Lizard's Leap: Chapter Fifteen: Act Two

During the interval they were herded into their dressing room to have their makeup touched up. They went past the King and the director who were shouting at each other in the corridor.

‘How dare you change the script without telling me?’ the King complained in a Cumbrian accent.
‘Charlie, I haven’t. I swear, I knew as much about that as you did but you have to admit, the audience loved it. We’ll keep it in.’

The argument was soon lost in the cacophonous roar of the children’s voices.

Soon they were herded back on stage again and they hadn’t had an opportunity to leap out of the show. Miss Anna was giving the King a dancing lesson. They were all on stage for this scene. The King and Anna twirled and sang to the song Shall We Dance. They would sing, ‘Shall we dance, cha-cha-cha,’ and the children had to stamp their feet in time to the cha-cha-cha.

Mark was bored with all the dancing; he thought it was soft. As he stood on stage he swayed from side to side, but not in time to the music, and his arms swung out with each sideward movement in that way that only the arms of bored boys do. He looked up into the rafters and was distracted by all the lights and electrical rigging. Two men were up there controlling the lights. Mark waved to them.

‘Hiya. Don’t fall down, will you?’ he shouted.
One of the men looked as though he was going to do just that.

‘Turn round and dance, you stupid kid,’ he hissed downwards.

Mark jolted out of his daydream. He realised that they were just coming to the stamp-stamp-stamp bit. He was good at that. Miss Anna and the King swished past him in their waltz just at that moment and Mark stamped hard on the King’s foot three times.

The King sang, ‘Shall we dance, ow—ow—owww’

The audience roared.

The King’s children filed off the stage and everything went well for a while. The King had a limp, though, and was in pain. The audience thought that it was part of the show and laughed every time he winced.

When the children trooped back on stage it was at the state banquet that the King was giving for the foreign dignitaries. The King wanted to show the people from England that they weren’t a pack of savage barbarians, and so the children had to present gifts to the visitors and say something nice to make the King sound like a wise and clever man. Not all the children had to do this, but every third child had a line to speak.

‘Father, you clever man and velly wise.’

‘Father, you richest man in all Siam.’

The King frowned. ‘In all world,’ he corrected his son.

‘Father, you velly best man in whole universe and best dancer.’

Kerry was pushed forward. ‘Go on,’ said one of the wives, thrusting a carved box into her hand.
Kerry walked to the King and handed the box to the Englishman. But she had no idea what to say. Feeling awkward as the silence went on she began to rock backwards and forwards.

‘Psst,’ it was the prompter. She was the lady who sits in the wings and whispers the lines to any of the cast who had forgotten them. ‘Father, I wish you long life and lots of luck,’ she hissed to Kerry.

‘Pardon?’ shouted Kerry, to the delight of the audience. ‘Speak up, I can’t hear you.’

‘Father, I wish you long life and lots of luck,’ repeated the prompter, a little louder this time.

‘Oh, okay,’ Kerry said, still not sure that she’d heard correctly. ‘Father, I wish you not limp like a duck.’

Kerry thought that the King looked angry again and it took a long time for the audience to settle down.

*

It was almost the end of the show and the King was lying on his deathbed. His son sat beside him with his head lowered onto the counterpane. The King drew a final, juddering breath and died. It was the most dramatic moment of the production. You could hear a pin drop. The cast loved the moment of shocked silence from the audience and held it for as long as they could…

Silence.

Silence—and a single, loud sob.

‘Oh, no.’ shouted Vicki, tears streaming from her eyes. She had two black lines down her cheeks where the makeup was running. ‘That’s just too sad,’ she wailed. ‘He can’t die, he’s supposed to marry Miss Anna and live happily ever after.’

Vicki couldn’t bear the thought of the King dying. She let out another loud sob and ran right across the front of the stage, past the King’s body, and exited—stage left.

A muffled voice came from under the blanket on the stage: ‘I—I don’t believe it.’

The King sat up in the bed where he’d just died. His cheeks were purple beneath the brown makeup.

‘I can’t take any more of this,’ he spluttered in his Cumbrian accent. ‘I can’t work with these—these—these—barbarians.’ he added, borrowing a word from the show. The audience laughed and cheered. They loved the way the company had twisted the show to make it more comedic.

The King got out of his bed and tried to stomp off stage in a temper. He tangled in the blanket and smacked loudly onto the stage floor, twisting his already sore foot and he howled in pain and humiliation. The audience laughed and cheered.

They clapped long after the curtain went down. It took longer for everyone to take their places than usual because the director had to calm the King down and it took a lot of persuasion to get him to go back on stage to take his bow.

The children in the show always got the loudest applause. They would join hands and go to the front of the stage in threes and fours. They held their hands together and bowed deep. When Vicki, Emma, Mark, and Kerry went forward, the audience stood up to give them a standing ovation.

They clapped and cheered and whistled and screamed. Emma’s cheeks burned hot and red but Vicki loved it and bowed not once but three times, until one of the stage hands shouted, ‘Oi. Gerroff.’

While everybody else were in their dressing rooms, they leapt back home with the strains of Shall We Dance still ringing in their ears.

*

The first thing the children did when they got back to the bedroom was check the frame to see if they had broken the rule of not using it unwisely. More importantly, they were desperate to find out if a precious berry had been taken. They breathed a huge sigh of relief when all the berries were present and accounted for.

‘Good night, Sylvia,’ they said before moving away from the frame. They did that every night now, just in case she was checking in on them through Granddaddy’s clock face. Emma was the last to turn from the frame and she wasn’t quite sure, but she was almost positive that, as she turned, a wooden eyelid came down on one of the lizards in a quick, cheeky wink.

That night they all dreamed dreams of grease paint and spotlights. Vicki said it was the best night of her whole life.

*

The next morning, Mr Taylor came to pick up the four children and give them a lift to school on his way to work.

‘How was the show last night, Steve?’ Nana asked him as they ate breakfast.

‘Oh, it was brilliant,’ he said. ‘They did it really well. The kids were fantastic, and they had things going wrong all over the place. I haven’t laughed so much in ages. It really brought the show up to date. Some of the kids didn’t half remind me of our four, though.’

Vicki, Emma, Kerry, and Mark lowered their heads and ate their cereal without saying a word.