Page 108 of Kiss Me at Christmas
“I guess there’s no point putting it off any longer. Better go see what the damage is.”
Their feet squeaked on the thick plastic protecting the carpet. Together they pushed through the swing doors atthe top of the stairs and headed straight to the edge of the balcony.
It was worse than she’d imagined. A huge chunk of ceiling flapped down from the joists above, like the lid of a grand piano hanging in midair. The sounds of wood straining creaked ominously around the theater like a portent of doom, and stagnant water dripped from the massive hole onto the stage below. The stage itself was a swamp. The trickle must have been a torrent before the water was switched off. The curtains hung heavy, saturated both from the waterfall above and then drinking in the flood from the hems up. Jagged fragments of old plasterboard littered the stage, and clumps of plaster hung down in wet clags from the horsehair they were originally mixed with. It smelled earthy, like chalk cliffs after a heavy rainfall. Inside the hole were bundles of wires, layers of old wet newspaper, and the bottoms of the floorboards that lined the attic space.
“Flapping fudge nuggets,” she breathed.
“Yeah,” James agreed.
“Frozen pipes did all this?”
“Ken thinks they probably had hairline cracks from winters before and were leaking so slowly that nobody noticed. Each year they weakened a bit further until this year’s big freeze—”
“Finished them off,” she concluded.
“Yeah.”
“Crikey. Thank god no one was here.”
She looked at the heavy chunks of plaster that had smashed down onto the stage, fragmenting into sprays of white shingle. “If anyone had been under there when it collapsed…” She shuddered.
James put his arm around her. “I know,” he said. “I keep thinking the same thing.”
Ken was directing the positioning of a skip being maneuvered by a heavy-duty forklift to rest beneath the island of swinging ceiling. To the side of it, a scaffold tower was being hastily erected. Ken looked up and saw Harriet and James watching.
“Right, people, keep going, I’ll be back in a mo,” he shouted to his team, and disappeared out of the auditorium, reappearing moments later by their side. “You got here quick,” he said.
“It didn’t seem like a time to dawdle,” she replied. “What’s the plan?”
Ken rubbed his chin, the sound of his stubble like sandpaper.
“Well, first off, we need to cut that lump of ceiling down before it flattens someone. Then we’ll make the area safe. And then we can start on a proper cleanup.”
“What about the show?” she asked.
He sucked in air through his teeth, the universal signifier of bad news.
“You’ve got two options. The first is to postpone the performance until after we’ve replastered and made everything good. Realistically you’re looking at the middle of January.”
“And the second?” asked James.
“We make it safe. Clean everything up and cover the hole with a strong waterproof tarp. It won’t look pretty, it’ll likely be drafty, but you can have your show as planned. We can get it into working order in a couple of days. Quicker if we have help with the surface cleanup.”
Harriet looked at James and could see him weighing the two choices in his mind. For her, though, there was only ever one course of action.
“Let’s do option two; not pretty with a tarp,” she said with conviction.
“Are you sure?” James asked. “I could speak to Evaline—”
“I’m sure. Too many people have worked too hard on this. If we postpone, we lose the momentum. This whole production has been created by determination and goodwill. We’ve built it on make do and mend, and I can’t think of a more fitting way to showcase our hard work in the face of adversity than to do it despite a massive hole in the ceiling.”
James smiled at her. “You’re right,” he said. “This has us written all over it.”
“Brava!” Gideon boomed, surprising them all. “I came as soon as I could. Of course, the show must go on, that is the cornerstone of every creative’s belief. The gods may rain their trials and tribulations down upon us, but we will rise to the occasion!” He swooped his arms into the air as though he intended to take off from the balcony and fly around the auditorium.
“Right you are, then,” said Ken, wholly unimpressed by Gideon’s outbursts. “I’ll crack on. Nobody’s to go down there until I say it’s safe. Understood?” They all nodded. “If you need to practice, do it in the cocktail lounges.”
And with that he was gone. The scaffold tower was almost complete, and at its base three members of the maintenance team were clambering into safety harnesses while others gave their chain saws a quick once-over.
