Maskerade

'Er. Could be,' she said. 'There's always a lot going on, I know that. Our Nev said they sometimes do different operations every night.'

'How did he find that out?' said Granny.

'Well, there was a lot of lead. That takes some shifting. He said he liked the noisy ones. He could hum along and also no one heard the hammering.'

The witches strolled onwards.

'Did you notice young Agnes nearly bump into us back there?' said Granny.

'Yes. It was all I could do not to turn around,' said Nanny.

'She wasn't very pleased to see us, was she? I practically heard her gasp.'

'That's very suspicious, if you ask me,' said Nanny. 'I mean, she sees two friendly faces from back home, you'd expect her . to come runnin' up...'

'We're old friends, after all. Old friends of her grandma and her mum, anyway, and that's practic'ly the same.'

'Remember those eyes in the teacup?' said Nanny. 'She could be under the gaze of some strange occult force! We got to be careful. People can be very tricky when they're in the grip of a strange occult force. Remember Mr Scruple over in Slice?'

'That wasn't a strange occult force. That was acid stomach.'

'Well, it certainly seemed strangely occult for a while. Especially if the windows were shut.'

Their perambulation had taken them to the Opera House's stage‑door.

Granny looked up at a line of posters.

'La Triviata,' she read aloud. 'The Ring of the Nibelungingung... ?'

'Well, basically there are two sorts of opera,' said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. 'There's your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like "Oh oh oh, I am dyin', oh, I am dyin', oh, oh, oh, that's what I'm doin"', and there's your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes "Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!", although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That's basically all of opera, reely.'

'What? Either dyin' or drinkin' beer?'

'Basically, yes,' said Nanny, contriving to suggest that this was the whole gamut of human experience.

'And that's opera?'

'We‑ll... there might be some other stuff. But mostly it's stout or stabbin'.'

Granny was aware of a presence.

She turned.

A figure had emerged from the stage‑door, carrying a poster, a bucket of glue and a brush.

It was a strange figure, a sort of neat scarecrow in clothes slightly too small for it, although, to be truthful, there were probably no clothes that would have fit that body. The ankles and wrists seemed infinitely extensible and independently guided.

It encountered the two witches standing at the poster board, and stopped politely. They could see the sentence marshalling itself behind the unfocused eyes.

'Excuse me ladies! The show must go on!'

The words were all there and they made sense, but each sentence was fired out into the world as a unit.

Granny pulled Nanny to one side.

'Thank you!'

They watched in silence as the man, with great and meticulous care, applied paste to a neat rectangle and then affixed the poster, smoothing every crease methodically.

'What's your name, young man?' said Granny.

'Walter!'

'That's a nice beret you have there.'

'My mum bought it for me!'

Walter chased the last air bubble to the edge of the paper and stood back. Then, completely ignoring the witches in his preoccupation with his task, he picked up the paste‑pot and went back inside.

The witches stared at the new poster in silence.

'Y'know, I wouldn't mind seein' an operation,' said Nanny, after a while. 'Senior Basilica did give us the tickets.'

'Oh, you know me,' said Granny. 'Can't be having with that sort of thing at all.'

Nanny looked sideways at her, and grinned to herself. This was a familiar Weatherwax opening line. It meant: Of course I want to, but you've got to persuade me.

'You're right, o' course,' she said. 'It's for them folks in all their fine carriages. It's not for the likes of us.'

Granny looked hesitant for a moment.

'I expect it's having ideas above our station,' Nanny went on. 'I expect if we went in they'd say: Be off, you nasty ole crones...'

'Oh, they would, would they?'

'I don't expect they want common folk like what we are comin' in with all those smart nobby people,' said Nanny.

'Is that a fact? Is that a fact, madam? You just come with me!'

Granny stalked round to the front of the building, where people were already alighting from coaches. She pushed her way up the steps and shouldered through the crowd to the ticket office.

She leaned forward. The man behind the grille leaned back.

'Nasty old crones, eh?' she snapped.

'I beg your pardon‑?'

'Not before time! See here, we've got tickets for–' She looked down at the pieces of cardboard, and pulled Nanny Ogg over. 'It says here Stalls. The cheek of it! Stalls? Us?' She turned back to the ticket man. 'See here, Stalls aren't good enough, we want seats in'–she looked up at the board by the ticket window–'the Gods. Yes, that sounds about right.'