The Blackpool Highflyer

Chapter Six

I was too late for Early Doors at the Palace, and too late for the start, come to that, but I was let in after the first turn.

I was put into the one seat left, which was in the stalls and directly in front of the orchestra. As I sat down, I knew I'd made a bloomer in coming, for I could hardly breathe. There were too many hot, red people in the theatre and not enough air to go round.

The sweat began rolling off me as a board was put up announcing a dog circus. The fellow in charge of the dogs wore a tailcoat and high collar. He had long hair flattened to his small head by Brilliantine and sweat. He stood still and sweated, swaying slightly as his dogs jumped about him. He looked like a tadpole, and his dogs would leap and hang quivering in the air like jumping fishes. At the moment that any dog made a jump, the fellow with the big drum, who was about four feet away from me, would hit the biggest of his cymbals, worsening my brain ache by degrees. Why can't those damned mutts keep down, I began muttering to myself. And why would the old fellow next to me not keep still?

After the dog circus came six men who were a German or Hungarian band. Oompah music. As they played, the orchestra played along, doubling the noise and doubling the heat; there was a lot of cymbal stuff from the drummer, and I would have liked to belt him with one of the bloody things. The band played against a painting of a pale-blue mountain; the colour dazzled, and I could not look at the mountain top, which was blinding white.

The bill-topper was the ventriloquist, the one I'd come to see, but he turned out to be the sort I don't like: the kind with a walking figure.

As the floods went up he was leaning on the figure, or the figure was leaning on him. It was an English Johnny, or Champagne Charlie. You could tell by the tailcoat and high collar. The head was weird: round, white and lumpy, like the moon or some great fungus, and the grey eyes seemed to be sliding to the side, as if the figure was sad and ashamed at having a perfectly round head. The ventriloquist was also got up like a toff: frock coat and top hat. He was breathing deeply, trying to get a breath in the heat like all of us, and preparing for the walk. The doll, of course, was not breathing at all. Any sort of weather was nothing in his way.

The walk started, and as usual a great cheer went up at the same time as the walking music started up. It was as if a famous cripple had got to his feet and taken his first steps in years. The ventriloquist's left hand was at the figure's back, and he was working the levers that swung the legs. The figure moved by a forward jerk of the left leg, which woke up the right one, and brought it swinging along behind, and the left arm rode up towards the chest every time this happened. The doll's right arm was in the hands of the ventriloquist.

They were heading for two chairs half involved in darkness in the middle of the stage, and you could see that disaster beckoned because the ventriloquist's legs (which were shaking) and the legs of the figure were moving further and further apart, so the two of them were starting to make the shape of an A.

In walking ventriloquism, the figures were always the Johnny or Champagne Charlie sorts, so that their funny walks could be put down to them being cut. It was all so samey, but there was an extra sort of desperation with this pair, and I really wanted them to get to the chairs without a collapse.

Part of the trouble was that the ventriloquist wasn't such a great hand at walking himself. He was a big fellow, but trembly from nerves. At one moment he lost control of the figure's head, which swung from left to right, as if saying:

No, I will not go on with this. But they did reach the chair, and sat down to great applause. The ventriloquist beamed out at the audience. He had a red face, shining with sweat, a wide grey moustache held out by wax, and a sharp, pointed beard, the two of them together making a cross on the lower part of his face. He looked so completely jiggered that really you did not want him to have to do any more work. But he presently produced a cigar and put it in the figure's mouth, saying, very loud, 'Well here we are at the eye doctor's!'

While everyone took that in, and puzzled over it maybe, and the worrit next to me continued with his infernal fidgeting, the ventriloquist produced from his waistcoat a Wind Vesta, and saying, 'A light of course, we must have a light,' he lit the figure's cigar.

Two things now happened that brought more applause: the lights came up to show a line of figures on seats, stretching away to the side of the ventriloquist and the figure, which was now shooting out puffs of smoke from its mouth. The other dolls in the row were an old lady, a rustic type, a darkie and a costermonger. One was moving: the old lady. Her head rocked up and down, as if she was saying: Well, here we are but we must just make the best of it.

I wondered whether folk were clapping because they thought it was good or bad, because it was bad, shocking bad. If you were a ventriloquist you ought to be funny – that was the only way you could get away with it. I had seen no ends of funny ones down in London, but they were mainly the fellows with the knee figures: schoolboy, little Johnny, Jack Tar. But it was always funny business, with the figure saucing the man, instead of this slow, exhibition stuff.

The ventriloquist took the cigar from the figure's mouth, and the figure said something that I worked out was: 'Can we speak in confidence?'

The ventriloquist looked along the row, and, looking ahead again, said: 'I doubt it, you know.'

I watched the nodding head of the old woman, which ticked like a clock, and watched the orchestra sweat as my own head clock ticked.

The ventriloquist was saying, 'Well, my vision is perfect, how about yours?'

It struck me that at this rate it could be as much as ten minutes before the end, and I couldn't take it any more. I was far too hot, and after the conversation with the socialist I'd been quite unable to put away thoughts of the stone on the line.

I stood up and walked out into the foyer, which was a red and gold circle of bars so that I was surrounded by barmen, who were all lining up glasses, waiting for the rush that would come at the end. I picked out one at random and walked over to him feeling strange, with my boots sinking into the carpet. I asked for a glass of water, and he said: 'You look jiggered, mate.' I told him I'd had quite a few days of it. He said, 'How's that then?' and I said, 'Well, I was in a train smash for one thing.'

I told him about the stone on the line, and the death of Margaret Dyson, but the barman wasn't interested in her: 'You, though,' he said, 'you were on the front of the engine, and you weren't hurt even a bit?'

'Well, no.'

'Cor,' he said, 'You're all luck, you are.'

This struck me as the wrong way of looking at things, and made me feel worse about Margaret Dyson. I heard a noise behind me, and was aware that all the barmen in the circle had got hold of the story now and were leaning forward and listening.

'I bet you were shitting yoursen,' said one of them.

'How did the stone get there, then?' one of them called out.

'Put there,' I said.

'You suspect… a spot of mischief, then, do you?' asked the same fellow again.

'I reckon it was socialists,' I said, 'socialists or anarchists who've got a down on excursions, because they're put up by the bosses… So the stone might have been put there as a sort of warning to the railway company.'

'Well, that's all fairly choice,' said one of the barmen. Another said, 'Anarchists,' very slowly, as if he was trying out the word for size.

Just then I felt extra heat and the ventriloquist was standing right next to me. It was powerful strange to see that marvellous beard and 'tache at large in the real world.

My barman handed him a glass of something mustardy coloured, and nothing was said. The ventriloquist was red, shining with sweat, and panting as if he'd run a mile: he was a fellow not meant to be seen at close quarters. He began to drink the mustardy stuff, whilst looking at nothing. He was bigger than he'd looked on stage, especially in his upper half: he looked cut out for something more than ventriloquism.

'A warning by anarchists!' said one of the barmen, slow on the uptake, and the ventriloquist continued to drink and to look at nothing, but the nothing had now moved further into the distance.

The ventriloquist finished his drink, turned, and disappeared through a door between two of the bars.

'I thought that bloke was on stage just now,' I said to my barman.

'He generally takes a little summat just about now for his vocal organ.'

'He gets through heaps of lozenges, you know,' said another of the barmen.

'But that was whisky and honey he had just there,' said the first.

'What's he doing out here, though?' I said.

'There's a bit where he leaves the dolls to it,' said the first barman. 'They're all waiting there at the hopticians -' (he said the word very carefully, and put an 'h' in front of it) '- and they start up with these coughing goes. First one, then the whole lot.'

'How do they cough if he's not there?'

'The movements are all worked from off by the fellow does the props. Rubber tubes and air valves and all that carry on. And property's mate, junior properties – he does the coughing.'

'While Monsieur Maurice drops in here for his little brain duster,' put in another of the barmen.

'And it won't be the last of the night,' added the first.

'Monsieur who?' I said.

'Maurice,' said the first barman, and it came out like 'more ice'. 'Very Frenchified, he is.'

'But not really, though,' added another of the barmen.

'I've seen his name before,' I said; 'it was being put up outside a little hall in Blackpool.'

'Very likely,' said my barman.

I looked at my glass of water and enquired about the price of a pint. On hearing the answer, I told my barman I'd nip back to the Evening Star for my last of the night, if that was quite all right with him. He grinned, and all the barmen watched me walk through the main doors and out into the hot night.

There might have been thirty people in the Star by now, and every man jack avoiding the billiard table. The Ramsden's was off, so I put away a pint of something else that I didn't much care for, and it didn't knock the stone on the line from my mind, so I took another, and that seemed about the right dose.

I came out of the Evening Star for a second time, and a tram went racing past like a comet with advertisements, or the fast drawing-back of a curtain. Looking far to my left, I saw the Joint and Hind's Mill, a black modern castle at the top of Beacon Hill. To the right, at the top of Horton Street, was another beacon of sorts, the Palace Theatre, but the show was done long since and, as I watched, the lights began to go out. I made towards this disappearing target anyway, and turned off before reaching it to enter the side streets.

The wife would have been home an hour since, or more, so I was late. I didn't like to be late back for the wife, and I didn't like to be bothered about being late back.

There was a quarter moon, lying on its back, lazy and not giving out much light; there were flies around all the gas lamps, and too much life in the streets, though none of it to be seen: just far-off shouts and cries, and all doubled by the echo of the houses. The shouts always seemed to be shadows of sound, around the corner, or in the alleyways behind the houses.

I turned down a snicket that cut a terrace in half, then pushed along a particular back alley because I liked the racket my boots made on the cobbles, but the clanging of the segs on my heels was presently doubled, so that the sound was more the clip clop of a horse. I turned, and there seemed to be a fast-travelling shadow, but no sound. I carried on walking, and was back to hearing the sound of my own boots. I turned into another snicket, and then I was in Back Hill Street.

The gas was up in the occasional house. I came to ours, which gave out no light, and saw a man or a shadow of a man beyond, in Hill Street. Something about him made me look behind me, and there came a shout from that direction that seemed to jump, so that it was two shouts, and then the noise of something happening in Hill Street, and then nothing.

I unlocked the door, walked into the house and sat down on the sofa, not breathing. It came as a relief, a few moments later, to hear the steady chimes of midnight coming up from the parish church. I stared at the closed door, and thought about how a good cold snap would put an end to all this nonsense in the streets. When the chimes ended, I stood up to put on a brew, and as I did so the letter box flipped open. I flew at the door and looked up and down Back Hill Street, but that's all I saw: the street and the quarter moon, looking like a painting.