Puccini's Ghosts (35 page)

25

L
ila waited at Sew Right until the rain stopped because there was no telling with reds, Enid’s mum said. It was only a shower but rain would go straight through brown paper and you couldn’t trust reds in the wet.

It was the afternoon of the first night. Turandot’s Act III headdress had been brought back to Sew Right for adjustments after Fleur had stopped yesterday’s dress rehearsal more than once to complain that it wasn’t dramatic enough. It needed to be more lavish if she was going to feel really princessy in it. Everyone was busy. It turned out there was nobody but Lila who could go to collect it in time for the evening. She sat on the bus, hot and shaking. For a few days now her throat had been hurting again and from time to time she was attacked by sudden shivering sweats that soaked her face and underarms, embarrassing her so much in front of Joe that she wondered if they were just an extreme, sick-making form of blushing. She walked from the bus depot in burning sunshine.

When she arrived and went through to the back shop she found Enid’s mum partially hidden behind the winged headdress on the table, still working on it. Exhausted by the walk, Lila sank into the other chair and breathed in the humid fug. Enid’s mum felt the cold; even in August the back of the shop wasn’t warm enough for her without the paraffin stove, but when it was lit it seemed to warm not the room but the water that lay invisibly in the air. Today the atmosphere was even heavier with glue and paint and floating fibre dust; the heat sent a tang so irresistibly chemical and narcotic around the room that Lila thought she might suffocate. She cleared the table in front of her of some scraps and pots and brushes, slumped forward and rested her head on her arms.

‘I’ve just a bit more fringe to put on,’ Enid’s mum said. ‘I wasn’t going to bother, it’s just a wee bit left over, then I thought, might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Like it?’

Lila raised her head and nodded, and went on gazing. Working from a picture of Eva Turner as Turandot, Enid’s mum had cut and twisted a wire lampshade frame, possibly two, into a sort of helmet shape with lethal-looking horns, like antlers, that branched out a foot at each side and ended in sharp points. The wire had been wrapped over and over with crimson silk and contrasting shiny red raffia and Christmas tinsel, all tied off with bows of red satin. Strings of red and gold beads hung in little swags down the wire bones of the antlers. Several ropes of red and gold braid and ribbon were attached at the pointed ends, from which they swung like loose trapezes across the top; from each of these strands were suspended paste jewels that shook as Enid’s mum worked, sending tiny shivers of light to mix confusingly in the toxic, vibrant air.

‘I can see your mum in it, right enough. She’ll need to fix it on tight now it’s a bit heavier. It ties under the chin. See?’

Fantastical as it was, Lila also could see her mother in it quite easily.

‘It’ll suit her, all right,’ she sighed, laying her head on her arms again.

It was true that Fleur would wear it as a natural extension of her allure. On her, the suggestion of a Viking at a Christmas party would not cross anyone’s mind for so much as a minute. The warm air of the room fell over Lila and wrapped itself around her like layers of gauze. She yawned. Outside, rain clouds welled suddenly in the sky and covered the sun. The yard beyond the barred window of the back shop grew dark, and Enid’s mum worked on, and Lila’s eyes closed.

‘Aye, you’ll be tired,’ Enid’s mum said, jolting her awake, ‘and here you’ve your big night to come still. You’re looking a wee bit peely-wally.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘Are you feeling a wee bit nervous?’

‘Maybe a bit.’ She was too limp and tired to feel anything.

‘What did you get for your dinner the day?’

‘There was toast and leftover raspberry mould.’

‘Will you be getting your tea when you get home?’

Lila yawned again and said she wasn’t sure. Enid’s mum said she couldn’t rise to a proper tea but she couldn’t see her starve, and sent her out to the shops for rolls, ham and tomatoes and biscuits, telling her to hurry and get back before the rain came on. She was serving a customer when Lila returned, so Lila went out to the passage at the back and made ham rolls and a pot of tea. They ate with plates and cups set anyhow on the table among the scraps of material and ribbon and the pots of paint and glue. Lila could not find the energy to talk. After her tea she dozed on and off while Enid’s mum worked away, pushing herself up from the table with a sigh when the shop bell sounded. While she was busy with customers Lila listened to the scrape and ring of the till and looked forward to her reappearance and more of her soft, drowsy atmosphere. Outside, heavy, pewtery drops of rain began to fall.

Enid’s mum came back and took up the fringing again.

‘Where’s Enid?’ Lila asked, for something to say.

Enid was off out, Enid’s mum told her, looking past the needle she was threading and straight at Lila. Her and Billy, the two of them were off out in their peasant costumes, along with the Mandarin and Pung.

‘In their costumes?’

‘Aye, and the Mandarin and Pung, Norman and Sandy, they’re in those
Mikado
ones we got the loan of, they’re old but the silk’s lovely. More colourful than yon pyjamas the peasants are in.’

‘But what for? Off out where?’

‘Down the esplanade. They’re off handing out leaflets, for publicity. Senga and Deirdre, too.’

Lila was shocked. ‘I can’t see Billy doing that,’ she said.

‘Aye, sounds daft to me,’ Enid’s mum said blandly. ‘Still, Enid got him to go.’

‘They’ll be getting wet,’ Lila said. Now that she had Joe, how could the idea of Enid, Billy and the others larking about together leave her feeling so bleak and excluded? The shop bell sounded again. While Enid’s mum served her customer, Lila swallowed the dregs in her teacup and tried to stop her throat hurting. She tried to lose herself in thoughts of Liù and Calaf, but they would not come.

When all the red fringing had been attached they made a bulky parcel of the headdress, wrapping it in several sheets of brown paper taped together and winding it in a complicated system of strings to use as handles. Enid’s mum made more tea while they waited for the rain to stop.

The shower passed quickly. Water was drying in wafts of vapour off the pavements when Lila set off home, shaken awake by the fear that she was very late. In the steamy sunlight she felt nauseous and unhappy and her bones hurt; she had not meant to sit out the afternoon in the hypnotising air of the back shop, lulled by the to-ing and fro-ing of Enid’s mum into forgetting how urgent life was outside. Now she felt unshelled and spilt, unprotected, back into a brutal day.

Hurrying along in short running steps, she tried to squeeze even five more minutes into the calculation of how much time there was. Her mother had wanted her back with the headdress by half past three and it was already after that. The performance was to start at half past seven and she ought to be at the farm at least by six or Uncle George would be furious. These days he was always furious about something. She was supposed to be using the front room of the farmhouse as a dressing room, sharing it with her mother who would take at least three hours over her costume and makeup, but Lila knew she could never manage the transformation from Lila to Liù in front of her. She had to leave Seaview Villas as Liù, so she had to get back in time for a bath—and today a cold one might be preferable—that would wash away Lila and her sweat and soreness and the stain of a Burnhead afternoon, the running of awkward errands with lumpy parcels. Even Enid’s mum must be rubbed from her memory of the day; Liù could not breathe the homely air of Sew Right. Liù lived on a richer mix, wearing her fate like a garment to which the slightest crumb of a back-shop ham roll picnic must not adhere.

And on top of that, she was so tired. Would there be time for her to rest for even half an hour? The strings of the parcel were cutting damply into her palms and tiny, icy rivers trickled down her body. Her face and throat burned. She began to fret that the brown paper parcel would not hold. She worried that when she got home the bathroom might not be empty. Her breath was coming in jagged little gasps. She walked with her head down, praying she would not run into Enid and the others. Part of her hurry was to do with escape; Liù and Calaf waited somewhere up ahead.

Then, glancing round before she crossed the top of Station Road where it joined Main Street, she saw Joe. She took a breath to call out but he was too far away, walking away from her, striding fast. He too was laden; one arm flapped from his shoulder as he listed under the weight of the big holdall in his other hand. He hurried into the wide turning yard in front of the station and disappeared into the ticket office.

Lila watched the entrance doors swing behind him, then slow, and stop. Already the station front was still and empty again. How quickly he had been and gone, his entrance and exit no more than an agitation of its surface; he could have been made of paper, so lightly had he moved across it. Marooned on the pavement, Lila felt that she was part of the emptiness he had created simply by being no longer present. She was aghast that he could assert his separateness from her so easily. How frail it was, the connection between them, and how invisible; to the ignorant eye she was no more than a girl in the street watching an ordinary man with short legs disappearing into the station. It appalled her to think that, beyond her sight, Joe might appear to be just anybody.

Now she could hear the thud of a train approaching from the left, the northbound Glasgow train. It lumbered under its cloud of smoke across the bridge that spanned Station Road with the ponderous chock, chock of slowing pistons and the wet sigh of steam. The smells of hot steel and burning coal punched the afternoon air.

Lila had no time to think beyond the obvious. He was leaving without her. She made off up the slope of the turning yard, running as fast as she could with the bumping parcel, tore through the empty ticket hall and up over the footbridge to the Glasgow platform where the train was still moving slowly, metal wheels screaming. The guard jumped out. Joe was a long way ahead, walking up the platform towards one of the front carriages.

‘Joe! Joe! Joe, wait!’

He did not hear. With more squealing and grinding, the train stopped. Lila, half-blinded by smoke, nearly collided with the guard as she ran up the platform. He shouted after her, ‘Hey, you! Slow down, you there! Stand clear there. You!’

As she turned at the sound of his voice, the parcel swung across in front of her legs and banged against the side of the train. She lost her balance and stumbled and with a scream went sprawling across the platform, squashing the headdress between her body and the ground.

‘Joe!
Joe!
’

She couldn’t get up because of a sick, swimming sensation in her head. Her mouth was full of dust; she gagged once and then gulped and had to swallow back the spoonful of bilious, hammy tea that flooded into her mouth. She coughed hard, then caught sight of the parcel and burst into tears. A moment later the guard was behind her, pulling her to her feet. Joe left his holdall on the platform and was marching towards them. She tried to stand upright as he approached, her legs trembling so hard that her skirt shook.

The guard said, ‘You all right, hen?’ He sounded shocked. ‘You’re a bit big to be falling over and skinning your knees, are you no?’

She turned her hands upwards. Her palms had taken the worst of it. They were scraped raw; welling beads of blood stood out from the ruts of torn skin and embedded grit.

‘The lassie with you?’ the guard demanded, as Joe came up.

Joe ignored him and stared at Lila. ‘What are you doing here? What’s going on? Are you all right?’

‘Joe…’

He pushed at the headdress with one foot and a few paste beads rolled out. Where the paper was torn, red sparkling fronds of tinsel escaped and winked in the sunshine.

The guard looked at it and shook his head. ‘You with him, hen? He’s no giving you any bother?’

Lila couldn’t answer. She felt sick and her nose was running. With a shaking arm she wiped a sleeve over her face, nodded her head, and then shook it.

Joe said, ‘She’s with me, okay?’

‘Is that right, hen?’

‘I told you.’

Lila nodded. ‘I’m all right.’

The guard looked at his watch. ‘Well, if yous are getting on the train, get on. If yous are no, get out the road.’

He dragged the parcel a few feet back from the train, hitched his trousers and returned to the guards’ van. As he blew the whistle a woman poked her head out of a carriage window and Lila and Joe watched her fluttering headscarf until the train disappeared round the shallow bend of the line.

‘Well, then,’ Joe said, over the top of Lila’s head. He was staring after the train and would not meet her eye. ‘So, you’re all right, are you?’

She looked at him and said nothing. His voice had changed; it was now as rough as other people’s.

He said, ‘I’ll have missed my connection to Euston now. I suppose I’ll just have to get the next one.’

Still Lila did not know what to say. She watched him walk up the platform and pick up his holdall.

‘Joe!’

He turned round. ‘You should go home.’

‘But,
Joe
! Why are you going? What about tonight?’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘go home. That’s what I’m doing. You’re only young, there’s things you know nothing about. Just go on home.’

‘But what about tonight? You’ve got to sing. Oh, Joe, it’s only nerves! You can’t let us down!’

‘I’m sorry if I’m letting anybody down, you’ll have to excuse me…’ His voice trailed off. ‘Look, I’m not cut out for this,’ he said. ‘It’s just not for me, all right? You’d better leave me alone.’

‘I can’t! I
can’t
. What about tonight? And afterwards? You’ve got to sing. You can’t leave now!’

‘I’m not doing it, okay? Joey no can do.’

He turned and made towards a bench under a hanging sign saying BURNHEAD. Lila watched, trying not to weep. ‘You can’t leave.
Joe! Why?
’