sequins stuck on her face. Her fingernails had been painted green by the dancing girls and a feather boa was wrapped round her neck and most of her body. He could only imagine what Emily would have to say about this get-up.
‘Sorry,’ he’d said to the room in general, as several girls were in a state of undress.
‘It’s all right, Harry,’ one of them sang out. ‘Nothing you haven’t seen before.’ Well, he thought, that wasn’t exactly true.
‘Those girls’ll eat that kid up,’ the magician said gloomily.
Bunny produced a cigarette packet, offered one to the magician and said, ‘Light us up, Harry, will you?’
Harry obligingly produced his lighter. ‘Can you show me a trick?’ he asked the magician.
The magician picked up the cards, shuffled them in a grandstanding kind of way and then fanned them out and said, ‘Pick a card, any card.’
As Harry approached Barclay’s dressing room a girl flew out. She surprised him by saying, ‘You’re not Harry by any chance, are you?’
‘I am.’
‘Oh, good.’ She was Scottish – she said ‘gud’. ‘Mr Jack was asking for you. He needs his pills, he can’t find them. I can get them if you tell me where they are.’
‘Is he all right?’ Harry asked. ‘He’s not had another funny turn, has he?’
‘He seems a bit distressed,’ she said.
Harry didn’t know why Barclay didn’t have his pills on him and he had no idea where they might be. He popped his head back in the dancing girls’ dressing room and Candace squealed with delight when she caught sight of him. A tiara had been added to her ensemble, one of the girls’ cheap rhinestone ones that they wore for a high-kicking routine they did to ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’. (‘And they are, Harry,’ one of them said to him. ‘Never forget that.’ ‘I’ll try not to,’ he promised.)
The tiara was far too big for Candace and she had to hold it to stop it slipping off. Harry rescued her before she could be eaten. He was going to have to use some of Bunny’s make-up remover on her before Crystal saw her. (Where was his stepmother?)
No, the girls hadn’t seen Barclay’s pills, neither had the ventriloquist. Nor had Clucky (according to the ventriloquist). Harry returned, defeated, to Barclay’s dressing room. There was another young woman in there now and they had been joined by Bunny, so it was a terrific squash.
‘Turns out Jessica Rarebit there had them,’ Barclay said, holding a bottle of pills aloft for Harry to see.
‘Hospital gave me them last night,’ Bunny said, ‘for safekeeping.’
‘Twat,’ Barclay said succinctly.
‘Are you all right, Mr Jack?’ Harry asked.
‘I’m freezing to death. Shut that door, will you?’ It was stiflingly hot in the dressing room. Harry wondered if Barclay really was ill, he certainly didn’t look well, but then he never did. As requested, Harry shut the door and was startled by the expression of absolute horror that washed over Barclay’s face. He looked as though he’d just seen some kind of ghastly apparition. Barclay’s mouth had fallen open, revealing his ratty, nicotine-stained teeth. He held up one trembling hand and pointed at Harry.
‘What?’ Harry said, alarmed, thinking of the decomposing son who had appeared at the door in ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, a story that had kept him awake at night recently.
‘It’s behind you,’ Bunny said, in his best pantomime inflexion.
Harry whipped round, expecting at the very least a vampire, but then he saw what had given Barclay a fright. Scrawled on the back of his dressing-room door in messy red paint was one word, in capitals: PEEDO.
Oh, for goodness’ sake, Reggie thought. Whoever had written it could at least learn how to spell.
There was a tentative knock on the door, but no one said anything so it seemed to be up to Reggie to say, ‘Come in.’
They all had to shuffle round so there was room to let another person in. A ventriloquist’s dummy, some kind of repellently unattractive fowl, put its disembodied head round the door.
‘Fuck off, Clucky!’ the drag queen yelled at it. There was what sounded like a scuffle outside in the corridor, as if Clucky was having an altercation with someone, and then Thomas Holroyd’s wife squeezed herself into the dressing room and joined the cast of misfits. This was what the Black Hole of Calcutta must have been like, Reggie thought. Only worse.
‘Mummy!’ a child, sequinned and feathered and invisible up until now, yelled at Crystal, holding her arms out to be picked up.