Link Arms with Toads! (28 page)

She has never been bettered…

If you ever journey to Eclipseville for cultural purposes I’m afraid you will learn that to your cost. But it’s a low cost. The price of a single ticket for admission is just a few froats.

There was no such word as ‘froat’ until Sacerdotal Bagge misspelled the word
groat
. From such accidents neologisms are stillborn, smacked back into unnatural life by evil doctors, set free to wander the banter of simple filk, his misspelling of folk…

The most popular writers for the shadow theatre are still those ancient geniuses, Omar Sixual, Virgil Rydikolos, Nitrogen Parsley and Vibration Javelin, but more modern authors aren’t neglected. Cassius Befuddle and Jimjam Spreadwinkle have recently penned mighty epics that look likely to become classics of the future.

Sacerdotal Bagge unluckily also regards himself as a playwright and it won’t be long before he forces the performance of one of his works on the inhabitants of his metropolis…

But when Prudence was at the apotheosis of her popularity, an upstart by the name of Groopinfoorth Crikey was the most commonly performed author. Many young playwrights live in attics but Groopinfoorth dwelled, or rather
pulsated
, in a pantry.

His plays were half comedy, half tragedy, half impossible fraction, and his favourite subject matter concerned the tribulations of revivalists, those eccentric people in every epoch who work so hard to revive the styles of older epochs, including epochs containing people who want to revive the styles of even older epochs…

And so on forever, or at least for a long time.

For a season Groopinfoorth’s vision held sway. He was responsible for the brief revival of revivalism.

The premiere of his new and long awaited masterpiece was scheduled for the night of the next new moon. In Eclipseville the moon is one of the most celebrated celestial bodies and its phases are carefully anticipated by all and sundry, even by sundry’s servants, and those servants’ slaves, and those slaves’ pets, for many very important festivals are timed to coincide with a particular shape of moon.

During nights of a gibbous moon the inhabitants of Eclipseville like to monkey around. I speak no lie.

A crescent moon has become a symbol of Frabjal Troose, the ancient tyrant who founded half the metropolis, nobody knows which half, and a gala of grins is held in his honour.

When the moon is full, Sacerdotal Bagge blows on an oboe tinted pink and leads people outside the city for an orgy where any unloved soul may have his frustrations vented…

But shadow theatre has a more practical need for data about the phases of that buttery orb, because its waxing and waning light can affect how an actor’s shadow appears on a screen.

Complete darkness is best for a decent show.

Hence the new moon rule…

Prudence decided to use the premiere of Groopinfoorth’s latest play to protest against her treatment in public, about the bias given to her shadow over her real body. She had no intention of enduring the humiliation more than a few extra weeks at most.

The title of Groopinfoorth’s work was
The Stars were Jars
and it was a sequel to
The Planets are Pots
, and like the earlier play it called for a cast of healthy, buxom shadows.

But Prudence stopped eating. She planned to starve herself and famish her shadow into the bargain…

Yes, she wanted to punish her umbra, to castigate a silhouette that had the temerity and contrast to be more worshipped than her own erect form, that had created a situation where a solid living woman was jealous of her own two-dimensional profile!

She also deprived herself of sleep…

Reasoning that if her mind lost focus, so would her outline, she pushed herself to weird extremes, for instance using her bed as a trampoline and juggling uneaten buns until the springs and her fingers no longer worked, or laughing continuously for an entire day at the realisation that a spider’s knees are higher than its head.

Once she hypnotised herself into believing she was not a woman but a regular polyhedron, I’m not sure which one, maybe just a cube, by staring at the pendulum of an antique clock on her mantelpiece for twenty hours. The effect wore off the following day, but not before she had tried to use herself as a cutlery storage box.

The minor wounds inflicted by the forks and knives festered and grew ugly, swelling into pustules, further distorting her facial contours, but the pain of the infection meant nothing to her. She intended to put so much stress on her form, to subject it to so many odd outrages that it must begin to warp and transform itself.

In the three weeks remaining before the premiere, she abused her body to such a degree that it truly did twist and shrink; but at these changes she merely smirked. A contorted body casts a contorted shadow. It can’t help but follow the laws of geometry.

Now her shadow wouldn’t be so appealing, and even its most ardent admirers would be shocked into an understanding that beyond the profile stood an unhappy human being.

And if those admirers desired a beautiful shadow to undulate for their entertainment, they would have to pay more attention to the solid woman who cast it. Prudence wanted them to make up for lost time, to fawn over every pinch of her meat and bones.

She was confident they would…

The big moonless night eventually arrived.

Sacerdotal Bagge brought his own ladder to mount a private box that was actually a modified vegetable crate perched on a pair of ships’ masts lashed together. Groopinfoorth Crikey also had a private box, the second highest in the audience, half the height of the chief guardian’s. The third highest box was occupied by rich merchant Rimsky Mooncup, a man who kept the city supplied with chives.

The ordinary public shifted impatiently on their stools, waiting for the lutists to tune up and for the projectionist to finish wiping the lens of his projector with a crimson cloth.

Then the silk screen was lowered into place and tightened until it had the acoustic properties of a drum membrane. A deep hush settled over the audience; a lute string twanged.

The Theatre of Tangible Absences was easily the most imposing and magnificent in the city. Not only everyone who was anyone attended its premieres, but all nobodies also.

With a soft hum the projector turned the screen into a glowing square of magic. Then more lute chords came. A shadow moved on a corner of the taut silk. Groopinfoorth grunted muffled delight, sighs were expelled, eyes bulged, mouths watered.

The play had commenced!

But what was this? The shadow slid closer to the middle of the screen and waited there, but it wasn’t the coolly curvaceous shadow of Prudence Clearwater. How could it be?

Yet it had a certain familiarity about it. Maybe it
was
her shadow, but horribly attenuated, a shadow of its former self, in other words a shadow of a shadow, which as everyone knows is less endearing than the echo of an echo. There was a unanimous gasp of disapproval and even Sacerdotal Bagge muttered disparagingly.

Then the sympathies turned…

An audience member cried, “The shadow must be ill!”

“
Yes, that’s right,” called another voice, “it has a disease of some kind. Poor shadow! It needs to rest!”

“
Not so!” countered a third opinion. “Antibiotics are the answer! Can I inject a profile, do you think?”

“
What a bizarre suggestion! Who are you?”

“
An evil doctor, as it happens.”

“
I thought as much. An evil doctor
would
suggest what you just did. A needle full of awful medicine… But this outline doesn’t want your drugs. Fattening is a better solution.”

“
Really! How exactly does one feed a shadow?”

“
Toast and jackfruit jam…”

“
You’re guessing, aren’t you? What a fake!”

“
Citizens!” boomed Sacerdotal Bagge. “Cease bickering at once! It is most unseemly. Clearly a specialist in shady ailments must be consulted and I pledge to secure the services of the right fellow within a week. The show will resume, I promise!”

“
Hurrah for the chief guardian!” shouted Groopinfoorth Crikey.

“
Hip hip!” added Rimsky Mooncup.

“
Pelvis, sternum, kneecap!” roared an anonymous wit. There’s always one joker in a theatre crowd.

The play was halted at this point and the projector turned off, much to the fury of Prudence, who wanted to display her lamentable condition for the entire duration of the performance. For the first time in her career, she left the stage without the thunder of applause to accompany her departure. But worse was to come. Sacerdotal Bagge went backstage in person with more than a dozen attendants and fussed over her shadow in her dressing room; but still they ignored her.

An identical outcome awaited her in the street the following day. The empathies of the other pedestrians were directed exclusively at that point where her shadow glided over cobbles and walls, and nobody had even a cursory glance for the real woman. This behaviour was repeated on each subsequent occasion and the deflated actress was forced to admit that her self-chastisement had been in vain. Yet she didn’t abandon the behaviour that had distorted her physique.

Her shadow alone was the star; and she was merely the black vacuum of interstellar space that surrounded this point of light and permitted it to shine so gloriously. Ironic that a living woman should be a nobody while her own shadow was a substantial presence, but that’s how things were in Eclipseville at that time. Prudence was a malnourished void. Before she had a chance to die of starvation, she was visited one morning by a group of men who burst into her house.

They broke open her front door with hammers and rushed up her stairs before she could jump out of bed and defend herself. Hired by Sacerdotal Bagge, they included a specialist in shadows from a distant town where it is still legal to experiment on silhouettes. His assistants held her in a tight embrace while the specialist went to work. First he fitted stiff cardboard margins to her body with straps. Then he ordered a sheet to be pulled off her bed and suspended in the air.

Two men stretched the cloth between them and held it steady without a crease, while the specialist utilised his powerful portable lamp to direct Prudence’s shadow against it. The cardboard margins didn’t fail. Her new outline was the same as her old…

They left her alone then, without even an apology, and when Prudence stumbled to a window and looked out, she saw the chief guardian himself standing in the street and waving, but not really at her; no, his wave went beyond the glass to her false shadow on the wall. Doubtless he expected it to return to acting immediately.

The entire city wanted a Prudence Clearwater revival, and there might have been one, but suddenly a bad moon rose in her head. In Eclipseville a bad moon is any moon deemed unsuitable for a festival of any kind. As every possible moon shape is good enough for a gala of some description it can be seen that bad moons are rare or even impossible. It simply meant that she couldn’t take any more…

This happens to actors all over the world.

Prudence decided to clear out for good, leaving in her wake the fates of everyone connected with her career in any way. And so she did. And this is how some of them fared:

Groopinfoorth Crikey’s meteoric rise fizzled out before the end of the summer. During the opening night of his third epic,
The Quasars shall be Spoons
, he was forced to run from a disgruntled audience that turned into a crazy mob. Seats were ripped up and hurled at the screen and expensive projectors tinkled into oblivion.

He never wrote another play and his obscurity was so profound that he later became famous for just that.

Sacerdotal Bagge, on the other hand, managed to persuade one of the less salubrious theatres to stage a work of his own, but he gave the actors no script to rehearse with. The premiere has been postponed until after his probable death at the hands of an assassin, maybe next year. Until then he refines his role as chief guardian of the metropolis and the shadows of his ears and jowls are everywhere.

Meanwhile, the Literalists begin to question the significance of their given name and whether it has any hidden meanings; and the Symbolists realise that if symbolism represents adherence to a truism that something might not represent itself, they can’t continue to exist until the meaning of symbolism becomes less literal.

That’s the standard of inner struggle among intellectuals over there. I hope you’re not like that yourself?

Even if you are, you’ll be interested to know about one theatre fanatic who doesn’t care about such matters. The anonymous wit in the audience was killed when the office tower of Hyperbole Inc collapsed on him, all twenty thousand floors of it, in a hurricane featuring winds stronger than any recorded before by anyone.

As for Prudence, she married chive merchant Rimsky Mooncup and took his surname. Much safer that way. The couple left Eclipseville on a steam-driven tandem bicycle and settled in Huknibonk-on-Stench, a city with its own special disasters.

But the marriage didn’t last very long and Rimsky ran off with the six sultry shadows he discovered in the highest room of their new house, and Prudence didn’t get the chance to tell him they were his own outlines, cast by lamps positioned in alcoves.