Illusions
The boy runs from the grimy alley’s mouth, trainers slapping on the pavement, eyes wild and lips forming a perfect, surprised ‘O’. A second boy appears, wielding an ignited aerosol, and chases the first boy with a tongue of flame that stutters in the night breeze and casts eerie shadows along the street. Alex has to stand aside to let them past. He watches the two figures run silently into a side road, and even when the second boy catches up with the first, licking the flame across the back of his head and setting fire to the short stubble of his hair, neither of them calls out. Once they are gone, Alex hears a keening moan far away over the houses that rises into a shriek and then fades like a siren. The street is quiet, the evening is dark.
Saturdays and Sundays are the worst. He fills the days he isn’t at work with walking. He used to visit his girlfriend in Glasgow, but the weekends are his own now, and he can settle on nothing else apart from putting one foot in front of the other and moving on according to some internal rhythm, not caring where he ends up or how long he is out. At work, thought can be killed; on his own, it has to be conquered.
A streetlight flickers and dies above him. There are basement flats around here with bars on the windows; potholes in the road are like ulcers, pitting the tarmac. He doesn’t know where he is, and turns down one street, then another, without gaining his bearings. A car passes by very slowly around the corner, and then guns its engines as it hits the flat stretch.
Alex has lived in this town for a year and knows barely a fraction of its streets, but he has never been lost before. Always, a local landmark or a sign pointing him in the right direction home. His feet hurt. They feel as if they’re trying to curl into fists.
In the quiet night he can hear a piano being played, a slow and mournful melody picked out one note at a time. It drifts along the road towards him and he follows its beckoning finger along the street, arriving at red door that opens onto a murky stairwell. The walls are covered in old posters. Peering down, he can see an oil lamp fluttering in the darkness.
The music changes to a carnival rhythm that stops abruptly when Alex pushes his way through the door, and becomes more ominous the closer he gets to the bottom.
They’re mocking me, he thinks. Whoever it is. The thought makes him smile. He keeps heading down.
There is a stage against the far wall, a thick red curtain that hangs low in each corner, and a piano in the pit below. There are three figures up on the stage, two men and a woman, but no one looks at him as he enters the room. The walls are black, and the ceiling is studded with silver jewels close enough for him to touch if he were to reach up his hand. There are five tiers of seats in the theatre. Alex slips into the back row and hunches down to watch.
There is a shout of laughter from the stage. One of the men has his head thrown back, the little scrub of beard on his chin pointing to the ceiling, and then just as quickly thrust down to bob against his chest. The other man, younger, taller than the first, strides over to the left hand side of the stage and disappears behind the curtain. The woman scratches her left calf with the toe of her right foot and adjusts a clasp in her bottle-red hair before taking up her position on the right. In the centre of the stage, the bearded man seats himself at a small wooden desk and makes quick movements with a pencil over a yellowed parchment page. Alex watches, his arms folded across the back of the seat in front.
The woman creeps forward, carrying a metal pail towards the bearded man. In front of his desk, she tips it up and pours out a pile of dirt. With her hands, she spreads the earth around, smoothing it out, glancing fearfully up at him to see if he is dissatisfied with her work. She slinks off as he rises up from his desk. The footlights cast rugged shadows onto the plain backdrop.
Even from the back of the theatre, Alex can see the muscular, hunched figure, strong and purposeful, drawn on the parchment.
The bearded man approaches the circle of earth on the stage floor and buries the drawing; the lights dim, a moaning wind scurries up from backstage. A fist emerges from the earth, then a muscled forearm, a shoulder joint and a mottled gasping head, followed by another hand and the straining torso of the younger man Alex saw exit stage left a few minutes earlier. He heaves himself onto the stage, out of the earth, and lies prone while he gathers his breath.
Alex knows that it’s all done with smoke and mirrors, that the stage magic stretches no further than clever lighting and a concealed trap door, but he is still on his feet and clapping before the actors have broken the scene. They all turn as one and bow.
“Come and say hello,” the woman says. She beckons him over. He slides out from the back row and walks down a strip of black carpet that is scarred with cigarette burns. The younger man brushes the dirt from his forearm.
“My name’s Louisa. The devilish character over there is Mr Blackwood, and our younger friend is called Christopher. ”
“I’m Alex,” he says. He stands below the apron of the stage, looking up at them. There is a seductive smell in the air, of old sweat, powder make-up and incense.
Louisa says, “Very pleased to make your acquaintance. You’re joining us just in the middle of our first rehearsal.”
“Joining you?”
“The advert outside?”
“Yes,” Alex tells them. “I saw it, and I thought …”
“Well you look perfect for the part. Perfect, I’m sure. And I promise that all this will be far more impressive once the details have been ironed out. ”
“It looks wonderful,” he says, and as straight opinion is not something that flows easily from him, Alex takes a step back in his mind and wonders what made him say yes in the first place. He picks at the skin around his fingernails; Louisa smiles widely. She has too many teeth for her mouth.
Mr Blackwood ambles off-stage and Christopher collects a dustpan and brush to clean up the dirt, which he pours back into the metal bucket. Alex looks for signs of a concealed trap door once the dirt has been removed. Nothing.
Louisa steps down into the band pit and takes his hand. She leads him into a seat in the front row and clasps his fingers between her palms.
“We said to ourselves, ‘The first person to walk through that door, that’s who we’ll use for the part’. We really did say that, didn’t we Chris?”
Christopher nods obliquely. He carries the bucket backstage.
“Within reason, of course,” she continues. “I mean … they had to look right, we had to get the right feeling from them.”
“Lucky for me. ”
“It’s written by Mr Blackwood. The piece we’re putting on. Just a little something to open with, you understand.”
“I should say,” Alex starts, thinking it better to confess now than have it become blindingly obvious once he’s committed himself, “I’ve never acted before. I don’t know how to act.”
“Nonsense. People do it everyday. Every time you meet someone, you’re acting a part. What do you do for a living?”
“Office work,” he says vaguely.” Data entry …”
Louisa bites down on her plump lip, commiserating.
“Well every day, when you put on your tie or walk through the door of your office, you’re acting a part. You’re adopting a persona. No one knows the ‘real you’, am I right?”
“I suppose.”
“Then it’s settled,” she grins. “You’re alive, and that’s all the experience you need with us.”
Alex glances up. Mr Blackwood is looking down at him from the stage, running the tips of his fingers through the auburn trim of his beard. Christopher is settled behind the piano, a primed cigarette twitching in his mouth as he runs off a short, celebratory trill across the keys.
“Rehearsals tomorrow are at seven o’clock,” Mr Blackwood says. “You can bring the wine.”
The streets that had baffled him an hour ago now gently lead him home. All that time, he was only ten minutes away from his front door. With some judicious short cuts he’ll be able to trim that down to five.
The next day at work breezes by. This is unusual; with something to look forward to at the end of it, the day usually drags. When he still had the train to catch to Glasgow and his girlfriend, Friday afternoon crept along minute by unforgiving minute. He types in his rows of numbers, prints off his reports, and uses up a solid hour staring into the fractal wastes of his computer screensaver. Under the electric strip lighting in the toilet, his skin looks greasy and pale. He thinks of the oil lamps in the theatre, the guttering candle making its shadow-play on the walls from the iron sconce above the piano. As he signs out at the end of the day, Alex remembers Louisa telling him that he is already an actor, and rehearsals will just make it official. He says goodbye to a few colleagues as he leaves. He acts saying goodbye.
Louisa sits him down with the script, her eyes button-bright and the gloss on her lips catching the candlelight. She is wearing a long, black lace cardigan over a red silk slip. When she crosses her legs and leans forward, Alex can see that she is trying to smuggle a roll of fat under it.
He has already had a quick look through the script. There are no lines or stage directions as such, only vague suggestions and thematic hints grouped under each scene. This is to be an improvised drama, of a sort.
“Which you’ll be perfect at,” Louisa reassures him. His stomach tightens. “After all, what do you do in any situation life happens to throw at you?”
“Improvise?” he suggests. Louisa beams and taps two fingers against his forearm.
“Precisely! I knew you would pick it up.”
It has been a good few months now since a woman last touched him, even with a gesture as innocent as two fingers on the forearm to illustrate a point. Alex feels his scalp tingle. Louisa’s voice becomes pleasantly soporific, and he nods along to her as she outlines the challenges and emotional value of improvised drama.
As Mr Blackwood suggested, Alex has brought along half a dozen bottles of wine, three red and three white. The others gather around him in the front row, lounging over the seats while they drink and discuss the script. Christopher rarely speaks. He runs his pianist’s fingers through his hair and scratches the stubble on his chin. Mr Blackwood makes the occasional gnomic pronouncement, and seems content to let the others interpret his work as they see fit. Louisa does most of the talking. She launches little sallies into each character’s field, before advancing or retreating depending on the severity of Mr Blackwood’s silent defences. A raised eyebrow is enough to send her back, before she regroups and approaches along a fresh avenue. Alex wonders what Louisa does in the evening, since as far as he can tell she lives alone.
He has this much worked out; Mr Blackwood is playing a medieval alchemist challenging God by attempting to create a golem-like creature from clay and ashes, calling it forth from the earth with his rituals and imprecations. Louisa is his abused and downtrodden daughter, forced to assist with her father’s blasphemous task. Christopher is to play the golem, when he isn’t playing the piano (recorded music to take over when he makes his entrance through the trap door). Alex, the last minute addition to their troupe, is to play a travelling poet, who stops at the alchemist’s house for the night, falls in love with the daughter, and attempts to free her from a life of nefarious occultism. It was all a little ripe, but Alex was eager to start.
“Now,” Louisa says, “what we want to do is really inhabit our characters. Mr Blackwood has provided us with rough sketches as to their means and motives, but it will be our job to colour in those sketches and make them stand up off the page, if you see what I mean?”
“And improvise the words?” Alex asks her. He sips his wine. With little to spend his spare money on, he has not bought cheap.
“There’s improvisation,” Mr Blackwood says, “and then there’s improvisation.”
Louisa nods. “I couldn’t have put it better myself. It doesn’t mean we’re going to go out there on opening night and just say the first thing that comes into our heads. This is where the hard work comes in. We block out the scenes in rehearsal, work on our own characters, and devise the dialogue at the same time. Do you understand?”
“I think so.”
“The dialogue is improvised, and then rehearsed, and then added to with more improvisation …”
“I see,” Alex says. They do this for a living.
“We can’t pay you,” Mr Blackwood says, as if noting the direction of Alex’s thoughts. “But you’ll get a percentage from the door.”
“Well, that would be more than enough, I’d be very happy –”
“And the pleasure of our company,” Christopher says, glancing at Louisa. “That should be payment enough.”
He tells no one at work what he is doing. They wouldn’t understand, although he thrills to think that curiosity might take one or two of his colleagues along to the little underground theatre on opening night, lured by the flyer he pins up on the staff room notice board. As he treads the boards, they might even recognise him, through the costume and the words and despite the sheer improbability of one of their workmates being up on the stage, inhabiting the skin of another person. He can’t quite imagine it himself. Diligently he prints off his documents, types in his numbers, signs his name on the way in and the way out of the office. In his head, and from seven until ten in the evening, he is love’s assassin, disguised as a troubadour.
After a week of rehearsal, on stage he becomes someone else. Peering out from behind his eyes there is a multitude, and only he can bring them into the light. There are muscles in his imagination that have never felt exercise before, and after that first week, grafting flesh onto the bare bones of his character, they ache.
He never tires of seeing Christopher emerge from the ground, an automaton clawing his way out of the earth to take his first commanded steps, while a spiky melody reverberates from the speakers above the stage.
Louisa comes up to him after rehearsals at the end of the week as they are getting changed to go home. No dressing rooms, just the corridor behind the stage and the cramped closet bathroom with a bracket of mildew against the window, and the view of a shattered car park. They have costumes now. Sewn together from Christopher’s designs, “Thematically true,” as Louisa claims, if not historically accurate. He warms to the idea of such a relative approach to the truth. During the day, factual accuracy. At night, emotional truth …
“Tomorrow’s the big night,” Louisa says. “Nervous?”
He nods, not trusting his voice. You’re nervous going to the dentist, or meeting a girl for a first date. This was a whole different scale. King Louis ascending the scaffold of the guillotine perhaps? It was that kind of fear.
“Have you invited anyone?” she asks him as, nonchalantly, she strips out of the rag dress she wears as the alchemist’s daughter. She’s naked underneath, apart from a black g-string, not as heavy as Alex at first thought, and her breasts jostle against each other as she turns towards him.
“My girlfriend,” he says, turning away, crimson. Get used to this, he thinks. Theatre is no place for inhibition. “My ex-girlfriend, I mean.”
“I didn’t think you were in touch?”
“No, well … I thought I’d ask her to see me in this. Moral support, you know.”
Louisa hooks on her bra and pulls the red silk slip over her head. “Well that’s nice, trying to be friends. I like that. Very mature.”
She grins at him as if he’s letting her into a private joke. When she leaves, slinging her handbag over her shoulder, she leans in towards him and kisses him with dry lips against his cheek.
“She’ll be so impressed with you, I know it. You’ll show her what you’re really like.”
Louisa leaves by the back door and he can hear her heels clacking across the concrete, fading as she turns the corner of the block. Alex stands alone backstage, clutching the green leggings and the purple tunic he has been given to help create the illusion of a wandering bard. It’s cold; he starts to shiver. He huddles into the costume. He’s only five minutes from home, and none of them know where he lives. He hasn’t spent any money on this, he hasn’t signed a contract. There is a tap dripping somewhere in the building, amplified by empty corridors and bare rooms. The piano describes a muffled tune on the other side of the wall.
He could be home in moments. He could never walk down this street again.
Taking up his clothes, Alex gets changed and waves goodbye to Mr Blackwood and Christopher as he leaves.
RICHARD STRACHAN – Born in 1977 in Stirling. Has lived and worked around the U.K. Now based in Glasgow. Short stories and articles in Markings and Sein und Werden. Also writes film reviews for the Future Movies website. In 2003 he was shortlisted for the London Writer's Prize. Currently looking for a publisher for his first novel.
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