Snakes' Elbows by Deirdre Madden Read Free Book Online

be when he was little, standing in the wings in his best suit waiting to go on. He could sense the audience out there on the far side of the footlights, snuffling and whispering like a thousand-headed monster. Barney knew that as soon as he put his toes on the stage everyone would start to clap their hands and he hated that too. The noise frightened him. Out there in the middle of the stage in a pool of bright light he could see his beloved piano. He knew that if only he could get to it and start to play, then everything would be all right. He would be happy and feel safe. But getting from the wings to the piano was like walking along the edge of a high cliff, with an angry sea crashing on the rocks below and thinking that at any moment you might fall in.
    â€˜But then,’ he went on, ‘my mother found a magic curtain. Every night before a concert she hung it up at the edge of the stage. It was invisible, but I knew it was there. It meant that I could see the audience, but they couldn’tsee me. I felt that I was completely on my own and so walking over to my piano wasn’t a problem.’
    â€˜Do you still have the curtain?’ Wilf asked, and Barney gave a strange little smile.
    â€˜No,’ he said. ‘I grew up and then I grew old and my mother wasn’t there any more. But by then I understood how the magic curtain worked. I didn’t need it any longer. I was able to walk across the stage alone. But I always loved the end of a concert.’
    â€˜Because it was over?’
    â€˜Because I knew I’d made the people happy,’ Barney said. ‘When I heard the applause at the end, I knew that I’d given them something special, something wonderful that they would remember for the rest of their lives. And that made me very happy.’
    â€˜You’re still very shy,’ Wilf remarked.
    â€˜Yes,’ said Barney, ‘I suppose I am. But O-Haru is even shyer.’
    Wilf imagined them sitting side by side,silent and blushing but completely happy in a forest of miniature trees, or in a garden in which there were no flowers, only stones and fine raked sand.
    *
    Later the same day, as darkness fell, it began to rain. A man on his way home from work stood under a chestnut tree opposite Barney’s house to take shelter. As he waited there, he noticed that in all of the great house only two lights were lit, one on the top floor at the extreme right of the building and one on the ground floor at the extreme left.
    Just at that moment a young woman appeared beside him. ‘Has it started yet?’ she asked, peering anxiously at the house from under her dripping umbrella.
    â€˜Has what started?’
    â€˜The lights,’ she said. ‘The switching on of the lights. Look, look, it’s beginning now!’
    As she spoke, the window to the left of the one at the top right of the house also lit upand then the window to the left again, and then the one beside that. Slowly the yellow light seemed to flow along the whole of the top floor of the building in a steady wave from right to left, until all the windows were lit. ‘It happens at this time every night,’ the woman said breathlessly. ‘I always try to get here in time to see it because it’s such a beautiful thing.’
    The man agreed. There was something mysterious and fascinating in what was happening. By now a window had been lit up on the extreme left of the floor below the one that was already completely illuminated, and now the yellow light was again flowing steadily, only this time left to right.
    â€˜They say he’s weird, and I read in the Woodford Trumpet that he’s very mean.’
    The young woman shrugged. ‘You can’t believe everything it says in the papers.’
    Now the light was flowing along a third floor. They stood watching in silence until finally it reached the last window in the house,on the extreme left on the ground floor, the window that had been lit