Clive Barker - Books Of Blood Vol 1

‘No need.’

‘Really —‘

‘It didn’t work too well anyhow.’

The Grand Circle door creaked a little as it closed behind the visitors. Galloway didn’t bother to look round. They’d gone, whoever they were.

‘There was somebody in the house this afternoon.’ Hammersmith looked up from the sheets of figures he was poring over. ‘Oh?’ his eyebrows were eruptions of wire-thick hair that seemed ambitious beyond their calling. They were raised high above Hammersmith’s tiny eyes in patently fake surprise. He plucked at his bottom lip with nicotine stained fingers.

‘Any idea who it was?’

He plucked on, still staring up at the younger man; undisguised contempt on his face.

‘Is it a problem?’

‘I just want to know who was in looking at the rehearsal that’s all. I think I’ve got a perfect right to ask.’

‘Perfect right,’ said Hammersmith, nodding slightly and making his lips into a pale bow.

‘There was talk of somebody coming up from the National,’ said Galloway. ‘My agents were arranging something. I just don’t want somebody coming in without me knowing about it. Especially if they’re important.’

Hammersmith was already studying the figures again. His voice was tired.

‘Terry: if there’s someone in from the South Bank to look your opus over, I promise you, you’ll be the first to be informed. All right?’

The inflexion was so bloody rude. So run-along-little-boy. Galloway itched to hit him.

‘I don’t want people watching rehearsals unless I author-ize it, Hammersmith. Hear me? And I want to know who was in today.’

The Manager sighed heavily.

‘Believe me, Terry,’ he said, ‘I don’t know myself. I suggest you ask Tallulah — she was front of house this afternoon. If somebody came in, presumably she saw them.’

He sighed again. ‘All right .. . Terry?’

Calloway left it at that. He had his suspicions about Hammersmith. The man couldn’t give a shit about theatre, he never failed to make that absolutely plain; he affected an exhausted tone whenever anything but money was mentioned, as though matters of aesthetics were beneath his notice. And he had a word, loudly administered, for actors and directors alike: butterflies. One day wonders. In Hammersmith’s world only money was forever, and the Elysium Theatre stood on prime land, land a wise man could turn a tidy profit on if he played his cards right.

Galloway was certain he’d sell off the place tomorrow if he could manoeuvre it. A satellite town like Redditch, growing as Birmingham grew, didn’t need theatres, it needed offices, hypermarkets, warehouses: it needed, to quote the councillors, growth through investment in new industry. It also needed prime sites to build that industry upon. No mere art could survive such pragmatism.

Tallulah was not in the box, nor in the foyer, nor in the Green Room.

Irritated both by Hammersmith’s incivility and Tall-ulah’s disappearance, Galloway went back into the audi-torium to pick up his jacket and go to get drunk. The rehearsal was over and the actors long gone. The bare hedges looked somewhat small from the back row of the stalls. Maybe they needed an extra few inches. He made a note on the back of a show bill he found in his pocket:

Hedges, bigger?

A footfall made him look up, and a figure had appeared on stage. A smooth entrance, up-stage centre, where the hedges converged. Galloway didn’t recognize the man.

‘Mr Galloway? Mr Terence Galloway?’ ‘Yes?’

The visitor walked down stage to where, in an earlier age, the footlights would have been, and stood looking out into the auditorium.

‘My apologies for interrupting your train of thought.’

‘No problem.’

‘I wanted a word.’

‘With me?’

‘If you would.’

Galloway wandered down to the front of the stalls, appraising the stranger.

He was dressed in shades of grey from head to foot. A grey worsted suit, grey shoes, a grey cravat. Piss-elegant, was Galloway’s first, uncharitable summation. But the man cut an impressive figure nevertheless. His face beneath the shadow of his brim was difficult to discern.

‘Allow me to introduce myself.’

The voice was persuasive, cultured. Ideal for advert-isement voice-overs: soap commercials, maybe. After Hammersmith’s bad manners, the voice came as a breath of good breeding.

‘My name is Lichfield. Not that I expect that means much to a man of your tender years.’

Tender years: well, well. Maybe there was still some-thing of the wunderkind in his face.

‘Are you a critic?’ Galloway inquired.

The laugh that emanated from beneath the immacu-lately-swept brim was ripely ironical.

‘In the name of Jesus, no,’ Lichfield replied.

‘I’m sorry, then, you have me at a loss.’

‘No need for an apology.’

‘Were you in the house this afternoon?’

Lichfield ignored the question. ‘I realize you’re a busy man, Mr Calloway, and I don’t want to waste your time. The theatre is my business, as it is yours. I think we must consider ourselves allies, though we have never met.’

Ah, the great brotherhood. It made Galloway want to spit, the familiar claims of sentiment. When he thought of the number of so-called allies that had cheerfully stabbed him in the back; and in return the playwrights whose work he’d smilingly slanged, the actors he’d crushed with a casual quip. Brotherhood be damned, it was dog eat dog, same as any over-subscribed profession.

‘I have,’ Lichfield was saying, ‘an abiding interest in the Elysium.’ There was a curious emphasis on the word abiding. It sounded positively funereal from Lichfield’s lips. Abide with me.

‘Oh?’

‘Yes, I’ve spent many happy hours in this theatre, down the years, and frankly it pains me to carry this burden of news.’

‘What news?’

‘Mr Galloway, I have to inform you that your Twelfth Night will be the last production the Elysium will see.’

The statement didn’t come as much of a surprise, but it still hurt, and the internal wince must have registered on Calloway’s face.

‘Ah.. . so you didn’t know. I thought not. They always keep the artists in ignorance don’t they? It’s a satisfaction the Apollonians will never relinquish. The accountant’s revenge.’

‘Hammersmith,’ said Galloway.

‘Hammersmith.’

‘Bastard.’

‘His clan are never to be trusted, but then I hardly need to tell you that.’

‘Are you sure about the closure?’

‘Certainly. He’d do it tomorrow if he could.’ ‘But why? I’ve done Stoppard here, Tennessee Williams — always played to good houses. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘It makes admirable financial sense, I’m afraid, and if you think in figures, as Hammersmith does, there’s no riposte to simple arithmetic. The Elysium’s getting old. We’re all getting old. We creak. We feel our age in our joints: our instinct is to lie down and be gone away.’

Gone away: the voice became melodramatically thin, a whisper of longing.

‘How do you know about this?’

‘I was, for many years, a trustee of the theatre, and since my retirement I’ve made it my business to — what’s the phrase? — keep my ear to the ground. It’s difficult, in this day and age, to evoke the triumph this stage has seen ...‘

His voice trailed away, in a reverie. It seemed true, not an effect.

Then, business-like once more: ‘This theatre is about to die, Mr Galloway. You will be present at the last rites, through no fault of your own. I felt you ought to be .

warned.’

‘Thank you. I appreciate that. Tell me, were you ever an actor yourself?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘The voice.’