Act 1
1
It wasn’t going well. He was polite enough – he was always polite – but I was losing him.
“It’s a fantastic story,” I said. “There’s this man – Einhard would be amazing in it. It’s the part he was born for.”
A little ground regained. Einhard was hard to find parts for, and under contract. “Go on,” he said.
“There’s this man,” I went on. “He’s a nobleman by birth but fallen on hard times. He’s begging in the street.”
“That’s good,” he said cautiously. “People like that.”
“And one day he’s sitting outside the temple with his hat on the ground and his dog on a bit of string—”
“No dogs. We never work with dogs.”
“With his hat on the ground, when who should walk up but the lord high chamberlain and the grand vizier. In disguise, of course.”
“But we know it’s them.”
“Of course. And they point out that the man bears an uncanny resemblance to the king. Yes, the man says, he’s my umpteenth cousin umpteen times removed, that’s why I grew the beard, because it’s embarrassing sometimes, but what can you do? And then the grand vizier says, we need you to do a job for us, and you’ll be well paid. And it turns out that the king’s been abducted by traitors in the pay of the enemy, who want to start a war, so we need you to pretend to be him, just long enough so that—”
He raised his hand. “Let me stop you there,” he said.
Oh well, I thought.
“It’s a great story,” I said.
“I agree. It’s a fantastic story. Always has been. It was a great story a century ago in The Prisoner of Beloisa. It was even better in Carausio, and The Man in the Bronze Mask—”
“A hundred and sixteen consecutive performances,” I pointed out.
“Still a record,” he conceded. “It’s one of those stories – well, a bit like you,” he said with a smile. “Starts off really well a long time ago and just keeps on getting better and better, no matter how many times you see it, up to a point, but after a while—” He shrugged. “Best of luck with it,” he said, “but I don’t honestly think it’s for us, thanks all the same.”
“There’s a siege in it,” I told him. “And a love story.”
He hesitated. “Sieges are good,” he said. “Tell you what. Why don’t you go away and rewrite it with just the siege, and forget about the other stuff? Sieges are going down really well right now.”
Which is bizarre. Seven years into the great siege of the City; that’s real life, for crying out loud, surely the last thing you go to the theatre for is real life. But (he explained to me, when I objected) what the people want is something that looks at first sight like real life, but which actually turns out to be a fairy tale with virtue triumphant, evil utterly vanquished, a positive, uplifting message, a gutsy, kick-ass female lead and, if at all possible, unicorns. Also, I told him, what they want is something that looks new and completely original but is actually the same old story we’ve all known and loved since we were kids. Exactly, he said. But, knowing you, what you’d give them would be something genuinely new and original disguised as the same old same old; and if I were to put that on in my theatre, after a night or two the actors would start to feel terribly lonely.
So I went away. As it happens, I wrote him a positive, uplifting piece of shit about a siege where virtue triumphed, evil was vanquished and Andronica looked stunning in slinky black leather as she kicked enemy ass from one side of the proscenium to the other. It ran twenty-six nights and more or less broke even, so that was all right.
Virtue triumphant, evil utterly vanquished, a positive, uplifting message, a gutsy, kick-ass female lead and, if at all possible, unicorns. I have to confess I’m no scholar, so for all I know there may be unicorns, in Permia or somewhere like that, so maybe one component of that list does actually exist in real life. Wouldn’t like to bet the rent on it, though.
2
I left the theatre and walked down Fishtrap Hill into Paradise. Curious thing about this man’s city. All the really horrible bits of it have absolutely charming names. Like the Old Flower Market, which at one time must have been a place where you could buy flowers, but not in my lifetime. It burned down in that big fire about five years ago and nobody’s missed it; the inhabitants moved out and separated strictly on Theme lines – all the Blues went to Old Stairs, all the Greens to Paradise – with the result that there’s no longer anywhere in town where Blues and Greens can be found living side by side. No great loss. Theme-related murders are down about ten per cent since the Flower Market went up in smoke. It’s so much easier to tolerate your deadly enemies if you never see them from one year’s end to the next.
A respectable professional man like me has to have a reason for setting foot in Paradise; not something you’d do frivolously, or unless you absolutely had to. I walked down a couple of alleys, with that dreadful twitchy feeling you simply can’t help, like painfully sore eyes in the back of your head, then stopped at one of twenty or so identical anonymous soot-black doors, wrapped a bit of cloth round my knuckles and knocked three times. The door opened, and this woman stood there staring at me.
You wouldn’t put her on the stage. You wouldn’t dare to. Stereotypes and caricatures are all very well – our life’s blood, if the truth be told – but there’s such a thing as overdoing it. So, if you want an obnoxious old hag, you go for two or three out of the recognised iconography: wrinkles, hooked nose, wispy thin white hair like sheep’s wool caught in brambles, shrivelled hands like claws, all that. You don’t use them all, because it’s too much. Which is why you don’t get much real life on the stage. Nobody would believe it.
“Hello, Mother,” I said.
She gave me a sour look. “Oh,” she said, “it’s you.”
“Keeping well?”
“Like you give a damn.”
You don’t stand talking in doorways in Paradise. “Can I come in?” I asked.
“Why? What do you want?”
She loves me really, but I’m a great disappointment to her. “I haven’t been to see you for a while,” I said.
“Six months and four days. Not that I mind.”
“Can I come in, please?”
My mother owns her own spinning wheel, which in Paradise makes you aristocracy. She’s also the widow of a Green boss, so nobody’s stolen it yet. And that’s not all. She spins high-grade coloured yarns for the daughters of the gentry, who sit doing embroidery all day; the difference being, my mother gets paid. She’s practically blind, but she’s still very good at what she does, very quick and never any problems with the quality of the product. I once figured out that she’d spun enough silk thread to stretch from here to Atagene and back. I told her that. She has no idea where Atagene is, and couldn’t care less.
“Is it money?” she asked.
Hurtful. True, very occasionally I’ve been obliged to borrow trifling sums, but not recently. Not for at least six months. “Certainly not,” I said. “I just wanted to see you, that’s all. You’re my mother, for crying out loud.”