up weren’t nearly as simulated as he would have preferred. “It’s these clown’s shoes. You can’t expect anyone to walk in them,” he grumbled. “Never mind looking as if I’m an embarrassment.”
“You’re nothing else, are you? You’ll be forgetting your own name next.”
“Don’t be daft,” he croaked, no longer understanding why he continued to perform, unless to fend off the silence that was dragging words and antics out of him. “We both know what my name is.”
“Not after that crack you fetched your head. You won’t be able to keep anything in there now.”
“Well, that’s where you couldn’t be wronger. My name …” He meant the puppet’s, not his own; that was why he was finding it hard to produce. “It’s, you know, you know perfectly well. You know it as well as I do.”
See, it’s gone.
“Tell me or I’ll thump you till you can’t stand up,” Shone snarled in a rage that was no longer solely the puppet’s, and brought the helplessly grinning heads together with a sound like the snapping of bone. The audience began to cheer at last, but he was scarcely aware of them. The collision had split the faces open, releasing the top joints of his fingers only to trap them in the splintered gaps. The clammy bodies of the puppets clung to him as his hands wrenched at each other. Abruptly something gave, and the female head flew off as the body tore open. His right elbow hit the wall of the theater, and the structure lurched at him. As he tried to steady it, the head of the puppet rolled under his feet. He tumbled backwards into the moldy curtains. The theater reeled with him, and the room tipped up.
He was lying on his back, and his breath was somewhere else. In trying to prevent the front of the theater from striking him he’d punched himself on the temple with the cracked male head. Through the proscenium he saw the ceiling high above him and heard the appreciation of the audience. More time passed than he thought necessary before several of them approached.
Either the theater was heavier than he’d realized or his fall had weakened him. Even once he succeeded in peeling Old Ruthless off his hand he was unable to lift the theater off himself as the puppet lay like a deflated baby on his chest. At last Amelia lowered herself towards him, and he was terrified that she intended to sit on him. Instead she thrust a hand that looked boiled almost into his face to grab the proscenium and haul the theater off him. As someone else bore it away she seized his lapels and, despite the creaking of her stick, yanked him upright while several hands helped raise him from behind. “Are you fit?” she wheezed.
“I’ll be fine,” Shone said before he knew. All the chairs had been pushed back against the windows, he saw. “We’ll show you one of our games now,” Unity said behind him.
“You deserve it after all that,” said Amelia, gathering the fragments of the puppets to hug them to her breasts.
“I think I’d like—”
“That’s right, you will. We’ll show you how we play. Who’s got the hood?”
“Me,” Unity cried. “Someone do it up for me.”
Shone turned to see her flourishing a black cap. As she raised it over her head, he found he was again robbed of breath. When she tugged it down he realized that it was designed to cover the player’s eyes, more like a magician’s prop than an element of any game. The man with the ha
ndless watch dangling from his wrist pulled the cords of the hood tight behind her head and tied them in a bow, then twirled her round several times, each of which drew from her a squeal only just of pleasure. She wobbled around once more as, having released her, he tiptoed to join the other residents against the walls of the room.
She had her back to Shone, who had stayed by the chairs, beyond which the noise of rain had ceased. She darted away from him, her slippered feet patting the carpet, then lurched sideways towards nobody in particular and cocked her head. She was well out of the way of Shone’s route to the door, where Daph and the manager looked poised to sneak out. He only had to avoid the blinded woman and he would be straight up to his room, either to barricade himself in or to retrieve his belongings and head for the car. He edged one foot forward into the toe of the slipper, and Unity swung towards him. “Caught you. I know who that is, Mr. Tommy Thomson.”
“No you don’t,” Shone protested in a rage at everything that had led to the moment, but Unity swooped at him. She closed her bony hands around his cheeks and held on tight far longer than seemed reasonable before undoing the bow of the hood with her right hand while gripping and stroking his chin with the other. “Now it’s your turn to go in the dark.”
“I think I’ve had enough for one day, if you’ll excuse—”
This brought a commotion of protests not far short of outrage. “You aren’t done yet, a young thing like you.” “She’s older than you and she didn’t make a fuss.” “You’ve been caught, you have to play.” “If you don’t it won’t be fair.” The manager had retreated into the doorway and was pushing air at Shone with his outstretched hands as Daph mouthed, “It’s supposed to be the old lot’s time.” Her words and the rising chant of “Be fair” infected Shone with guilt, aggravated when Unity uncovered her reproachful eyes and held out the hood. He’d disappointed Ruth; he didn’t need to let these old folk down too. “Fair enough, I’ll play,” he said. “Just don’t twist me too hard.”
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