‘Then bloody get on with it,’ Collop roared and after another moment the front curtains closed a little jerkily and the lights that illuminated the hall dimmed slowly. The cast, who had started to arrive, settled down at the back of the hall to whisper to each other and watch and listen.
The technical rehearsal went fairly smoothly, with Collop needing to bawl at the hidden lighting and sound engineers only two or three times and even then on quite minor matters. The music he’d chosen for the play was unusual, modern jazz with a blues lilt to it, and it fitted the play remarkably well, once the shock of the incongruity of it had passed, and the lighting was smooth and beautifully designed, with pools of light of different colours appearing at various sites on the stage to focus the audience on whatever new piece of action was taking place there. You have to hand it to him, Hattie thought, watching and listening intently. The man’s got a gift for production.
The last chords of the incidental music crashed through the hall as the curtains closed on the last lighting change, and Collop shouted, ‘Give me all you’ve got on stage for the calls. I’ll rehearse them now. Well, where are you then? You lot, principals first, and then the rest of you. In the order I arranged last time. I want you back stage and in the proper wings right now. Faster, faster faster!’
They scurried, running across the hall like a tide coming in, and Hattie stood to one side of the flanking curtain which hung between the wall and the stage in order to let them into the wings more quickly, and was amused to see Harry Forster, resplendent as Petruchio in feathered hat and crimson ruff over black sweater and tights, waving his sword over his head with one hand as he came running. His other hand was clasping that of one of the other principals who ran behind him trying to keep up, and Hattie had to peer to see who it was, for the stage curtains were still closed and the house lights were still down, and then as the pair reached the corner where she was standing she saw it was Bianca, and was startled. Genevieve? And Harry?
She was looking up at him with her face alight with laughter. Her eyes were wide and dark in her pale face and for once her extreme thinness didn’t make her look drawn and bony. There was a glow about her that Hattie had never seen before, and she looked from Genevieve, who, laughing now, had stopped to untangle from her feet the train that was attached to her long white skirt, to Harry, and saw much the same expression on his face. He was good to look at at the best of times, but now, in his great crimson ruff and with a wide-brimmed feathered hat on his head, he was devastatingly beautiful, and he caught Hattie’s eye as she looked at him and grinned widely, a grin full of such bliss and self-satisfaction that it made her blink.
It was over in a moment; he made an elaborate bow to Bianca, who laughed delightedly and swept past him, her skirt held free of her feet in both hands. Harry stretched out one hand and with great skill reached for her bottom and tucked his fingers under it; and Bianca laughed again even more delightedly and then they were gone, into the wings, leaving Hattie staring after them as Collop started roaring again from the front.
Hattie stood there, shaken, and then began to smile, a long slow smile that wreathed her face. For the first time since the accident to Tully she felt a wave of simple pleasure; Genevieve in love? For that was how the child had looked, she thought, staring blankly at the stage as Collop began supervising a series of elaborate tableaux vivants to be used as curtain calls. The girl’s in love, and what’s better still, it’s reciprocated. Harry too had carried the unmistakable air of delight and separateness that goes with that particular state of lunacy. If nothing else gave it away it was the sheer beauty of them both; only when people were wrapped in mutual adoration could they show that sort of glowing glorious face to onlookers, Hattie thought, and hunched her shoulders with delight. To see Genevieve like that was marvellous. There was one problem at least she’d be able to stop fretting about. Because surely, now she had Harry in her life, she’d start to eat again? He wouldn’t let her starve herself to illness. I’ll see to it he won’t, she thought a little grimly as again the stage curtains swished back to show the final tableau of Petruchio standing in a Henry VIII wide-legged pose, arms akimbo, with young Carter, his plump chest suitably bulging over the top of his gown, submissive at his feet, and beside him Bianca standing smiling and chin-tilted in a would-be dream pose, with her suitors equally submissive before her. She looked at them both again, and it was unmistakable. Petruchio was looking sideways at Bianca and Bianca was looking just as slyly at Petruchio and they were like characters in a comic strip rather than a Shakespeare play. Any moment now, Hattie thought, wanting to laugh aloud, plump scarlet hearts with golden highlights on them will bob up around their heads and then plop like bursting bubbles. Oh, yes, the problem of Genevieve is surely solved. I’ll speak to Harry, see to it that he persuades her to get help. She’ll do anything he tells her, that’s for certain.
‘OK, that’s all for the curtain calls. Just remember them tomorrow and Christ help anyone who moves a muscle until the curtain’s well down and the lights are dimmed. Hear me. I’ll slay anyone who ruins it, and don’t think I don’t mean it.’
The curtain rose again and stayed up, and the cast came clattering down from the stage to stand around waiting for further instructions as Collop looked at his watch.
‘I have to make a phone call,’ he said. ‘Before we start the run-through. I’ll need ten minutes.’ He looked up at Hattie then. ‘Nursie here has some sandwiches for all you diddums so now’s the time to eat ’em. You won’t get a chance later and that’s a promise. Go on. I’ll be ten minutes, no more.’
He looked at Genevieve then. ‘Will he be there at this time?’
Genevieve, her attention dragged from Harry who was standing close beside her, blinked at him.
‘What?’
‘Are you deaf, girl? I said is he there now? Your father?’
‘My father?’ Genevieve looked even blanker.
‘Ye gods, girl! Who else? He’s the Governor, isn’t he, the one who deals with the Council applications?’
‘Oh,’ Genevieve said. ‘Oh, yes. He’s a Governor. I don’t know what he does with the Council though —’
‘Forget it,’ Collop said. ‘I’ll sort it out for myself. Got to get an application for a grant for next year’s Drama. Now remember, I’ll be ten minutes, if that. So get a move on.’
They grabbed for the sandwiches like so many gannets, clearing the trays at an amazing rate, but Hattie rescued one tray and very deliberately took it out to the hall to where Harry and Genevieve were sitting with some of the others, though clearly not with them, since they were still wrapped in their own private bubble.
‘I brought you some sandwiches,’ she said, looking directly at Genevieve. ‘Help yourselves.’
The others did, reaching with alacrity, but Genevieve didn’t move and Hattie said more loudly, ‘Genevieve?’
‘I’m not —’. Genevieve began but Harry reached over her shoulder and picked up two.
‘We’ll share,’ he said. ‘What’s this? Egg and cress. That’ll do nicely. Despite our primitive attire, Mistress Clements, we do not choose to sup upon dead creatures, do we, O divine Mistress Bianca.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ Genevieve said, and Hattie shook her head.
‘I think you must be,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long time since lunch. See to it she eats something, Harry.’
Harry lifted his chin, aware now of the emphasis in her tone and then looked at Genevieve, who had her head bent, staring down at her hands. ‘What’s all this, then?’
‘Genevieve doesn’t eat enough, Harry,’ Hattie said. Her voice was lower now, though the others who were sitting near them were too involved in their own conversations to hear them anyway. ‘She’s rather thin, don’t you think?’
‘She’s great,’ Harry said, and looked at Genevieve and then again at Hattie, and saw the expression on her face, and reached down and picked up one of Genevieve’s hands. It lay in his big hand, itself long-fingered
and elegant, like a small bag of bleached bones and he closed his fist on it gently and then released it and said, ‘But she is too thin. For your health, Bianca of my heart, only for your health.’
She looked at him and then at the sandwich and her face seemed to tighten, so that she made a rictus of a grin and then it smoothed out.
‘Are you going to go on at him about me?’ she said looking at Hattie. ‘The way you do at my mum?’
‘Yes,’ Hattie said. ‘It’s important, you see. Even more now that there’s Harry, don’t you think?’
Genevieve took a deep breath, not quite a sigh and, oddly, smiled, a great wide shimmering grin that lifted her cheeks to a spurious roundness. ‘I’ll have to, won’t I?’
‘Yes,’ Hattie said simply and again Genevieve took that deep breath that was almost a sigh, and reached for one of the sandwiches in Harry’s other hand. She took it, and turned it round once or twice and then very deliberately opened her mouth and took a sizeable bite. And Hattie wanted to cry.
Twenty-seven
Collop, when he came back, looked furious, and Hattie glanced at him as he came crashing in through the main doors and felt her chest tighten. Oh, God, she thought. He was bad enough before; now what’s happened?
‘What’s going on here?’ he shouted. ‘How much longer do you people intend to tit around? Get yourselves back on stage and ready, for Christ’s sake. It’s gone six already. Get a move on.’
Quite what possessed Genevieve Hattie couldn’t imagine. Perhaps in her besotted state she hadn’t noticed the change in Collop’s mood, but as he came pushing his way past her back to his chair in the front row she looked up at him and said, ‘Was he there, then?’
‘What?’ Collop snapped.
‘You said you wanted my dad. Was he there?’
‘What’s it got to do with you?’ He almost shouted it and she stepped back, startled, and Harry, who had been close beside her, but talking to one of the others, felt her movement and turned at once, lissom as a cat, and looked hard at Collop.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said, not taking his eyes from Collop’s face but clearly talking to Genevieve. ‘What’s up?’
‘I don’t know,’ Genevieve muttered. ‘I just asked —’
‘And I said it’s nothing to do with you.’ Collop sounded less fierce now, but he was clearly having to struggle to be calmer. Something had obviously made him very angry indeed. ‘I meant, it was Council business, and as such it’s private. Nothing to discuss with outsiders, even the Councillor’s daughter.’ He managed to grin, a somewhat wolfish baring of teeth, and Harry looked down at him from his superior height and said coolly, ‘I see.’
‘Well, now, are we all ready then?’ Collop had clearly decided to change his manner and he rubbed his hands together now in a show of joviality. ‘Had your sandwiches? Had your drinks?’
There was a chorused murmur of assent and Collop looked around at them all and said, ‘Well, then, where’s mine? Hmm? Where’s my share?’
There was a shocked silence as someone looked round to where two of the empty trays, bearing no more than a few crumbs and wisps of cress, lay abandoned on chairs, and Collop followed his gaze and grinned, this time with real pleasure.
‘Well, well, you are greedy little sods, aren’t you? Pigs, every one of you.’ The discovery seemed to have completed the overturning of his bad mood. Now he was genuinely delighted to have caused them discomfiture. ‘Not so much as a soggy crumb left for the old man? Poor old man, no one to look after me, boo hoo!’
‘I’ve got some KitKat left, sir,’ someone volunteered and pushed forward, holding it out, a rather battered chocolate finger in its red wrapping to which much of the chocolate, melted in a trouser pocket, had clung. Collop looked at it and sighed theatrically, ‘One half-chewed bit of chocolate. Is that the best you can do? What about a drink, then?’
The Cokes and lemonade had all been finished too, and Hattie, deeply irritated by the man’s silliness, lifted her chin and said loudly, ‘They’re all gone, too. Everyone paid up, of course. You said you had your own, anyway.’
‘So I did, so I did!’ he said and reached down for his zipped bag. ‘And to tell you the truth, dear Mrs Clements, and you, you horrible lot, what I have here is infinitely more interesting than even a whole chocolate biscuit would have been, and certainly beats Coke into a cocked hat.’
He reached in and took out his screw-topped bottle and with an expert twist of the little finger on his right hand undid it, turning the bottle against his other hand with such speed that he cap was off and held inside his palm within a split second, while he held the bottle high in the air in his left hand. It was full of a colourless substance and someone at the back of the crowd, emboldened by being hidden, called, ‘Got a drop of vodka in there, have you, sir?’
‘No, it’s gin and tonic,’ someone else said. ‘See the bubbles?’
Collop shook his head and laughed and threw back his chin and opened his mouth and began to tip the bottle from its place high above his head, and Hattie thought disgustedly, Boring show-off. He’s going to do that stupid trick of his.
Afterwards she tried to remember how it was, how long it had taken, but she couldn’t. The event would for always be locked in a sort of time bubble in her head, one in which everything happened at incredible speed and yet so slowly that she was aware of every tiny change in what she saw, as though it were a film being run at impossibly slow speed.
The watery liquid appeared at the neck of the bottle, and began to stream down towards Collop’s open mouth. She could actually see space between the leading part of the stream and his mouth; but then it made contact and the sound happened too, a great eldritch shriek that made her head spin, as Collop flung the bottle from him and leapt to his feet, both hands held to his face as the shriek went on; and then he seemed to try to breathe and couldn’t, and the sound became a choking silence which was infinitely worse than the scream; and they stood there, all of them frozen into horrified stillness as he stared back at them with slowly bulging eyes over a face that went by smooth stages from red to the deepest purple.
It wasn’t until he hit the floor and lay there, his chest heaving and his heels drumming on the wooden boards, that she could move, and she shot forwards to bend over him and then almost reared back, shocking herself, as the fumes caught her, acrid, burning, tear-jerking, and it was as though she were a small inky child again, in a school laboratory, and her teacher was intoning warnings at her about the bottles of acid. Do not touch, dangerous, do not touch —
But that was memory. She was reaching down for his throat, pulling at his shirt and tie to release it and shouting. She didn’t know till afterwards what she had shouted, only that she had, but someone went running and then someone else shouted too and more feet were running and she was still pulling at the shirt round Collop’s purple throat. He still had his hands at his mouth and she tried to pull them back, but he resisted her, and then at last, with one more heave of his chest, he relaxed and she could pull his hands down and she saw it; the gaping mouth and in it the deep red of the mucous membrane peeling, whitening at the edges, swelling before her eyes, and the acrid fumes came even stronger. Someone pushed in beside her and a long arm came over her shoulder and she saw the black skin and registered — Harry, and then took from him the jug he held in his hand. Water; that must have been what she had asked for, and she pulled on Collop’s shoulder, turned him slightly, set his head to one side and began to pour the water into his mouth, watching it run out from the other side, nearest the floor, trying to think what to do next; water to neutralize, alkaline —
‘Soda water,’ Harry said loudly and pushed a bottle into her hands and she caught the sheer commonsense of it and thought absurdly, Where did that come from? And went on washing out the mouth, unaware of the face above it, just that gaping hole with its fringe of yellowing teeth.
‘He’s not breathing,’ someone said beside her and then began to whimper. ‘Is he dead?
He isn’t breathing. Oh, what’s happening? Why isn’t he breathing?’
Hattie reached down to the shirt again and pulled it hard, and the buttons burst and she could see his chest at last and the sign was clear: the inwards curving that meant an obstructed airway, and she said aloud, ‘Tracheostomy. He needs a tracheostomy.’
‘Do you need a knife? A scalpel?’ Harry again, on his feet beside her though he’d been kneeling a moment ago. ‘I’ll get them. Biology lab. Get towels, someone. Cloakroom —’
She went on pouring water in a steady stream into Collop’s mouth, reaching for the refills people were bringing, waiting, needing to do something, not sure she was doing anything useful after all, but with acid burns it was what you did. Neutralize the acid.
‘How did he get acid in his drink?’ she said aloud and then the voice that had whimpered spoke and Hattie turned her head and saw it was Bridget Quinton, one of the sillier sixth-form girls.
‘It must have come from Biology. I can smell it. It’s the hydrochloric acid we use in the biology lab. How did he get it in his bottle?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hattie said. ‘Has someone thought to call an ambulance?’
‘I did.’ Arse came pushing out of the crowd to crouch beside her. ‘They’re on their way. I said it was poison.’
‘Arse? What are you doing here?’ Hattie said, knowing it was a stupid question, but asking all the same, and still she went on trickling in the water though it seemed pointless now. The acid must be gone, washed away into the floorboards. ‘You’re not in the play —’ And then there was Harry, looming above him and Arse shuffled away and Harry was kneeling in his place.
‘Here’s a scalpel — will that do? And I found these forceps. A bit rusty, but I thought —’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ and made herself remember. Just by the cricoid cartilage, wasn’t it? ‘Help me roll him on his back.’
Dangerous Things Page 29
