They're draped in costumes as white as their large heads, and are standing utterly still, waiting to be noticed. I'm desperate to prevent my mother from doing so. 'I think we should – '
The light flickers like my nervousness made visible. 'Hang on a tick, Simon,' my mother interrupts and thumps the back of a seat with the flashlight. While the impact sounds soggy, it has an effect. The light goes out, burying the auditorium in darkness.
I'm stumbling sideways towards the aisle – I have to reach her before anything worse can happen – when my father shouts 'Don't play games with that. Put it back on.'
'I'm trying.' A series of muffled thumps demonstrates how. 'You were meant to be changing the batteries,' my mother reminds him. 'They're dead as I don't know. They're dead.'
'You've just done that, you stupid woman.'
'It'll be all right,' I attempt to convince everyone, not least myself. 'Stay where you are. Keep talking if you like so I can find you, mum.'
Perhaps the prospect of drawing attention in the blackness fails to appeal to her. She falls silent as I shuffle blindly along the row, grasping a spongy handful at each step. I haven't reached the aisle when she discovers her voice. 'Is that you, Simon?'
I've bruised my shin against a folding seat that has dropped horizontal since I passed it, and so my response is less amiable than it might be. 'I'm coming,' I mutter.
'Which of you is it?' she insists, and I realise that she may not be referring to my progress before she adds 'Don't keep trying to make me laugh. It's not fair when it's so dark.'
'You heard your mother, Simon.'
'It isn't me,' I say, but under my breath. What does her behaviour imply about her state of mind? Am I seeing a pack of whitish shapes ahead, or are they the remains of an after-image? I can't judge how close they are, which disorients me so badly that I have to remind myself where the aisle is; I feel as though I'm groping through a maze rather than along a straight line. I will my mother to speak so that I can locate her, and then I wish she hadn't when she says 'Is that your face?'
'That's it. The end,' my father shouts. 'Keep still, Sandra. I'll get you myself.'
'I don't like that. It feels like it's going to – Oh, my hand's gone in.'
My body jerks as if it's expressing the panic that has begun to surface in her voice. I hitch myself desperately to the end of the row. As I lose my hold on the last seat and lurch into the darkness, I collide with someone far too plump. I'm embraced by softened swollen arms without affection before my captor speaks. 'That's where you are, is it? Want to knock me down?'
'I just want to help her. Let go,' I tell him, and hear my mother gasp. Perhaps she's startled by the sudden flood of light. It would be more welcome if the stage hadn't lit up as if we're about to be treated to a private performance.
The clouds have parted, and moonlight is slanting through several holes in the roof. Surely they explain the snow that's piled on the seats. My mother is within arm's length of one of the heaps, the lump on top of which displays a rictus where her gloved hand must have plunged in. She moves towards the aisle as I disengage myself from my father's quilted grip. Before I can reach her, she turns towards the stage and sees the object of most of the light. 'What are they?' she says and quite as uncertainly 'They're funny, aren't they?'
At least it's clear that the line of figures is formed out of snow under the largest gap in the roof. The trouble is that their shapes aren't random enough. Who would have gone to the trouble of modelling them in here? Perhaps it's the effect of shadows as well as of the pallid light, but some of them could indeed be draped in robes, while others might be sporting icy headgear. I like the third shape even less, since it lacks a head. I could do without fancying that a head is about to rise into view and plant itself on the white neck. At this distance I can't see what the others have for faces, and I'm not anxious to. 'It's just snow,' I tell everyone – the three of us, that is, because the boxes are deserted, however much the moonbeams suggest the presence of etiolated watchers in the gloom. 'We'd better get out while there's light.'
'Yes, come out of it,' my father orders.
Perhaps my mother doesn't care for his tone. She limps sideways to the aisle less rapidly than I would prefer. At every other step her body tilts as if she's delivering a bow to the spectacle onstage. I take her arm as she leaves the row at last. 'Get a move on,' my father says and stumps towards the exit. I help my mother after him and try to ignore the sound behind us – a whispering too faint to be identifiable. Then it grows louder, though surely not closer, and there's a soft flat thud.
I have to look, because my mother has twisted around to see. The sixth figure has sloughed its face, a pale lump that is lying inches away from the edge of the stage. I've barely distinguished this when the front of the next head slides off. As it plops onto the stage the clouds shut off the moon.
There's further movement on the stage. It sounds as if the entire line of figures is collapsing – shifting in some way, at any rate. My mother halts as though the darkness has frozen her, and when I take a firmer hold on her arm I realise she's trying the flashlight. 'Don't bother with that,' I say too much like my father, except not as steadily. 'We can still see.'
We barely can. As I steer her towards the exit a section of the lobby is just visible beyond my father's bulky silhouette. 'Move yourself if you want us to,' my mother tells him.
He doesn't budge. Has he chosen this moment to demonstrate that he's too old to be ordered about, or can he hear the noises I'm hearing? I do my utmost not to take them as any kind of a response to my mother's words. It sounds as if the shapes against the walls are collapsing as well, slowly and at length, unless they're stirring in some other fashion. I'm preparing to urge my father aside when he finishes peering at my mother, who is giving the flashlight a last try. In a few paces hindered by her limp I'm able to make out the exit to the street beyond the lobby. I know she can't safely walk any faster, but I feel as if we're shackled by the dark.
My father blocks the way into the lobby in order to check that we're following, and my mother repeats her command. As we follow his grudging retreat I keep my eyes on the exit. I won't be distracted by the fancy that a pale lump is pressed against the window of the box office. I'm ushering my mother across the frozen mass of misshapen footprints to the car when she says 'That was an adventure, wasn't it?'
My father glares at this and me as he crouches into the Mini. 'I'm glad you liked it,' I feel bound to respond.
She climbs in beside my father and twists her head around as I open the rear door. 'Better shut it up, do you think? We don't want children getting into mischief.'
I can't see any children. I can see the car looking out of place on the abandoned street and isolated by the nearest working streetlamps several hundred yards away. I hurry across the treacherous pavement to seize the edge of the board and tug hard. The door resists for a grinding instant and then yields, which dislodges some kind of loose fabric that brushes my fingertips. It doesn't really feel like a farewell kiss from a moist puffy mouth. The door slams with a clank of the bar, and I manage not to fall in my absurd haste to reach my parents. My father has already started the car, and swings it away from the kerb almost before I'm seated. 'What would you like to do now, Simon?' my mother says.
She seems so unaffected by the recent panic that I wonder if her memory has lapsed. 'I suppose I should be thinking of heading back to London.'
'No sooner thought than done,' my father declares.
As the car puts on speed, the forsaken theatre surges after us, or at least its reflection in the mirror flares up with renewed moonlight. The building seems to brighten in proportion with the distance before it vanishes like an image expunged from a screen. We've simply turned where the road forks, but my mother says 'Where are you taking us, Bob?'
'Where I was asked.'
Is he proposing to drive to London? 'I didn't mean you should take me literally,' I say, attempting to laugh.
The narrow street is pulsing with the buds of trees in front rooms. When I was little my father used to drive us on a tour of the Christmas suburbs, but if I feel like a child again it's from helplessness. My mother gazes at me in the mirror and says 'He's like this now.' At least, I think that's what she mouths, and I'm about to voice another protest when my father claps his hands like a magician or the solitary enthusiastic member of an audience. 'There, I was right,' he tells anyone who doubted it, and grabs the wheel again. 'Here we are.'
An unlit building brings the street to an end. Trees flicker on either side of the car as if they're close to giving
