Come Again

by Robert Webb

  The three men started after her. She turned and leapt up the rest of the stairs, hearing Tassy’s voice behind her. ‘Madam! Gentlemen! Mr Lloyd is extremely particular about latecomers!’

  She swept aside a black curtain and pushed through a heavy swing door, finding herself at the top-left of the dress circle. It was about a quarter full: mainly older people and tourists. She moved swiftly down the aisle but years of theatre conditioning had her performing the same apologetic hop that people do when briefly passing between a wedding photographer and a large cake. Adjacent to the front row was another door, also marked ‘Private’ but with no code-lock. She pushed through this second door, just as her pursuers emerged from the first.

  It was a dingy backstage stairwell, filthy and lit with flickering naked bulbs. She rattled down three flights of narrow spiral steps. Two more doors: to her right, presumably the stalls of the auditorium. Ahead – she guessed this one would lead to a wing of the stage. She heaved open the soundproof door and let it swing closed behind her. Now she entered the relative gloom of the stage-right wing, subtly illuminated with blue working-lights. She could hear Kes proclaiming a soliloquy from near the end of the play. Most of the cast were onstage but a young woman in black clothes stared at Kate in astonishment. She was holding some kind of fairy costume by the shoulders, ready to help an actor with a quick change. Kate gave the costume assistant an excited smile and a thumbs-up as she darted past. ‘Break a leg!’ she randomly whispered and quickly started to climb up a metal ladder bolted to the side of the wall. She’d never been backstage at a proper theatre before and, despite the imminent potential for getting her own legs broken, had to admit to being a little thrilled. Or maybe that was just terror.

  As she climbed she saw the three heavies bundle into the wing below. Endearingly, they were keeping their voices down, although Kate considered that maybe that was because they were listening for her as well as frantically scouring the dark. Then they looked up and spotted her.

  Kate was now in the fly-tower of the theatre and scrambled onto a steel lighting gantry that stretched across the roof to the other side. It was narrow, with a low handrail on the side nearest the audience and nothing but a twenty-metre drop on the other. It was the natural habitat of lighting technicians wearing safety harnesses. She took a few steps across but spotted one of the heavies already halfway up the ladder of the opposite wall. She turned back and another was already at the top.

  This one first, then.

  The heavy walked towards her with an intimidating calm, the gantry wobbling slightly on its framework. Kate took the theatre programme from her back pocket and rolled it into a tube. The big dude chuckled at her pathetic weapon and was a metre away when Kate grabbed one of the powerful lights pointing down at the stage and swung it straight in his eyes. The lamp was red-hot and Kate muffled a scream of pain but leapt at the blinded heavy and jabbed him in the eye with the end of the rolled-up programme. He fell back and flailed uselessly at the end of the gantry, blocking her escape.

  She turned to see the other heavy clattering carelessly towards her, vibrating the steel bridge and almost losing his balance. Shorter, this one – but fast and sturdy. Kate panicked at the thought of how easy it would be to trip the idiot and see him fall to his probable death below. She dropped the programme and raised her arms. ‘I surrender!’ she said. He stopped in surprise. She continued truthfully in a slowly enunciated Russian whisper: ‘The strange thing is – I love Russia! And I’m sorry you’ve got wankers in charge! So have we! Let’s go downstairs and talk about Colonel Gagarin. I used to have a poster of Yuri and thought he was magnificent!’

  The heavy blinked momentarily and then swung a vicious left hook at Kate’s head. Disappointed, she flipped away from the swing, taking her weight on her strong right leg, calf, core – down, she coiled, then sprang! Jack-knifed herself forward into the air, whipping her head back and now down with horrible power into the face of her opponent. The heavy’s nose exploded with blood as the headbutt smashed into it. Kate recoiled with a lightning pain to her forehead but landed drunkenly on her feet. The man staggered back, his hands clutching his broken nose. Instantly moving, she swiped the blood from her dizzied sight and took three running strides to follow up with an airborne kick to the man’s chest. Her heel crashed into his solar plexus and she bounced heavily back onto the steel gantry as the Russian toppled like a modest fir tree and landed flat on his back.

  Kate climbed to her feet and stepped carefully over the groaning heavy, taking a breath and sprinting to the ladder at the opposite end.

  She jumped down the last few rungs and landed on the deck of the stage-left wing. She spotted the third heavy looking deeply unhappy. He was engaged in a muted, pushing-pulling argument with an outraged gaggle of actors and technicians. The performance was ongoing and Kate could see Kes still at work under the lights in a massive grey beard, throwing irritated glances at the noises off. The heavy spotted her, roughly shoved the skimpily-clad young man playing Ariel to the ground and rushed at Kate. She grabbed a sword from the props table and wielded it with two hands above her head. It was metal but blunted. Perfect.

  Actually, not perfect. Possibly a mistake. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with this thing.

  The heavy didn’t care about the sword and barrelled into her before she could bring it down. Her nostrils were accosted by his vinegary after shave as the two of them collapsed into a balsa-wood throne, smashing it to fragments. Kate was under the man and felt his hands reaching for her throat.

  She twisted to the side with all her might and managed to jab the heavy in the temple with an elbow. He yelled with pain and she struggled from under him, staggering to her feet. She ran onto the stage but the heavy rugby-tackled her to the floor again. She felt the warmth of the stage lights and wished she could have made a more dignified entrance.

  ‘Stop wrestling me!’ she yelled, face-down on the deck. ‘I don’t know anything about wrestling. Stand up nice and straight so I can hit you, you awkward bastard.’

  The man now had his arms around her waist and was trying to squeeze the life out of her. Feeling the blood swelling in her face, she looked up to see Kes in some kind of see-through wizard’s gown over gold pants. He was staring at them in a state of apoplexy. But he was also a true pro and would surely incorporate the stage invasion into the performance.

  ‘Marsden! What the LIVING FUCK are you doing?!!’

  ‘Sorry!’

  She reached back and grabbed the heavy’s ears in two fists and pulled as hard as her triceps would allow. He gave a low roar and his grip loosened enough for her to wriggle free. The heavy was first to his feet: as Kate turned, his fist ploughed squarely into her left cheekbone.

  She felt the wooden stage rush to meet her, the pain of the blow only registering as her head bounced against the polished floorboards. Her vision was blurring but she caught sight of Kes’s veiny bare feet.

  Why don’t they ever wear shoes any more?

  She gave her training a micro-moment to translate the pain into mere information.

  Always the bare feet. People in real life don’t go around in bare feet the whole time. Absolutely weird.

  Flat on her back, she aimed her trainers at the gantry high above and summoned what was left of her power. Her knees halfway to her chin, she exploded up onto her feet in a single jump and turned, whipping round with a punch aimed at where she hoped the guy’s stomach would be. She wasn’t far off but he blocked with his right hand and now caught her in the face with the back of his left.

  Okay, element of surprise gone. This one knows he’s fighting a fighter.

  She spun from the blow and went down again. In her dazed world she realised that a large portion of the audience were laughing and applauding. The Wednesday matinée tourists and pensioners were flabbergasted but impressed by this daring take on The Tempest. The reviews had said that it was avant-garde but until now they’d assumed that was just to do with the reggae music.r />
  Now the heavy was advancing but Kate got a good view of Kes’s impressive gold-laméd arse as he stepped between them.

  ‘How DARE you strike my friend, you ATROCIOUS CUNT!’

  Kes squared up to the Russian and delivered an excellent stage punch – which is to say that he missed by a perfect two inches. Astonished that the Russian hadn’t obligingly gone down in a feigned knockout, Kes stood frowning as the man delivered a hefty upper-cut that sent Kes sprawling backwards onto the ground and out cold. Kate was getting to her feet as she heard a scream: Ariel in a chiffon leotard had jumped on the heavy’s back, getting a skinny, muscular arm around his neck and punching him in the ear with the other fist. The heavy wheeled around in confusion and now Miranda, Caliban and Antonio (the usurping Duke of Milan) all dragged him to the ground and piled on top.

  In the same moment, two more heavies invaded the stage from the other wing. Kate was given an extra second of recovery when the men stopped dead, bamboozled by the spectacle of their colleague drowning under a sea of torn Lycra and naked legs.

  Kate looked to the lip of the stage. She needed to get the memory stick to safety. She imagined jumping the metre down and making a dash for the exit.

  But now, a voice. A deep one with a Russian accent.

  ‘Wonderful!’

  She turned and was astonished to see Nestor Petrov advancing onto the stage. He was giving the kind of slow clap that made her think he ought to be wearing gloves and blowing a whistle to summon the von Trapp children.

  ‘Wonderful,’ he repeated. Middle-aged and handsome, with his short grey hair and his dark suit, carrying himself with the perfect posture of a bad actor, Petrov walked past his motionless and freaked-out henchmen to take centre-stage.

  Nestor locked his green eyes with Kate for the briefest moment before turning to the audience. ‘Is anyone filming this? You should! Get out your phones! Don’t be shy, this is part of the show! The theatre is too elitist. It belongs to us all!’

  Kate peered into the dark of the auditorium. The stage lights meant that she could only see the first two rows of the stalls: a look of delighted recognition on most of the faces. But nobody reached for their phone.

  Petrov went on: ‘Nice to see you – to see you nice! I am Nestor Petrov. You probably don’t recognise me but I sometimes appear on beautiful shows like Have I Got News For You and The National Lottery Live. You may also know me from a less successful show called My Football Team Win the Premier League!’

  A ripple of amusement from the audience. Petrov put his hands in his pockets and gave a self-deprecating shrug. ‘Well … maybe one day, yeah?’

  The visible fame and wealth of the actual Nestor Petrov was not what the audience had been expecting this Wednesday lunchtime. But given recent events in this exciting production, anything was possible.

  Petrov wagged a knowing finger at the audience and continued. ‘I know what you’re thinking. What has this to do with our wonderful Shakespeare’s famous The Tempest? Haha! I will tell you.’

  Kate stood with her black eye; her bleeding hands by her sides.

  Petrov took a modest little stroll, a few feet left and then right, marking out a patch of territory at the front of the stage, always keeping his eyes on the audience. ‘I identify with Prospero,’ he said with an abrupt sincerity. ‘He is my brother.’

  Erm.

  ‘Like me, he comes from nothing and had to work hard to become king of his island.’

  Double erm.

  ‘It’s not something you’ll hear from the mainstream media, sadly. The elites don’t like it. A humble man like me needs to be brought down by the Establishment …’

  Kate tried to judge how this was going down with the audience. But then she experienced a moment of clarity.

  Fuck the audience. The audience have no idea what a galaxy-class shit they’re dealing with.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Petrov,’ Kate said, raising her hand like a schoolgirl. ‘Can I say something?’

  ‘Of course. I am a free-speech advocate. People should be free to say what they think.’

  ‘That’s good of you.’

  ‘Including women.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘In Russia, I was considered something of a feminist.’

  ‘Fancy.’

  ‘Of course you can go too far with this.’

  ‘Right. What I’d like to—’

  ‘Ultimately, a man is a man and a woman is a woman.’

  ‘Uh-huh. I was going to ask—’

  ‘You, for example are not really a woman.’

  Kate had been slowly approaching the showboating paedophile. But her curiosity was piqued. She had absolutely no intention of entering a debate with this unpardonable man. The hearts and minds of this audience would be best won by reading about his criminality tomorrow in a respectable newspaper. But she couldn’t help being interested in how his awful brain worked. ‘Am I not a woman?’ she asked with her most reasonable smile.

  ‘No. You are part of this show, are you not?’

  ‘As much as you are.’

  ‘And you have given a splendid performance. The way you pretended to attack these men. Impressive. But Shakespeare was right. The stage is no place for a woman. Maybe I am old-fashioned.’

  ‘Shakespeare said no such fucking thing. He was working within the context of—’

  ‘You see, your dirty language is not fit for the public space. Indeed, the plays you say were written by Shakespeare were more probably written by your Earl of Oxford—’

  ‘There’s no evidence that—’

  Petrov extended an open hand towards Kate and slowly closed it as if closing a puppet’s mouth, saying rapidly: ‘A-shoo-shoo-shoo-shoo-shoo-shoo-shoosh.’

  I mean, sorry, but fuck this.

  She broke his arm.

  Or, to go back a little, in the blurred space of a second she: grabbed his wrist, twisted it over herself, transferred her grip as she swiped his legs from under him, levered the arm straight and then punched down on the back of his elbow with all her remaining strength, snapping it backwards.

  ‘Earl of Oxford, MY HAIRY TWAT!’

  Petrov screamed and passed out.

  It was at that point that the matinée audience began to wonder if this performance of Tempest! was going entirely as rehearsed.

  Three astonished heavies looked at each other in a frenzy of indecision. The one nearest to Kate regarded her with a face of pure murder. He began to move towards her. So did the others. Kate had nothing left and wondered at what point during what was about to happen to her anyone in the audience would understand that this was real.

  ‘Security service! Nobody move!’

  Toby Harker strode down the left aisle with six armed MI5 officers behind him. Another three were marching down the parallel aisle. ‘Thank you for your patience, ladies and gentlemen. Please keep your seats. This won’t take long.’ Toby leapt up the treads to the stage and Kate saw him containing his anguish as he registered her cut and bruised face. He pointed at the heavies in turn. ‘Right, then. You, you, and you – you’re under arrest under the Prevention of Dickheads Act, 2008.’

  ‘That’s not a real law,’ protested one of the heavies.

  ‘That’s okay, we’re not real policemen.’

  One of Toby’s agents moved ahead of him, aiming his pistol at the Russian. ‘On your knees, hands behind your head. Right now, you silly man.’

  Toby nodded towards his agent. ‘See?’

  Leaderless and drastically outnumbered, the newcomer’s unanswerable authority had the men glumly doing as they were told. Toby’s agents holstered their weapons and handcuffed the hired muscle.

  Toby approached Kate and muttered, ‘Really sorry I couldn’t get here sooner.’

  Kate smiled painfully. ‘You were worth the wait.’

  A partially recovered Kes joined them and said woozily. ‘Nice to see you, Tobias. Marsden, why didn’t you use the facility?’

  ‘Tassy wouldn’t let me
.’

  This made complete sense to Kes. ‘Oh God, yes. We’re all scared of Tassy.’

  Suddenly, a voice from the back of the stalls: ‘He’s got a gun!’

  Kate spun round to see a recovered Petrov standing right next to her. In the hand of his non-broken arm he was pointing a pistol at her head.

  ‘These people want to tell you lies about me!’ he yelled hoarsely into the dark. ‘But it’s all fake news, my friends. Whatever you read in their Jewish newspapers—’

  He didn’t get any further.

  Without a moment’s thought, Kate dropped backwards and delivered a kick at Petrov’s wrist that sent the gun spinning high into the fly-tower. She sprang straight back up and delivered a powerful chop to the side of his throat. In one fluid movement, Toby caught the gun and dropped its magazine on the deck. Petrov crumpled to the ground. Toby tucked the safetied weapon in the back of his belt and knelt by the unconscious Russian.

  ‘This prick needs an ambulance,’ he murmured to one of his agents.

  Kes was aware of the excellent acoustic qualities of his theatre and that Toby’s comment would have been audible from the back of the stalls. Still half-concussed, and with his grey beard hanging off one side of his chin, he decided to incorporate the line into some kind of conclusion.

  ‘This prick needs an ambulance,’ he intoned with a solemn inflection while swaying slightly. ‘And yea …

  Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits and

  Are melted into air, into thin air:

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on, and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.

  Kes caught the eye of his colleague up in the lighting box, who obligingly delivered a blackout.