by Bruce Barber
nostrils were full of an odour combining decayed refuse with frying onions and automobile exhaust.
Illusion and reality, Keyes thought, Mutt and Jeff, as he stepped around a broken beer bottle, brown shards of which were strewn across a torn copy of the program for Medea.
Lost in such thoughts, Keyes did not notice that his feet had made their way without his help back toward the Festival theatre. He realized what was happening to him only when the spiky mass of the building loomed at the end of a tree-lined street.
“Avaunt,” he growled goofily, “and quit my sight!”
To be sure that it did, he made a sharp left turn and stalked down toward the river.
The Avon is not the stream it has been made to seem in promotional brochures about Stratford. A system of dams and weirs downstream from the main part of town, and most particularly, downstream from the theatre, have made it into a sizeable pond which patriotic townsfolk at one time or another dubbed Lake Victoria.
Her again, Keyes thought as he usually did when he encountered the Queen of Jubilees. Why must it always be her?
Still, the lake was pretty enough with its borders of softwood trees, most of them bending over the water and trailing parts of themselves in it, as Pre-Raphaelite girls might bend and trail their sleeves. By the time he reached Lake Victoria’s phony but picturesque banks, Keyes was in an almost lyrical frame of mind.
Then he remembered the swan. The newspaper had blamed the death of the bird on a territorial squabble. Keyes knew swans to be thoroughly disagreeable creatures, at least on some occasions. He had seen a swan stop the charge of a large black dog, stop him dead in his tracks and so abruptly that the dog rolled over backwards. And this the swan had done merely by rising to its full height and displaying its wings, thereby transforming itself from something that must have reminded the marauding dog of a rather large duck into an exterminating angel seven feet high and just as wide.
“I suppose it wouldn’t be pretty,” Keyes told himself, “a fight between two bull swans...”
But was it a bull swan, he wondered, or a cock swan, or whatever it is that swan males are called? The paper hadn’t sexed the bird, or gendered it. The report was too pristinely journalistic for such details.
Still thinking of swans and their dramas, Keyes sat down on a bench. It was wet, but he didn’t really mind. The day was mild and the damp across his rump seemed somehow appropriate to it. Sitting there, he noticed that one of his shoelaces was coming undone. He bent forward to tie it, and as he did so an airborne feather settled between his feet. It was white – a swan feather.
“I don’t believe it,” Keyes said, but believe it or not he reached out and collected the bit of fluff in his hand.
And now he saw something still more unbelievable. Just where the feather had lain, there was a tiny silver star.
“Last night,” he murmured, “there were stars.”
He had forgotten them, the little bright bits that he had found between the head of Alan Wales and the head of the Bard of Avon.
Keyes relaxed his fingers, and the swan feather quickened on the light breeze and continued its journey. Then he picked up the silver sequin. He was sure it was the same.
What had he done with the others?
He rummaged in his jacket pocket among the house keys and theatre tickets. When he drew the hand out again he had lint between his fingers. He also had a sequin. It was the twin of the one he had just found on the banks of dear old Lake Victoria.
From the notebook of Jean-Claude Keyes:
Sometimes I believe that many of the seemingly intricate problems of being exist solely because God had too big a production budget and couldn’t resist using it to load reality with an overabundance of brightly coloured bells and whistles whose only real effect is obfuscation. Viewed uncritically, our lives are a façade of multicoloured murk... but just because it’s murky doesn’t mean it’s deep, as a lady once dear to me used to say. And death? Just God’s way, like Shakespeare’s, of clearing the stage when all else fails.
(3:5) The Jester’s Bells
All streets in Stratford, in the end, led to The Jester’s Bells, at least all streets roamed by actors, and so Keyes found himself there at the end of the day, having a light supper and feeling, if not better, at least more fit to socialize.
There were a great many customers over the dinner hour, most of them tourists as far as Keyes could tell, and these all disappeared as if by magic at around 7:30, half an hour before curtain time. The atmosphere went through a subtle change as the lights were dimmed, which enhanced the muted pastel colours of the walls and the varnished woods; decorative stained-glass panels above the bar brightened perceptibly, green, red and gold, and cigarette smoke whirled lazily in orbit around the ceiling fans. Soon, off-work Festival employees began to come in through both the front and back entrances, and within the hour, it seemed to Keyes that everyone who wasn’t on or backstage was in the pub; and all were drinking heavily. The words “Wales” and “murder” buzzed about like undisciplined pixies, interrupting and underscoring every conversation.
Anyone who knew Keyes even slightly sought him out, bought him a drink, and asked him what had happened, what it had been like, what he thought about it. Some of the drinks he accepted, and some of the questions he tried to answer, or theorize about, but mostly his side of the dialogue consisted of shrugs and head-shaking.
“Do you think he’d been dead long?”
“Was it, like, you know... really messy?”
“Was Wales robbed?”
“Did the cops give you a rough time?”
“Who...?”
“What..?”
“Where...?”
“How...?”
“When...?”
“Why...?”
It was with a great deal of relief that Keyes finally saw Seamus O’Reilly elbowing his way through the smoke and chatter; he had Sandra on his arm. O’Reilly spotted Keyes and waved for him to join them in a vacant high-backed booth near an ancient Rockola jukebox which had been recently refurbished and moved into the bar. (This jukebox was not so offensive as some, since it contained solely a wide selection of blues music, both country blues from the Mississippi Delta, and city blues of the Chicago hue.) Keyes excused himself from his current knot of inquisitors, picked up his beer mug, and a moment later seated himself beside Sandra.
The waitress, Julia, appeared in a puff of efficiency.
“Strong drink!” O’Reilly demanded, handing her some coins as he spoke. “And put some music on for us, my dear, to shield our discourse from prying ears!”
Julia complied, and soon after the air was filled with the voices of old blind black men with old guitars, gossiping about women and whiskey and the retribution of the Devil.
Seamus O’Reilly, for his part, wanted to gossip about the police, and Alan Wales.
“The garda were waiting for me at the stage door,” he said. “I still had my make-up on when they invited me down to the station to assist them with their investigation; that’s how the British Bobbies refer to it. They also suggested quite strongly that I improve my attitude.”
“Why would they say that?” Keyes asked.
“Well, I suppose I must have laughed... I think I said ‘about time,’ or some such thing, as well.” O’Reilly seemed to have overcome the horror he had experienced in the physical presence of the body.
“I see their point – the police are apt to be over-sensitive to someone who finds murder a source for amusement; they’re funny that way. I wonder if they investigate swans?” Keyes said.
“What have swans got to do with anything? Anyway, I guess they brought me in first because somebody overheard me say something unkind about Mr. Wales at a party; something involving unpleasant and inventive forms of torture and termination; there’s quite a long list of people they’ll be interviewing for expressing precisely the same sentiments. Anyway, I told them I hated the bastard – I’m sorry, Sandra, that’s the way it was – but I didn�
�t kill him. You know, Claude, I’m thinking about setting up a lottery or something to pick whoever did it, maybe with some kind of reward...”
“That’ll please the cops.”
“Fuck them. In Ireland – ”
“You haven’t been within spitting distance of Ireland in thirty-five years!”
“Beside the point. Whose side are you on?”
“Yours, but that’s beside the point, too.” Keyes glanced sidelong at Sandra, to see how she was reacting to this disparagement of her late lover; sometimes O’Reilly rode roughshod over other people’s emotions, even people he cared about, so carried away did he become with the strength of his own. Seamus had been an actor too long, Keyes thought, to have any real insight into character, or rather any insight into real character.
Sandra might as well have been onstage, deep into a role and unaffected by the small concerns of the mundane world around her. She stared at some point in the middle distance, a vague half-smile turning up the corners of her mouth. However, Keyes noticed something that perhaps only six other people in the world knew about Sandra Edel.
On her right hand she wore, as always, her most treasured possession, a large paste-and-pewter ring which had been part of her costume as Vittoria Corombona; the director of The White Devil had presented the ring to her as a gift on closing night, many years ago. When she was extremely upset or extremely happy, she had the habit of twisting the ring a quarter turn round her finger every few