With two weeks to go before the first opening the blizzards still swept in every day, the gutters were blocked with ice, the roads were crested with dark and dirty mounds of old snow, compacted by their own weight and the endless passage of vehicles.
I began to like Jayr. He did not say much but he was always alert to my needs. He worked me hard but we took regular breaks and he often paid for lunch out of the theatre budget. I never really found out what he thought of me: sometimes I seemed to amuse him, sometimes to annoy him, but during most of our working days we were in separate parts of the building.
One day, during a break for a cup of tea, he said to me, ‘Have you seen the ghost yet?’
‘Are you trying to wind me up?’
‘Have you seen it?’
‘Is there one?’ I said.
‘Never knew a theatre without a ghost.’
‘Is there one here?’ I said again.
‘Haven’t you noticed how cold it is in the scenery bay?’
‘That’s because the doors are often open.’
I don’t know what he was intending. It turned out that he had been in the Sjøkaptein for about five weeks before I arrived, often after dark, always alone, going into many of the deeper recesses of the large building, below and behind the stage, along the corridors, up to the high circle.
Everyone who worked in theatre was superstitious, Jayr said: there were plays the actors would never name, parts they would never accept, scripts they would not read without someone there to cue them, ropes the stagehands would never pull when working alone, the weird or sudden deaths onstage and offstage when mechanisms unaccountably failed, or the accidents with scenery or props, and the supernatural consequences of them all.
Jayr told me about hauntings reputed to be a feature of every other theatre he had worked in, but here, the Sjøkaptein, seemed to be entirely free of spirits, wild or sad or bereaved.
‘Never knew a theatre without at least one ghost,’ he said again at the end.
‘Except this one,’ I said. He was making me feel nervous, maybe intentionally.
‘Wait and see,’ he said.
I expected a cold draught to wind its way under the door and chill me, or an eerie cackling laugh to break out in the distance, but then the telephone rang and Jayr answered, speaking with his mouth full of food.
Every day, I would trudge through the narrow streets to and from the theatre, skidding and balancing on the rutted frozen snow, to do what I could to assist Jayr in his endless preparations.
Although he was dealing efficiently if unenthusiastically with the daily cascade of paperwork, Jayr’s main concern was the non-arrival of the tech crew, whom he knew were trapped somewhere on mainland Faiand, held up by visa regulations, the weather and the irregular ferry service. Even if they should negotiate themselves free of the bureaucrats, much of the sea around Goorn, and the Tallek region in particular, was still full of ice floes. Although most facilities could be prepared before they arrived, the actual operation of theatre performances was impossible without a full crew.
Jayr became especially anxious when a message unexpectedly arrived from one of the first acts due to perform in the theatre. It was a magician, an illusionist, who styled himself THE LORD OF MYSTERY.
The message contained some straightforward publicity material (including obviously posed photographs of the great man performing, whose appearance and archness we both found amusing) and what appeared to be a standard list of demands he felt he had to make before he arrived: lighting requirements, the need for technical rehearsals, the raising and lowering of the curtains, use of stage apparatus and so on. There was nothing unusual in that, which would anyway be arranged in the technical rehearsals all performers underwent as a matter of course, but with it came a document that was obviously an extra item.
It consisted of a detailed drawing to scale, with measurements and angles drawn meticulously, of a large sheet of plate glass. At the bottom, written in capital letters, was the following:
‘PART OF MY ACT HAS TO BE PERFORMED WITH A LAYER OF CLEAN GLASS BETWEEN THE APPARATUS AND THE AUDIENCE. THIS SHOULD BE OBTAINED PRIOR TO MY ARRIVAL, AS PER OUR CONTRACT, AND MUST EXACTLY MATCH THE ABOVE SPECIFICATION. ON MY ARRIVAL THE PANE OF GLASS MUST BE FITTED TO THE APPARATUS WITH WHICH I TRAVEL, AND WHICH HAS PRECISE MEASUREMENTS. LORD.’
‘Do you suppose his parents gave him the name “Lord”?’ I said.
‘That’s how he signed the contract,’ Jayr said, showing me a copy.
He seemed amused by the whole matter. The act had been booked at the end of the previous season by the outgoing management. It was true that it contained a clause written in verbose language, presumably dictated by the Lord himself, about the venue’s responsibility to arrange the supply and fitting of the glass.
Other than the contract, Jayr knew nothing more about this Lord. He appeared to be resigned about it, saw it as part of the day-to-day life of a provincial theatre, a problem to take in his stride.
One morning, when the snow was blowing fiercely down the main street where I lived, I was as usual struggling towards the theatre. Staying upright on the slippery ground was always a problem but on that morning the difficulties were increased by the blustering of the wind. I had long developed the technique of watching the icy ground wherever I walked, but I also knew how to keep a general look-out where I was going. Moving about was hazardous in the snows of Omhuuv.
I was therefore not too surprised when I collided with a man walking in the other direction, although I had definitely not spotted him coming. He was somewhat shorter than myself, and as we bumped into each other his shoulder hit against my chest, spinning me around violently. I managed, just, to keep my footing, but I did so only by an ungainly manoeuvre with both legs spread and my hands reaching down desperately to avoid the fall. I skittered across the ridges of frozen snow, my chest aching from the blow and for a moment I found it difficult to breathe.
The man I had crashed into, though, was much more affected by the collision. As I was struggling to stay upright, I saw him first bounce away from me, and then in some fashion seemed to fly backwards, his arms flailing. He landed on his neck and shoulders in a heap of soft snow deposited during the night by the blowers, his legs aloft. He was struggling furiously to release himself as I skidded anxiously over to help him.
‘You bloody fool!’ he shouted at me, shaking his head and spitting out snow. ‘Why don’t you look where you’re walking?’
‘I’m sorry!’ I said. ‘Here — take my hand!’
He clasped my wrist and after much pulling and shouting I managed to tug him out of the heap of snow. He clambered laboriously to his feet, shaking his arms and head, trying to bang the loose snow away from his clothes.
‘You nearly killed me, you careless bastard!’ he yelled, as the wind continued to howl around us. ‘Look where you’re sodding well walking in future, do you hear?’
‘I said I was sorry.’
‘Sorry isn’t enough. You might have killed me.’
‘Were you looking where you were going?’ I said. His reaction to the accident seemed extreme, to say the least. Now he squared up to me.
‘Where are you from, you bloody fool?’ he said in a fierce voice. He leant towards me, as if trying to memorize my face. ‘I don’t recognize you. You don’t talk like a local.’
I was still struggling to get my breath back. The man was thrusting his face pugnaciously towards mine.