Wonderkid

by Wesley Stace

  “How’s it going?” Greg asked. “Units?” I shook my head. “Well, where’s your sign?”

  “Sign?”

  “You’ve got to have a sign. Prices. What’s for sale! A sign! Use your noggin! Count it in! Count it out! You’re a vital part of the operation. I’ll help out with the rush at the end. This is Mister Hedges. This is, er . . .”

  “Sweet,” I said. It seemed vastly preferable to Edward. It didn’t even feel like being called by my surname.

  “Yeah, Sweet,” confirmed Greg. “He’s given up a life of crime to join the circus.” I had? No one could possibly have described me so glamorously until very recently: my life had been transformed in the span of an hour. I’d been unexpectedly promoted, improved, a black-and-white movie colorized and made 3-D.

  Mr. Hedges ignored me, struggling to make himself heard over the music. “So how’s the great experiment?”

  “Well,” said Greg, scratching his head: “Your guess is as good as mine. They’ve let two entire classes come in from the local kindergarten and some older kids from the comprehensive; the band are doing their bit; be nice to see some music moving; be nice if you got behind them on the radio, you know; the usual.”

  “Well, they sound good . . . when you can hear them.”

  “Yeah,” said Greg, throwing me a look behind Mr. Hedges’s back.

  Mr. Hedges turned to me: “How old are you? Seventeen?”

  “Fourteen,” I shouted.

  “What do you think of them?”

  “Honestly?” No one ever asked my opinion. “I like ’em. I thought it was going to be for children, when I saw all the kids, but it looks like the adults are into it as well.” How the Terrys would have hated it! “It’s a bit like punk for kids.”

  Mr. Hedges stood back and beamed: “Yeah. Punk for kids. Punk for kids whose parents like punk. Music for kids with cool parents. Top of the Pops for Tots. I like it.” He turned back to Greg. “Well, tell the boys to keep doing what they’re doing, and we’ll keep doing what we’re doing. We’ll get there. I believe in this. And we’re gonna join the dots. We’re not letting go.”

  After he’d gone, Greg turned to me with a smile: “Punk for kids? You’re doing his work for him.”

  The parents unavoidably passed my table as they exited but very few actually stopped; they had their hands full with their kids and their snacks and their sippy cups. Just when it seemed a total washout, up Blake bounded like a circus ringmaster, standing on a chair and shouting “Roll up! Roll up! Get your music here! Wunderkinds unite!” And the kids surrounded him, clambering on to and over him: it was like he was going to get dragged into the ground by African killer ants. Blake sat the kids on his knee one by one, let them have the prized photo, told a knock-knock joke, asked what they had for breakfast, and offered an autograph. Sales went through the roof. I had never held so much money in my life. I didn’t have change, and had no idea how to get any. Greg mouthed and mimed: “Make everything a fiver.” Up on the stage, the other three members of the band were breaking down gear, packing it into cases. That was why Blake spent so much time with the kids, Jack said: anything to avoid load-out.

  Greg stood back and basked in the moment, watching in admiration; I handed him the fivers as they rolled in. We sold out of everything, but Blake just kept going. No kid ever felt he was shaking and faking. When you were with Blake Lear, he was with you, and only you. There was no one else around. He wasn’t some disappointingly thin, dubiously bearded Santa Claus at the end of a long line: he was the man himself, the Spirit of Christmas.

  The last kid bailed reluctantly; the infant meet-and-greet had lasted almost as long as the gig. Greg riffled fivers in front of my face and said “I always said we needed a merch boy. Pizza’s on the band, Sweet,” as he kicked empty CD boxes across the room in celebration: “Blimey, I wouldn’t want to clean up this lot.” The floor was a scene of terrible devastation, wrappers floating in sticky spillage and oily slick: an environmental disaster in miniature.

  Blake breathed a sigh, either relief or exhaustion; perhaps simply pleasure at a job well done. “I’m starving. Can we feed you, Sweet? You want your just desserts? Or just dessert?”

  “Don’t you have a home to go to?” asked Greg.

  “Yeah. I live with my foster parents. Not far.”

  “Foster parents?” asked Blake. “What are they like?”

  “Slightly less fun than the children’s home, where I was before.”

  “Which one?”

  “Clements.”

  “I know that place. They wouldn’t have us play there. Shall we see if it’s okay for you to come and get pizza?”

  “No,” I said. “I can just come.”

  “No, no,” said Blake, as he led me back to the dressing room. The band had magicked the cases into a van. “Got to ask permission. Don’t want them to think you been kidnapped. Parents worry.”

  “Foster parents,” I said. “They don’t worry.”

  “All parents worry.”

  “Vol-au-vent,” said Greg with a shrug, before rubbing money fingers together, going in search of a check. “I’ll do the necessary,” he announced, the floorboards a trampoline beneath his bouncing stride.

  “Vol-au-vent?” I asked Blake, thinking this might be a less desirable dinner suggestion.

  “Yeah. He means ‘whatever you like,’ ‘it’s up to you,’ or ‘comme il vaut’ or something . . . but it gets a bit muddled in his head.” I nodded. “Come on,” he said, “let’s ask these foster parents face-to-face. And when they say yes, we’ll buy you pizza.”

  “Vol-au-vent.”

  It seemed a kind of miracle that Teri agreed, but when I smiled and waved to her out of the van window, just to reassure her that I wasn’t being kidnapped, she waved back and made a “shoo” gesture, which I took to mean that she didn’t much care one way or the other, though I did notice that she was talking to Blake in an unusually twittery, almost giggly, way. Perhaps she fancied Blake; she certainly never behaved that way with her husband or any other male. Our most regular form of communication was the rap of her knuckles on the kitchen window when she saw me doing something wrong in the back garden. At least, that’s how I remember it. (In extreme situations, she would take off her shoe and use that; once when I was “misbehaving” in the car, she put her heel right through the window of a phone box.) Perhaps Blake told her precisely what had happened (with any luck omitting all reference to my spectacular entrance), that I had very kindly helped them out and that they wanted to reward me; perhaps he mentioned that he taught at the local primary school; heaven knows what credentials he offered. But there she was, sending me on my way with a little wave. Bye.

  It was the band’s last date for a month or so: disappointing. Just as things had seemed like they were getting going. Real life notwithstanding, I’d pictured myself thumbing a ride on the WunderVan, leaving the home counties for dead and lighting out for the territories, eating pizza, drinking Coke, selling merch. That was not to be—at least not for now. In fact I had no immediate excuse to see them for some time. Blake himself was off on holiday: “and all you’ll get is a lousy postcard.”

  Life went back to normal, but normal was now more monotone than ever, completely substandard. Blake’s card finally came. On the front, a picture of a sandy beach with CORFU in bright red letters, and on the back: “Sun, sea, and hand in hand by the edge of the sand! I am in a state of knownothingatallaboutwhat­oneisgoingtodoness! It’s perfection! Any son of mine would be here. You would be here. Blake. P.S. Urgent non-band business to sort out on return. A QUEST! Meet me at the Regal, next Friday night, 11.15. By the exit.”

  A quest. Scrub that: A QUEST!

  In the middle of the night!

  The whole thing, although I didn’t know it at the time, was typical. Blake’s cautious approach to Teri that first evening had been entirely out of character, but it had worked. How could he now expect me simply to waltz out of the house after dinner? That was up to me,
none of his concern. I’d better come up with something. A late night screening of Rocky Horror? Hmmm. Another sleepover with dreaded Brian? The Terrys’ lack of curiosity was easily exploited.

  The Regal was on the High Street, just down from the library; Blake worked there part time, a job he scored due to the Cambridge Arts Cinema’s prominent position on his CV. It had once been a grand one-screen cinema—double features, Wurlitzer—that at some point was split into five different screens, four of which were only marginally larger than the television in your front room. There was still one big screen, where the hits played, but the others were like pinhole cameras.

  Blake ushered me in through the exit, ruffling my hair.

  “You’re not wearing your blazer: smart.” He surveyed the street shiftily. “I’m going to try to turn as few lights on as possible. We’re not strictly meant to be here.” He handed me a torch. I’d never been in a cinema after hours; it was eerie, echoing, strewn with popcorn and drinking straws; our flashlights made it even spookier. We were evidently quite alone; I felt like one of the meddling kids in Scooby Doo.

  “The cleaners don’t come in until 6 a.m.,” he said.

  “What?”

  “We’ve got until dawn.”

  I laughed. “What are we going to do until dawn?”

  “We’re going to begin at the beginning, go on until we come to the end, then stop. Alice in Wonderland.” He led me through a warren of corridors that connected projection rooms, foyers, bathrooms, and screens. Just like the first time we’d met, I found myself presented with weird new perspectives, from the other side of the counter, within the mechanism, behind the scenes, the wrong side of the screen, backstage—places off-limits to mere punters. I was on the inside, and I liked it. “I’ll tell you everything,” he continued, “but we might as well work while I do. Come with me. I have a hunch.” Once in the basement, among the pipes, he opened every door, as if he expected to find anything but cleaning equipment.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “We”—who were apparently in it together; a thrilling first person plural—“are looking for treasure. Open Sesame!” he proclaimed, turning the handle of the final door and throwing on the lights in a much larger room, full to bursting with old cinema seats. He laughed and turned off his torch. “Well, at least we can see what we’re doing down here. They ripped all these seats out, but someone was too mean to throw them away. See that door down there?” At the far end of the room, glimpsed just above the piles of seats, there was a door, a door that couldn’t have been opened in years, at least since the seats staged their occupation. I nodded, fearing, already knowing that he expected us to move them all to get to it. “Well, that’s the goal. Where there’s a door, there’s a beyond. And I want to get there.”

  “Why?”

  “Doesn’t every bone in your body yearn to open that door, that portal?”

  “This’ll take hours.”

  “We’ve got until 6 a.m.”

  “I will not start moving any of these seats unless you give me a good reason.”

  And, as he rolled up his sleeves, Blake said: “Well, listen to this.”

  There was an elderly usher at the Regal called Ernie. He’d been there for years, all through the various architectural downsizings, and, though he was famous for sleeping on the job, and seemed mysteriously to disappear from time to time, reappearing smelling of cigar and whisky, Ernie was a fixture; more of a fixture, in fact, than the fixtures—the Egyptian fittings that had glittered when he took the job, since pulled down to make way for featureless little screening rooms. Ernie kept himself to himself, but enjoyed a cuppa with Blake, along with the opportunity to rattle on about Leyton Orient, the horses, and old films. Right to the end, and quite unnecessarily, Ernie prided himself on his old-fashioned usher’s overcoat, gray with epaulets and gold buttons; the dress code had changed in about 1970.

  One day, Ernie didn’t come in to work: that was that. But a month or so later, his widow appeared—Ernie had never mentioned family—and proceeded to waste the general manager’s time with some tall tale about taking delivery of her husband’s collection of cinema posters. On his deathbed, Ernie had told her about them; it’d be a nice little pension. She was extremely insistent, the only problem being that no one at the Regal knew anything about such a collection. The general manager dismissed the possibility—he knew the building like the back of his hand; besides it wasn’t a museum and any posters were surely the property of the cinema, and Ernie would have had no business using the premises as his own personal store room. He pawned her off on Blake, but Blake, remembering Ernie’s quiet resolve, the sly smile that seemed to imply he knew something you didn’t, suspected that Ernie wouldn’t, couldn’t, have made this up, that the posters were there somewhere. Where? And how to get them without arousing suspicion? The widow’s mistake had been going to the general manager rather than Blake.

  To understand Blake, you have to know that, armed with this suspicion, this knowledge, there was no way he could not now try to locate, and succeed in locating, those posters, this secret collection, now amplified in his imagination into an invaluable trove of Rare Cinema History; that was Blake.

  “Could you crawl underneath the rest of them?” sighed Blake. We were already tired out. Most of the seats were in multiples of three and shifting them at all was difficult. We’d moved as many as possible into the corridor, now impassable, yet we didn’t seem to have made much headway towards the door.

  But on we went, stopping briefly for a Coke. Exhausted, I took a breather at about 2. It was fatal. The first time my head lolled forward, I caught myself; the second time, I was a goner. Next thing I knew, Blake was tapping me on the shoulder.

  “Well,” he said, smiling, happy, buzzed, sweaty. “Do you want to know what was in there?”

  God knows how long I’d been out. I looked towards the far end of the room. Blake had parted the remaining cinema seats like the Red Sea, and had been able to slide the door just wide enough to squeeze through.

  “What?”

  “Nothing!” He said, as though this were quite as good as finding Aladdin’s cave. “Nothing! Two brooms and a few buckets.” He started to laugh.

  “We moved all these for nothing?”

  “Absolutely not. We’ve now ruled out this room. The posters are not there. That’s one less place that the posters are. Besides, there was real excitement and satisfaction while we were moving the seats, wasn’t there, a real feeling of potential?” He was nodding his head, eyebrows raised, begging for agreement.

  “Yes,” I said, shaking my head. “No.”

  “Much more excitement and satisfaction, and a much greater feeling of potential, for example, than the sinking feeling we’re now going to have as we put ’em all back.” He laughed. I groaned. “At least, clear the corridor.”

  The quest was ours, how we started spending time together.

  The setback with the broom closet (terminal, I would have called it) was simply amusing to Blake; that’s what you got for dreaming. He loved Sod’s Law; he laughed at it. In no way would he let it deflect him from his course. The posters were as good as his. And his enthusiasm was infectious. I mean, I was more circumspect, and the battle against the chairs would have put me off entirely, but I happily followed along because, whether he found the holy grail or not, every step of the way was an adventure, even the hard work. I might have drawn the line at another roomful of seats. My arms ache just remembering that absurd evening, the moment he said “Put ’em all back.” I kept nodding off at the merch booth the next afternoon.

  He took me back to the Regal two other nights, neither of which yielded much as we poked around with our flashlights. I wasn’t disheartened because it wasn’t my dream, but I worried about him. He set such store by their discovery. And increasingly it looked like he was living in la-la land.

  “Wait here a second,” he said one night, letting himself into an office. He emerged with two rolled up cinema p
osters; I assumed them to be posters. “Treasure maps!” he said. First it had been Alice in Wonderland, then Aladdin, and now it was Treasure Island. “Well, blueprints.” And he unrolled them on the floor in the main foyer. Someone peered in through the front door at the goofy burglars with their giveaway torches. Blake waved and shouted through a big smile, blinding them with his beam: “We’re done for the night! Eff off please!” He turned his attention back to me. “Now, look at these; what do you see?”

  “I have no idea what I’m looking at.” One was older than the other.

  “This is the cinema as it was when there was one screen.” I could more or less make that out. “And this is the cinema as it is, now that there are five screens.”

  “Right.”

  “If you split one screen into five, what do you get?”

  “A lot of very small cinemas?”

  “Look at the blueprint.” I could still see nothing. “Look at the gray bits,” he said. “The gaps between. If you make four small cinemas and one big one, you have to create little rooms, and that means gaps between the rooms . . . spaces that could easily hide Ernie’s little secret. You have to turn your mind inside out a bit.”

  We knew the screening rooms, the basement, the projection booths, the foyers, the cupboards, but there it was, plain as day on the blueprints: the spaces between. Blake knew he was on to something, but he needed an assistant to get to the places he couldn’t reach on his own, someone to wriggle and climb, a little monkey.

  It was three months after the first trip, on the fourth foray, still by torchlight, that Blake insisted I crawl under the screen in Cinema B. I wouldn’t have chosen to, even in the middle of the day with the lights on: it looked disgusting.

  “It’s the most obvious big space,” said Blake, flapping the blueprint in mitigation.

  “Look, how do you think an elderly gentleman got in and out? Crawling under this screen? I don’t think so.”