[Stingy Jack]

Okay, here's a short story from the current issue of Cemetery Dance (#49). It's the best story in this issue, so far (I haven't read them all.)

Misdirection
by
Tony Richards

He is coming towards me now, his dark and unreflective eyes fixed upon mine.
And there doesn't seem to be a thing that I can do about it . . . .

*********

I have heard that the population of Edinburgh, Scotland, pretty much doubles during the first three and a half weeks of August, the even has become so renowned.
The Edinburgh Fesitval. Drama. Dance. Art. Cinema. And jazz. The largest cultural gathering in the world. Sixteen hundred different shows running throughout it on a staggered rotation that begins about midday and can go on till well past midnight.
And the city's population doubles, like a sponge taking on too much water.
Visitors arrive from Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Even the smallest, pokiest of guesthouses responds by upping its rates. People who have spare rooms in their homes will rent them out for the duration, to take up the overflow.
We had hired an apartment to ourselves for the two weeks that we were staying. Were up from London, mostly here to see the Fringe -- what the Americans passing by us now might call 'off-Broadway'. Small productions starring nobody you'd ever heard of. Stand-up comics ranging from the brilliant to the banal. Avant-garde dance-troupes ... that kind of thing.
You could keep the bigger shows. The Festival, for us, was an exploration, a mental adventure.
There was myself. There was my girlfriend, Cassie, who I'd only been with for two months, but with whom I was deeply in love. There was her best friend, Miranda. And there were my closest pair of pals from college days, Big Ritch and pensive Daniel.
College had, in fact, only ended for the five of us a year ago. And this ... ? It was like going back and doing the fun parts all over again, just better.
We were into our fourth day. Were sitting almost literally in the shadow of the Castle, at an open-air cafe on the Royal Mile, taking a very late, rather quiet, somewhat hung-over breakfast. The bars in the modernistic Dome complex stay open till three in the morning, and the time passes almost without your noticing if you get chatting with some other crowd.
And .... perhaps we had chosen the wrong location, considering the state that we were in. But almost all that doubled population seemed to be walking past us now. A lot of people were clutching programmes. But there were more than just civilians out here this late in the morning.
Actors were moving amongst the flow of normal people, advertising their shows in various and novel ways. They were going past us dressed as hobos, penguins, sexy robots. Angels. I think Genghis Khan. On top of which, a fire-juggler was working the crowd in one direction, and a pair of buskers with full black-tie and cellos in the other.
We hadn't exactly chosen somewhere quiet, in other words. But -- just the same as every other day we'd been here -- the atmosphere started to unfect us before too long, and we forgot how tired we were.
We began to discuss what we were going to give a try today. There was obviously a long potential list, and we'd been taking in a bare minimum of four shows daily since we'd got here. Seen a good and solid play abuot an unemployed steel-worker being pushed over the edge. Another flimsier but striking one about the war against the Taliban. Five stand-up comics. A mime show that had rendered everybody quite speechless with boredom. And an astonishing visual-arts piece by a modern-dance collective from St. Petersburg, all weird lighting, dry ice, and luminous props.
So we went through the programme again, turning over the alternatives.
All the while we did this, the pile of flyers on our table grew. And if you've never been to the Festival before, that probably requires some explanation.
Sixteen hundred shows, all vying for the visitor's attention. There are posters everywhere, placed illegally or otherwise. There are banners. There are t-shirts. There are teh actors out plugging their own events. But most of all, there are the flyers. Printed handbills, mostly on thin cardboard. Everybody hands them out, pushing them towards you as you walk along the street, or simply slapping them down by your elbow if you're sitting at a table.
If you ever find yourself in Edinburgh without a bed for the night, you can at least make yourself a decent mattress, you get given so many of the things.
We took a casual, sideways notice of them as they tumbled down in front of us, one after the other.
'You, Myself, and Me, a one-woman show about the underlying grief of personal relationships.'
'An Hour with Kevin Morrison, brilliant stand-up humor by Tasmania's finest new comedian.'
'The Trap, a harrowing new drama by Igor Zetermelelian.'
'Carry On Forever, a tribute to Sid James.'
None appealed, certainly not this early in the day, though Daniel tried to claim that he had actually heard of Igor Zetermelelian.
Cassie started nuzzling my neck after a while, and so didn't see it when ... what seemed to be a disembodied shadow suddenly loomed out of the crowd. Hovered over me, so closely that he genuinely made me flinch. Dropped a glossy, almost wholly black handbill next to my coffee up. Then disappeared again.
It took my weary brain a few seconds to figure out what had just happened. It had been a man, dressed from head to tow in black. In what had to be some kind of cat-suit, with gloves and a full-head mask. Too weird.
But I picked up the flyer.
Cassie's head came back up -- she was obviously wondering why I'd flinched. And then she looked at the thing as well.
"Here's a peculiar one," she murmured. "I can barely read it."
As I'd said, it was almost entirely black. But there was tiny, spidery red printing on it, the lettering so narrow that you had to squint to decipher it even in bright daylight. As though some wounded insect, bleeding profusely for a bug, had dragged itself across the pasteboard.
"Chopper," I read slowly out. "An entertainer with a difference. Pleasance Below at one o'clock."
Exactly what difference was nowhere explained.
"Intriguing presentation though," Ritch pointed out. Was he referring to the flyer, or the way that its distributor had been dressed, or both? With Ritch, you never could be quite sure. "Aren't we here for something different? We could always check it out."

****************

"He's one of those extreme circus types," the young Australian woman at the Pleasance Courtyard box-office informed us. "You know, nails up the nose, juggling with chainsaws, that sort of thing."
Cassie's friend Miranda looked a little dubious at the sound of that. Not Cassie herself, though. She may look sweet and petite, but she's actually quite a hardy little cookie. Ritch and Daniel began to take more interest too.
"Today's his first show," the woman added. Which was odd, since we were halfway through the Festival. "The act who had his slot was forced to drop out yesterday -- death in the family, something along those lines."
"Isn't that unusual?" Cassie asked her. "I mean, letting someone else take over at so late a stage?"
"I wouldn't know, I'm afraid. This is my first time here."
The Pleasance Courtyard, like the nearby Dome, is a student building most of the year round and converted to theaters during August. Unlike the Dome though, it's an old and disorderly structure, somewhat reminiscent of those sprawling and quadrangled farmhouses Napoleon used to fight battles around. The cobbled area at its heart was filled with people taking a drink and enjoying the sunshine between shows. Others disappeared inside to have lunch at the bistro, or stood in line at the various doorways, tickets in their hands.
"Oh, I practically forgot," the woman added. "It's two tickets for the price of one, just for today."
Which was a pretty standard Festical gambit to attract a good audience.
It decided us, though.
It was our first time in the Pleasance Below, and it turned out to be one of the smaller of the dozen or so theaters in the complex. Subterranean, obviously. The seating descending at a forty-five degree angle. Dark. Stuffy too, on a warm day like today. There was air-conditioning at the nearby Pleasance Cavern, but apparently no such luxury here.
And the place was almost full. At the Fringe, so heavily attended by backpackers and students, cut-price tickets do it every time. Miranda, Cassie and myself squeezed into three folding-chairs halfway up, I took the aisle seat on account of my long legs. Daniel and Ritch found places in the row behind me.
We just had time to settle down before the usher closed the door, a spotlight came on.
And the show began.

*************

(to be continued in next post)