Fic:: That Little Western Flower [S&A]
Sep. 1st, 2007 01:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenFic! Thank you to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rosariotijeras for looking it over, and also, er, I feel the need to apologise to slasheuse, whose wonderful outdoor production of AMND was just that - wonderful - and while it gave me the idea for this story, its problems are all its own.
Anyway. For my darlingthe_acrobat as part of my Slings & Arrows ficathon.
Fic:: That Little Western Flower
by Raven
PG-13, Slings & Arrows, het, Geoffrey/Ellen.
“Greetings, everyone!” called the man walking on stage, looking marginally flustered in the late-evening sunlight. His footsteps on the wooden boards were making the birds scatter. “Thank you for coming, and welcome to the New Burbage Festival’s one and only outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If you’re all sitting comfortably, then we’ll begin in just a few moments.”
Richard watched him stalk, coat flapping, off stage, and felt himself being poked in the shoulder by the woman sitting next to him. “Who is that?” she asked with interest.
Something cleared in Richard’s head. “You’re new here, aren’t you,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.
She nodded. “I’ve just started teaching at the elementary school. I thought an outdoor performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream would be a nice thing to bring the kids to, and my colleagues all agreed. They said the school always tries to maintain good links with the festival.”
“Oh, yes, absolutely,” Richard told her reassuringly. “We’ve always tried to maintain good links from our end, too. But... you’re new.”
“Right.” She smiled at him, just as reassuringly.
He took a deep breath. “That was Geoffrey Tennant, artistic director for the New Burbage Festival.”
“Oh,” she said, and her tone had changed slightly.
“You’ve heard of him?”
“A little,” she said quickly. “My colleagues have said… well, nothing very much, really. Um...”
“Yes?” Richard felt it was always best to let people find their own feet, take their own time, when it came to their first encounter with theatre people.
“Does he always wear that on his head?” She made an encircling gesture with both hands. “The... daisy-chain.”
Richard took another deep breath. “No. No, he doesn’t. Um... I don’t know why he was doing that.”
“I guess we can excuse his eccentricities,” she went on, bravely, Richard thought. “I hear this was all his idea, and it’s in a good cause and the children get to see Shakespeare performed in this lovely outdoor setting. It should be a good show, shouldn’t it?”
Richard sat back in his garden chair, taking in the lightly buzzing audience in rows, the verdant grass, the flowers, the pleasantly rustic stage and the fairy whispers behind the watercolour-painted backdrop, and privately doubted that.
*
Backstage, it was quiet. Only the distant voices of actors dancing through well-loved lines, the murmur of the audience undercutting the birds, disturbed the silence.
It had started, as many things had a tendency to, because Geoffrey was terrified of Anna. It was justifiable, he thought. Standing here, in this square of shadowed grass which, for lack of a better word, he was choosing to call backstage, resting his head against a tree, it all seemed like a clear progression of events that had begun with Anna running into his office mid-sentence and, like the best nightmares, wasn’t over yet.
“...and so Richard thought,” Anna had continued hurriedly, “maybe we could do a charity performance, in the park on Midsummer Eve. The takings would go to the elementary school’s drama fund, and we’d cement the festival’s relationship with the local community, and…”
“Wait.” Geoffrey had raised a hand and stared for a long, intense moment at the skull on his now mercifully empty desk. “We cement our relationship with the local community by subjecting it to fun-for-all-the-family outdoor murder, insanity and what Nahum calls a portrait of pure evil, in iambic pentameter with breaks for ice-cream and the removal of traumatised small children from the immediate vicinity?”
“No, of course not! We’ll do A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“A Midsummer – on Midsummer – Anna, this is not a good...”
“Nearly everyone in the company has been in one of Oliver’s productions,” she went on, cutting him off as politely as she could. “It would be easy to do! One performance, and most people will only need a couple of rehearsals, and….”
“It’ll need to be re-blocked,” said Geoffrey in spite of himself. “It’s ridiculous to think of taking a play out of the Rose and doing it on, I don’t know, a park bench.”
“Oliver considered it… he had notes.” Anna was looking nervous. “Would it help if you thought of it as, oh, a tribute to him?”
“A tribute to him.” Geoffrey’s voice was carefully expressionless. “A tribute to the late great Oliver Welles. Has no one in this godforsaken place heard of putting flowers on a grave, for fuck’s sake!”
Anna took a deep breath, made to say something, thought better of it and walked out of his office. Geoffrey looked at the skull a minute longer, muttered “Shit!” and went after her. It took a few seconds for him to spot her sitting behind her counter, face turned deliberately away from him.
“Anna,” he began, but she held up a hand to stop him.
“First of all,” she said, voice shaking only minimally, “Oliver was cremated.”
“Right.” Geoffrey nodded, and tried to look as non-threatening as possible. “I scattered his ashes.”
“Second of all,” and she fixed him with her sternest gaze, “you are a quite horrible person.”
“Yes,” Geoffrey reassured her, “yes, yes, I am.”
“Well,” Anna said. “Good. I’m glad you agree.” A pause. “So you’ll do it?”
And after that he hadn’t been able to say anything, because really and truly, she was right.
Still savouring the quiet, Geoffrey sank deeper into the bark and listened to his own heartbeat echoing against the tree. Two minutes later, someone stuck their head out of a doorway and yelled, “Geoffrey!”
Inconsequently, Geoffrey chose that moment to remember that his mother had wanted him to be an accountant.
*
The stage was makeshift, but Maria and her army had conspired to make the wooden planks and steps look rustic and period-authentic, or so Richard was no doubt telling the press, and there were large, lush-leaved trees on either side, with strong branches and spreading crowns that cast light and then mottled shade onto the boards below. The two painted backdrops screened a downwards slope and the two trailers that served as hidden dressing-rooms.
In his quieter moments, Geoffrey liked the set-up – it was hushed, calming, an external mirror for peace inside his mind, a relief after the Rose. This was not, he reflected, one of his quieter moments.
“I put it down for one second!” Ellen was yelling. “One second, and you blithely walk off it as if I didn’t have a fucking outdoor performance of the fucking Dream!”
“You put it down on my head,” Geoffrey got out, through gritted teeth. “I went out in front of hundreds of people, unaware that I had a daisy-chain crown on my head. People who, by the way, already think that I’m psychotic.”
“And I don’t know why they would think that, for heaven’s sake!” Ellen sat down in a huff, perching on the edge of a step, and got out a small mirror and a handful of blusher brushes. “Things happen, Geoffrey! It’s just – it’s just another production, for God’s sake. Things happen and you don’t have to overreact.”
“She’s right,” Oliver cut in, sprawled on the grass a few inches from where Geoffrey was pacing furiously up and down.
“Just another production?” Geoffrey said softly, dangerously. “This is just another production to you, Ellen? And I suppose acting is just a job, and Shakespeare just, just some guy, and I gave my sanity, my life, for... what?”
“Not everything is about you, Geoffrey.” Ellen sounded tired. “You don’t have to do this. Not every time.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” Geoffrey took a deep breath. “That’s where you and I are different. I have to do this every time. Doing this” – a quick expansive gesture, taking in the backdrop and the actors, the grass and sky and world – “is all I know how to do.”
“You’re not different. You’re both exactly the same,” Oliver said, exasperated. “Basically, you both have an almost operatic tendency to go to extremes.”
“Shut up, Oliver!” – and then he remembered, just in time to see Ellen’s expression change into finely-sculpted blankness.
“Geoffrey,” called a new voice, and Geoffrey wheeled around with what Oliver would probably call a balletic entrechat.
“What fresh hell is this?” he yelled, and blinked at the sight of Nahum, who merely looked serenely at him. “Sorry,” he said quickly. “Sorry. I’m spending too much time around actors.”
Nahum walked up quietly, nodded at Ellen, who had gone back to her make-up, and drew Geoffrey into a corner under the spreading branches. “We have a problem with the fairies in the trees,” he said, pointing up. “Moth is saying that she is feeling seasick.”
“Seasick,” Geoffrey repeated. “Up a tree?”
“There is a light wind. It must be... unpleasant.” Nahum was still serene. “And also, Puck is feeling faint. I believe this may be a combination of nerves and several hours under the sun.”
“Nahum,” Geoffrey said desperately, “the show started twenty minutes ago. Why, exactly, are you telling me this right now?”
“It is good to be prepared. I once directed a production where all my understudies had food poisoning at the last minute. Needless to say we did not open on time.”
“Wait.” Geoffrey held up a hand as Nahum made to leave. “What happened to the original actors?”
“They were in prison at that time.” Nahum strode away, around the right-hand backdrop and back out towards the audience. Helplessly, Geoffrey turned to face Ellen, expecting a prickly truce, their peace renegotiated, but the light here was brighter than in the theatre; without swirling dust, without the shadows, he faced her eyes.
“You still...” She stopped, brought her hands out in a gesture he recognised. “Oliver. You can – you still...”
“Yeah.” He nodded, feeling suddenly weak and tired. “Really, Ellen, I’m not. I’m not whatever you’re thinking.”
“Not psychotic?” Oliver looked disbelieving. “Geoffrey, my sweet, you see dead people.”
“Please shut up,” he said, and off Ellen’s expression, she knew exactly whom he was talking to. She watched him silently as he sat back down on the grass and took the flowers, one by one, out of his hair. A bird fluttered up, came to rest in the tree above his head.
“Your cue,” he said softly, after a moment, but she was already gone.
*
The great benefit of the outdoor setting, Richard thought, was that he didn’t have to watch the performance. Which wasn’t to say, he hastily amended, that he didn’t want to watch the performance, or even that these things weren’t generally a lot better since Oliver, God rest his soul, had departed for more elevated climes, but that it was okay, sometimes, to whisper out here, and he was fine with that. The sunshine, the noises of the outdoors – lawnmowers, crickets and children – made for a nice change from the reverent hush of the Rose.
Less pleasant, though, was the distant sound of a couple arguing, or perhaps it was a radio left on; the voices were jerky and unpleasant, and made for a buzzing distraction from Oberon and Puck doing their slow dance of words, moving in and out of each other’s reach with each line. Richard liked the costumes, but couldn’t help but notice that some of the fairies were looking green about the gills.
“I wish whoever that is would shut up,” said a voice beside him, and he smiled.
“What’s your name?” he asked, in a voice pitched not to carry; he had some standards, after all, and most of the audience were transfixed by the events on stage.
“You’re not going to…” She stopped. “You’ll laugh.”
“I won’t.” He shook his head fervently to make the point, and realised all at once that he wasn’t working to make himself sound reassuring; it was just coming, reassurance, like sitting here in this garden chair talking to a complete stranger was where he belonged, or something. “What is it?”
“Helena.” She grinned, shyly. “And wait till I stand up – I’m tall, too.”
He was confused for a moment, but he’d been to one of the last rehearsals, memorably conducted in Geoffrey’s high and hysterical fashion, and he remembered it. “Oh. Thou painted maypole.”
She was still grinning, but it had lost some of the shyness. “Yep. Still like me?”
He nodded, slowly. “There’s an intermission at the end of the second act. I could – would you like me to… um.”
“What, Richard?” she asked, so softly that her voice was almost obliterated by the calls of the crossed lovers.
“I could buy you an ice-cream?”
She laughed into her hands. “I’d like that very much.”
On the stage, Helena was angry, tearful, devoted – use me but as your spaniel – and Richard was pretty sure he was a better man than that. He sat back in his chair, smiling to himself, aware of the body heat to his right and the sunshine on his head.
A few seats down, Anna caught his eye and gave him a tiny, appreciative thumbs-up.
*
Geoffrey didn’t resist when Oliver took his hand and said, “You’re coming with me.”
They walked in a straight line, outwards. Behind them, the noise of the play and the audience grew fainter, and the sunlight grew more bright in front as they left the shadows of the trees. With each step, Geoffrey breathed a little more easily, and it helped that Oliver was, at least, keeping his silence.
“Why are there fairies in the trees, anyway?” Geoffrey asked at last.
“It uses the space, I thought,” Oliver said, easily. “They’re creatures of light and shadow, neither good nor evil. They live and love, but not as we do. They exist in dappled shade. Which the leaves conveniently and economically provide.”
“Why, Oliver, that sounded positively like an artistic thought.” Geoffrey smiled. “I thought you left those behind with your hair.”
“Such a bitch, Geoffrey,” Oliver said indulgently. “But then, you always were.”
Geoffrey shrugged, noticing the way his steps were leaving impressions in the grass and Oliver’s, ethereal, were not. “It’s good to know that I’m noticed for reasons other than my personal hygiene and spiralling insanity.”
Oliver snorted and ran a lazy hand over Geoffrey’s hair. “You cultivate it,” he said. “You’re not nearly as mad as you look.”
Geoffrey didn’t shake off the touch, and Oliver paused. “And what do you mean, noticed?” He frowned. “Don’t try to be subtle, Geoffrey. It doesn’t suit you.”
Geoffrey merely looked at him.
“No,” Oliver said, in reply to something that hadn’t been said. “That’s the one thing you can’t do. Blame me if you want. Blame Ellen. But you can’t say for a moment that everything that happened to you happened because people didn’t love you. Because you weren’t loved.”
Geoffrey said nothing. A swallow took flight from behind him, insubstantial as a piece of black paper, fluttering across his vision, disappearing against the sky.
“I remember your father,” Oliver said gently. “He led you to this life, you always said. What was that, other than an act of love?”
Geoffrey watched the shadows of the oncoming twilight, thought about birds in flight, still said nothing.
“That night, Ellen knew what was about to happen. She knew how close she was, how close we all were, to losing you – and she jumped off a bridge.”
“The water was three feet deep,” Geoffrey said without rancour.
Oliver ignored him. “And me, Geoffrey. I’m here with you, having this conversation. I’ve been dead for a year and a half, and I’m here.”
There was a long, long, pause, and in the distance the audience laughed, voices rising into the sky, dissipating below the birdsong.
“Do you know,” Geoffrey said, “that within the province of Ontario, it is prohibited by law to wilfully kill, injure or interfere with any one of eleven species of migratory birds?”
“Geoffrey,” Oliver said, and he didn’t imbue it with any wealth of meaning; it was just a word, a name dropped like a kiss into the silence.
“I got off because of ‘wilfully’,” Geoffrey went on quietly. “Claimed diminished responsibility and it was written off as the final free act of the criminally insane. I couldn’t vote in the last election. I have trouble renewing my driver’s licence. I don’t overreact, Oliver. This is all I have.”
This time the silence was different, shot through with wires twisting round and round to breaking point, and no one speaking to snap them. But then Oliver was reaching for his hand, taking him somewhere, and Geoffrey followed, responded to the immediacy of the movement, because the easiest thing to do, right then, was to come when he was called.
Oliver led him, step by step, back to their theatre, open to the elements on all sides – like Shakespeare’s had been, Geoffrey thought – and all at once the audience were visible as a blur of mixed colour against the green. “Look,” he said, softly.
Geoffrey looked. Ellen was on stage, with Bottom, and her hair was woven through with his flowers.
“Let this be enough,” Oliver said, and in the midsummer twilight, caressed by words and wind, Geoffrey understood.
*
Under the tree, it was quiet and still. Fairies and Mechanicals fluttered through, trailing make-up and cues, but there was something muted about their movements, something holding them apart from where Geoffrey was perched on the base of the roots. “Ellen...”
She stopped still and stared down at him. “What?”
Quickly, he glanced around for Oliver. There was no sign of a ghost, no ghost of a footstep, and he said, quickly, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
“Geoffrey,” she snapped back, exasperated, “if this is just another manifestation of your latest psychotic break...”
“Thou art more lovely and more temperate,” he went on, gesturing towards the twilight at the edges of the sky. “Here’s our summer’s day, Ellen. Here it is, right here.”
“Geoffrey,” she said again. And he might have been imagining it, but there was a softness there, something in her voice that wasn’t just hard, brittle, worn and scored with time. “Are you trying” – a brief, incredulous pause – “to make up?”
He opened his mouth to speak, to match it, to use words for something other than half-cracked hysteria, but a new voice yelled, “Geoffrey!” and really, he thought, he was beginning to hate the sound of his own name.
“There is bad news,” Nahum said in clipped tones, hurrying up to him. “An accident. She was leaning down to throw up and hit her head standing up.”
Ellen looked confused. “Hit her head on what, standing up?”
“Who did?” Oliver asked, popping into existence with a grin and a flutter.
“Puck,” Geoffrey said, aware of his own rising voice. “We have no Puck?”
“Alas, no.” Nahum nodded sagely. “We should not perform this play at the solstice. It tempts the fates.”
“Oh, the fucking fates!” Geoffrey’s head was pounding, and the dappled sunlight bathing their backstage in soft light was beginning to seem like an ironic personal insult. “Do any of the fairies know the speech well enough to be trusted? Are you sure she can’t go out there just once more, Nahum?”
“I fear she may have a concussion.” Nahum was still perfectly calm. “The first-aid team have been called.”
Geoffrey groaned, deeply, and covered his face with his hands. “No one knows the speech – of course, I mean that none of the apprentices know the speech, because everyone knows the speech, but they’re all, what do you know, already in the play. Fuck.” He kicked the tree. It hurt. “Fuck!”
But there was a silence around the words, and something was happening to the air. He turned around, hands still pressed to his face, and Ellen was on her feet, looking at him strangely. “Geoffrey... you, I remember you...”
And Oliver was saying: “You were... God, you were so beautiful, Geoffrey...”
Through his fingers, Geoffrey saw them mirror each other in their gestures, felt their words blurring into sonorous nonsense, and said, “No, no, no, no…”
“You were Oliver’s Puck. You can do it again.” Ellen grabbed at him, sitting him in a canvas chair and tangling her hands through his hair. “Come here.”
“No,” Geoffrey said again, sinking, helplessly, into her touch, “no, I don’t go on stage, I don’t – that was, that was twenty years ago, and the audience will notice I’m not their Puck! I’m twice her age! I’m fucking male!”
“Shut up, Geoff,” Ellen said, just as Oliver cut in, anxiously fluttering between them, “It would work, you know, Puck who crosses worlds, it would work thematically – give me your hands, if we be friends, you know it! – and the director breaks the fourth wall, you see!”
Geoffrey tried to stand up and run, couldn’t move. “No... Nahum, get me a fairy, any fairy, teach it to them, there’s a minute left, teach someone the damned speech!”
“There is no minute.” Nahum was calm. “There is no time. Ellen, you must hurry…”
“I’m doing it!” Ellen snapped, and she was twirling Geoffrey around, hands soft and familiar on his body, doing, he wasn’t sure, something, and then he noticed all at once that it was stage glitter wafting in clouds from her fingers; she was making him into someone new. “Close your eyes,” she murmured, and he did it.
A cold chill of a brush on both eyelids, and he looked, startled, into the mirror to see himself and Ellen as reflections of each other, peering out beneath stripes of silver and gold, and then there really was no time left at all.
“Remember,” Oliver said, in the final second, “you belong to the night...”
And Geoffrey was out there on stage, glittering in coat and boots beneath the final gleaming of a northern twilight, and the audience were there, deadly, silent and waiting beneath the giant dome of the sky. The candle was in his cupped hands; he was the light to hold off the coming darkness, the lone spirit of the air, left behind to sweep clean the mouldering world.
“Now the hungry lion roars” – and the audience, too, were roaring, their whispers cutting through the evening breeze – “and the wolf behowls the moon.”
The howls – Geoffrey could hear them beginning, at the edge of perception, and the holes in his memory were reminding him that he wasn’t strong enough to shine this brightly, and it was going to get dark very, very soon, and he was drowning for want of a line.
But he heard it, strangely enough – from above, a tiny, terrified gasp, and then the snap sound as finally, inevitably, the bough broke – and then everything went mercifully black.
*
The schoolchildren were getting restless. Richard couldn’t exactly blame them, not after three hours of Shakespeare, but he was quite comfortable, himself, with his ice-cream in the sunshine. His thoughts were slow, meandering, comfortable, and he might be a mere bean counter, administrator instead of artist, but there was a lack of urgency in his head and the thought had lost its sting. And administrator he might be, his inner voices pointed out, but he could tell a bad director from a good one, and Geoffrey’s Dream, for all its tribulations, had something Oliver had never given it: a kind of rushed lushness, a deep heart. The fairies danced languorously at the edge of the stage, the words became poetry, became music; there was rhythm in their meaninglessness, something he didn’t know he knew, and something new.
His companion, leaning forward with hands clasped and eyes wide, hissed, “That’s not Puck!”
Richard remembered Puck from rehearsals as a girl possessed of the twin blessings of not being Claire and yet fitting into the costume. He looked at the person executing her blocking, blinked, and his brain told him he’d been right the first time.
Startled and sparkling, Geoffrey looked like he was holding his breath. Richard started thinking about open graves, and then about daggers, and then fairly rapidly about straitjackets, sedatives and financial liquidation, and then Geoffrey choked, said a few words, and something large and noisy fell out of the sky.
Richard closed his eyes, stood up, and said out loud, “Please, God, don’t let him be dead.”
“Don’t say that!” said Helena the elementary school teacher, her hand going to his shoulder and all her professional instincts coming into play. “He might have hurt himself a little bit, but he’ll probably be just fine.”
“I’ll never get anyone else to take the job,” Richard muttered, “not after two in two years... Excuse me.”
*
Voices rushed out, an eldritch chorus in the purplish dark. Geoffrey rolled over, his body stretching out and matching the curves of the earth beneath him, and stood up so his feet were steady on hard ground. He held the candle above his head and saw the enormous, flickering shadows, the creeper-bound trees and flashes of wings, and the fairy king.
It struck him all at once, then. “Am I,” he said, and then started again because it was all meaningless and strange, and his voice was soft in the warm night, “Am I dead?”
“No.” There was laughter all around, pleasant accompaniment beneath the ethereal voice ringing through the wood. “You speak of strange things, my gentle Puck.”
Geoffrey could feel the change. He was younger, with a ferocity of purpose running through his blood, and at the same time, ancient as the turn of the earth. He took a step, described a huge circle with his arms outstretched and smelled distant spices on the wind. There were roses, elderflower and eglantine, woven into his hair.
“It’s a dream, then,” he suggested, and felt inexplicably light.
“A dream,” Oberon agreed. “An interlude.”
Like a dance at the end of a play, Geoffrey thought. Like the last lingering seconds of disbelief, stretched out. He moved to speak again, and was aware that the chorus of fairies was fading, becoming part of the whispering trees. Only the fairy king remained; he, and his loyal servant, and suddenly he knew the story.
“Don’t tell me.” Geoffrey held up a hand and was unsurprised to note that his feet left the ground easily; he could float, rise, free-fall, land on four inches of air. He wanted to laugh. “Don’t tell me – you know a bank where the wild thyme blows?”
Oberon smiled at him, deviously, and reminded Geoffrey of Oliver. “Hast thou the flower there?”
Geoffrey laughed. “Not yet.” And because this was his dream, and he was feeling light in heart and head, drinking in night air like wine, he said, “I’ll put a girdle round around the earth in forty minutes.”
He jumped up as he said it, pointing his toes in some sort of demented grand jeté, and if he really were Shakespeare’s Puck the story would have gone a certain way, then; it would unfold in comic and romantic beauty, come round through subtlety of theme into quiet, neat resolution. But it was, after all, a dream in the life of Geoffrey Tennant, and those always ended the same way.
“Geoffrey!” called the voice, and it was in rhythm with the world, in rhythm with the beating of his heart, and he twisted and turned and flipped over in mid-air, graceful and waiting for what came next.
She brought him back.
*
Geoffrey came back to consciousness slowly. He knew the path well – at one time he’d chosen to stay in the in-between, paced a groove into the ground between here and there – but he followed her voice, step by step, and emerged, body aching, with wooden boards beneath his head and the summer breeze fresh all around. He didn’t open his eyes.
“I don’t care who you think you are, Richard!” Ellen was yelling. “Get out of the way, he’s my-”
Not boyfriend, Geoffrey thought, quickly, clearly, still with his eyes shut. Not like that, not teenage and simple, not lover – except, yes, of course, because that was it, a lifetime defined and darkened by love, but not lover so luscious and intimate, not for public consumption – and not partner, as though they’d merely danced at arm’s length, rather than held each other together, skin to skin without a chink of daylight in between, and then that was it, there was no other word...
“Mine,” Ellen said. “He’s mine. Get out of my way.”
And now he could feel Ellen beside him, stroking his hair back, fingers creeping to his pulse. He breathed in, breathed out, asked: “I’m going to fall in love with the next person I see, aren’t I?”
“Try it and see,” she said, softly.
He opened his eyes.
“Geoffrey,” she said, “you complete fucking idiot.”
“What...”
“A fairy fell on you out of a tree.” She glared at him, and suddenly it was hilarious – in the dark, familiar way, like dramatic irony and restraining orders against wildlife – and Geoffrey let himself be helped up. He was laughing as he took Ellen’s hand and finally, stood up. Richard looked like he might cry.
“You’re not dead,” he said, in a voice thick with emotion.
“No. No, I’m not.” Geoffrey brushed the dust off his shoulders. “Is she – Moth..."
“She’s fine,” Ellen assured him. “She mostly landed on you. Nothing broken.”
“Geoffrey!” Anna hurried up to him, jumping up from the front row of the audience, who were mostly looking on in silence as though this were a scene from the play. “Did you lose consciousness at all? Even for a few seconds?”
“Sort of,” Geoffrey said, looking down, and crumpled at the sight of her expression. “Yes, I did.”
“I’m calling 911,” she called from over her shoulder, waving away his anxious denials – he’d had hangovers worse, he insisted, she told him to shut up and listen for once, the audience came to life all at once and started muttering to themselves – and in all the confusion Geoffrey leaned on Ellen and let her take him, step by step, to the edge of the stage.
Just before they disappeared from sight, he remembered.
*
Closing his eyes, Geoffrey turned to the audience and called out:
“So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.”
The applause was slow, building, melting into the sounds of the coming night. Richard, standing on the grass at the edge of the stage, watched Ellen helping Geoffrey down the steps. “You’re such a drama queen,” she was saying, fondly.
“I love you, too,” he said, and like glittering shadows, they were gone.
Richard walked slowly back to his place, and thought about the only world Geoffrey knew – drama and its audience, birdsong, grass and sky, fairies, Shakespeare and Ellen – and then he thought a little about financial security, and the future of the arts in Canada.
“He’s very good, isn’t he?” said Helena, admiringly. “Isn’t he, children?”
And after that, mostly, Richard thought about the night air, warm and fragrant, and about the softness of skin under theatre lights, and about ice-cream.
Behind the stage, a bird took flight.
finis
rosariotijeras for looking it over, and also, er, I feel the need to apologise to slasheuse, whose wonderful outdoor production of AMND was just that - wonderful - and while it gave me the idea for this story, its problems are all its own.Anyway. For my darling
the_acrobat as part of my Slings & Arrows ficathon.Fic:: That Little Western Flower
by Raven
PG-13, Slings & Arrows, het, Geoffrey/Ellen.
“Greetings, everyone!” called the man walking on stage, looking marginally flustered in the late-evening sunlight. His footsteps on the wooden boards were making the birds scatter. “Thank you for coming, and welcome to the New Burbage Festival’s one and only outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If you’re all sitting comfortably, then we’ll begin in just a few moments.”
Richard watched him stalk, coat flapping, off stage, and felt himself being poked in the shoulder by the woman sitting next to him. “Who is that?” she asked with interest.
Something cleared in Richard’s head. “You’re new here, aren’t you,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.
She nodded. “I’ve just started teaching at the elementary school. I thought an outdoor performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream would be a nice thing to bring the kids to, and my colleagues all agreed. They said the school always tries to maintain good links with the festival.”
“Oh, yes, absolutely,” Richard told her reassuringly. “We’ve always tried to maintain good links from our end, too. But... you’re new.”
“Right.” She smiled at him, just as reassuringly.
He took a deep breath. “That was Geoffrey Tennant, artistic director for the New Burbage Festival.”
“Oh,” she said, and her tone had changed slightly.
“You’ve heard of him?”
“A little,” she said quickly. “My colleagues have said… well, nothing very much, really. Um...”
“Yes?” Richard felt it was always best to let people find their own feet, take their own time, when it came to their first encounter with theatre people.
“Does he always wear that on his head?” She made an encircling gesture with both hands. “The... daisy-chain.”
Richard took another deep breath. “No. No, he doesn’t. Um... I don’t know why he was doing that.”
“I guess we can excuse his eccentricities,” she went on, bravely, Richard thought. “I hear this was all his idea, and it’s in a good cause and the children get to see Shakespeare performed in this lovely outdoor setting. It should be a good show, shouldn’t it?”
Richard sat back in his garden chair, taking in the lightly buzzing audience in rows, the verdant grass, the flowers, the pleasantly rustic stage and the fairy whispers behind the watercolour-painted backdrop, and privately doubted that.
Backstage, it was quiet. Only the distant voices of actors dancing through well-loved lines, the murmur of the audience undercutting the birds, disturbed the silence.
It had started, as many things had a tendency to, because Geoffrey was terrified of Anna. It was justifiable, he thought. Standing here, in this square of shadowed grass which, for lack of a better word, he was choosing to call backstage, resting his head against a tree, it all seemed like a clear progression of events that had begun with Anna running into his office mid-sentence and, like the best nightmares, wasn’t over yet.
“...and so Richard thought,” Anna had continued hurriedly, “maybe we could do a charity performance, in the park on Midsummer Eve. The takings would go to the elementary school’s drama fund, and we’d cement the festival’s relationship with the local community, and…”
“Wait.” Geoffrey had raised a hand and stared for a long, intense moment at the skull on his now mercifully empty desk. “We cement our relationship with the local community by subjecting it to fun-for-all-the-family outdoor murder, insanity and what Nahum calls a portrait of pure evil, in iambic pentameter with breaks for ice-cream and the removal of traumatised small children from the immediate vicinity?”
“No, of course not! We’ll do A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“A Midsummer – on Midsummer – Anna, this is not a good...”
“Nearly everyone in the company has been in one of Oliver’s productions,” she went on, cutting him off as politely as she could. “It would be easy to do! One performance, and most people will only need a couple of rehearsals, and….”
“It’ll need to be re-blocked,” said Geoffrey in spite of himself. “It’s ridiculous to think of taking a play out of the Rose and doing it on, I don’t know, a park bench.”
“Oliver considered it… he had notes.” Anna was looking nervous. “Would it help if you thought of it as, oh, a tribute to him?”
“A tribute to him.” Geoffrey’s voice was carefully expressionless. “A tribute to the late great Oliver Welles. Has no one in this godforsaken place heard of putting flowers on a grave, for fuck’s sake!”
Anna took a deep breath, made to say something, thought better of it and walked out of his office. Geoffrey looked at the skull a minute longer, muttered “Shit!” and went after her. It took a few seconds for him to spot her sitting behind her counter, face turned deliberately away from him.
“Anna,” he began, but she held up a hand to stop him.
“First of all,” she said, voice shaking only minimally, “Oliver was cremated.”
“Right.” Geoffrey nodded, and tried to look as non-threatening as possible. “I scattered his ashes.”
“Second of all,” and she fixed him with her sternest gaze, “you are a quite horrible person.”
“Yes,” Geoffrey reassured her, “yes, yes, I am.”
“Well,” Anna said. “Good. I’m glad you agree.” A pause. “So you’ll do it?”
And after that he hadn’t been able to say anything, because really and truly, she was right.
Still savouring the quiet, Geoffrey sank deeper into the bark and listened to his own heartbeat echoing against the tree. Two minutes later, someone stuck their head out of a doorway and yelled, “Geoffrey!”
Inconsequently, Geoffrey chose that moment to remember that his mother had wanted him to be an accountant.
The stage was makeshift, but Maria and her army had conspired to make the wooden planks and steps look rustic and period-authentic, or so Richard was no doubt telling the press, and there were large, lush-leaved trees on either side, with strong branches and spreading crowns that cast light and then mottled shade onto the boards below. The two painted backdrops screened a downwards slope and the two trailers that served as hidden dressing-rooms.
In his quieter moments, Geoffrey liked the set-up – it was hushed, calming, an external mirror for peace inside his mind, a relief after the Rose. This was not, he reflected, one of his quieter moments.
“I put it down for one second!” Ellen was yelling. “One second, and you blithely walk off it as if I didn’t have a fucking outdoor performance of the fucking Dream!”
“You put it down on my head,” Geoffrey got out, through gritted teeth. “I went out in front of hundreds of people, unaware that I had a daisy-chain crown on my head. People who, by the way, already think that I’m psychotic.”
“And I don’t know why they would think that, for heaven’s sake!” Ellen sat down in a huff, perching on the edge of a step, and got out a small mirror and a handful of blusher brushes. “Things happen, Geoffrey! It’s just – it’s just another production, for God’s sake. Things happen and you don’t have to overreact.”
“She’s right,” Oliver cut in, sprawled on the grass a few inches from where Geoffrey was pacing furiously up and down.
“Just another production?” Geoffrey said softly, dangerously. “This is just another production to you, Ellen? And I suppose acting is just a job, and Shakespeare just, just some guy, and I gave my sanity, my life, for... what?”
“Not everything is about you, Geoffrey.” Ellen sounded tired. “You don’t have to do this. Not every time.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” Geoffrey took a deep breath. “That’s where you and I are different. I have to do this every time. Doing this” – a quick expansive gesture, taking in the backdrop and the actors, the grass and sky and world – “is all I know how to do.”
“You’re not different. You’re both exactly the same,” Oliver said, exasperated. “Basically, you both have an almost operatic tendency to go to extremes.”
“Shut up, Oliver!” – and then he remembered, just in time to see Ellen’s expression change into finely-sculpted blankness.
“Geoffrey,” called a new voice, and Geoffrey wheeled around with what Oliver would probably call a balletic entrechat.
“What fresh hell is this?” he yelled, and blinked at the sight of Nahum, who merely looked serenely at him. “Sorry,” he said quickly. “Sorry. I’m spending too much time around actors.”
Nahum walked up quietly, nodded at Ellen, who had gone back to her make-up, and drew Geoffrey into a corner under the spreading branches. “We have a problem with the fairies in the trees,” he said, pointing up. “Moth is saying that she is feeling seasick.”
“Seasick,” Geoffrey repeated. “Up a tree?”
“There is a light wind. It must be... unpleasant.” Nahum was still serene. “And also, Puck is feeling faint. I believe this may be a combination of nerves and several hours under the sun.”
“Nahum,” Geoffrey said desperately, “the show started twenty minutes ago. Why, exactly, are you telling me this right now?”
“It is good to be prepared. I once directed a production where all my understudies had food poisoning at the last minute. Needless to say we did not open on time.”
“Wait.” Geoffrey held up a hand as Nahum made to leave. “What happened to the original actors?”
“They were in prison at that time.” Nahum strode away, around the right-hand backdrop and back out towards the audience. Helplessly, Geoffrey turned to face Ellen, expecting a prickly truce, their peace renegotiated, but the light here was brighter than in the theatre; without swirling dust, without the shadows, he faced her eyes.
“You still...” She stopped, brought her hands out in a gesture he recognised. “Oliver. You can – you still...”
“Yeah.” He nodded, feeling suddenly weak and tired. “Really, Ellen, I’m not. I’m not whatever you’re thinking.”
“Not psychotic?” Oliver looked disbelieving. “Geoffrey, my sweet, you see dead people.”
“Please shut up,” he said, and off Ellen’s expression, she knew exactly whom he was talking to. She watched him silently as he sat back down on the grass and took the flowers, one by one, out of his hair. A bird fluttered up, came to rest in the tree above his head.
“Your cue,” he said softly, after a moment, but she was already gone.
The great benefit of the outdoor setting, Richard thought, was that he didn’t have to watch the performance. Which wasn’t to say, he hastily amended, that he didn’t want to watch the performance, or even that these things weren’t generally a lot better since Oliver, God rest his soul, had departed for more elevated climes, but that it was okay, sometimes, to whisper out here, and he was fine with that. The sunshine, the noises of the outdoors – lawnmowers, crickets and children – made for a nice change from the reverent hush of the Rose.
Less pleasant, though, was the distant sound of a couple arguing, or perhaps it was a radio left on; the voices were jerky and unpleasant, and made for a buzzing distraction from Oberon and Puck doing their slow dance of words, moving in and out of each other’s reach with each line. Richard liked the costumes, but couldn’t help but notice that some of the fairies were looking green about the gills.
“I wish whoever that is would shut up,” said a voice beside him, and he smiled.
“What’s your name?” he asked, in a voice pitched not to carry; he had some standards, after all, and most of the audience were transfixed by the events on stage.
“You’re not going to…” She stopped. “You’ll laugh.”
“I won’t.” He shook his head fervently to make the point, and realised all at once that he wasn’t working to make himself sound reassuring; it was just coming, reassurance, like sitting here in this garden chair talking to a complete stranger was where he belonged, or something. “What is it?”
“Helena.” She grinned, shyly. “And wait till I stand up – I’m tall, too.”
He was confused for a moment, but he’d been to one of the last rehearsals, memorably conducted in Geoffrey’s high and hysterical fashion, and he remembered it. “Oh. Thou painted maypole.”
She was still grinning, but it had lost some of the shyness. “Yep. Still like me?”
He nodded, slowly. “There’s an intermission at the end of the second act. I could – would you like me to… um.”
“What, Richard?” she asked, so softly that her voice was almost obliterated by the calls of the crossed lovers.
“I could buy you an ice-cream?”
She laughed into her hands. “I’d like that very much.”
On the stage, Helena was angry, tearful, devoted – use me but as your spaniel – and Richard was pretty sure he was a better man than that. He sat back in his chair, smiling to himself, aware of the body heat to his right and the sunshine on his head.
A few seats down, Anna caught his eye and gave him a tiny, appreciative thumbs-up.
Geoffrey didn’t resist when Oliver took his hand and said, “You’re coming with me.”
They walked in a straight line, outwards. Behind them, the noise of the play and the audience grew fainter, and the sunlight grew more bright in front as they left the shadows of the trees. With each step, Geoffrey breathed a little more easily, and it helped that Oliver was, at least, keeping his silence.
“Why are there fairies in the trees, anyway?” Geoffrey asked at last.
“It uses the space, I thought,” Oliver said, easily. “They’re creatures of light and shadow, neither good nor evil. They live and love, but not as we do. They exist in dappled shade. Which the leaves conveniently and economically provide.”
“Why, Oliver, that sounded positively like an artistic thought.” Geoffrey smiled. “I thought you left those behind with your hair.”
“Such a bitch, Geoffrey,” Oliver said indulgently. “But then, you always were.”
Geoffrey shrugged, noticing the way his steps were leaving impressions in the grass and Oliver’s, ethereal, were not. “It’s good to know that I’m noticed for reasons other than my personal hygiene and spiralling insanity.”
Oliver snorted and ran a lazy hand over Geoffrey’s hair. “You cultivate it,” he said. “You’re not nearly as mad as you look.”
Geoffrey didn’t shake off the touch, and Oliver paused. “And what do you mean, noticed?” He frowned. “Don’t try to be subtle, Geoffrey. It doesn’t suit you.”
Geoffrey merely looked at him.
“No,” Oliver said, in reply to something that hadn’t been said. “That’s the one thing you can’t do. Blame me if you want. Blame Ellen. But you can’t say for a moment that everything that happened to you happened because people didn’t love you. Because you weren’t loved.”
Geoffrey said nothing. A swallow took flight from behind him, insubstantial as a piece of black paper, fluttering across his vision, disappearing against the sky.
“I remember your father,” Oliver said gently. “He led you to this life, you always said. What was that, other than an act of love?”
Geoffrey watched the shadows of the oncoming twilight, thought about birds in flight, still said nothing.
“That night, Ellen knew what was about to happen. She knew how close she was, how close we all were, to losing you – and she jumped off a bridge.”
“The water was three feet deep,” Geoffrey said without rancour.
Oliver ignored him. “And me, Geoffrey. I’m here with you, having this conversation. I’ve been dead for a year and a half, and I’m here.”
There was a long, long, pause, and in the distance the audience laughed, voices rising into the sky, dissipating below the birdsong.
“Do you know,” Geoffrey said, “that within the province of Ontario, it is prohibited by law to wilfully kill, injure or interfere with any one of eleven species of migratory birds?”
“Geoffrey,” Oliver said, and he didn’t imbue it with any wealth of meaning; it was just a word, a name dropped like a kiss into the silence.
“I got off because of ‘wilfully’,” Geoffrey went on quietly. “Claimed diminished responsibility and it was written off as the final free act of the criminally insane. I couldn’t vote in the last election. I have trouble renewing my driver’s licence. I don’t overreact, Oliver. This is all I have.”
This time the silence was different, shot through with wires twisting round and round to breaking point, and no one speaking to snap them. But then Oliver was reaching for his hand, taking him somewhere, and Geoffrey followed, responded to the immediacy of the movement, because the easiest thing to do, right then, was to come when he was called.
Oliver led him, step by step, back to their theatre, open to the elements on all sides – like Shakespeare’s had been, Geoffrey thought – and all at once the audience were visible as a blur of mixed colour against the green. “Look,” he said, softly.
Geoffrey looked. Ellen was on stage, with Bottom, and her hair was woven through with his flowers.
“Let this be enough,” Oliver said, and in the midsummer twilight, caressed by words and wind, Geoffrey understood.
Under the tree, it was quiet and still. Fairies and Mechanicals fluttered through, trailing make-up and cues, but there was something muted about their movements, something holding them apart from where Geoffrey was perched on the base of the roots. “Ellen...”
She stopped still and stared down at him. “What?”
Quickly, he glanced around for Oliver. There was no sign of a ghost, no ghost of a footstep, and he said, quickly, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
“Geoffrey,” she snapped back, exasperated, “if this is just another manifestation of your latest psychotic break...”
“Thou art more lovely and more temperate,” he went on, gesturing towards the twilight at the edges of the sky. “Here’s our summer’s day, Ellen. Here it is, right here.”
“Geoffrey,” she said again. And he might have been imagining it, but there was a softness there, something in her voice that wasn’t just hard, brittle, worn and scored with time. “Are you trying” – a brief, incredulous pause – “to make up?”
He opened his mouth to speak, to match it, to use words for something other than half-cracked hysteria, but a new voice yelled, “Geoffrey!” and really, he thought, he was beginning to hate the sound of his own name.
“There is bad news,” Nahum said in clipped tones, hurrying up to him. “An accident. She was leaning down to throw up and hit her head standing up.”
Ellen looked confused. “Hit her head on what, standing up?”
“Who did?” Oliver asked, popping into existence with a grin and a flutter.
“Puck,” Geoffrey said, aware of his own rising voice. “We have no Puck?”
“Alas, no.” Nahum nodded sagely. “We should not perform this play at the solstice. It tempts the fates.”
“Oh, the fucking fates!” Geoffrey’s head was pounding, and the dappled sunlight bathing their backstage in soft light was beginning to seem like an ironic personal insult. “Do any of the fairies know the speech well enough to be trusted? Are you sure she can’t go out there just once more, Nahum?”
“I fear she may have a concussion.” Nahum was still perfectly calm. “The first-aid team have been called.”
Geoffrey groaned, deeply, and covered his face with his hands. “No one knows the speech – of course, I mean that none of the apprentices know the speech, because everyone knows the speech, but they’re all, what do you know, already in the play. Fuck.” He kicked the tree. It hurt. “Fuck!”
But there was a silence around the words, and something was happening to the air. He turned around, hands still pressed to his face, and Ellen was on her feet, looking at him strangely. “Geoffrey... you, I remember you...”
And Oliver was saying: “You were... God, you were so beautiful, Geoffrey...”
Through his fingers, Geoffrey saw them mirror each other in their gestures, felt their words blurring into sonorous nonsense, and said, “No, no, no, no…”
“You were Oliver’s Puck. You can do it again.” Ellen grabbed at him, sitting him in a canvas chair and tangling her hands through his hair. “Come here.”
“No,” Geoffrey said again, sinking, helplessly, into her touch, “no, I don’t go on stage, I don’t – that was, that was twenty years ago, and the audience will notice I’m not their Puck! I’m twice her age! I’m fucking male!”
“Shut up, Geoff,” Ellen said, just as Oliver cut in, anxiously fluttering between them, “It would work, you know, Puck who crosses worlds, it would work thematically – give me your hands, if we be friends, you know it! – and the director breaks the fourth wall, you see!”
Geoffrey tried to stand up and run, couldn’t move. “No... Nahum, get me a fairy, any fairy, teach it to them, there’s a minute left, teach someone the damned speech!”
“There is no minute.” Nahum was calm. “There is no time. Ellen, you must hurry…”
“I’m doing it!” Ellen snapped, and she was twirling Geoffrey around, hands soft and familiar on his body, doing, he wasn’t sure, something, and then he noticed all at once that it was stage glitter wafting in clouds from her fingers; she was making him into someone new. “Close your eyes,” she murmured, and he did it.
A cold chill of a brush on both eyelids, and he looked, startled, into the mirror to see himself and Ellen as reflections of each other, peering out beneath stripes of silver and gold, and then there really was no time left at all.
“Remember,” Oliver said, in the final second, “you belong to the night...”
And Geoffrey was out there on stage, glittering in coat and boots beneath the final gleaming of a northern twilight, and the audience were there, deadly, silent and waiting beneath the giant dome of the sky. The candle was in his cupped hands; he was the light to hold off the coming darkness, the lone spirit of the air, left behind to sweep clean the mouldering world.
“Now the hungry lion roars” – and the audience, too, were roaring, their whispers cutting through the evening breeze – “and the wolf behowls the moon.”
The howls – Geoffrey could hear them beginning, at the edge of perception, and the holes in his memory were reminding him that he wasn’t strong enough to shine this brightly, and it was going to get dark very, very soon, and he was drowning for want of a line.
But he heard it, strangely enough – from above, a tiny, terrified gasp, and then the snap sound as finally, inevitably, the bough broke – and then everything went mercifully black.
The schoolchildren were getting restless. Richard couldn’t exactly blame them, not after three hours of Shakespeare, but he was quite comfortable, himself, with his ice-cream in the sunshine. His thoughts were slow, meandering, comfortable, and he might be a mere bean counter, administrator instead of artist, but there was a lack of urgency in his head and the thought had lost its sting. And administrator he might be, his inner voices pointed out, but he could tell a bad director from a good one, and Geoffrey’s Dream, for all its tribulations, had something Oliver had never given it: a kind of rushed lushness, a deep heart. The fairies danced languorously at the edge of the stage, the words became poetry, became music; there was rhythm in their meaninglessness, something he didn’t know he knew, and something new.
His companion, leaning forward with hands clasped and eyes wide, hissed, “That’s not Puck!”
Richard remembered Puck from rehearsals as a girl possessed of the twin blessings of not being Claire and yet fitting into the costume. He looked at the person executing her blocking, blinked, and his brain told him he’d been right the first time.
Startled and sparkling, Geoffrey looked like he was holding his breath. Richard started thinking about open graves, and then about daggers, and then fairly rapidly about straitjackets, sedatives and financial liquidation, and then Geoffrey choked, said a few words, and something large and noisy fell out of the sky.
Richard closed his eyes, stood up, and said out loud, “Please, God, don’t let him be dead.”
“Don’t say that!” said Helena the elementary school teacher, her hand going to his shoulder and all her professional instincts coming into play. “He might have hurt himself a little bit, but he’ll probably be just fine.”
“I’ll never get anyone else to take the job,” Richard muttered, “not after two in two years... Excuse me.”
Voices rushed out, an eldritch chorus in the purplish dark. Geoffrey rolled over, his body stretching out and matching the curves of the earth beneath him, and stood up so his feet were steady on hard ground. He held the candle above his head and saw the enormous, flickering shadows, the creeper-bound trees and flashes of wings, and the fairy king.
It struck him all at once, then. “Am I,” he said, and then started again because it was all meaningless and strange, and his voice was soft in the warm night, “Am I dead?”
“No.” There was laughter all around, pleasant accompaniment beneath the ethereal voice ringing through the wood. “You speak of strange things, my gentle Puck.”
Geoffrey could feel the change. He was younger, with a ferocity of purpose running through his blood, and at the same time, ancient as the turn of the earth. He took a step, described a huge circle with his arms outstretched and smelled distant spices on the wind. There were roses, elderflower and eglantine, woven into his hair.
“It’s a dream, then,” he suggested, and felt inexplicably light.
“A dream,” Oberon agreed. “An interlude.”
Like a dance at the end of a play, Geoffrey thought. Like the last lingering seconds of disbelief, stretched out. He moved to speak again, and was aware that the chorus of fairies was fading, becoming part of the whispering trees. Only the fairy king remained; he, and his loyal servant, and suddenly he knew the story.
“Don’t tell me.” Geoffrey held up a hand and was unsurprised to note that his feet left the ground easily; he could float, rise, free-fall, land on four inches of air. He wanted to laugh. “Don’t tell me – you know a bank where the wild thyme blows?”
Oberon smiled at him, deviously, and reminded Geoffrey of Oliver. “Hast thou the flower there?”
Geoffrey laughed. “Not yet.” And because this was his dream, and he was feeling light in heart and head, drinking in night air like wine, he said, “I’ll put a girdle round around the earth in forty minutes.”
He jumped up as he said it, pointing his toes in some sort of demented grand jeté, and if he really were Shakespeare’s Puck the story would have gone a certain way, then; it would unfold in comic and romantic beauty, come round through subtlety of theme into quiet, neat resolution. But it was, after all, a dream in the life of Geoffrey Tennant, and those always ended the same way.
“Geoffrey!” called the voice, and it was in rhythm with the world, in rhythm with the beating of his heart, and he twisted and turned and flipped over in mid-air, graceful and waiting for what came next.
She brought him back.
Geoffrey came back to consciousness slowly. He knew the path well – at one time he’d chosen to stay in the in-between, paced a groove into the ground between here and there – but he followed her voice, step by step, and emerged, body aching, with wooden boards beneath his head and the summer breeze fresh all around. He didn’t open his eyes.
“I don’t care who you think you are, Richard!” Ellen was yelling. “Get out of the way, he’s my-”
Not boyfriend, Geoffrey thought, quickly, clearly, still with his eyes shut. Not like that, not teenage and simple, not lover – except, yes, of course, because that was it, a lifetime defined and darkened by love, but not lover so luscious and intimate, not for public consumption – and not partner, as though they’d merely danced at arm’s length, rather than held each other together, skin to skin without a chink of daylight in between, and then that was it, there was no other word...
“Mine,” Ellen said. “He’s mine. Get out of my way.”
And now he could feel Ellen beside him, stroking his hair back, fingers creeping to his pulse. He breathed in, breathed out, asked: “I’m going to fall in love with the next person I see, aren’t I?”
“Try it and see,” she said, softly.
He opened his eyes.
“Geoffrey,” she said, “you complete fucking idiot.”
“What...”
“A fairy fell on you out of a tree.” She glared at him, and suddenly it was hilarious – in the dark, familiar way, like dramatic irony and restraining orders against wildlife – and Geoffrey let himself be helped up. He was laughing as he took Ellen’s hand and finally, stood up. Richard looked like he might cry.
“You’re not dead,” he said, in a voice thick with emotion.
“No. No, I’m not.” Geoffrey brushed the dust off his shoulders. “Is she – Moth..."
“She’s fine,” Ellen assured him. “She mostly landed on you. Nothing broken.”
“Geoffrey!” Anna hurried up to him, jumping up from the front row of the audience, who were mostly looking on in silence as though this were a scene from the play. “Did you lose consciousness at all? Even for a few seconds?”
“Sort of,” Geoffrey said, looking down, and crumpled at the sight of her expression. “Yes, I did.”
“I’m calling 911,” she called from over her shoulder, waving away his anxious denials – he’d had hangovers worse, he insisted, she told him to shut up and listen for once, the audience came to life all at once and started muttering to themselves – and in all the confusion Geoffrey leaned on Ellen and let her take him, step by step, to the edge of the stage.
Just before they disappeared from sight, he remembered.
Closing his eyes, Geoffrey turned to the audience and called out:
“So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.”
The applause was slow, building, melting into the sounds of the coming night. Richard, standing on the grass at the edge of the stage, watched Ellen helping Geoffrey down the steps. “You’re such a drama queen,” she was saying, fondly.
“I love you, too,” he said, and like glittering shadows, they were gone.
Richard walked slowly back to his place, and thought about the only world Geoffrey knew – drama and its audience, birdsong, grass and sky, fairies, Shakespeare and Ellen – and then he thought a little about financial security, and the future of the arts in Canada.
“He’s very good, isn’t he?” said Helena, admiringly. “Isn’t he, children?”
And after that, mostly, Richard thought about the night air, warm and fragrant, and about the softness of skin under theatre lights, and about ice-cream.
Behind the stage, a bird took flight.
finis
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on 2007-09-01 01:29 pm (UTC)Well done.
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on 2007-09-01 03:46 pm (UTC)no subject
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on 2007-09-01 04:54 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-01 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-01 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-01 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-01 10:53 pm (UTC)&hearts
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on 2007-09-01 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-02 05:26 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-02 05:27 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-02 11:32 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-02 11:32 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-02 04:25 pm (UTC)*loves*
You know, I was just saying to Sig, who is puttering around in the kitchen where I have my desk, "I'm reading this story by this woman at Oxford, and it's so good it makes me get weepy. She's like the next Michael Ondaatje. If I could write like her, I'd give all my teeth." All of which sounds like hyperbole, but isn't. You have something special, and your delicate touch and nuanced reading of relationships and mental states, and your gentle, layered construction of mood are all part of that.
Not boyfriend, Geoffrey thought, quickly, clearly, still with his eyes shut. Not like that, not teenage and simple, not lover – except, yes, of course, because that was it, a lifetime defined and darkened by love, but not lover so luscious and intimate, not for public consumption – and not partner, as though they’d merely danced at arm’s length, rather than held each other together, skin to skin without a chink of daylight in between, and then that was it, there was no other word...
“Mine,” Ellen said. “He’s mine. Get out of my way.”
See? That, or any one of a dozen other wonderful, quiet moments here.
*loves loves loves*
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on 2007-09-02 07:14 pm (UTC)Really truly perfect. The voices of the characters were spot on. I could see them and hear them in my mind's eye. What a gem!
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on 2007-09-02 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-02 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-02 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-02 11:00 pm (UTC)*blushes and gets weepy* See, you see? This is what I think about YOU!
I am so glad you liked this! *smushes you*
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on 2007-09-03 09:33 pm (UTC)I loved the inclusion of Oliver, and the banter was wonderful - Geoffrey/Ellen snark, and Geoffrey/Oliver snark, and unflappable Nahum, heh. And bonus possessive!Ellen, that was a lovely touch. ♥
Quite the romp, playful and poignant in the best S&A tradition. :)
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on 2007-09-03 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-04 10:47 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-04 10:52 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-07 02:14 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-07 08:53 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-22 09:10 am (UTC)“Mine,” Ellen said. “He’s mine. Get out of my way.” There's something so right about that. And people falling out of trees, of course. You are my favourite.
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on 2007-09-27 12:18 am (UTC)no subject
on 2008-01-18 06:17 am (UTC)Is
Beautiful.
Thank you, a thousand times, for this; I think I will now love Midsummer Night's Dream because of this fic.
I don't even know what to say. I am speechless.
This.
This is.
This is beautiful.
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on 2008-01-27 02:51 am (UTC)no subject
on 2008-06-07 01:58 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-03-15 03:31 pm (UTC)