Theatrical Page 11

  I should probably get back to the timesheets. Before I can move, he sucks in a long breath, then sighs. “Well, Hope. Seeing as you’re here, you can make yourself useful. I need to do a bit of maintenance, but just as I was coming up the stairs, I realized I’ve forgotten part of my kit.” He pats the tool belt at his waist. “Pop down to the tech storage room and tell Rav you need a long weight. He’ll know what you mean.”

  “Right. Long weight. Okay.” Relieved to have been dismissed, I turn on the spot – and then turn right back. “Where is tech storage, out of interest?”

  He points at the ladder. “Down, down again, past the production office, left and second on the right.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s what I said.” He turns his back on me and runs a hand up and down one of the ropes, tugging experimentally on the knot. It’s only as I’m halfway down the rungs (which are terrifying on the way down – no way were they this steep going up) that it clicks that he’s checking I didn’t mess anything up.

  Grabbing the timesheets, I dodge another piece of walking scenery and dive back through the door to the basement, heading past the production office and finally winding up at the very end of the corridor and in front of a grey door marked TECH STORE. I’ve walked so far along the corridors that I may well be under my own house at this point, but I’ve been given a job, so I’m going to do it. Being useful. That’s what deputy stage managers are supposed to do. Keep things running.

  I knock. Another guy – again, in head-to-toe black, but this time with short, spiky hair – opens the door.

  “Hi. Rav?”

  “What do you need?”

  So much for being friendly. “I’m Hope, one of the…” I stop. I try again. “I’m the stage management intern. I was sent, by…ummm…actually, I don’t know. But he was up on the fly-floor and said he’d forgotten something?”

  Rav studies me. He raises an eyebrow.

  I wait.

  He waits.

  I’m supposed to be talking. “Right. Yes. So, he sent me down for a long weight? He said you’d know what he meant?”

  “Chris sent you?”

  “If that’s his name, then yes.”

  “And he said I’d know what to give you?”

  “Yes.”

  Rav purses his lips, then nods slowly. “As it happens, I do. I think I have the very thing.”

  He disappears back into the store, pulling the door shut behind him and leaving me in the corridor. I lean back against the wall.

  This is good, actually. It feels like I’m part of the crew already – like this is completely normal, what I do every day. Maybe when I take the weight up to…whatever his name was – Chris – he’ll show me what he was going to do…

  I stretch out my legs, one at a time. Bend my ankles back and forth. Peer at the soles of my trainers.

  Reach up towards the ceiling and lock my fingers together, turning my palms up.

  Drop my arms; shake out my wrists.

  Check my phone. No signal down here.

  Rav is taking an awfully long time.

  I wonder how much stuff there is in the tech store? It must be pretty full, I mean, to…

  To…

  He sent me down here for a long weight.

  A long weight.

  A long wait.

  A. Long. Wait.

  Oh my god, they’re hazing me.

  Unbelievable.

  I yank open the door. Rav is settled in an old armchair with a wad of stuffing poking out of the top, a screwdriver and an old plug in his hands. He looks up at me. “Not bad. It usually takes them at least five minutes. Tell Amy she picked a smart one.” He grins and a hot ball of embarrassment forms in my chest, spinning round and round. I can feel it boiling inside me – and then suddenly, it’s washed away by a rising laugh.

  George.

  I need George.

  Now.

  There’s no sign of George in wardrobe – just a lot of wigs sitting on their stands, hair neatly pinned in place to set, and a couple of racks of half-assembled costumes in front of the bulb-framed mirrors. He must be on his break. So I duck back out to the corridor. Where would he go?

  At the far end of the passage, a door – left ajar – moves in a draught.

  The much smaller studio theatre. It’s not being used at the moment. Bingo.

  But there’s no sign of him at all. Not on the narrow stage, not in any of the seats, not even in the little tech booth at the back… Although, there is – if I hold my breath – a noise. Very, very quiet music. It sounds like it’s coming from the middle of the auditorium…

  I clamber over the front three rows of seats and look over the back of them – to find George lying on the floor, headphones plugged into his iPad and completely absorbed in a make-up tutorial video.

  “Hi!” I lean over and tap him on the top of his head. “Whatcha doing?”

  “OHGODWHATTHEHELLWHATAREYOUDOING?” He lets out a high-pitched burst of panic, rips his headphones off and manages to both drop and catch his iPad all at once.

  “Hey.” I give him a little wave.

  “You nearly gave me a heart attack.” He sits up and slides the tablet into his bag. “Aren’t you supposed to be running around being busy?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I’m on my break – and let me tell you, I’ve earned it. I’ve been pinning wigs all morning and I had no idea how much it makes your fingers ache when there’s thirty of them. And then there’s the other thing.” George shuffles on the floor in the gap between the rows and crosses his legs, looking around like he’s checking nobody else can hear him. “A couple of days ago, Nathalie – have you met her? She’s the wardrobe assistant – asked me to order in some supplies from Screenface to be here for this morning, so I rang them up with the list she sent me. This morning, the courier drops off the package and I’m getting it all out, checking it off, and – get this – one of the things isn’t there. So I call them up again, and I’m having a real go, and they start laughing down the phone. ‘What’s so funny?’ I ask, and they tell me to check again and hang up on me.”

  “Seriously? But that’s—”

  He holds up his hand. “Wait for it. So I find Nathalie, and I tell her that we’ve got everything except the invisible concealer, but they’ve accidentally included an empty pot in there and—”

  I groan. “You too?”

  He blinks at me. “You figured it out?”

  “The empty pot. Invisible concealer.”

  He looks so distraught that I can barely stop myself laughing. “If it’s any consolation, they got me as well. I got sent to the tech stores for a long weight.”

  This perks him up. “What happened?”

  “They left me there.”

  “Oh, a long wait!” He snorts.

  I’m just glad it wasn’t only me. It means it’s not personal – it’s a hazing, a ritual. A way of checking that someone belongs – and even though we clearly both fell for it, it kind of means that we’ve passed their test too. I drape myself over the back of the seat and he pulls a sandwich wrapped in a paper napkin out of his shirt pocket, gulping it down in one enormous bite without dropping so much as a single crumb.

  “How do you do that?”

  “Hungry,” is all I get back as he wipes his mouth and fingers with the napkin.

  “Hang on…is that…lunch? Already?”

  He side-eyes me, confused. “Yes?”

  “I mean, theatre lunch.” I jab a finger at the napkin. “Was that the food delivery?”

  “Yeah, it arrived ages ago. Didn’t you know?”

  “I must have missed it.” My stomach growls so loudly that George’s eyes widen. “Think there’ll be any left?”

  “Maybe?” He sounds doubtful. “But when I was coming out of there, I passed most of the build team in the corridor on their way in. You should go now, or it’ll all be gone.”

  I push my hair out of my eyes. “I promised Amy I’d get the timesheets
done after I’d looked round backstage, maybe I’ll run out and get a sandwich after that.”

  George nods at the bundle of paperwork. “Well, if you ask me, it looks like you need to have lunch first.” He flaps a hand to shoo me away. “They were in the stalls bar,” he says. “Go get ’em.”

  Maybe he’s right – it’s not like I can’t eat while I’m doing them, is it? Multitasking. I can do that. “Thanks.”

  I slide off the seat and give him a goodbye salute. He’s already plugged himself back into his headphones and is focusing very hard on blending.

  The stalls bar is on the other side of the theatre. I pile the staff list, my folder and timesheets into my arms along with a pen. I’m almost at the top of the stairs, and I’ve just about figured out what the little +ht note on one timesheet means, when, without warning, the top folder slips from my pile and hits the steps with a loud thump. Sheets of paper cascade down the stairs like a waterfall.

  I make a grab for another stack of sheets that’s starting to slip, but I’m too late. Down they go…and for a heart-stopping second they take me with them.

  But suddenly there’s a hand on the top of my arm, steadying me. I look round into those blue, blue eyes which eclipse everything else and my heart bangs hard against the inside of my ribs, because he is both the best and worst person to save me from plummeting head first down the steps.

  “Hello there,” he says, and it takes me far longer than it should to realize that Luke isn’t looking down at me, but across at me. He’s crouching on the step beside me, sitting back on his heels. “You all right?”

  “Yes. Thanks. I’m fine. Not sure about Amy’s filing, though…” I wave at the stairs, and nearly lose another folder. He slaps his hand on top of the pile, holding them all together. And his other hand is still resting on my arm – just resting. As though he’s waiting for me to move away.

  I don’t.

  Another wodge of papers slides down the stairs.

  “I should probably get those.”

  And when he takes his hand from my arm, it feels like a cloud has covered the sun.

  “You get the top ones,” he says, hopping up. “I’ll take the ones at the bottom.”

  “It’s fine. Really.” I point at the rolled-up paper in the back pocket of his jeans. “Another script?” (Because obviously, that’s what I’m staring at.)

  “Sea Wall. A monologue I’m trying to learn – it’s for college,” he adds. “My tutor says that keeping up with assignments while I’m working is good preparation for the future. He says it’s what we train for.”

  “I wish my maths teacher had been so supportive when I talked to him about the classes I’d be missing.”

  Luke shuffles the papers from the bottom steps. “You didn’t think I was going for another job or something, did you? I wouldn’t give this up. I loved Lancelot when I read Piecekeepers – getting to be him is pretty cool.”

  He slides the sheets he’s collected into my hands and somehow now he’s kneeling on the step below mine, and his eyes are so close to me, I feel myself sinking into them so deeply that I don’t even hear what he says – I might as well be underwater.

  “You know, if you need someone to help you with your lines…?”

  I look around for the person who said that.

  We’re alone in the stairwell, and it definitely wasn’t him.

  Which means it must have been me.

  Oh, wow.

  Having only talked to him a grand total of two or three times – one of which was him actually asking for help with this very thing, and me being no use whatsoever – I’m now blurting this stuff out. Why would he even take that as anything other than crazy? Besides, someone like Luke will have plenty of people to help him learn his lines, won’t he? People on his course. His friends. His girlfriend, his boyfriend…I don’t even know if he’s with somebody. I don’t even know if I care. Do I care? Why should I care? I just…I…

  His cheeks – even in this light – flush a little.

  “Only if you promise to be gentle. I’m not sure I’m made of stern enough stuff to cope with the kind of prompting you gave Tommy in the rehearsal room. I still haven’t forgotten the look on his face.”

  “Well, I guess you’ll have to make sure you don’t screw up your lines, then.”

  Again: wow. It was meant to be light – a bit flirty maybe, a bit carefree – and instead it’s just come out a bit…well, mean.

  Something in his eyes flickers. He’s studying me, I can feel it. Just like I can feel the faint buzzing under the surface of my skin…and then he smiles. “I guess I will,” he says, and something behind my ribs twists, squeezing the breath out of me.

  He hands me the papers he’s collected as I try to shuffle the stack into a more manageable bundle, and we head towards the stalls bar.

  “I like the waistcoat.” Again, me. For no reason other than never knowingly being too intelligent.

  He tilts his head to one side, obviously trying to decide whether or not I’m kidding, then his smile widens. “Most of the front-of-house staff are off, but obviously I’m still around. Seeing as I’m not rehearsing today, they asked me if I’d do an extra shift and cover the press reception, and a job’s a job.” He works his tie looser at his unbuttoned collar, and just for a second his shirt twists with it and I catch a glimpse of his collarbone, pale in the harsh light. I glance back up at his face and his eyes are on me as he rolls his tie into a ball and vanishes it into a pocket.

  “It doesn’t get in the way? Working front-of-house when you’re…working-working here?”

  “Working-working?” His unscarred eyebrow twitches. “It’s all work, really, and I’ll take whatever I can get. It’s just –” his voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper – “that I like some parts of it better than others.”

  I barely even notice when we reach the stalls bar, only to find it deserted. A handful of chairs are scattered about, but the rest are still stacked on top of the small round tables. Three large platters sit in a neat row along the bar; empty except for a handful of crumbs, half a crust and a dozen strands of cress. It’s not just deserted, it’s barren.

  Luke whistles. “The locusts have been through here, haven’t they?”

  “They have. I’ll have to go and get something from outside.”

  He drums his fingers on the bar. “Can you wait five minutes?”

  I grin and pat my paperwork. “This is going to take more than five minutes.”

  “Okay. Stay put. I’ll be back.”

  And without another word, he disappears, leaving me alone with my paperwork and my non-existent sandwiches.

  I help myself to a glass of reddish juice from the only pitcher on the bar that seems to have survived the onslaught, and shift the platters to one side, swiping the worst of the crumbs away. If nothing else, at least it’s a big flat surface I can sort all the jumbled papers on, and undo the mess I’ve made of Amy’s filing…

  I’ve re-sorted the worst of it and am halfway through pre-filling lighting crew timesheets to leave at the stage door, when Luke reappears carrying a matching pair of bags from the sandwich place around the corner.

  He holds one out to me. “Here. For you.”

  He got me lunch.

  He actually went out and got me lunch.

  “Sorry, I realized I had no idea what you ate, or even liked, so it’s the safest one I could think of. Which means it’s the most boring. Here.” He hands the bag over a little apologetically. “Cheese and tomato. Sorry.”

  “No! Don’t be sorry! That’s brilliant. I love cheese. And tomato. Love them both! Together!”

  Never in the history of sandwiches has anyone ever been this excited about one. I’m not sure whether to eat it or hug it. Or hug him. Which I don’t. Obviously.

  He pulls up a chair next to mine and unwraps his sandwich, carefully smoothing the paper out on the table. Without looking up, he says: “What about you? How come you’re here?”

  “Me?”<
br />
  “No – I was talking to my sandwich.” He sounds so serious that for a second I almost think he means it – and then he tilts his head and looks at me and I see he was kidding. Because obviously he is.

  “Oh. Right. I’ve just always wanted to do this, you know?”

  “Stage management’s a pretty specific thing to want to do. I’m not even sure I know what half of it is.”

  “Well, I’m a pretty specific kind of girl.”

  What does that even mean, Hope? Stop talking.

  Even this latest attack of stupid doesn’t seem to bother him. All he does is laugh.

  I try again. “I mean, I kind of grew up around theatre stuff, and this is the bit I liked best.”

  “I see.” But then his face clouds – just slightly – and I can read the words forming on his lips before he gives them a voice. “Have…have you got family in the theatre then?”

  I freeze. And panic. Simultaneously.

  And somewhere in that moment, I decide the best thing to do is to take an enormous bite of sandwich and start chewing it, all the while beaming at him.

  Wow, Hope.

  As it happens, it’s not the sandwich that saves me from having to answer. Someone in the room clears their throat loudly – someone who isn’t Luke and definitely isn’t me.

  I snap back to the room, to the theatre…and see Roly leaning on the bar and grinning at me.

  “Sorry to interrupt, loves. Luke – Rick’s after you. Something to do with Tommy.”

  Luke stares down at his flattened sandwich paper.

  “I’ve…got to go. Sorry.” His voice is quiet and somehow it feels like he’s slipping away, retreating from me. His eyes are flicking around the room and down again like always: the walls, the floor. So much the floor. I wish he’d look up, look at me.

  I gulp down the mouthful. I don’t want him to go – not yet. “So, maybe I’ll see you later – or tomorrow?”

  He finally looks up at me; he shrugs and smiles and his eyes flash and I can’t feel my fingers any more, and the whole room falls away.

  “You’ll see me,” he says – and I believe him.

  The moment shattered, Luke slips out of the bar, away through the doors into the foyer…but as he does, through the dimpled glass pane, I’m sure I see his blurred outline stop and look back towards me.