The Dress Rehearsal

I was fifty-two years old and my big night out was carrying a toolbox across a car park. That tells you most of what you need to know about my life. I'm Bridgette, I weld for a living, and lately my evenings had gone quiet in a way I didn't love.

Zelda had called me that afternoon. "Bridgette, love, are you doing anything tonight? Don't answer, you're not. Come to the Exchange around seven. I need a pair of hands and yours are the only ones in town that know what they're doing."

That's how I ended up at The Strathspey Exchange at ten past seven, toolbox in one hand, torch in the other, standing in an old Victorian building that smelled like dust and lemon polish. The place was an antique mall, four floors of glass cases and creaky boards, and the central atrium had been cleared out for a dress rehearsal. Some amateur theatre society was putting on a period play, and Zelda worked the till there and volunteered me for everything.

I found her in the atrium, and she was not okay.

"Oh thank God, thank God, thank God," she said, grabbing my arm with both hands. She's sixty-three and stronger than she looks. "Bridgette, we've had a disaster."

"Show me."

She dragged me over to the costume rack by the north wall. There was a prop oil lamp on the floor beside it, one of the old brass ones, and it had cracked right down the side. Oil had spread across the floor and soaked into the bottom half of the costume rack. Three dresses were ruined, or close to it, and the smell was strong enough to make my eyes water.

"When did this happen?"

"Twenty minutes ago. Nobody touched it, it just went. That's the worst part, it just went on its own." She pushed her hair off her face. "And there's the thing, Bridgette, the lamp isn't just a prop. It's stock. It's from a case, Mrs. Guthrie let us use it because it was already cracked and now it's more cracked and she's going to kill me."

"Is anyone hurt?"

"No, thank the Lord. It splashed a bit and Delia jumped back and then she stormed out."

"Stormed out?"

"She's the lead. She said, and I quote, 'I have been saying for three weeks that lamp is a death trap and nobody listens to me,' and she left. She took her coat and her script and she left. She's got a point about the lamp but she didn't have to say it like that."

I set my toolbox down and opened it. "Right. Show me the crack."

"Bridgette, you're a welder, not a, what do you call it, a lamp surgeon."

"Brass is brass. It'll hold or it won't, but I can tell you which in about five minutes. Get me a rag and some paper and don't let anyone step in that oil."

Zelda went off to find rags and I knelt down by the lamp. The crack ran along the base seam, old solder gone brittle. That I could work with. The oil I couldn't, not on the costumes, but that was Zelda's problem and Zelda knew a lady who did alterations.

That's when I heard the footsteps on the atrium stairs, and a voice I had not heard in thirty years.

"Mrs. Fairweather? Sorry to come up on you, I did ring the bell twice."

"Up here, hen, we're in the atrium."

I looked up and a woman came through the archway with a clipboard under her arm and a torch in her hand. Fifty-one now, silver coming in at her temples, same dark eyes, same way of standing like she was waiting for the room to give her a reason to leave. My stomach did something I hadn't felt it do since I was twenty-one.

She saw me and stopped walking.

"Bridgette?" she said.

"Monika," I said, and my voice came out an octave wrong.

She laughed, quick and surprised. "No. No, that's not, Bridgette from the certification course? Strathspey College, the evening class?"

"That's me. Two evenings a week for a year and you still remember my face."

"I remember your face," she said, and then she went pink, which she never did back then, and looked down at her clipboard. "Hello. Hello, this is mad. What are the odds?"

"Pretty good, actually. Small town."

"Yes, small town." She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "You look exactly the same, by the way."

"I look like someone who's been welding for thirty years."

"Fine, you look like someone who's been welding for thirty years and wears it well."

Zelda came back with a roll of paper towels and caught the two of us standing there like statues. "Oh, you two know each other? That's lovely, that saves me an introduction. Monika, hen, you're not here to fail us, are you?"

"I'm here for the late security audit," Monika said, and her voice settled back into professional mode. "Regional transit authority, I do the whole district, and the Exchange is on my list because of the alarm company changeover. I told Mrs. Fairweather I'd need an hour after close."

"Aye, aye, we arranged it, I'm not arguing. Just mind the oil."

Monika looked at the floor, then at the lamp in front of me, then back at me. "That's a mess."

"It's a disaster," Zelda said. "That's our only lamp and our lead actress has walked out and the play is in nine days."

"Walked out?" Monika asked.

"Delia. The lamp cracked, she took it personal."

Monika stood there for a second, and I watched something happen on her face, some decision being made. "You need a lead actress," she said slowly.

Zelda blinked at her. "Do you act, hen?"

"I did amateur theatre for six years in Inverness before I moved. I haven't been on a stage in a decade, but I still know most of it."

"You know the play?"

"I've seen it twice. What role is it?"

"Mrs. Cameron. It's a period piece, lots of standing about and being right about things."

"Then I can definitely do it," Monika said, and Zelda laughed so hard she had to put the paper towels down.

"You'd do that?" Zelda said. "On a Tuesday, at half eight at night, off the street?"

"I'm already off the street. I'm doing an audit. The audit can wait an hour." She glanced at me. "Besides, it seems like the evening's already turned strange. I'd hate to leave before it gets stranger."

I unscrewed the torch cap and got back to the lamp so nobody could see my face doing whatever it was doing. "The seam's clean," I said. "I can braze this tonight. It'll hold for a rehearsal. After that it belongs back in a case with a note on it."

"See, that's what I said," Zelda told Monika. "I said get me a welder. And look, God sent me one and a leading lady in the same ten minutes."

"Don't thank God yet, the play's in nine days," Monika said, setting her clipboard down on a display case. "And I'll need the script."

"I'll get you the script. Bridgette, the kitchen kettle works, do you want tea?"

"Aye, go on then."

Zelda bustled off, and then it was just me and Monika and a broken lamp and thirty years of nothing in a room full of other people's old furniture.

"You really haven't changed," Monika said. She crouched down next to me, not touching, just close. "Still fixing things nobody asked you to fix."

"Somebody asked. Zelda asked. I'm a pushover."

"You were never a pushover. You were the only one in that class who told Donald Mackenzie he'd blown his own weld and then showed him how to do it right." She was quiet a second. "I thought about that a lot, over the years."

"You did?"

"Everyone did. Nobody else would say it." She picked up a corner of the paper towel and wiped oil off the brass near my hand, careful not to get near my fingers. "So. Welder. In Strathspey. Married?"

"Never. You?"

"Once, briefly, my thirties. Divorced ten years ago and it was friendly, which everyone says about their divorce and in my case it's even true." She looked at the crack in the lamp instead of at me. "It's really good to see you, Bridgette."

"It's good to see you too." And it was. It was the first time in months that an evening had felt like it might go somewhere.

Zelda's voice came echoing up the stairwell. "Tea's on! And Monika, hen, I hope you're not fibbing about the acting!"

"She'll find out in twenty minutes," Monika said to me, standing up, and offered me her hand to help me off my knees. I took it. Her grip hadn't changed either.

* * *

Zelda came back with a tray, three mugs, and a script held together with a rubber band. "Right, here's the script. Delia's copy, so mind the tea. She underlines everything."

"I'll mind the tea," Monika said, taking it.

"Which scene do you want to start on?" Zelda sat down on an upholstered chair that had a sign on it saying DO NOT SIT, PLEASE, and then ignored her own sign. "We were halfway through act two when the lamp went."

"Act two's the heavy one. The confrontation with the minister?"

"That's the one."

"I remember it. I watched it twice from the third row and I still remember it." Monika flipped pages, and I noticed she read fast, her finger running down the margin. "Bridgette, do you read?"

"Sorry?"

"In the scene. There's a part for a manservant. Two lines, mostly holding a lamp."

"There's a lamp in the scene?"

"There's a lamp in every scene. It's why we're all in this mess." She looked at Zelda. "Can she? Or is she only here for the braze?"

Zelda looked at me over her mug. "Bridgette, love, I'd love you forever if you'd just stand there and hold the thing once I've brazed it. That's what half the play is. People holding lamps at each other."

"Fine," I said. "Two lines. I'll manage two lines."

"She's modest," Zelda told Monika. "She built half the sets for the society for the last four years. She could act if she wanted."

"I don't want," I said, and Monika laughed, and I remembered that laugh from the college workshop, thirty years ago, and something in my chest went quiet and warm at the same time. That hadn't happened in a long time. I wish to be truthful about that, because it surprised me. Work, shop, home, work. My evenings had been the same evening for years. And here was a woman I'd known for one year of night classes, three decades back, laughing at my flat delivery like no time had passed at all.

We ran act two twice. The first time Monika held the script and stumbled twice. The second time she put the script down and didn't stumble once. Zelda clapped, which echoed through all four floors of the building and sounded like applause from a much bigger house.

"There. You see? Six years in Inverness doesn't just walk out of you."

"It mostly walked out of me," Monika said, "but thank you."

"Not mostly. Mostly nothing. You're better than Delia already and Delia will never hear me say that."

Then Zelda went to check the oil situation in the storeroom, because the lamp, once brazed, would need filling, and the good lamp oil was somewhere on the third floor behind a chest of drawers nobody had moved since the sixties. That left Monika and me alone in the atrium with a mended brass lamp and a script.

"Where do we go in the scene after the confrontation?" I asked, mostly to have something to say.

"Nowhere. The confrontation is the end of act two. But Zelda wants to rehearse the embrace." She said it lightly, turning a page. "Scene at the top of act three. Mrs. Cameron and her husband reconcile. Or pretend to."

"Do we rehearse that with you holding a script?"

"We could hold off. Or." She closed the script. "We could just walk through it. Blocking only. Zelda will want it blocked anyway."

"Blocking only," I said, and I heard how fast I agreed and hoped she didn't.

She came around the display case and stood opposite me, about a foot of space between us. "So I put my hands on your shoulders, and you put yours on my waist, and we stand there looking at each other like two people who've just decided to stay married."

"Who decides?"

"Mrs. Cameron decides. Her husband just stands there relieved." She put her hands on my shoulders. Light, through my shirt. "That's all it is. Standing."

"That's all it is," I said, and put my hands on her waist, and the whole building seemed to creak at once, all that old wood settling around us.

She was close. Closer than the scene needed, or exactly as close as the scene needed, I couldn't tell anymore. Her dark eyes went from my left eye to my right and stayed there. I could smell her perfume, faint, something I didn't have a name for. My heart picked up, and not from the stairs I'd climbed earlier.

"You're trembling," she said quietly.

"I'm cold."

"You're not cold. It's not cold in here."

"Then I don't know what it is." I didn't move my hands. Neither did she. "It's been a while since anyone stood this close to me on purpose."