The stage was set. The curtain was waiting - not that they had any idea what they would find behind it. They had been presented with specific seats, allocated seemingly randomly. Two of them had been directed from the foyer through external corridors to a private box each, while the remaining three were guided by The Hostess to particular seats in the stalls. And now there was nothing to do but to wait.
A tense minute passed under the dim house-lights, by which almost nothing but silhouettes could be made out. The Hostess had returned to the door to the foyer behind the guests and out of their sight. They were now on their own, alone to face whatever it was that Mr. Jig’s ‘Extravaganza’ had in store for them.
Suddenly, from behind the curtain, there was the moan of a violin - soft at first, but growing in intensity. A melody erupted from nowhere, gliding from note to note, interwoven scales that ached of a breathless intensity. And then, with all the verve of a potato thrown at a wall, there was a bum note. The music stopped with a mutter, unintelligible but just audible from behind the curtain, a thin clatter, a deeper, hollow thud, and, finally, the unbearable sound of crunching wood. It was that moment that the red curtains swiftly parted and, when the view of centre-stage was unobscured, there was an audible
click of a spotlight-
“I told you not to cross me!”Standing in the central cone of light was the man that had been so irritable in the foyer; the man that had introduced himself as Nicholas; the man who had been directed to a private box but who had slipped backstage and removed his jacket without anybody noticing. The violin, or, what remained of it, lay underneath his foot. The body had been caved in underneath his heel, and the strings emerged from the headstock in a spray that still bobbed gently in its death throes..
“Good evening! Welcome to Mr. Jig’s Speakeasy: The Reality Extravaganza!” His New York accent was gone, to be replaced by a crisp, British one. The fury and drunkenness he had carried with him earlier had apparently disappeared just as his wet hair had by now dried, replaced by a slightly lopsided smile, and energetic, theatrical movements,
“Please excuse my little disguise from earlier - I just can’t resist dressing up! After all,”He gestured to his right, and, simultaneously, a second spotlight illuminated a large trunk facing backstage, lid wide open but concealed from the audience. In a physical shift, his posture twisted from an intense slouch to something almost military. His fast, dark eyes, which had been tracing the individual faces in the auditorium suddenly locked, as though frozen over, and began to stare into the very back of the auditorium while his hands gently tugged at the knot in his tie.
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;”He removed his tie and threw it over his shoulder where it landed silently behind him. His hands began to unbutton the buttons of his shirt and waistcoat, working down from the neck, while one foot gripped the shoe of the other so as to kick it off to the side with a dull thump.
“They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”His shirt and waistcoat hung open, revealing the cotton unity suit underneath. Both shoes had by now been kicked beyond the scope of the minimal lighting. Unflinchingly and without pausing, his hands roved down to the buttons of his trousers while his shoulders shrugged off the braces that suspended them.
“At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.”Bending one leg up and then the other, so as to reach them with his hands, he removed his trousers, one sleeve and then the other, still glaring, eyes unmoving, piercing unseeingly into depths of the theatre only he could see. For just one beat, he stood centre-stage, immobile, naked but for his short union suit and argyle socks pinned to his calves by garters. The harsh light picked out every hair on his arms and thighs, while the thin white cotton did nothing to conceal the physical stirrings of a man enjoying himself.
After that brief moment, he twisted, still mid-soliloquy, and crossed the stage to the trunk and crouched before it.
“And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.” An acidly blue shirt emerged from the trunk. He buttoned its front rapidly, leaving its cuffs to flap unsecured before addressing them with gleaming red cufflinks.
“Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth.” As he rummaged, there was a pause, and, breaking character, if that’s what it was, he looked inside the trunk and removed a belt and held it limply in his off-hand. With a twist of the neck so sudden that its bones could be heard to crack, he turned to the man closest in the audience, the one sitting in the second row, and tossed it to him,
“I suppose you’ll want this back.”There was a shriek of realisation cut short by the universal signal for silence: a finger pressed against the lips.
“Now, where was I?” The man on the stage picked back up where he left off, his expression flashing back to a seething rage or hatred or whatever that empty emotion was in a change so swift it almost appeared to pulse across his face. He had pulled a pair of trousers from the trunk and was now pulling them on. The braces were snapped down over his shoulders, one, and then the other, and, in an unnatural move of the arm, groped at his own back to adjust them.
“And then the actor,
A fair round glutton of shape all liquid,
With two faces, and eyes on either side,
Full of good words and evil instances;
And so he plays his part.”A tie. He flipped his collar accordingly and wrapped it around his neck.
“The sixth age shifts
Into the squirm and sweated pantaloon,
While the gallows await a future soon;
His youthful hose, rotten, a world too wide
For his shrunk soul, and his big manly voice,
Faltered amid his own forged avenue, pipes
And whispers in his sound.”Finally, a pair of spats. He crouched down tightly to lace them, causing the light above him to cast his body by turns deep into shadow and stark relief. Not once did his head turn and not once did his dark eyes soften. By contrast, they were now aflame, his voice, nothing more than a deathly murmur.
“Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is Mr. Jig (that’s me) and mere oblivion,
Sans hope, sans joy, sans soul, sans innocence.”
He stood before them, now fully realised, in a moment of silence so thick it could have been a second or a decade. The spotlight softened to illuminate the full stage, bare but for his now-discarded costume and the debris of the violin. He wriggled, both as though to shrug off the performance and to acclimatise to his own skin; there was an almost physical change in his presence, the cold, hard form making way for a loose, jocular silhouette. Eyes once again free to roam, they roved slowly over the room before him.
“I hope you don’t mind my bastardisation of The Bard while I play around up here. A few moments in the limelight is all I wanted because the show tonight, ladies and gentlemen, is an audience with your very own selves! It’s amazing what you’ve gotten up to in your ‘strange eventful histories’. Of course, we all spend our lives treading these boards in one way or another, dancing across cemeteries and ballrooms alike and writing our stories in fluid, red penmanship,” He mimed each action, while pacing the stage,
“Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, those are the rules, but, you, ladies and gentlemen, have given such an IMPASSIONED PERFORMANCE that I couldn’t help but watch. But the problem is, I’m a devil for giving away the ending.”Sweat stains could be seen pooling at his armpits; his lower lip, even at rest, hung slightly open and made his mouth a cruelly-curved, slender maw.
“Listen to me very carefully. I know who you are. I know what you’ve done, ladies and gentlemen, and it’s not just that I can tell colourful stories about you; I can illustrate them with evidence - which our Hostess will collect now.”He clapped his hands together twice, and, as though from a secret enchantment, the tension in the room dissipated slightly. Nevertheless, the auditorium remained so still that the hostess could be heard to leave from the back of the room by the soft sounds of heels on carpet and the gentle swishing of the door behind her.
Mr. Jig, for his own part, softened slightly, posture and face both somehow thawing before the audience’s very eyes. He continued:
“So here’s the deal; if you don’t want me to jig on down to NYPD tomorrow morning and give away the ending with my big mouth and crucially, let’s not fool ourselves, my big box of evidence, you’re going to have to buy it off me. Don’t worry - it’s all here in this theatre and I’m happy to take cheques, but, and trust me on this, ladies and gentlemen, it’s going to cost you. To put it another way, you’re all mine.”Suddenly, there was a crackle of electricity. The lights blinked out and cast them all into blackness, then strobed temporarily back in a juddering pulse of light that only half-illuminated the room for half a moment before cutting out completely. Amid the hubbub, Mr. Jig could just be heard to say,
“Just hurry up and get the evidence while these bloody lights come back on. This isn’t fair! I was almost-”Bang.Screams. A few heavy footsteps. The sound of something dropping with a slight clatter. An audible gurgle and a splatter not dissimilar to a wet sponge being dropped.
With a low hum, the house lights turned back on, properly this time, illuminating the auditorium once again, brighter than before. Mr Jig lay slumped backwards over the trunk, utterly unmoving and covered in what could only be his own blood.
