me from across the path. He stands up. He walks towards me. His knees don’t make the sound of a football rattle.
He reaches out and squeezes the flower’s neck, its mouth pouts and opens.
‘Antirrhinum majus. Anti means like, rhinos means snout.’
He looks at me. His eyes are watery.
I add the word ‘Botanist’ to his imaginary plaque.
‘Like snout,’ he says.
His nose bridge is thin, delicate and perfectly straight.
‘Wha’s a lad your age doing here two days on the trot?’
I watch him. Tiny white hairs poke out from the tip of his nose like stamen.
‘If you’re going to steal flowers then take ’em from round by yer,’ he says.
I follow him off the path to a flowerbed that is tucked away behind the greenhouse. He walks quite quickly, with a kind of skip-limp.
‘Chinese gardenias. If these don’t get her then nothing will.’
He snaps off four long-necked whites and a few flowerless greens and holds them out.
Zoe is waiting for me in the café, wearing thick-cut beige cords that droop on to her green plimsolls and a baby-blue T-shirt beneath a black zip-up hoodie. The top is unzipped to the point where her brand-new boobs strain against the zip. The audience are finishing their hot drinks. She is smiling, as well she might be. Her sheeny brown hair is tucked behind her ears.
She doesn’t say a word about the Chinese gardenias. Taking my free hand, she pulls me through a set of double doors into near total darkness. She leads me up some steps. I use the darkness to imagine Zoe as a gross pancake stack, worming up the stairs. She stops briefly on a landing. To my left, down a short corridor, a thin dash of light at floor level implies the shape of a door.
‘That one goes backstage,’ she says, continuing up. At the top of the stairs, she opens a single door.
The control room is hardly lit, darker than romance. She clicks on a long-necked lamp; it gives off a blue light like the ones in train-station toilets that stop heroin users from seeing their own veins. It gives the room the feel of being deep underwater.
‘Welcome to the boudoir. Make yourself at home.’ She rolls a leather-padded office chair towards me. I can see it has air suspension. ‘As guest of honour, you may also have a spinny seat.’
I hold the flowers out. In the blue light, the white gardenias glow the colour of X-rays.
She shakes her head.
‘They’re Chinese gardenias,’ I say.
I doubt anybody ever gave Pie a bouquet.
I’m still holding out the flowers.
‘Give them to me at the end,’ she says.
The upper half of the far wall is taken up with plugs protruding from rubber-rimmed holes. It looks like an oversized version of the whack-a-rat game in the marina arcade. But with the plugs hanging limp and dead.
‘That’s called the patch bay,’ she says.
Beneath the plugs is a coral reef of yellow, green and blue leads, bunching together, sticking out at all angles.
Zoe says: ‘Check out me cans.’
She’s wearing leather-trim headphones that have a microphone attached. The mic bobs in front of her lips like a mosquito.
‘I said: check out my cans,’ she says.
I exaggeratedly perv on her tits.
‘Thank you.’ She slips her headphones to her shoulders. ‘We call headphones cans.’
‘Great joke,’ I say.
I never thought I’d see the day when Zoe would deliberately draw attention to her own body.
‘It’s techie humour. We spend a lot of time in the dark.’
Her sound desk sits in front of the window; there are rows of sliders, knobs and a single golf-ball-shaped roller. A computer screen displays rectangles of block colour: red, blue, green.
Through the window I can see into the audience, blue side-lights run down the steps. The stage, brightly lit from above, is made from interlocking pine floorboards. Most of the audience are in their seats; one man is standing up, removing his jumper in silhouette.
Using both hands, she repositions four faders, steadily lowering the house and onstage lights: the man quickly sits down; the audience focus on the stage.
‘It’s terrible but I’m so fucking bored of this play now.’ She jabs a rubber button on the control desk and then slumps into her leather chair. I sit down as well. ‘I know I shouldn’t get bored because it’s the holocaust yadda yadda but I can’t help it.’
She flips a switch on a squat black box that looks like what I imagine an old transistor radio would look like. A red light pings on. She lifts her headphones from