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“I won’t. Go.” Alex backed up towards the arcade’s entrance.
Joan’s eyes roamed to the darkening sky. “Don’t dillydally. Looks like rain.”
“If you hurry love, you can catch the 2:25 train home.” Helen didn’t budge.
Alex’s eyebrows met in the middle. “Okay, weirdos. I’m going…even if you’re not.” She skipped under the stone arch and into the Royal Exchange Arcade.
• • •
Finding Freddie’s card proved more difficult than Alex thought. Ten minutes and three cards later, she stood underneath the arcade’s Cross Street entrance, watching the pummeling rain flood the road. What to do? Buy a cheap umbrella? Grab a taxi? All the cabs splashing through the dirty puddles were occupied. Alex looked at her phone: only two fifteen P.M.Hmm. The entrance to the Royal Exchange Theatre was next door, just a quick dash away. If she had to wait out the rain…
Pulling up the collar of her coat, she ducked her head and dodged the fat raindrops. She ran up the theatre’s stone steps and through its glass doors. Craning her neck, Alex’s eyes climbed the soaring columns that reached upwards to the ceiling of the Great Hall, a historic meeting space once used as the epicenter of Manchester’s booming 1920s cotton trade.
“Gorgeous,” Alex sighed aloud, happy to revisit the beauty of the hall’s massive glass domes dominating the ceiling. Even with the unrelenting downpour outside, natural light spilled through the glass, illuminating the floor.
Cafés and a gift shop hugged the perimeter of the cavernous space. The steel and glass theatre, suspended from the building’s four columns, commanded attention in the centre like a seven-sided spaceship. Alex weaved around theatre fans, their anticipation contagious as they rushed to their seats for the matinee’s start.
Why not?Since she was here… head down, texting furiously, she strode over to the box office line. She hit send.
Dad, change in plans. Seeing a play! Be back for tea.
The play would be…research. Yeah. Not only would she chill out for two hours or so, but she would also get a grasp of the stage size, how intimate the space was for the audience, all need-to-know details if she was to submit work there.
She dug for her wallet but got interrupted by a buzz in her hand.
Alex, your writing won’t get done sat in a theatre.
Oh, Dad.She shouldn’t have mentioned at lunch about falling behind in her writing. His motto was always work now, play later. She didn’t reply and stuffed the phone in her pocket as the woman ahead of her turned away from the ticket window.
Alex looked up.
Fuck?!
She did a double take, her heart stuttering beneath her coat. For the first time in six weeks, her lungs felt heavy, uncooperative. The pale Irish skin. The dark eyebrows. The jet-black hair, misbehaving and tumbling over his forehead. The parted lips that had softly touched hers so many times. The poster’s artwork was abstract, but the identity of the male was unmistakable: Mark. Her Mark was in Manchester on the poster for this play—Constellations—a play she had read and always wanted to see. The beautiful story was a romantic wallop to the gut about fate and what-ifs and clumsy communication; a tale about falling in love, cheating, and breaking up; the cruelty of forgetting and the desire to remember. Her jaw fell open as an unbearable ache pressed down on her chest, her family’s words replaying in her mind: We’ll walk with you…Don’t dillydally…Your writing won’t get done sat in a theatre…
They knew.
The poster was all she could see, the two people who had broken her heart, lost in each other’s eyes: Mark’s intense gaze, drinking in his co-star, his hands cradling her face. Fallon’s body offering the unspeakable: longing, want…love. Mark and Fallon. A couple. On stage. Here.
“Hello, can I help?” The chirpy voice of the woman behind the box office window snapped Alex back into the room. “You all right?”
No, Alex wanted to holler. She breathed deeply, her mind racing, desperate to hold on and not allow this shock to unravel the past six weeks’ hard work. She wouldn’t allow it.
“The performance starts in less than five minutes…”
Alex smiled tightly. “One…please.”
“There’s one seat stage level, back row?”
“I’ll take it.”
• • •
Mark’s hand touching Fallon’s lower back, pulling her closer…that sweet smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes…the urgency in his kiss…the nuances he had shared with Alex triggered memories: warm, loving, painful memories that would never be relived and would be forever altered.
Alex’s hands flitted from her collar to her abdomen to her face, unable to lie idle. Each time Mark touched Fallon, Alex’s stomach dropped, an endless rollercoaster ride—her worst nightmare—except here, she couldn’t scream. She had to take it. Watch it. Even looking away, their voices intermingled like their lips. Was this what it would have been like in Dublin? To watch them together after midnight struck and “Auld Lang Syne” had been sung? Did Mark like the way Fallon’s skin felt? How she tasted? How much of this was acting? How much was real? Alex couldn’t tell.
The theatre had always been her safe place, a port in the storm, but right now it was pushing her under, locked in an undertow that threatened to drown her once again. She squirmed in her chair, nausea swirling in her stomach. Her usual response—her old response—would be to cry and run. Her eyes darted down her row. G10, her seat, was one of three that made up the short back row. It was on the end beside the wall, and the only way out was to her left, past two people sitting beside her. She was blocked in, trapped. She checked her phone: forty of the play’s seventy minutes left to go. Damn.
