the audition would be ruined and it would all be her fault. She found the handle and pressed the thumb, but it would not go down. She knocked, then knocked again, loudly. The door flew backwards, opening, and there was the broom-boy from the theatre. It was a very big broom.
‘Stuck?’ he asked. He had a sad, strange, flattened face, but it broke open in a moon-wide smile, and he took her arm and pulled her out of the dark stairway. ‘Did you go under all the way without a light? You are brave!’
She nodded.
A clattering of pail and bucket: the old woman had finished the lobby cleaning, and she gave the boy a cuff. ‘You’re up, young Nando,’ she said, eyes and mouth cold. She clumped through the double doors and down the long aisle created by the chairs, now back in their places. Bella and the boy followed.
He stopped halfway and held her sleeve. ‘I’m not on yet, it’s my dad and mam first.’
They stood still and watched what was happening onstage.
Two box-set pieces had been lowered, walls of a room with a window and a door, and a bedstead. There was a loud alarum, clang-clang-clang, so Bella was afraid it was fire, but a man in a nightshirt leaped out of the bed, higher than a human could, and landed with his feet plump! in his slippers. He found a giant wind-up clock hopping beside the bed, and threw it out the window—it came winging straight back at him and beaned him on the back of the head with a tremendous clatter.
‘Got him good!’ said the boy, close in her ear so as not to distract Mr. Cleveland.
The man stomped on the clock and hurt his foot. He leaped around the room one-footed, found and reached for his pants—but they whisked away on strings, to the right, to the left, as he lunged for them. The bed revolved as he was diving and caught him in mid-air, and he bounced once, straight up and then down, legs out, slippered feet pointed, and whoosh—straight into the pants now hovering over the bed—and whoops onto the floor all splay-legged and dazed.
‘Set the strings right that time!’ the boy said, laughing. ‘Cleveland’ll love that.’
The man pulled on his yellow waistcoat and reached blearily for his flask, but unstoppered his hot water bottle instead and took a big glug. He spat it out in a fan of spray, aggrieved, and went staggering round the room for his flask. No sooner had he found it than a vast pink elephant floated into the room, and as he backed away in horror from the elephant, a white-robed lady appeared from nowhere and grabbed the flask, holding it out of reach.
‘Mrs. Cleveland ought to like that, Temperance herself!’ the boy said, elbowing Bella. ‘Whoops, I’m up, I’ll miss my cue—’ He flew down the length of the hall and vanished.
Onstage, the drunken man wrestled and danced with the pink elephant until he had vanquished it and tossed it out the window.
The beautiful lady held the flask aloft, shaking her finger at the man, but he hauled off and punched her—very hard, Bella thought—so that she seemed to float back, suspended in air, before dropping like a dead bird. Satisfied, he smacked the effort from his hands and walked right up over her flattened body to grab the flask from her limp fingers.
Just as he grabbed it, the door opened and in came the skinny boy with his broom at the ready, as if to sweep the floors. When he saw the lady lying supine and frail, he pointed accusingly at the big man, who was busy draining the flask to the lees and would only roll his eyes and shrug.
The boy shrugged too, and swept her up as if she weighed nothing, had no substance but imagination. She tumbled over and over, light as air, and when they got to the window somehow she was picked up with the broom, and the boy shook her out the window, nothing but a dust roll. She reached backwards once with a graceful hand, and then fell—it looked like she was falling thirty stories, like a wind-blown leaf, but Bella had seen backstage and knew she must only have fallen into a mattress.
The father seemed to take offence at losing the woman, then. He grabbed the end of the boy’s broom in his huge hands and swung, and the boy rose in an aerial handstand as the