“Oh, it’s all right,” she said. “I’m not one of them. I’m the president of our own little chapter of pro-choice activists in Birmingham, you see, and I’m planning to infiltrate the ranks of the pro-lifers to do some pamphleteering and so on. We can’t let these fanatics win, you know.” Her eyes held a fanatical light of their own.
“I’d heard somebody mention a rally, actually,” I said, remembering that both Maude on the “trine” and the lady in the taxi had asked me if I were attending it. I suppose my pregnancy must have made them think I had a vested interest in the issue. “A big rally, is it?”
“Well, I expect so,” Alma said. “It’s not nearly the hot topic here that it is in America, but the anti-types have been mobilizing just lately, picketing clinics and so on, and there have been one or two nasty incidents with providers being harassed. Oh, I do hope I haven’t read you wrong—you’re not one of them, are you?”
“No, I’m pro-choice,” I said. “Although I’ve never had the energy to do anything overt about it.”
“Well, somebody’s got to,” Alma said. “The rally this week is going to be quite well-attended, we think. We have to make sure the voice of reason is heard, or else before you know it, it’ll be outlawed and we’ll have back lane abortions and knitting needles and things again.”
“Well, I admire your dedication,” I said, a little distantly. I wondered if the fact that she was pregnant herself made it harder or easier to promote her views, but it was hardly a polite question to ask someone I’d only just met. Alma answered it for me in the next moment, patting her belly contentedly.
“Of course, this one is wanted,” she said. “But not every baby is, as you no doubt know. I’ve got three more at home, but not everybody has a mother who likes to look after her grandchildren. And you know, this works as a wonderful disguise. Pro-lifers simply assume that every pregnant woman on the face of the earth is an anti, don’t they?”
It was an interesting point, but I didn’t have time to answer it, as the crush of people in the Hospitality Room was thinning all of a sudden, everybody moving through a set of double doors that had opened into a large lecture hall. We moved together to join the throng.
“You don’t mind if I sit with you, do you?” Alma asked. “I don’t know a soul here, and they’ll throw me out if they think I haven’t registered.”
“Of course,” I said. “Why are you so eager to hear this Killington guy, anyway?”
“He’s going to talk about street demonstrations,” she said. “You know—the kind where they carry great big figures of political leaders and so on through the streets—that sort of over-the-top activism. I want to get a few pointers, because Samantha—that’s an artist friend of mine in our group—she’s made a big effigy of a baby for me to carry during the march tomorrow, with “Wanted Baby” written on its nappy. I’m hoping to ask him afterwards if he has any advice for me.”
“Golly,” I said. “That’s brave.”
“And very un-English,” Alma said, with a certain amount of satisfaction. “I’m expecting a bit of bother about it, actually, and I want to be prepared.”
“You’re doing this all alone?”
“Well, the others are with me in spirit, but nobody in our group could get away except me,” she said, her voice a little tight, as if she weren’t entirely happy about being a lone voice in the wilderness.
I had a mental image of Alma in the midst of a horde of roaring anti-abortionists, her agitprop effigy being pummelled to death by the kind of signs-on-sticks that pro-lifers carry—those ones with graphic pictures of aborted fetuses on them.
“I hope you’ll be careful,” I said.
The auditorium had filled up, and the only empty seats we could find were quite near the front. It was a big room, laid out in a half circle, amphitheatre style, with comfortably padded, raked seats. The lectern was off to one side, and a big screen filled the central area. Obviously, Mr. Killington was going to be using PowerPoint. Perhaps I could pick up a few pointers, too. I felt thankful that my own modest little puppetry session would be on a much smaller scale, in a small lecture room with a flip chart.
The lights in the auditorium dimmed, and a slim, dapper gentleman walked up to the podium to make his introductions and welcome. In my belly, the Sprog did a double backflip, then settled down to digest her apple juice. The Canterbury International Puppetry Festival (CIPF) had begun.
Fourteen
It seems there’s more and more pressure these days to buy your baby just the right toys to broaden her horizons and make her a little genius by the tender age of six months. Don’t fall into the “baby won’t learn as much if I don’t buy this toy” trap.
-From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide
The puppet has always had a totemic power,” Blaise Killington was saying. “The audience, young and old, instinctively accepts the premise that the manipulator is a servant of the animated object, someone in the background, merely. The object, the puppet, takes on a larger-than-life aspect, which allows it to express a viewpoint that might not otherwise be tolerated, coming from a human performer.”
He was winding up a truly fascinating forty-minute lecture, and my mind had not wandered once, though the Sprog, exerting a little pressure on my inner self, had suggested that a visit to the ladies’ room might be appropriate when a break was called.
“This is most evident from the behaviour of the police during the street demonstrations last year in Karachi, when their first action, upon engaging with the crowds, was to pull down the puppets we were using and stomp them into the ground.” On the screen, a short film clip of the Karachi demonstration appeared, the police in riot gear, and the puppets, huge creatures with arms on sticks, were indeed the objects of the first assault. The puppeteers, I noticed, did not exactly escape punishment, either. A man in charge of one of the figures was shown having his head stomped at the same time his puppet’s head was being ground into the dust. It made my flesh creep.
“Just recently, several NGOs in the war-torn regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan have approached UNIMA for help with setting up a program to help kids deal with post-traumatic stress issues, using puppets,” Killington went on. The screen showed a picture of a woman in a head scarf working a friendly-looking hand puppet, which looked just like her. The small child beside her was focussed entirely on the puppet, speaking to it in an intimate way that tugged at the heartstrings. “We know of course that puppets have been used extensively to help children articulate and work through the trauma they’ve experienced—notably in cases of sexual abuse. Kids will tell things to a puppet that they would never tell an adult. It’s proved invaluable, and the program in Kabul has been enormously successful.” There was a smattering of applause at that.
Killington received a huge round of applause after his address, and Alma moved in immediately after the lights came up to talk to him. “I’ll see you later,” I said. “Gotta pee.”
“Me, too,” Alma said, grimacing, “but I must catch him before he disappears. I hope to see you later, Polly. It’s been fun meeting you.”
“Yes, and if we don’t bump into each other again, best of luck with the rally,” I said. “I hope the anti-abortionists don’t stomp on your head.” Alma chuckled and then waded off into the crowd, using her substantial belly as a battering ram. I headed for the exits, looking for a washroom sign.
In the rest room, I noticed that the toilet paper dispensers were made by Kimberly Clark, a North American manufacturer which had a factory in Laingford, back home. This evinced in me an absurd and surprising little twiggle of patriotism. I was glad to see that, in spite of what Brent Miller had said, English washrooms did not all have user-fees. He’d earnestly suggested I keep a handful of change on hand for bathroom breaks. “It’s where the expression ‘spend a penny’ came from,” he had said. “It costs money to use a toilet, eh? My aunt told me that.”
There was a demonstration of wayang kulit puppetry, Indonesian shadow puppets,
that I wanted to check out, but that wouldn’t happen for twenty minutes, so I headed for the outdoors. During Killington’s speech, the fog had lifted, and a little pale lemon sun was working its way to earth through a gap in the clouds.
It was a huge campus. The blurb had said there were three hundred acres of it, and there were a lot of open spaces, which were probably gorgeous in the summertime. In February, it was pretty bleak, and there was a chilly wind coming off the open fields beyond the visitors’ car park out front. From where I stood, I knew I had my back to Canterbury, facing towards London, basically, though the breeze was fresh and wonderfully salty. Students scurried to and fro, all with backpacks, all looking about twelve years old. Behind me loomed the Cornwallis building, which housed the lecture theatre and Phyllis’ state-of-the-art seminar rooms. Off to my left were more buildings, all in that 1960s concrete bunker style, imposing and a little bit military, with bulky exterior walls and long, thin, castle-like windows very high up, with turrets at the top. In the distance were the student residences, attractively laid out to form a sort of village. To see the vista of Canterbury, the Stour Valley and the Cathedral, I’d have to walk south-east, through the campus to the hill on the other side. I decided to save that for another time, but I was looking forward to it.
I had a sudden, profound urge to march into the registrar’s office and sign up for something. University campuses always affect me that way. They stir up in me a long-contended-with urge to throw myself once more into the swamp of academe, to follow a schedule and do what I’m told and listen to lectures and take notes and concentrate on nothing more important than a paper or an exam. They make me feel safe, or at least wrap me up in the feeling that safety is possible.
In truth, I have never actually completed anything other than Grade Twelve. I was at Art College in Toronto for one-and-a-half years, then got bored and transferred to Theatre School instead. Halfway through my theatre course, I got bored again and quit to work for a puppet theatre company out east. Although I like the idea of university, and the romantic notion of classes and student life, I’d never really been any good at it. The discipline always defeated me, once boredom set in. It was like those nice fresh notebooks we all had as kids in elementary school—the ones we swore black and blue we’d keep clean and free of mind-wandering doodles. The ones that were covered with scribbles and “Kilroy was here” cartoons by December. I still had occasional dreams of monumentally important things unfinished. Standing there on the campus of the University of Kent, Canterbury, I felt again that faintly shameful yearning to earn myself a proper degree, a piece of paper that would make me worthy, that would impress Aunt Susan and would guarantee me a life of gainful employment, instead of the hardscrabble existence of an itinerant puppet maker.
I sat on a stone bench in a courtyard in front of the elegant grey building and fought the urge for a cigarette.
“Excuse me, are you Polly Deacon, by any chance?” I turned to see a man standing there, whose tag-on-a-string identified him as Richard Seth, Canada.
“That’s me,” I said.
“I thought you must be,” he said. “Juliet Keating said you were here doing a workshop and told me to look out for you.” Juliet was the artistic director of the Steamboat Theatre, a childrens’ theatre touring company based in Sikwan, a town south of Laingford. I’d worked there the previous summer. Juliet and I weren’t speaking, as it happens, and I was surprised that she’d bothered to mention my name to anybody, particularly someone so, well, delicious. His skin was a rich bronze, he was dark and mysterious, and he had the kind of bone structure you do actually write home about. “Dear Earlie,” I composed in my mind, “I’ve met a perfectly beautiful man . . .”
“What did you think of Killington’s talk?” he said, sitting down beside me after we’d introduced ourselves.
“It made me think I wasn’t doing enough serious work to change the world,” I said. “It made me feel guilty, as a matter of fact.” He laughed, a nice, light, ringing laugh.
“I know what you mean. Like I suddenly wonder if I’ve got this gift that I’m supposed to use for world peace, and instead I’m building foam rubber props for a production of Hunting and Fishing Is Our Heritage for the Ontario Federation of Guys With Guns.”
“Yikes. You’re working on that one? I read about it in the Laingford Gazette. I almost swallowed my tongue.”
“It’s government funded, eh?” Richard said. “Big bucks for Juliet.”
“And they’re going to include copies of the Ontario Firearms Handbook with the teacher’s guides, right?” We laughed together about that. Better than weeping, I guess. It was nice to meet somebody from home, actually. It wasn’t that I was homesick or anything—I’d only been on foreign soil for forty-eight hours, but if you start waxing nostalgic about a toilet paper dispenser, then there must be something going on.
We agreed to meet later in the student pub for a beverage and to gossip about Juliet and her crew at Steamboat. Richard was fresh out of the theatre tech program at Ryerson and knew many of the same people I did. He smoked, too, and after asking if I minded (are you kidding? Blow it my way, won’tcha?), he pulled out a pack of DuMaurier Lights and lit up.
“I brought a carton with me, duty free,” he said. “Last time I was here, I tried to adapt to British cigarettes, but they all tasted funny, like someone had boiled the tobacco in cabbage water before drying it. I tried a dozen brands, but eventually had to find a specialty shop in London that carried Canadian brands. Cost me a fortune. I was going to quit before I came over this time, but it didn’t happen. I tried the patch, but it just made me crave band-aids.”
“Try getting pregnant,” I said. “Works like a charm.”
The wayang kulit demo was amazing. I’ve always been fascinated by shadows. I remember my mother being awfully good at creating animal hand-shapes in front of a candle or a lamp bulb, throwing fantastic shapes against the wall. She taught me how to do a camel and a bird when I was very small, and I have always cherished a mental image of a big bird and a little bird, her hands and mine, flying together across the blank wall in the dining room, eons ago.
When I was doing touring theatre, there was one rather memorable and wild night of partying (which may perhaps have included the modest use of some recreational substances) during which a couple of us, with the help of a hotel room lamp with the shade pulled off, entertained the cast for about two hours straight. We’d put the show tapes on someone’s portable tape deck and had done a hand-shadow puppet version of the play we were touring, becoming increasingly more hysterical and inventive as we went.
In formal shadow puppetry, the audience only sees the shadows of the puppets, thrown onto a screen by a light or a fire. Its history is ancient. Many think it originated in Greece, although Chinese records show forms of shadow puppetry being performed two thousand years ago. In wayang kulit, intricate flat puppets made of wood, paper and animal hide are manipulated in front of a light thrown onto a muslin screen, usually telling stories from Hindu mythology. In Java, audience members sit on both sides of the screen—either to watch the shadows, or to see the puppets and the manipulating puppeteers.
The demonstrators explained their techniques as they went and did allow us to move back and forth so we could see the effects. They allowed us to give it a shot, as well, and it was great fun. They had some of their puppets for sale, too, and I couldn’t resist buying one, a perfectly flat, exquisitely delicate, paper and balsa wood figure that looked, in an Indonesian sort of way, awfully like my pregnant-lady puppet. At least when the time came to take it back across the border, the security people wouldn’t be inclined to tear it apart, looking for bombs. There’s a lot to be said for working in two dimensions.
The shadow puppet demonstration had also put my mind at ease regarding my own lack of high-tech props for my workshop. They didn’t have PowerPoint (they had no slides), just their screen and their puppets. All I had were my two puppets, resting quietly in their case b
ack at the Pilgrim’s Rest, ready and waiting for their shining hour. My session was scheduled for the next day at one p.m., after lunch.
Before leaving the building, I went in search of Phyllis Creemore, to see if she could direct me to the room I’d be lecturing in. It turned out to be a very small, intimate classroom at the end of a long hallway next to the main auditorium. There was no raked seating or stage—although there was a slightly raised platform at one end of the room, with a simple table and—yes!—a flip chart.
“I found one, you see,” Phyllis said, having led me to the location herself. “There were several, actually, in a storeroom in the basement. I’ve got you some nice, thick markers as well, dear. I hope that’ll do you.”
“It’s perfect, Phyllis. Thanks,” I said.
“Now you’re sure you won’t be needing anything else?”
“Nope, I’m the soul of simplicity, really. I just hope somebody comes.”
“Oh, they’ll come, all right. We don’t often get marionettists at these things, you know. Too many strings to pull to get you here.” She giggled again—an incongruous sound coming from such a matronly person. “Actually, there may well be a visitor or two from town as well,” she said. “I had a call from someone this morning asking when and where your presentation was going to be. You’re quite famous, my dear. We do allow the public to attend some of the sessions, provided they pay something at the door.”
“Oh? That’s flattering,” I said. “Any idea who they were?”
“They didn’t say. Sounded like one of the teachers from the comprehensive,” she said. “I could hear children in the background, anyway.”
“That might be awkward,” I said. “One of the puppets I’ve brought is a little indelicate.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Phyllis said. “We’ve had a no-children policy here, ever since the time we offered a Punch and Judy show for the kiddies on the Cathedral grounds and got had up by the local authorities for propagating violence in our youth. It was rather embarrassing. So now, no children allowed.” She bustled away, leaving me with the amused notion that an international puppetry conference that didn’t allow children anywhere near it was, well, peculiar. Like one of those model train displays presented by a bunch of deadly serious old men who wouldn’t let anyone under thirty-five anywhere near their stuff.
Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle Page 87
