The Serpent's Sting Read Free

of scaly dandruff. With his other hand he picked off the flaky skin from the corners of his nostrils, blithely unaware that an onlooker might find this disgusting.
    â€˜You’re only filling in, of course, so I suppose we must make do,’ he said, as he wrestled with a stubborn flap of desiccated skin. The fact that I was ‘filling in’ was the one thing that was making my circumstances tolerable.
    After the first performance, I began to find my feet. The other cast members, whose names I was trying to remember, were generous to me, and one or two of them even praised my performance. No praise was forthcoming from Percy Wavel, and Jim Stokes didn’t become any more accommodating. He accused me of trampling on his lines and mischievously putting him off by missing cues and wilfully ignoring his feeds. I forbore to point out that any flaws in the performance were the result of his inadequate stagecraft, not mine. I’d been told to follow his lead, but I’d abandoned this strategy when he revealed himself to be such a frightful old fraud. Following his lead on stage would take me nowhere.
    By the third performance I was absolutely on top of the role, and my biggest challenge was preventing Jim Stokes from sabotaging me. Behind the camouflage that is the extravagance of pantomime, he tried to undermine me at every turn. With years of Shakespearian training behind me, I was more than equal to his assaults, and rose each afternoon magnificently above them. It was wearing and tedious, however, and my final performance loomed as a relief. Roger was recovering, and he was expected to return to his role after the fifth performance.
    My final appearance went well, and even the minimally discerning audience of children gave me a round of applause that was more sustained than that which they gave Jim Stokes.
    I might have put this brief flirtation with the grimmest of theatre’s byways behind me, were it not for the fact that, unbeknown to me, my brother, my mother, her paramour, Peter Gilbert, and his two adult children from his first marriage had decided to catch the show, and worse, much worse, they’d decided to ‘come round’ afterwards. The stage door wallah was supposed to keep people out, but an appeal to this decrepit creature’s sentimental side, along with a one-pound note, ensured that not only were my visitors allowed in, but the delightful surprise in store for me wasn’t ruined by their being announced.
    Jim Stokes hadn’t yet returned to the dressing room. It was his habit, often, to share a beer at the end of a performance in a remote corner of the wings with a young man for whom Jim Stokes in full drag fulfilled some bizarre, inexplicable yearning.
    I’d shed the heavy, ponderous dress, and was enjoying the sudden weightlessness of being naked before pulling off the wig and removing the make-up. I’d reached up to lift the wig when the door opened and my five visitors leaked into the room. From the neck up, I was a pantomime dame; from the neck down, I most certainly was not. There were a few frozen seconds in which everyone dredged his or her memories for a rule of etiquette that might cover such a situation. The young woman, who I’d never met, but who I knew to be Peter Gilbert’s daughter, stepped forward and introduced herself.
    â€˜Cloris Gilbert. Will Power, I presume.’ She put her hand out and, in an action that I hoped expressed an insouciance I wasn’t feeling, I shook it.
    â€˜I believe we’ll soon be related by marriage,’ she said, as if this somehow restored some balance into the wildly unbalanced situation in which we found ourselves. Over her shoulder I saw the look on the face of the young man who I assumed was her younger brother, John, and it came as close as I’ve ever seen to a cartoon sneer of unadulterated, unguarded contempt. Absurdly, I thought it might be the wig, and ripped it off, thereby providing