Idea in Stone (9 page)

“Thank you,” she said. “Do you have any bourbon?”

Stefan nodded, giving her a
one second
finger. As he poured the drink, he found himself taken with this woman, her total mastery over her condition—not physically, there was nothing she could do about that, but socially, personally. He brought her the drink, handing it to her with a square napkin. He pulled a chair over from the kitchen table and sat beside her.

“So what do you do?” asked Helen.

“I do voice-over work for a children’s show.”

“Oh yeah, which one?”

“
The Green Brigade
. Do you know it?” Helen nodded. “I’m ‘Bloob Ox’.”

“Really? That’s amazing. You don’t sound anything like that in real life.”

“Well,” said Stefan with a cocky angle to his head, “that’s where the talent comes in, isn’t it?”

“Do me,” she said.

Oh God
. Many people asked him this, and he was generally able to do it to varying degrees of success, depending on how much vocal character the person had in the first place. But with Helen it wouldn’t be fair. It was too easy. How could he produce anything close to her voice that wouldn’t sound like a mockery?

“Go on. I’ve heard myself on tape before, I know what I sound like. I dare you. If you get it right, I’ll buy you a drink.”

Stefan swallowed, then poked his fingers underneath his jaw to loosen his tongue-muscles. “Okay,” he said, “here goes.
Hi, my name’s Helen Jackson, and I’m here tonight to make you all feel very awkward
.”

“Son of a bitch,” she said, “that’s very good.” Stefan sighed. His risk paid off.

The two of them talked for an hour, gossiping about the people around them. They talked about the state of the world, then came back around to their work in broadcasting.

“I’m going to leave the show,” Stefan confided. “I’m going to leave Canada.”

Helen’s eyebrows rose on her pointed, elfin face. “Delonia never mentioned this.”

“She doesn’t know.”

Her eyebrows rose higher.

“She’s everywhere, Helen. There’s no place I can go here where I’m not ‘Delonia Mackechnie’s son’. If she’s not getting in my way, her reputation is.”

Stefan expected her to counter this, but instead she said, “So where are you going?”

“I’m going to Edinburgh. In Scotland.” This was the first he’d said it out loud. The commitment of it made his stomach flutter.

“Oh,” said Helen, “are you putting on a show at the Fringe?”

“Sorry?”

“The Fringe Festival. Are you putting on a play there?”

Stefan’s heart stalled.

“Yes, I am.”

Five

Helen on Wheels

“There’s a lot here,” said Helen, “but it’s a mess.” She riffled through the manuscript, her eyes flicking back and forth across the pages, magnified so many times by her lenses that each blink surprised Stefan. She looked up at him. “But it’s very good. I haven’t seen anything like this in a long time.”

His spirits lifted. “So what should I do? What’s next?”

Helen lifted her glasses and rubbed her eyes, her fingertips beneath the lenses like pink eggplants. “You’ll need a cast, obviously, and a director. A stage manager, a production manager—those could be the same person. And this script wants a dramaturge, someone to get it into shape. Then you’ll need producers, backing. Getting a show together and paying everyone, particularly if you want to ship it overseas, is more expensive than you might realise, even if you do it on the cheap. That is, unless you get people to do it for free, maybe on some kind of point-sharing system. But then you’re probably looking at student actors. And some of these parts, particularly the older man—you don’t want to do that to this script.”

Stefan slumped back in his chair. He had his own debts to think about, now this. He felt dread coming over him, the feeling that often made him pull the covers over his head instead of facing the day.
This is too hard
, he thought.

Helen sat up in her custom-built, ergonomic executive high-chair. She flicked her long hair from her face and leaned on one of her small arms. “So?” she asked.

“So?” replied Stefan, unsure.

“So when are you going to ask me to help you? Or were you?” she croaked at him, point-blank.

“I couldn’t do that,” he said. “I can’t ask you to take this on. You know I can’t afford you.”

“Stefan, at this point in my life, I don’t need any more money. I’m not rolling in it, but I’m not exactly hard-up, either. This work I do here, I enjoy it, and I enjoy the people I work with, but it’s pretty familiar. Most of it is just entertainment. This play you’ve brought me, it means something, and not just because it has a sentimental attachment for you. I would love to do something I thought had as much meaning in it as this. I also haven’t been involved in theatre in years. It could be fun to try that again.”

“Helen, that’s amazing! I can’t thank you enough. But what about the money?”

“Stefan, look at me. I’m a handicapped First Nations woman who can speak French. I’m a government grant on wheels. I also happen to be a very good producer. I can raise us some money. But you’ll also have to hustle, too. I can’t do everything.”

“Oh, for sure,” he said, with no idea how he’d raise his portion.

“So,” she said, “is it a deal?”

“Definitely. Deal.”

“Alright, shake,” she said, offering him one of her little clover-like hands, “but not too hard.”

“You amaze me,” said Stefan.

“Thank you,” she said, smiling, then going deadpan. “If you patronise me again, this whole thing is off.”

~

Stefan walked through the large concrete park next to the broadcasting centre where he’d just left Helen in her office. Dried leaves scraped across the ground in the chill wind. Skyscrapers towered all around him, monoliths of glass in turquoise, copper, and black. Across the park, lights blinked around the marquees of theatres that hosted touring mega-musicals. Stefan tried to imagine what the budget for those shows might be, but didn’t know where to begin. Equally unfathomable was the amount they pulled in each night with their enormous ticket prices.

He faced into the wind, digging his hands into his pockets, making a mental note to find his gloves when he got home. He tried thinking about his own show, tried breaking the task down, but his mind had a habit of not sticking with difficult tasks, chasing every stray thought like a little dog after feigned throws of a non-existent ball. Before he knew it, his mind fixated on the need for a coffee—that drink his mother referred to as “office drugs”. Stefan turned back toward the broadcasting building, a giant concrete block outlined with red metal piping. On the ground floor was a coffee shop (“An institutionalised dealer,” Delonia said in his mind).

The shop was a cafeteria decorated like a bistro. Stefan poured himself a medium cup of coffee from an urn, then followed the roller coaster tray rails to the till, where he paid, then took a seat at one of the small tables. He preferred his coffee with sugar, but he also preferred not to hear Delonia’s reminder that the brown sugar they offered was just white sugar with molasses added, and white sugar was “powdered cancer”. The chemical alternatives to sugar weren’t an option for him either, having heard his mother unconsciously mutter “excitotoxins” every time she saw someone dump the contents of one of the little paper sachets into a cup. Nothing in her world was simple. On their search for her birthday cake, Stefan had commented to Allen that it would be easier to find the Arc of the Covenant than to find a ‘cake’ that matched her nutritional demands. Allen suggested that the Arc might make a nice gift, but Stefan insisted that it was a bit Christian for her tastes. Allen suggested that she could still use it for storing linen, as long as she vacuumed it out with her eyes closed first. Would that then, Stefan asked, make their vacuum cleaner the Electrolux of the Covenant?

Stefan realised he would miss his friends when he left.
Still,
he thought,
it’s always easier to be the leave-er than the leave-ee.

“You’re Delonia Mackechnie’s son, aren’t you?” said a voice, bringing Stefan back to the cafeteria.

“Yeah, it’s Stefan, hi.” In this building the tone of such exchanges was different, easier for him to take: less take-home autograph requests, more expressions of professional admiration for his mother.

“My name’s Roger. I’m the floor manager for
Super Fantastic Window
. Do you know the show?”

Stefan stifled a laugh. “Uh, yeah. Every time I see that couch on your show I get a happy feeling.”

“‘The Mirror’ died on Thursday,” said Roger.

“What? Not—what was his name? Theo, wasn’t it? Oh, I’m really sorry.”

“Yeah. Bad circumstances, too. Luckily we’re managing to keep it out of the papers. If he lived it would’ve been a scandal, but since he’s dead it wouldn’t play for very long, so we managed to convince everyone to skip it.”

“Wow, that’s too bad. I met his wife a few times. She’s really nice.”

“She was there, too. And some other couples, along with some strippers, hustlers, animal handlers, you name it. Big private party in a hotel pool, disco lights hanging overhead—you can do the math.”

“Oh God,” said Stefan.

“Yeah. Big investigation, everyone from the vice squad to the SPCA. We’ve put off shooting for a few days, but if we can’t start again right away, the show might fold.”

Something in Roger’s voice was less than matter-of-fact, Stefan realised. “You’re telling me all this for a reason, aren’t you?”

“Well, I’ve heard about you from the people on your show. They say you’re really talented.”

“And you want me to voice-over ‘The Mirror’?”

“Well,” said Roger, “you’d also have to do the arms, too. You know, how they wiggle on either side of the mirror-frame with those big gloves on? Theo loved that part.”

“Does it pay scale?”

“God no,” said Roger, “the guy did the show for fifteen years. It’s three times that.”

Stefan grinned. “For three times scale, Roger, I’ll wiggle anything you want.”

~

“The stimeless story of a woman’s passion,” said Stefan in an earnest
basso profundo
.

“Perfect,” piped a voice electronically into the tiny sound booth. Behind the word Stefan heard the echo of another voice.

“No, it wasn’t,” said Stefan, “I said ‘stimeless’.”

“Oh,” replied the electronic voice with the echo. “All right then, let’s do it again.”

Stefan enjoyed this, doing movie trailer dubs. The film distributor couldn’t afford the ‘real’ voice that everyone knew from the cinema, but Stefan could provide them with a version just different enough to have that familiar feel, yet not invite any potential legal problems. The day’s recording would pay well, but he’d also receive residuals every time the trailer ran. He also liked getting an early peek at the movies being produced locally, though sometimes he found it difficult to speak about them with the seriousness the films’ producers requested.

“Alright,” said Stefan, then took a deep breath. “The timeless story of a woman’s passion...”

~

Stefan looked over the pages of the grant application. “Wow,” he said, “this is pretty thorough.”

“You have to be,” said Helen. “This is decision by committee we’re talking about. Lots of applications are eliminated off the bat because they goof up on the basic requirements. It saves the committee looking at everything in depth. I know that some of what I’ve written there doesn’t sound much like your play—”

“My dad’s play,” interjected Stefan.

“It’s
your
play now,” countered Helen. “You have to take ownership of it. We won’t ever get it on its feet if we’re being precious with it.” She adjusted in her chair with a little hop. “So that’s what I’m submitting. We’ve missed this year’s deadline, of course.”

Stefan’s face fell.

“Oh, don’t look so gloomy. Let me make a call.” She put on a headset with a microphone and a little dial-pad attached, flipped through a wheel of cards on her desk, then dialled a number with a deft series of finger-pokes. “Hi, yes, this is Helen, could you put me through? Thanks.” She smiled at Stefan and gave him a little thumbs-up. “Hi there. I was just wondering how you were getting along with my application. What do you mean? Oh, don’t tell me you didn’t get it! Dammit! Okay, I tell you what, I’m going to courier it over to you right now. Yeah, perfect. Thanks. Yep. Great. Okay, so I’ll hear from you soon? Perfect!” She poked her dial-pad and took off the headset, grinning. “That’s how it’s done, baby.”

“So what do you think our chances are?” asked Stefan.

“Very good. And not because of that little manoeuvre there, and not just because of that application. I wouldn’t push it through like that if I didn’t believe in that play.”

“I really appreciate this, Helen.”

“I appreciate the opportunity, Stefan. Art can change the world, you know. Well, so can business. But art can save it.”

Stefan had never considered this. It hadn’t come up. “So how long until we find out?” he asked, after deciding that he had nothing to add to her declaration.