by Bruce Barber
who she is,” Keyes asked, “and what her sins are, or do I have to resort to blackmail by threatening to reveal a few things I haven’t told anyone about you yet?”
“How much could that be? Leave me something for my memoirs, Claude. Her name is Janie – Janie Ellison, but she dances under the name of Kiri,” Betty said. “She’s an area girl – from St. Marys, I believe – and has quite a reputation around here. Shame, really. Somebody told me she has a beautiful mother whose heart she’s breaking, a hard-working father... how dope and sleeping around and booze evolve out of such a solid heritage is beyond me. Makes me thankful I’ll never have to deal with something like that! I have enough trouble with tourists, let alone children.”
“Betty, can you be a little more specific? For example, what did this Janie Ellison have to do with Alan Wales, if anything?”
“Oh, she was one of his girls...”
“‘One of his girls’? How un-’90s of you.”
“I’m old-fashioned. It’s part of my charm. No, really, Wales always kept a kind of groupie-harem around him, three or four on the string, sometimes. It’s a character flaw in certain young actors – and some of the old ones, too.”
Betty was also well-acquainted with Seamus O’Reilly. She continued.
“But as a rule, most of them keep their romances, if you can call them that, within the company, which, while incestuous, is quite wise and much less complicated in the long run. The ‘lock-up-your-daughters’ attitude is still very much alive in some places; Stratford, for example.”
“Keep going.”
“That’s really about all I know, except that the girl was so obsessed by Wales that she dropped out of school, and ended up with this... dancing job. Wales was fond of making jokes about it at the bar, comments about how all her skills were oral ones, and he didn’t mean declaiming Shakespeare. No one else thought his jokes were particularly funny. I thought about smacking him one night after one of his cracks that disgusted even me, but I was too drunk.”
“But she still seems to care about him. How is it possible, after treatment like that?”
Betty shrugged.
“You’re asking me? I barely understand how my microwave works, let alone other people’s love lives.”
“And that we have in common, my friend,” Keyes said, hoisting his mug in her direction. “But I am beginning to understand the lack of deep and abiding sorrow over Wales’ untimely departure, in every case but Ms. Kiri Ellison’s.”
“You’re not going to get involved in all of this, are you?” Betty asked.
“I already am involved.”
“Just because you found the body? It could have been anybody!”
“But it wasn’t anybody – it was me.”
“Claude, don’t start that ‘for whom the bell tolls’ nonsense. Hasn’t anyone pointed out to you lately what an unpleasant world this is? The bells stopped tolling a long time ago.”
“No, they’ve just gotten so loud and constant that people have forgotten they exist. Like traffic noise and the moaning of starving millions.” Keyes stood up. “Thanks for the information. Well, I should spend the evening working on my manuscript, maybe make it an early night.”
“While you’re at it you should work on curing this rampant sentimentalism you seem to be suffering from – it can’t be good for your liver.” Her voice was gentler than her words.
“It probably isn’t,” Keyes agreed, and left Betty Beardsley to her quiet battle with her own liver’s nemesis.
Keyes awoke in the middle of the night, troubled. He tried his usual remedy for insomnia, work, but was unable to concentrate on his current chapter, which dealt with one of Seamus’ four ex-wives. He went to the kitchen and sat there by candlelight smoking a cigarette over a glass of warm milk. After fifteen minutes of this therapy, Keyes yawned, extinguished his cigarette and candle, rinsed his milk glass, and returned to his own room.
This time he fell into sleep quickly... and equally quickly, plunged into the depths of a dream which he would remember until the end of his days. The dream went on and on, and was one of those in which he was aware that he was dreaming, but was unable to escape from it.
First, he saw the well on the Marquee deck, but the hole was three times as wide as in reality, and virtually bottomless. The entire scene itself floated in some kind of star-speckled void. Loud thunder boomed and rolled like a great cosmic ocean. Out of the well floated Alan Wales, handsome and vital and laughing in echoing guffaws at three figures who stood around him.
The Keyes-who-dreamed knew somehow that he was looking at Three Murderers, and these were stock players from one of his earlier dreams – each one had the face of Claude Keyes. Wales’ laughter was now almost as deafening as the thunder, and the first Keyes, as if unable to stand the laughing any longer, struck at Wales with a set of iron manacles which had appeared in Keyes’ hands. Wales, still laughing, began to rotate in the air from the force of the blow, pinwheels of blood radiating from his spinning form.
The second Keyes seized the whirling body, and pinned it down, forcing the limbs into unnatural positions.
The third and final Keyes was suddenly in possession of the manacles, and began to run in leaping slow-motion strides to the river. It was a much cleaner and clearer river than the Avon had been for years – the stars were reflected in it.
Keyes flung the chains away from himself and a fine spatter of blood rained from them as they whirled through the air toward the deepest part of the Avon river. But the heavy metal links landed upon a swan instead, wrapping themselves around its neck, and dragging the huge pale bird beneath the surface...
At last, the river disappeared. The stars went out, and Keyes saw his three selves fly through the air toward each other, to become one again. The spirit of Wales was gone.
Keyes was alone in the void.
(3:8) The Jester’s Bells
Very late that night, slightly into morning of the next day, Grace Lockhart sat on a stool in The Jester’s Bells, quietly telling a mostly sympathetic George Brocken a great many of her hopes, her fears, her aspirations. Her make-up, not terribly subtle or effective at the best of times, was streaked with tear tracks, so that parts of her face resembled a dog-eared street map. The names “Sandra” and “Wales” came up frequently. When the well of her miseries became too deep for Brocken, he privately occupied his mind with one of his favourite mental exercises, that of redesigning the people around him, of clothing Grace more suitably (to his mind), re-styling her hair, and visualizing her in some far place, where she might be happier. Occasionally, Brocken’s nose would wrinkle as Grace’s perfume wafted across his face; it was an inexpensive scent which was supposed to suggest “the magic of a midsummer night,” but made Brocken wonder only if Grace had recently fallen into a vat of fermented apricots.
From the jukebox behind them, a husky-voiced woman questioned, in less high-flown terms, the validity of continuing to exist without love in this troubled world.
(3:9) The Gilded Lily
Around the corner and down the street in The Gilded Lily, Kiri Ellison’s thoughts were her own, as hidden and protected as her body was exposed. It was a rough crowd tonight, of truckers and factory labourers and drug dealers, and she was dancing to Guns ‘N’ Roses rather than Carl Orff, concentrating on giving the men what they wanted, as opposed to any experimentation with the limited form of her art.
What one of them wanted, just before last call, resulted in her being forced to explain her lack of interest to him with an open-handed punch. She left her surprised admirer on his leathered ass, blood spewing from a nose permanently altered.
(3:10) The apartment of Alessandra Edel
Sandra Edel was in her tower room across the river, walking back and forth through the apartment, wearing her favourite nightdress, a translucent blue affair of silk and lace. She was talking to herself, soliloquizing in the best tradition of her profession. There was no one there to applaud or criticize or hear at all, unless perhaps ther
e was an audience of shades from the past lurking quietly in the stairwell.
From time to time, she would pick up the framed photograph of Alan Wales, and hold it at arm’s length, frowning as if she was not quite sure who it was. Finally, she turned it face down on the table, and stood staring out the window, her lips still moving silently.
(3:11) The Necropolis
Alan Wales was laid to rest, as the saying goes, on Saturday morning. The weather was splendid, as the days of late autumn often are in southern Ontario. The sun shone gloriously; the crisp air had about it the zest of champagne. Stratford’s Avondale Cemetery looked even more charming than it ordinarily did, and it was one of Canada’s more charming graveyards. Only the solemn old evergreen trees and some tombstones, so mournful in both colour and attitude, kept the place from asking to be pressed into service as a set for A Midsummer Night’s Dream or even The Magic Flute.
The grave was near the river, which was allowed to be itself this far downstream. The water in it moved slowly, meandering through a swamp of dead and dying trees – gnarled, twisted, blasted. Beavers might have made something useful and pleasant of it, had there been any beavers about.
Rats liked it well enough, and birds. The dark copses were filled with birds, and on such a morning as this, they were singing their gaudy heads off.
Wales was fortunate in the neighbourhood