The Islanders

much. It was not he who had hired me, it turned out. We were both temporary staff, although I was more temporary than Jayr. He lived in Omhuuv all year round.

I slowly pieced together some idea of what the story was. The previous owners had sold the theatre to a new company, or there was a transfer of a trust document, or another kind of legal dispute. No one was officially the owner for the time being, so they needed staff to stand in temporarily and prepare for the season ahead. Although Jayr lived in the town he had not been born on Goorn, but on one of the other Hetta islands, at the far western end, a small industrial island called Onna. He had worked here the previous summer, more or less in the same position I was now in. He said he had been given a big chance, a fabulous opportunity to prove what he could do as manager. He told me the technical facilities in the theatre were as good as you would find anywhere. The official tech crew had not yet arrived and were not expected for a few more days.

He took me out to show me around the backstage area, giving me a guide to the main technical facilities. I took all this in without a problem: my course had given me a thoroughgoing background in stage management and theatrical craft.

The theatre was about to re-open after the winter break. Bookings had already started coming in. The Sjokaptein was a popular feature of the town. The problem, Jayr’s problem, was that the programmes were so unimaginative. He told me the previous year the season had included several plays, but now he was here he had discovered that this summer the main bookings were for variety shows, comedians who were famous from television, pop tribute bands, magic acts. There were problems with the need to hire musicians, finding out what special or extra lighting effects were needed, obtaining releases from TV companies, dealing with agents, all in addition to the normal concerns of staffing, safety measures, office paperwork, and so on.

The programmes at the end of the season were more to his taste. During two weeks towards the end of the summer a couple of plays were scheduled, and he was looking forward to those. In the meantime he was making the best of the rest. There was a renowned clairvoyant coming for a short season — Jayr was looking forward to her too. Clairvoyants always filled the seats, he said. And a mime artiste. Jayr liked mime. But he found the rest uninspiring. He told me there was plenty of scope for me to become involved.

Later, when Jayr had to make some phone calls, I wandered away on my own and walked down to the semi-dark auditorium. The seats were protected by vast over-thrown translucent plastic sheets. I sat quietly in the luxuriantly cushioned rows of seats, somewhere in the middle of the stalls. I leaned back, staring up at the ornately decorated plaster ceiling, the cluster of small chandeliers, the velvet plush on the walls. The building had clearly been renovated recently, but it still felt like a traditional theatre.

A sense of contentment spread through me. The only other theatre I had been in was the civic playhouse in Evllen, but that was financed and managed by the local authority, part of the leisure complex, with squash courts, a gym, a swimming pool and a lending library. The Sjokaptein had the grace of tradition and years on it, but it was magnificent and alive, and dedicated to the calm illusionism of drama, entertainment, amusement.

The next day it began snowing again in earnest. The snow fell day and night, high, thin flakes blowing up the fjord from the direction of the open sea, drifting in the streets and against the houses, the wind gusting relentlessly from the frigid north-easterly quarter. Snow was an accustomed part of life for the people of the Tallek region. Snow changed the mood of everyone — snow had to be dealt with as a practical matter. Every morning and evening, and sometimes during the nights also, the Seigniory snow-ploughs and blowers were out, keeping the streets and wharves open, allowing the shops to trade, the fish to be landed, the trucks to enter and leave. I kept the stove in my room alight all day and night, as did everyone else in the town, fusing the billows of snow with thin grey woodsmoke. For me, Omhuuv took on a more rustic, medieval quality, feeling closer to the elements, deeper in a wild history.

I settled into daily routines. Jayr set me to work testing and checking all the mechanical equipment in the theatre: the ropes, the trapdoor, the rigging, the lights, the sound system. The scenery bay was cluttered with flats from last season’s plays, and because we had no use for most of them I set about breaking them up, keeping intact the pieces that I could, or which Jayr said were standard pieces of scenery. I discovered I knew less about this kind of thing than I had thought, but because I was working alone I soon picked up what I needed to know. I carefully kept all the pieces of reusable timber, storing them in the scenery bay.

Jayr was concerned about the slow intake of his bookings: the theatre was due to open in the first weeks of spring, when the snow was supposed to be no longer falling, if not completely melted from the mountains. This was the regular schedule, but according to the records the bookings this year were unusually low. Jayr fretted and complained about the lack of audience support for some of the artistes, especially about the acts he favoured. There was one in particular: a man who worked under the stage name ‘Commis’, a renowned mime artiste. Jayr swore Commis would probably be the most popular act in the year, as he had been in the past, but at the moment his performances were being no better supported by the public than any others.

With two weeks to go before the first opening the blizzards still swept in every day, the gutters were blocked with ice, the roads were crested with dark and dirty mounds of old snow, compacted by their own weight and the endless passage of vehicles.

I began to like Jayr. He did not say much but he was always alert to my needs. He worked me hard but we took regular breaks and he often paid for lunch out of the theatre budget. I never really found out what he thought of me: sometimes I seemed to amuse him, sometimes to annoy him, but during most of our working days we were in separate parts of the building.

One day, during a break for a cup of tea, he said to me, ‘Have you seen the ghost yet?’

‘Are you trying to wind me up?’

‘Have you seen it?’

‘Is there one?’ I said.

‘Never knew a theatre without a ghost.’

‘Is there one here?’ I said again.

‘Haven’t you noticed how cold it is in the scenery bay?’

‘That’s because the doors are often open.’

I don’t know what he was intending. It turned out that he had been in the Sjokaptein for about five weeks before I arrived, often after dark, always alone, going into many of the deeper recesses of the large building, below and behind the stage, along the corridors, up to the high circle.

Everyone who worked in theatre was superstitious, Jayr said: there were plays the actors would never name, parts they would never accept, scripts they would not read without someone there to cue them, ropes the stagehands would never pull when working alone, the weird or sudden deaths onstage and offstage when mechanisms unaccountably failed, or the accidents with scenery or props, and the supernatural consequences of them all.

Jayr told me about hauntings reputed to be a feature of every other theatre he had worked in, but here, the Sjokaptein, seemed to be entirely free of spirits, wild or sad or bereaved.

‘Never knew a theatre without at least one ghost,’ he said again at the end.

‘Except this one,’ I said. He was making me feel nervous, maybe intentionally.

‘Wait and see,’ he said.

I expected a cold draught to wind its way under the door and chill me, or an eerie cackling laugh to break out in the distance, but then the telephone rang and Jayr answered, speaking with his mouth full of food.

Every day, I would trudge through the narrow streets to and from the theatre, skidding and balancing on the rutted frozen snow, to do what I could to assist Jayr in his endless preparations.

Although he was dealing efficiently if unenthusiastically with the daily cascade of paperwork, Jayr’s main concern was the non-arrival of the tech crew, whom he knew were trapped somewhere on mainland Faiand, held up by visa regulations, the weather and the irregular ferry service. Even if they should negotiate themselves free of the bureaucrats, much of the sea around Goorn, and the Tallek region in particular, was still full of ice floes. Although most facilities could be prepared before they arrived, the actual operation of theatre performances was impossible without a full crew.

Jayr became especially anxious when a message unexpectedly arrived from one of the first acts due to perform in the theatre. It was a magician, an illusionist, who styled himself THE LORD OF MYSTERY.

The message contained some straightforward publicity material (including obviously posed photographs of