The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

As he spoke, he reached out and rotated a large knob, and the lights faded up on the stage below us. I nearly lost my balance as the little world seemed to materialize from nothingness beneath my feet. I found myself suddenly gazing down, like God, into a dreamy countryside of blue sky and green painted hills. Nestled in a valley was a thatched cottage with a bench in the yard, and a ramshackle cowshed.

It took my breath away.

"You made all this?"

Rupert smiled and reached for another control. As he moved it, the daylight faded away to darkness and the lights came on in the windows of the cottage.

Even though I was looking at it upside down, as it were, from above, I felt a pang — a strange and inexplicable pang that I had never felt before.

It was homesickness.

Now, even more than I had earlier when I'd first glimpsed it, I longed to be transported into that quiet little landscape, to walk up the path, to take a key from my pocket and open the cottage door, to sit down by the fireplace, to wrap my arms around myself, and to stay there forever and ever.

Rupert had been transformed, too. I could see it in his face. Lit from below, his features completely at peace, his broad features relaxed in a gentle and benevolent smile.

Leaning against the piping of the rail, he reached forward and pulled a black cotton hood from a bulky object at the side of the stage.

"Meet Galligantus the giant," he said. "Last chance before he gets his comeuppance."

It was the face of a monster, its features twisted into a look of perpetual anger and spotted with boils, its chin covered with grizzled black whiskers like carpet tacks.

I let out a squeak and took a step backwards.

"He's only papier-mache," Rupert said. "Don't be alarmed — he's not as horrid as he looks. Poor old Galligantus — I'm quite fond of him, actually. We spend a lot of time together up here, waiting for the end of the show."

"He's ... marvelous," I said, swallowing. "But he has no strings."

"No, he's not actually a marionette — no more than a head and shoulders, really. He has no legs. He's hinged where his waist should be, held upright out of sight just offstage, and — promise you won't repeat this: It's a trade secret."

"I promise," I said.

"At the end of the play, as Jack is chopping down the beanstalk, I only have to lift this bar — he's spring-loaded, you see, and — "

As he touched one end of it, a little metal bar flew up like a railway signal, and Galligantus tumbled forward, crashing down in front of the cottage, nearly filling the opening of the stage.

"Never fails to get a gasp from out front," Rupert said. "Always makes me laugh to hear it. I have to take care, though, that Jack and his poor old mother don't get in his way. Can't have them being smashed by a falling giant."

Reaching down and seizing Galligantus by the hair, Rupert pulled him upright and locked him back into position.

What bubbled up inexplicably from the bottom of my memory at that moment was a sermon the vicar had preached at the beginning of the year. Part of his text, taken from Genesis, was the phrase "There were giants in the earth in those days." In the original Hebrew, the vicar told us, the word for giants was nephilim, which, he said, meant cruel bullies or fierce tyrants: not physically large, but sinister. Not monsters, but human beings filled with malevolence.

"I'd better be getting back," I said. "Thank you for showing me Galligantus."

Nialla was nowhere in sight, and I had no time to look for her.

"Dear, dear," the vicar had said. "I don't know what to tell you to do. Just make yourself generally useful, I expect."

And so I did. For the next hour, I looked at tickets and ushered people (mostly children) to their seats. I glared at Bobby Broxton and motioned for him to take his feet off the rungs of the chair in front of him.

"It's reserved for me," I hissed menacingly.

I clambered up onto the kitchen counter and found the second teapot, which had somehow been shoved to the very back of the top shelf, and helped Mrs. Delaney place empty cups and saucers on a tea tray. I even ran up the high street to the post office to swap a ten-pound note for loose change.

"If the vicar needs coins," said Miss Cool, the postmistress, "why doesn't he break into those paper collection boxes from the Sunday school? I know the money's for missions, but he could always stuff in banknotes to replace what he's taken. Save him from imposing on His Majesty for pennies, wouldn't it? But then, vicars are not always as practical as you might think, are they, dear?"

By two o'clock, I was completely fagged out.

As I took my seat at last — front row, center — the eager buzz of the audience rose to a climax. We had a full house.

Somewhere backstage, the vicar switched off the house lights, and for a few moments we were left sitting in utter darkness.

I settled back in my chair — and the music began.

* ELEVEN *