The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [13]
His mouth goes bitter. “Don’t patronize me,” he says. “You think I wanted to end up here?”
“It’s funny how often I hear that about Pella.”
He’s not interested. “You know who’s going to be all right? The only one? Pentheus. You know why? Because I’m going to end up playing him myself if he misses one more bloody rehearsal.”
“Fucking,” I say.
“One more fucking rehearsal. You’ll have me passing for a native by Friday. Where is that cunt, anyway?”
Something lands on the table between us: the ball of rags the actors used for Pentheus’s head. It’s come unwound, trailing a rag-tail like a shooting star. The grubby, soft white bundle lands almost soundlessly, not even overturning our cups. The paint on it, eyes and mouth and some pinky gore, is smudged like a child’s drawing.
“That wouldn’t scare anyone.” The boy steps from the shadows. I wonder how long he’s been listening to us.
“It’s you, is it?” Carolus winks at me. “Monkey. What would scare us, then?”
The boy looks up at the ceiling. “A real head,” he says.
Childish bravado, but Carolus is nodding, eyebrows raised. A show of seriousness; I’ll play along.
“And where would I get one?” the director says.
The boy looks blank, as though the question is so stupid he wonders if he’s missing something. “Anywhere.”
“Logistical problems,” I say. “You’d need a new head for each performance. I doubt they’d keep.”
“We’re doing only the one night,” Carolus says.
“Lot of blood,” I say. “Messy.”
“Messy,” Carolus says to the boy.
“Well, sure,” he says. “Don’t you want it to look real?”
“We use the costumes over and over,” Carolus says. “Pentheus today, Creon tomorrow. You want us to do everything in pink? Real, but only just real enough, if you see what I mean.”
“You could cauterize it,” I say. They look at me. “Cauterize. You heat a metal plate over a brazier. Then you press the cut end to the plate to burn it. Seals it right up, stops the blood.”
The boy frowns. “Like frying meat.”
“Exactly.”
“Well.” Carolus claps his hands together once. “Problem solved.” He tosses the ball of rags back to the boy. “I’m putting you in charge, then. Pentheus’s head is now your department.”
The boy looks pleased. He leaves, tossing the ball in the air and catching it as he goes.
“Interesting,” I say.
“He likes to watch rehearsals, like you,” Carolus says. “Stays out of the way, doesn’t say much. The actors seem to like having him around. Bit of a pet.”
“He’s got a flair for the dramatic, anyway.”
Eyebrows up again: “He’s got a flair for something,” Carolus says.
The boy is back. “By the way,” he says. “I know where Pentheus is.”
I clear my throat, assembling a formal introduction. It’s time.
“Brat.” Carolus ignores me. “Where, then?”
“He’s sick,” the boy says. “I heard the actors talking about him. He can’t eat and he can’t shit and some days he can’t get out of bed.”
“Fucking ass-fucker,” Carolus says, pleased with himself. The boy turns, waves the rag head above his own, and is gone for real.
I’VE LEARNED IN THE past week that I can get Arrhidaeus to do anything if it has to do with horses.
“How many?” I point to the stalls.
“One, two, five,” he says, and sure enough there are five horses inside this day, including his favourite, my big Tar.
“What colour?” I say of Tar, and he giggles and rocks and claps his hands and reaches for the bridle hanging from a nail in the wall. “No.” I pull his hand away. “Soon. Not yet. What colour is Tar?”
“Back, back, back,” he says.
“Black.”
“Buh-lack.”
“La, la, la,” I say. “Blah, blah, blah. Black.” He laughs at me; fair enough. I give him a stick and tell him to draw me shapes in the muck: circle, triangle. He struggles with square, and I see his attention is almost gone, like oil almost burnt out in a lamp. He has a kind of feral intelligence, knows more or less how to get what he needs—food, drink, basic companionship, the piss-pot—but try to draw him up a level and he’s quickly exhausted. Literally: red rims his eyes, he yawns, even his skin seems to go more grey.
I leave off the shapes and have him jump up and down