Provender Gleed (39 page)

Then came the biggest blow of all. With the sets designed, scale models constructed, parts of Elsinore Castle already built, not to mention the costumes measured for and in the process of being sewn, Arthur had a change of heart. He came to Lockwood and said he had decided he didn't want a traditional
Hamlet
any more, he wanted a bold one, a groundbreaking one, a
Hamlet
that would startle (but still please) the Bard and would enliven modern audiences who were jaded, he felt, by stuffy old renditions of Shakespeare and were seeking something different, something that was exciting and spoke directly to the modern-day theatregoer. He had roughed out some drawings of how he wanted Elsinore and the dramatis personae to look. Lockwood stared at the drawings, and stared at them some more, and calculated how much it would cost to abandon the existing designs and begin afresh, and came the closest he had ever got to punching someone. This thoughtless, this
arrogant
little fuckwit...! How dare he turn up with a few clumsy ballpoint sketches and expect the set designer, the costumier, the property master,
everyone
to scrap everything they'd already done - work they had sweated over - and start again from scratch.

But, as ever, Lockwood capitulated.
Gleed patronage
, he told himself.
Gleed patronage, Gleed patronage, Gleed patronage
. He tried to talk Arthur into sticking with the original concept but Arthur's mind was made up and no amount of friendly persuasion could get him to budge. There was a near-riot as Lockwood announced the change of plan to the assembled design crew. For some reason not wishing to make Arthur a scapegoat, he took half of the responsibility onto himself, claiming it was a joint decision by the pair of them. He also promised to meet any overtime costs out of his own salary, an offer which meant that by the end of the play's run Lockwood would have earned a grand total of nothing, his income as director entirely eliminated by the expense of implementing Arthur's alterations.

It was around this time that Lockwood developed insomnia and, on his GP's advice, went on a course of antidepressants. Ever since, he had stopped caring about the production nearly as much and was even content to let Arthur assume some of his directorial duties. Arthur made suggestions about blocking and stage business which Lockwood rarely disagreed with. If he objected strongly, all he would do was say yes and then later have a private word with the players concerned and tell them to keep to the original way of doing the scene. They ignored him, invariably going along with Arthur's idea instead, but at least Lockwood had made the effort to look like he was still in charge. Nor was he in a position to be upset now if the reviews castigated the style and quality of the production, as some of them this morning had. He wasn't to blame. He had tried his best. He could do no more.

Arthur's re-envisioning of the play had turned it into something Lockwood barely recognised any more. The setting was now not a thirteenth-century Danish castle but a latterday English mansion, expensively decorated and furnished. The characters were kitted out in the latest fashions and had been advised by Arthur to declaim their lines in a free-form manner, ignoring the rhythms of Shakespeare's iambic pentameter. The play-within-a-play in Act II, scene ii, had been supplanted by a film-within-a-play, a prerecorded one-reeler projected onto a backdrop screen while Hamlet and family sat in cinema seats and, would you believe it, munched popcorn. The arras behind which Polonius meets his doom in IV, iii, had become a tinted-glass picture window, and Polonius himself was wheelchair-bound, though no less crotchety an old codger for that. There was no Ghost. Arthur preferred a modern psychological interpretation of the spectre - it was all in Hamlet's mind, a subjective manifestation of Oedipal leanings and madness - and so he taped Hamlet's Father's lines himself and had them played over the sound system. As a consequence, any of the other characters who see the Ghost in the course of the play were expected only to
pretend
to see it, as if humouring Hamlet, even if Hamlet didn't happen to be onstage at the time. It was absurd, but it was what Arthur wanted, and what Arthur wanted Arthur got.

Then there was Arthur's performance itself. He had chosen to essay the role naturalistically and with a set of tics and mannerisms clearly modelled on a real person, perhaps someone he knew or had once met. This lent it the air of an in-joke, but one so obscure that possibly only Arthur himself got it. Certainly Lockwood, as he observed the rehearsal at a dispassionate distance from the back row of the stalls, had no idea who Arthur was aping with those hesitancies of his, those inhibited gestures, those improvisational ums and ers, that whole peculiar blend of realistic underplaying and relentless mugging. Not forgetting that wig which was not a wig - a fine-furred latex cap which fit snugly over Arthur's own slicked-down hair and gave the impression of a close-shaven, downy scalp.

Provender, on the other hand, understood who it was straight away.

And was at first thunderstruck, then indignant beyond belief.

When Provender entered the auditorium, with Is and Moore not far behind him, the play was halfway done. Hamlet had just killed the figure lurking behind the arras - or rather the picture window, which he had shattered to spun-sugar smithereens by hurling a heavy potted shrub through it - and discovered that his victim, whose skull had been crushed by the pot plant, was not his uncle but Polonius. Gertrude was now soundly berating him, as well she might, and Hamlet was defending his actions at some length, though not, of course, at the length Shakespeare originally envisaged.

'Nay,' said Arthur, 'but to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, / Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty!'

'O, speak to me no more!' replied the actress playing his mother. 'These words like daggers enter in my ears. / No more, sweet Hamlet!'

'A murtherer and a villain!' Arthur exclaimed.

'You bastard,' Provender hissed, almost simultaneously. His voice did not carry far but it did reach the ears of Sean Lockwood, who swivelled in his seat to see who had spoken. In the dimmed auditorium light he failed to identify Provender Gleed, but something about the person was naggingly familiar. The way he held himself. His cropped hair.

'You absolute and utter bastard,' Provender hissed again as, onstage, Arthur began a conversation with the unquiet spirit of his father. Much like a lunatic hearing voices in his head, Arthur twitched and twisted and frowned while he interpolated his own lines with the Ghost's booming taped tannoy pronouncements.

What Provender was looking at, however, was not acting. It was rank satire.

Is, standing at his shoulder, came to the same realisation. In a low whisper she said, 'He's doing you, isn't he?'

Provender hadn't needed it confirmed but to hear it from someone else was heartening. It meant he wasn't imagining things, this wasn't an instance of misplaced vanity; his cousin really was playing Hamlet in the guise of Provender Gleed, or perhaps Provender Gleed in the guise of Hamlet.

And the more Provender looked, the more grotesque and insulting it all became.

The set - it was highly reminiscent of Dashlands House. The décor, the furnishings. The slain Polonius was lying next to an overturned wheelchair and, although Provender didn't have a clear view of the actor's sprawled body, what he could see of him made him think of Great. As for Gertrude, the actress playing her did not physically resemble his own mother but she was smartly turned out, beautiful, coiffed, shapely, stately. The similarities were there.

Rage boiled up within him, so vast and fierce and all-consuming that he could barely think straight. Laying hands on Arthur was his one overriding imperative. Wringing his cousin's scrawny little neck. He scanned the auditorium to see how he might get up onstage. The Shortborn, being an old-fashioned theatre, had an orchestra pit between stalls and footlights. It wasn't a gap that could be easily leapt (it was wider, indeed, than the gap between the closer pairs of adjacent balconies on a tower block in Needle Grove). As he cast around for some other means of reaching the stage, he noticed a man sitting in the back row. The man was staring at him in that manner Provender was fast becoming weary of: the I-know-you look. As their gazes met, the man got sharply to his feet.

'Sean Lockwood,' he said. 'Director. This is an honour, Mr Gleed. I'm sorry, it took me a moment to place you. Arthur mentioned some of his Family might be coming along at some point but I didn't expect --'

'There,' Provender snapped, pointing at the stage. 'How do I get there?'

'But the rehearsal is --'

'How?'

Lockwood collected himself. 'You can get backstage if you use that exit.' He indicated a door close to the stage, with a green sign glowing above it. 'Turn right, there's another door beyond which connects to the wings. It's locked during proper performances but I don't think it will be at the moment. You can...'

His voice trailed away. Provender was already off and running - running with the determination of a man who had business to finish and didn't care if he finished it with help or alone.

59

Backstage was traditionally a place of hush and caution, but the need to be discreet and avoid causing a disturbance was not, it must be said, uppermost in Provender's mind as he thrust open the door at the end of the passageway that ran alongside the auditorium. The only circumspection he showed was a brief pause, as the door swung shut behind him, to allow his eyes to adapt to the sudden gloom he found himself in. Gradually shapes made themselves apparent. He was on the side known as Opposite Prompt. Facing him was a short flight of steps, which you had to surmount in order to get level with the stage. Up there, in the wings, he could see a handful of motionless figures, various bulky props either waiting to be carried on or just recently taken off, black dropcloths hanging in swathes, and rows of sandbag-weighted ropes tethered to a complicated arrays of pulleys - people and objects in a state of suspension, all dimly limned by the light that filtered in sidelong from the stage.

No sooner had he got the lie of the land than he made for the steps, bounding up them two at a time. Heads turned. You weren't supposed to thump around like that back here. Move slowly, tread softly. Provender ignored their scowls. One man - big brawny chap, had to be a stagehand - did a double-take, evidently recognising him. Provender was by now heartily sick of being recognised by strangers. He was also, at this moment, too incensed by Arthur to care much about anything else. He breezed past the man, drawn towards the stage lights. Between two flies he caught a slivered glimpse of the set. There was Arthur-as-Hamlet, revealing to Gertrude his knowledge of Laertes's plot against him and his plans for foiling it:

Let it work,

For 'tis the sport to have the enginer

Hoist with his own petar, an't shall go hard

But I will delve one yard below their mines,

And blow them to the moon.

By the time it took Arthur to deliver these lines, Provender was just a step away from entering stage right. His foot was inches from the white gaffer tape on the floor that marked the sightline.

Then he heard a heavy huff of breath behind him. Then hands seized him, one clutching his chest, the other clamping over his mouth.

O, 'tis most sweet

When in one line two crafts directly meet

The sense of déjà vu was sickening. Provender knew, in an instant, who had grabbed him. He knew these arms, their strength.
Him
. He was here. Damien Scrase. Is's accomplice. No,
Arthur's
accomplice.

This man shall set me packing;

Immediately, he writhed. He struggled. He fought as he had before at the party but this time with even greater force and viciousness, with an absolute refusal to be taken captive again. Damien hauled him backwards...

I'll lug his guts into the neighbour room

...but Provender continued to resist, jabbing behind him with both elbows, left, right, kicking with both heels, right, left. When that didn't work he thrust his head back, hoping to smash Damien's nose with a reverse head-butt. It didn't work either, but he did manage to dislodge his face partially from the other man's grip...

Mother, good night indeed.

...so that now his mouth was level with the top of Damien's hand, his lips pressing against the ball of the thumb.

Nothing else for it. Provender opened wide and sank his teeth in. No squeamishness, no hesitation. Biting as hard as if he was tucking into a succulent chicken drumstick.

A gush of blood over his lips. The ghastly sensation of skin splitting, flesh parting. His incisors cleaving down into gristle and knucklebone.

Come, sir, to draw toward an end with you.

And, from Damien, a scream. A shrill, unbridled howl of agony. Deliciously, deliriously wonderful to hear.

Everything onstage stopped. Backstage, pandemonium broke out. Shouts, cries from the stagehands and actors. Shh! What was this? What was going on?

The hands let go of Provender, Damien rearing back. Provender spun round, spitting out blood, spitting, spitting, and thinking he would never be able to forget the taste, never to his dying day forget how it felt to bite through the flesh of a living being. A retch reflex brought bile to the back of his throat. He spat that out too.

He looked at Damien. Damien was clutching his wounded hand under the other arm, pressing it against his ribs, and he was stamping, hissing, seething, like a stove kettle on the brink of boiling. His face was contorted, as ugly in this state as Provender had imagined it would be. His eyes, in the stage-light glow, were a pair of fireballs.

Then he had a knife. Damien's uninjured hand, his right hand, was holding a knife. The knife Is had mentioned. The sheath knife he knew how to use like an expert.