The Playmakers

by Graeme Johnstone

  Here he was, chained to a harridan with the strength of an Amazon, the tongue of a viper, and a temper that knew no bounds.

  Even though his drinking mates had been friends since Grammar School, he was now living in a different world, and their conversations were losing their spark.

  Any talk of Susanna’s development plodded along for a few sentences until it veered toward more bachelor-related topics.

  Ah, but this night was different.

  For some reason, the concept of impending fatherhood seems to excite the celebratory nerve in all men.

  “A drink for my friend Will, here,” shouted a tall robust young man, with an almost rectangular face, as he welcomed his pal to the table right in the middle of the crowded smoky room. “He’s going to be a father again!”

  This was Harold Granville, one of William’s best friends. Handsome, intelligent, mischievous.

  The serving wench came with the ales, catching Harold’s eye as she put the tray down, bending down to give him a good view of her breasts in the low-cut dress as she placed the drinks before the group. There was a mighty roar as Harold pulled her down onto his knee, and whispered in her ear. “Not now, Harold! Later,” she blushed, got up and bounced away.

  “I wish I could do that,” said Will staring gloomily into his beer.

  “Will, you’re a lucky man, you have your own woman - every night!” said Harold. “Here I am, chatting up bar-girls with no luck at all.”

  “The luck is always on your side,” said Will. “And I can tell you, I have no luck any night, these days. Any night at all.”

  “Will, Will,” said Harold. “You’re going to be a father again, that’s a wonderful event. The rest of us can only dream about that. Who knows, this time you might have a son!” Grabbing his tankard he stood up and shouted, “Here’s to William Shakespeare and his son. We think …”

  The mob stood as one, shouted “To William Shakespeare and his son. We think!” They downed their ales, and called for more.

  After four more rounds, William began to look around and judge the time. “Two hours,” he said. “I’ve got to go.”

  “What’s this?” said Harold. “Leaving already? The night is but young.”

  “Yes, Will,” chimed in Charles Porter, a young man with a pointed goatee beard and coal-black eyes. “Plenty of time yet to have a baby.”

  “One more?” said Harold, his arm around Will, his eyes sparkling.

  The serving girl arrived, and moved next to Harold. “What will it be, gentlemen?”

  “One more, especially for my friend Will here, who is going to have a son.”

  An elderly man at the next table turned around, his big red face creased with a mighty grin. “What, young Shakespeare, you’ve had a son? Have an ale on me!”

  “I actually haven’t had a son, yet ...”

  “But he will have one, that’s for sure,” said Harold. “I have that feeling.”

  The man laughed, his giant belly flopping up and down. “From what I understand, you’ve always got that feeling, Harold!”

  The crowd roared with laughter, intermingled with the phrase, “A drink for young Shakespeare, on me,” coming from all quarters.

  “Two hours, Harold,” said Will, taking a sip. “They told me two hours.”

  The next thing Will remembered was hearing the laughter. The bell-like laughter! That girlish giggle that enthralled him in ages past, in the good times before one stupid mistake had ruined things forever. The laughter resounded through his head, and he reached out to touch the image of Anne Whateley, smiling, giggling, beautiful as ever, before him.

  And suddenly, she was gone, and he awoke, his head ringing, his eyes scratchy, his mouth dry.

  He was lying on the floor, a dirty, smelly, earthen floor. Next to him, barely a foot away, Charles Porter lay, snoring through his pointed goatee. And beyond him a lay a girl Will had never seen before, asleep on her side.

  The girlish giggle continued to haunt him, and he turned to see that it was coming from the corner where Harold and the wench from the inn were cuddled up in the only bed in the room, a low-slung single sleeper made of rough logs and straw. They were both obviously naked, but under a grubby sheet, and Harold was tickling her nose with a piece of straw, lightly touching it and just as suddenly, pulling it away, making her laugh. That laugh.

  Will pushed himself up on one elbow. His forehead felt sore and he brushed it with his hand. He felt a lump, and examined the palm of his hand. There was blood.

  “Where … what?”

  “Ah,” said Harold from the comfort of his bed. “Alive at last, young Will.”

  “What happened?”

  “Do you want the long version, or the short version?”

  “Any version. Just tell me what happened.”

  “Well, basically, you consumed lots of ale.”

  “And ..?”

  “Which somewhat retarded your debating skills …”

  “Debating?”

  “Yes, debating. To reply to the ungenerous gentleman who, in a similarly debilitated state, commented that in a perverse switch of the usual roles of nature, you had been taken to the altar by an older woman. That is, you were cradle-snatched.”

  “So I debated this?”

  “No, no. That’s what I’m saying. Your debating skills had been dimmed by the ale.”

  “And so?”

  “So you elected to resolve it with your fisticuffs skills. But, alas, they were similarly hobbled by your intake of the Stratford Arms’ finest brew.”

  “So that’s how I got this bump on the head.”

  “He belted you, my dear baby boy!”

  “The baby!” said Will suddenly shaking his head. “Why didn’t you take me home!”

  “Will, you were indescribably drunk, bloodied, dirty from being flung in the street, and smelling of cow-shit where you landed. You were aggressive, nasty, and trying to thump anyone who came near you. Charles and I made an executive decision to carry you home here - after you mercifully passed out.”

  “Passed out?”

  “Believe me, you were in no condition to be hanging around a birth.”

  Will staggered to his feet, clutching his head, stepped across the bodies on the floor and rushed out the door.

  He ran the streets and lanes to the leather-works, pushing people out of the way, swearing to himself and feeling sickness rising to his throat through the excess of alcohol and the realisation of what he had done.

  He reached the doorway breathless, threw up over the steps, and went to the bottom of the rickety stairs to the garret. A stopped, grey-haired old man, with a kindly wrinkled face, one of John Shakespeare’s veteran leading hands, stopped him.

  “I would take it easy, if I were you, young Will,” he said calmly.

  Will looked at the old man’s gentle face, and looked down at himself. He was filthy, bloodied and he smelled of shit and vomit. “Is the … has she ..?”

  “You have a son,” said the old man.

  “Praise the Lord,” whispered Will.

  “And a daughter as well.”

  “Yes, I know I have a daughter!”

  “No, no, no. A daughter this time, too.”

  “You mean …”

  The old man nodded. “There are two babies.”

  “Twins!” said Will, his red eyes opening as wide as his shocking condition would allow them. “We’ve had twins! Holy Jesus.”

  He began to stagger up the stairs, wiping the vomit from his mouth and the blood from his head as he went. But if he felt that his behaviour would be overlooked, or ameliorated by the unexpected arrival of an extra baby, or that people would look kindly upon this because he had put up with such a miserable existence through most of his marriage, then he was wrong.

  When he got to the top of the stairs, he looked down the far end of the garret to see Anne in bed holding two little bundles wrapped in white rugs.

  Next to the bed stood the mid-wife, and next to her stoo
d his father and his mother.

  All staring at him, silently.

  “I’m … er …I’m sorry, I …” he mumbled, staring at the floor.

  But this time, there were no screams of abuse from the viper, no yells of contempt from the harridan. Nothing he could even retort to, or maybe mount a defence against, with his own invective and shouting.

  This time there was silence.

  A silence that shamed him as he stood there hung-over, dirty and smelling.

  But then, almost right on schedule, a pot flew across the room, glancing off the unwounded side of his head, and clattering to the floor.

  And this time, he knew he had no other choice but to go downstairs, grab the remainder of the cash from the business, and walk out into the street and on to a new life.

  Because this time the pot had been thrown by his mother.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The water was cold. Damn cold. Rightly or wrongly, William Shakespeare had walked away from his family, his village, his life.

  But doing it on a February afternoon in England, he soon discovered, was not the wisest of decisions in terms of escapee comfort. Especially so when he splashed water on his face from the tiny creek to try and clean off the mud, the blood, the cow-shit, the memories of his drunken night, and the awful follow-up. Even though it was now mid-afternoon, and the feeble winter sun was endeavouring to vainly signal its existence from behind a bank of dull cloud, there was still a thin crust of ice near the bank, extending nearly a yard out into the rocky stream.

  There was no choice. He would have to break this with his fist so he could get at the freezing, almost still water underneath.

  It had to be done. He was filthy and he knew it.

  He knew it from the way the townsfolk and the farmers had stared at him as he had marched angrily out of Stratford earlier that day and up the main road, south-west towards Bristol, anywhere, just to get away from a marriage that he had never wanted in the first place and which had now gone horribly wrong.

  To get away from Her, he kept thinking, as he struck out at a vigorous pace. And that child.

  No, wait, the word was children now! Twins had arrived, would you believe? My God, from one to three children in one leap. Is that possible? What are you doing to me, Lord? What did I do to deserve this?

  I’m better off out of there, he thought, as the miles and the hours passed.

  Better off.

  Better off.

  I’m better off out of there.

  The phrase had been running through his mind all day, and now it positively bounced around his head as he splashed the freezing water on his face, arms and chest.

  Better off. I’m better off, he thought, as the snap-cold water peeled away the grime and cleaned the blood from the wound on his temple.

  Better off. I’m better off, he thought, as he held a piece of the ice to his forehead, stimulating a shocking but brief surge of pain which, when it faded, mercifully took away the thumping headache of his hangover.

  “I’m better off! I’m better off without you all,” he shouted, the words bouncing across the water and echoing through the thin poplars adjoining the creek. “Better off, do you hear? Better off!”

  There was silence.

  He looked back into the still water to see the reflection of William Shakespeare.

  The New William Shakespeare!

  Yes! The New Shakespeare, now freed from the tentacles of that harridan; now marching down a different and exciting road on the journey of life; for the first time, taking the route decided by him, and not decreed by others. Or determined by circumstance. Or engineered by trickery.

  Why, he thought, even his mother had given up on him now.

  And for the first time in the day he felt acutely sad.

  She had been his only supporter. She had backed him through the shock of Anne Hathaway’s declaration of her pregnancy, through the tragedy of Anne Whateley’s suicide, through the grim facade of a wedding ceremony and the joyless union that followed.

  But now she had withdrawn her support, too.

  He took a deep breath and expelled it. That part hurt. The fact that his mother had given up on her oldest son, who loved her dearly.

  And that she had demonstrated it, too, by hurling the symbolic pot - the pot that his screeching wife had used as her principal weapon in the minor skirmishes and the major battles that had constituted the war known as their marriage.

  That was the final, deepest cut.

  “She cut me to the quick,” he murmured to himself.

  But, in doing so, he reflected, brightening up a little, she has cut the rope holding me back.

  He looked down into the still stream. Peering back at him was the watery reflection of the New William Shakespeare.

  He studied the face. Not bad, he thought. The beard had started to fill out, the pimples had gone, the seductive brown eyes would look even better once the red lines, etched in the night before by numerous tankards of the Stratford Arms’ finest ale, had disappeared. The nose was developing a sort of regal nobility.

  Not a bad face, he thought. Not a bad face at all.

  Certainly better than the face of the gargoyle next to it …

  The gargoyle?

  He shook his head, startled.

  He thought he had spotted it a moment before out of the corner of his eye, but tried to convince himself he was seeing things - an understandable reaction after the physical and emotional pounding he had taken over the last twenty-four hours.

  But this time he flicked his eyes slightly to the right, and there, in the water, adjacent to the splendid, confident visage of the New Shakespeare, shimmered another face.

  The face of, well, not to put too fine a point on it, a gargoyle. Like the type he had seen poking out from the corner of a forbidding Gothic church.

  It had a huge mouth containing a handful of misshapen teeth, large almond-shape eyes with half-closed lids, a squashed nose with two giant nostrils turned outwards for all the world to peer up, an unruly thatch of flaxen hair, and a giant pair of ears, one of which was bent forward.

  The New Shakespeare recoiled from the vision in the water, frantically spun his head, and looked over his right shoulder. There, but an inch away, was the real version of the gargoyle’s face, leering at him.

  Shakespeare jumped back with fright, his left foot slipping on the icy rocks, and he tumbled backwards into the water. He landed flat on his back and disappeared under the shallows, and as the icy water burrowed into his skin, he concluded that this was not the start to the redefined life he had envisaged for the New Shakespeare.

  He lifted his head out of the water and wiped his eyes, to see that the gargoyle was now itself laughing. Or at least giving the impression of laughing. Its mouth was wide open and its body shook with mirth as it pointed at him. But no sound was being emitted from the black cavern of a mouth. He could also see that this awful ugly head was actually stuck on top of a tiny, ugly body. The figure was approximately a yard tall, with short, stubby legs, and tiny arms, at the end of which was a pair of hands that somehow matched large open palms with roly-poly truncated fingers.

  It was dressed in a bizarre costume of pantaloons and top, made of silk in a pattern of red and white diamonds, with a yellow ruff around its neck. It wore a big leather belt. A small pair of leather bootees peaked out from under the flowing trousers.

  “Who … what … er, who are you?” Shakespeare scrambled to his feet, his voice quivering partly from fright and partly as a result of his unexpected icy bath.

  There was another roar of laughter, coming from behind the gargoyle, somewhere amongst the forest of poplars.

  And whereas the gargoyle’s laugh had been a weird, silent pantomime, this was a deep, resounding bassoon of a laugh. A laugh, Shakespeare reckoned, that would have to come from a much bigger body. A laugh that sounded as if it had been generated from the depths of a sizeable stomach, fuelled by air from prodigious lungs, and expelled through a throat w
ell lined with cheap wine residue and roughened by inhalation of England’s new social pastime, tobacco.

  His previously shattered and drenched confidence in the skills of the New Shakespeare was given a boost when he looked past the gargoyle to see just such a source of laughter slowly heading toward him.

  The stomach was not only sizeable, it was enormous, a big red cummerbund stretching itself to the limit to cover the mighty girth and give the panting trousers some sense of decency. The trousers were brown, the elephantine shirt a greasy white, the waistcoat yellow, and over these was draped a massive brown cape that looked like the result of two enormous tents having been stitched together. A magnificent hat, trimmed with a piece of silk the same slashing red as the cummerbund, sat jauntily atop the imposing figure.

  The giant held a solid piece of Blackwood beautifully fashioned into a walking stick, with a large silver cap at one end. He used this device to both assist his progress and accentuate his laughter by periodically jabbing it in the air.

  A pair of calf-high leather boots covered surprisingly tiny feet, which picked their way through the rocks and mud.

  “Ha-ha-ha,” roared the laugh. “He can’t tell you who he is. He can laugh or express any emotion you wish, but not in the way your or I do, for he is condemned to eternal silence - as you have just seen. But he can mime beautifully, especially if there is a tankard of ale passing by in the hands of a well-endowed serving wench. He knows everything you say. But, sadly, he cannot tell you his name.”

  “Well, I …” Shakespeare moved to say.

  The big man cut off any reply with a wave of the stick. “However, there there’s no finer comedian, no better joker, no funnier man that’s travelling the roads these days, I’ll warrant you that,” he said, his big hazel eyes sparkling. “Although, looking at you now my friend, and having just witnessed your performance in these icy waters, you might be a challenger for his position.”

  At the mention of this, the gargoyle looked at the big man, frowned, clenched his fists and moved at Shakespeare with a menacing motion.

  “Easy, easy, Soho,” said the big man, pushing him gently back with the cane. “I’m just teasing.”