Shadowplay

by Joseph O'Connor

  ‘I see you brought our old friend the Ripper into your work after all,’ Irving says. ‘Your one-time moral scruples notwithstanding.’

  ‘The piece has nothing to do with the Ripper. What are you talking about?’

  ‘Coincidence, you will tell me, those elements of the piece. The preying on young women, the sick obsession with their blood. Of course everything is grist to your mill. Isn’t that right, Bram?’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I should rather not discuss it at the moment. I have work that needs doing.’ He drops the cigarette to the floor, mashes it out with his foot.

  ‘I would value your opinion.’

  ‘I do not think so.’

  ‘That is for me to judge.’

  ‘Very well.’ He sighs, stares up at the stair-head. ‘I thought it filth and tedious rubbish from first to last. A bucket of piss and schoolboy vulgarity.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘This is what you have learnt from your years at the Lyceum? Where Shakespeare was god? Where beauty was our aim?’

  ‘The script, such as it was, was culled together hastily. If perhaps you were to read the novel and base your final judgement on that.’

  ‘Damn you and your “novel”. A cheap, fetid, piece of lavatory trash. Choked full of arch glances and cowardly hints, you sly little hack. Things you don’t have the nerve to spit out like a grown-up. A penny dreadful reeking of sex-weirdness and pimples. Confidences I imparted to you, man to so-called man, now quoted like daubings on the wall of a jakes. A phonograph where your heart should be, that is what you have. And the gall to mention the name of Ellen Terry in this sordid gutbucket? How dare you look your reflection in the face?’

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘But your sort has no reflection. You are vampiritude itself. You take all and give nothing, but gorge on those around you. Then, enjoy your miserable self-portrait, you bloated, talentless slug, you are the only one in the world who ever shall.’

  Harks now steps between them, voice shaking. ‘Chief, I’ll thank you to step upstairs and calm yourself down.’

  ‘Shut your impudent mouth, woman, and don’t get above your station.’

  ‘You thick-headed, posturing ponce,’ she says. ‘You bullying low bastard, you’ll talk of my station? You’re due a razoring but I wouldn’t dirty my blade on you. Come over here, Chavvy, say that to my face. I’m a London-born girl, you remember that, Tosspot, else I’ll beat you to Brixton and back, you bitch’s leavings.’

  ‘Get out of my theatre.’

  She spits at his shoes. ‘Stick your playhouse up your frock, John. I never liked you.’

  The Chief strides onto the stage and bellows at the stagehands, ‘Get any shit that belonged to that pantomime out of my sight. We have a play to perform this evening.’

  ‘We was just talking a moment to Miss Terry, sir. Hold your horses if you would.’

  ‘In case you had failed to note it, Miss Terry is not your employer and neither is the author of that abortion. Get it out.’

  Now she is crossing the stage, her face a mask of fury.

  ‘Could you comport yourself with the tiniest shred of dignity,’ she says. ‘You might be down yourself one day, don’t kick another when he is.’

  ‘He is a little Irish clerk, Ellen. That is all he ever was. These pretensions to so-called literature are the curse of all his countrymen, I never met one of them didn’t think himself a bloody poet, as does every other savage on the face of Christ’s earth.’

  ‘Stop it, can’t you. He is listening.’

  ‘My theatre is almost penniless and he’s puking his stupid stories. Wish to Christ I’d never laid eyes on him if you want to know the state of it. He’s held me back, that’s truth.’

  ‘You would be nothing without him. This place would be a ruin. He has given you nothing but loyalty and love all this time and this is how you reward him?’

  ‘Some were born to serve. It’s all they’re bloody good for.’

  ‘You filthy arrogant pig. How dare you speak of any friend of mine in that way? He is many times the man you will ever be.’

  ‘THEN GO TO HIM. God knows you have never been selective before.’

  The few steps from the wings seem to take Stoker twenty years, and the punch that has been building in him every second of that time fells the Chief like a punctured sack. He sprawls, lips bleeding. No one moves to help him.

  ‘You cur,’ Stoker says. ‘Get up.’

  But he doesn’t.

  ‘Enjoy your revenge, Bram. I hope it soothes your envy.’

  It is like the unleashing of a poison gas, this sight of the Chief laid low. It will never be put back in the vial. He elbows up, gapes about, blood spilling from his mouth and nose, wipes his lips with the back of his wrist, begs a handkerchief but nobody has one. There is no script for this scene. Even the dog looks afraid.

  The felled Chief manages to stand, leans against the proscenium pillar, wheezing, the florid red map on his white linen chemise like a splattered Africa. He bends, picks something tiny from a crack in the floor, undrapes his cravat, wraps the tooth in it, gasps racking him. One of the costume girls brings a towel and a pitcher of water. He keeps brokenly whispering the same word … ‘violence … violence’ … as the girl, now weeping, attempts to help him.

  A police sergeant is here, calling out from the main aisle. He needs to see the proprietor, it is an emergency, he says. There is no time, they must hurry. It must be now.

  Outside a fleet of hansoms has been hurriedly summoned. Every player, every stagehand, every carpenter tumbles to find a place, the ticket-girls, the ushers, the box-boys, the mechanics. As the convoy makes its glacial progress across thronged Waterloo Bridge, prayers arise from the passengers, as steam from a train. God help us. Don’t let it be true.

  Some are weeping or trying to console, others sit glass-eyed, silent. In the distance arise the spires of south-east London, beyond them the hilltops of Kent. The drivers are whipping their horses, ‘on, boy, on’. Now the mountains of thickening smoke, rising over where Deptford must be, coaxed by the wind into a vast spiralling corkscrew.

  On the Mile End Road, three fire-wagons appear, bells clanging, axe-men at the ready, and a division of the Horse Police thunders from its barracks, but the smoke is so chokingly black and the sky so dark that those who have seen these things before know it is already too late

  They hear the fire before they see it, a bellowing, churning crackle, which grows louder as they round the barricades into Tobacco Dock Yard and the horses whinny up in terror. The railway bridges are burning, the scenery store is ablaze. The sight is not possible. How can stone burn?

  Ropes and pulleys on fire, a roaring conflagration, black and purple flames licking viciously at old masonry, smoke streaming ever upwards, flaps of burning canvas rip themselves away and float into the wind, others whip themselves like flagellants. Elsinore and Venice. Birnam Wood and Caesar’s Rome. The Forest of Arden, the storm-tossed sea, all of them burn, their ancient oils in smoulders, now melting, now smoking, collapsing in on themselves, now bursting into globes of orange-black flame. Lines of men passing buckets but nothing can be saved. The fire-wagoners, the Lyceum people, rush forward to help, high cries echoing around the upper caverns of the scorch-blackened arches. The moss on the walls burning, the wild flowers among the bricks, the abandoned rail-tracks up on the summit, the little sheds and work-shacks. And now the bricks themselves.

  The backdrops pop and burn, one by one the vats of paint explode, the hanging-racks collapse and sunder. A moving, squealing, scrabbling flood as a hundred thousand rats flee their metropolis among the stones, scuttling over the boots of the carpenters, swarming over each other, over their own blind young.

  In the high unseen nooks, wrens’ nests are burning and a sparrowhawk on fire falls through her final agony. Hosepipes have been connected to a culvert from the canal but in the face of the bellowing furnace-like heat, their puny spurts turn to steam. Soon the hoses
themselves are burning and must be sacrificed. As the first of the bridges starts to totter – impossible sight – those fighting its flames rush back.

  It shudders, this mountain of blockwork, lowing groans split the sky, boards and gutterings from its upper level rain down, broken pipes and manhole covers, rusted bolts, warped planks, showers of mortar, then the heaviest blocks themselves, the vast capstone and voussoirs, which seem to fall with strange slowness and shake the earth when they hit, the sound so sickening, the clouds of red-black dust.

  Like some terrible giant of stone attempting to uproot himself from a captor’s chains, the second bridge shudders, incensed by the death of his brother. ‘Fall back,’ call the captains. ‘Christ’s sake, fall back!’

  The galleon on which Faust was sailed into Hell, the battlements trodden by Banquo’s ghost, the balcony from which poor Juliet asked the reason for names, all inside the angered arch is now vomiting flame and utters a bilious roar. Burning innards flail and spill, a cataract of falling sewage spills down the soaked and tottering walls in a hail of filthy gravel and burning railway sleepers. The stench of tar and cordite, the spumes of crashing sparks. As though in trance Irving totters, magnetised towards the monster. His stagehands drag him back.

  ‘My life’s work. My plays. My children … I am ruined.’

  As the second bridge collapses, bent trees on its summit ablaze, the avalanche of broken blocks sends a tremoring roar so far through south-east London that it is measured by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.

  ‘Stoker,’ Irving rages, being led away through the dust cloud, his trembling hands singed, shocked face blackened like a sideshow Othello’s. ‘You vengeful Irish parasite. You cursed me this day. I will never forgive you. My murderer.’

  — XX —

  The Fall

  Fog spreads across Mina’s windows like an evicted child’s breath.

  She is a pentagram drawn in blood.

  An upside-down crucifix.

  All’s well that ends well.

  No.

  Mina knows all languages, has inherited all dictionaries, has counted up to the number where infinity stops.

  But these creatures she will never understand.

  When first came the apes, they began their custom of naming everything they saw, like a conqueror putting a stamp on his colony: prompt table, fore-stage, paintcloth, cyclorama, greenroom, stalls, vomitorium. But why name the things that will all end in dust and leave nameless the things that shall live?

  A salt-shake of stars across the blackcloth of the sky.

  The kind of praise that makes the waves dance. Why have they no word for that?

  She screams her name at him nineteen times, a black-magical number. He thinks it’s just the wind in the eaves.

  Mina

  Mina

  Mina

  Mina

  Mina

  Mina

  Mina

  Mina Mina Mina Mina Mina

  Mina Mina Mina Mina Mina

  Mina

  Mina

  A shadow among the purlins, the weary oaken skeleton, she watches the man with the word-machine, he is weeping.

  ‘Stoker’, his name. One who burns fires. Everything in him dried up and smouldered out by anger, an arid Arizona of the heart.

  The greatest actor here is none of the players on the stage but the man come to haunt her attic every night. All these years he has played himself, he knows the role well, is often convincing as he plays it.

  But then there are the othertimes. They all have their othertimes.

  Times when he carries his lantern into the fog of himself. Through realms of flames and whispers, forests of shadowed memories, caves where the daubs on the walls are of monsters, made with a bloodstained palm.

  He is not breathing air. He’s breathing Mina.

  He inhales her with the dander. She roams his fevered bloodstream, the canyons of his heart, his jellyfish lungs, the vats and pumps and valves that keep him living, in the world he makebelieves is the real one.

  He

  believes

  in his senses

  when even a dog

  hears more and the bat sees

  more and a fox has keener smell

  and the fishes talk by touch

  and the hummingbirds

  by taste and the lowliest

  earthly vermin know

  more of their rock

  than this ape

  who refuses

  to know

  it

  Light in at the window, through a gap in the curtain of sacking. He listens to the plash of the rain.

  An actor remembers every part ever played. There are times when he wonders why.

  Mina knows.

  What they call life is a ghost-ship. On the ship are many rooms. Small. Others grand. Some princely. Some poor. An uncountable number. There is always another. This is how they escape the prison of the self. To see the world through the windows of someone else’s room.

  There is only one way. He tried to build a room. Poor scatter-heart. Now the ship has been burnt.

  30th May, 1897

  At dawn this morning, took the ferry down the river to work. Cold, blowy day. Felt feverish, a chill coming on. Wheezing, hard to breathe. Black phlegm when I coughed. Took a half grain of arsenic and a dose of chloral.

  Unlocked the building – no one in – went directly up to my office. Of late find myself unable to look at the stage.

  Commenced to empty the desk and shelves, tie my books into parcels. Much work in the task, shall take four or five days. From down in the auditorium and backstage I heard people coming in. But I did not go down.

  Stepped out into the corridor for a smoke when I noticed E coming up the stairs. She looked bad. Asked me what I was doing there. I said lately I have preferred to smoke out the big bay window there, on the landing, don’t like the stench in the office. Could see there was something she wished to ask me. Felt I knew what it was, but, since might be wrong, did not prompt.

  Would I see him?

  I said no.

  Nodded, said she understood. Followed me back to the office, shut the door behind.

  As a favour to her, in honour of friendship, might I reconsider my stance? He had suffered such a bad shock, she feared for his sanity.

  I said that his sanity, in my own view, had gone several leagues past the point of any normal person fearing for it, his behaviour to me at the staging had surely made that clear. As for what she termed my stance, it was nothing so worked-out. All I had remaining to me was an instinct for survival. No more would I grovel for my dignity.

  I must surely know what he was like? Headstrong, mercurial. Saying things he didn’t mean and soon came to regret. It was hard for him, being stubborn, burden of genius. The usual claptrap and balderdash.

  I said I had no interest in what was hard for him, would no longer give consideration to the agglomeration of self-regard and cruelty that too often calls itself genius.

  How so?

  Had hoped to come to the matter more gradually with her but suddenly it was there between us like an unwelcome acquaintance who comes in and sits down at the table. The bard is correct. If ’twere done, it were better done soon.

  Told her I am leaving the Lyceum, have written and sent my letter of resignation. This morning put the house for sale or lease, whichever proves the quicker, shall be returning to Dublin with the boy and Flo as soon as is practicable.

  You shall kill him if you do, she said. He would not last a year.

  Good, I said.

  You do not mean that, I know.

  At this point, I don’t know why – tiredness and strain, I must suppose – my feelings began to spill over and overcome me. She listened as I spewed my litany. To have failed so long was painful enough, to have done it this publicly had left wounds from which no friendship could recover.

  ‘Love survives all,’ she said.

  A remark I ignored and a demonstrable falsehood. I
f there is one thing I have had my fill of by now, it is actorly trash.

  One endures them bleating away like spoilt ninnies at rehearsal, would my character do that, should she wear this. One wishes the misfortunate author would rise from the tomb and tell them do what you are bloodywell told.

  God knows how fond of her I am and the high regard in which I hold her own artistry but these people who dress up for a living all have something amiss with them, some hollowness where sense or ordinary morality should be. This they seek to fill by spouting emotionally evocative but substantively meaningless gobbledegook, followed by a deft half-turn-away as the lights fade. I should rather listen to any raving idiot in the street than an actor. At least he doesn’t expect you to applaud.

  Back again she flew to the subject of the Chief like a maternity-crazed bird to its nest among dragons. She wrung her hands and insisted. I stood my line.

  Added to his personal slight was his professional arrogance. He had never listened, had met my every plea with gainsaying and mockery, had ignored my counsel with metronomic regularity. When I asked him to quit insisting on productions of such ludicrous flamboyance, every word I uttered he ignored.

  Our backdrops were burnt. We were led by a madman. For this I had left my country? Ruined my marriage? My happiness? Missed the hours better spent with my child at home?

  No, I said. No more.

  You are saying to me what you would like to say to him, she said.

  That much was true, one supposed.

  Then she did something I wished she had not. Reaching into her cloak she pulled out a copy of that accursed book that I wish I had never seen or begun to contrive. When I bring to mind the thousands of wasted hours it represents, the mausoleum made of paper, the hundreds of miles I walked in its wretched company, I hate myself for ever having been born with the storytelling disease and having squandered, in its service, whatever life I was intended to live.

  ‘This work is your country,’ she said. ‘Is it no consolation?’

  It took every famished fibre of the little manliness I have remaining not to seize the book from her hands and hurl it out the window. Followed by her. And me.