I am dying. At least, I am dying slowly, much more slowly than a mortal, by all means, but my life has been given a finite limit, a lack of continuation, a short fall to mark and pass the days to. I am scared, which is to say I am more scared than I usually am in the pursuit of the everyday adventures I endeavour to be part of. I am, as you might say when so stricken with fear you’ve no graver words to turn to, mortified.Open to all, details to be found here.
Duffy sighed, and set his diary down onto his lap. The fire lapped with flames aplenty, and cast an azure glow over his weak smile and sickly pale skin. He daren’t look at the clock which hung by the theatre house’s rear entrance, for fear of finally agreeing that it was time for him to sleep. There was still much to do, interring his thoughts into the heavy volume aside, before he could remotely picture his feather pillows and well stitched blankets in his shattered mind.
Of late, the troupe had been busy putting on a modest run of I Want to Be Your Canary, its theatrical opus. Ruby and Lillith had about had enough of the triple matinees, and had finally retired to house and the country to grab whatever respite from the harsh reality of a performer’s life they could. Soon, and Duffy loathed to think of it as being so close, the troupe would have to begin its practice run of their winter spectacle, with it would come glitter wounds, ice skating disasters and long, cold and bitter nights.
“I don’t suppose I’ll be able to disappear into the limelight and forget my duties,” his voice was soft, belittling his own determination to make his thoughts heard. As dawn was only an hour away, the troupe was asleep in the play house’s grandiose stage room, too far above the lonely bard to hear his protestations. In his younger days, Duffy would have strode upstairs, likely half drunk and roused them with a fanfare and drilled a new performance into their half asleep heads until they quite literally fell back asleep where they stood.
He doubted now if he’d even make it to the top of the stairs, let alone do anything approaching guidance when he got there. Slowly he rose, setting the book on the chair in his place before he stretched a long righting of muscles and bones from their crooked angles. His first order of duty was to clean the kitchen, as Ruby had promised to return the morning of the first Sunday after she had left to cook the traditional monthly roast that Duffy, shall we say ‘was unable’ to do on his own without burning half of the slums to the ground.
Culinary arts were not amongst the plethora of talents Duffy possessed. He could dance, sing, fight and incite great acts of bravery in himself and others; a leader of leaders born to, well, lead. He could not cook anything more complicated than mash and gravy, or prepare anything more exciting than sandwiches, tavern grub and something he passed off as stew. He stepped through the low doorframe into the Prima Vista’s cook house and sighed.
There were plates, dirty and clean together in stacks on every surface. Chopping boards had been left caked with refuse, glasses half full and pans half empty of their long moulded contents. If Ruby had not left him an ample supply of wire mesh sponges, dishcloths and bicarbonate, he would have cut his throat there and then to escape the nigh slavery proportion of work that would be required to clean them proper. He rolled up his sleeves with rugged tugs, tied them back with the little button fastens he had Lisa and Minnelli stitch when he gave up on living with wet hems and approached the large white stoneware sink.
“I’ve only got three centuries to go before I cop it,” he chuckled, turning the copper taps with both hands so that an equal froth of hot and cold water poured into the sink. He stuck the plug in with clumsy movements, before he started to move around the kitchen, stacking like with like and gathering the pots onto the long galley platform to the right of the basin in order of urgency.
First he stacked the cutlery, dirtied end first in jugs of water filled from the flow. Then he piled the plates, bowls and saucers, scraping them with nimble, agile flicks of his wrists and dropping the food waste into the pale beneath the pipework. After that, he stacked the glasses, tankards and vases, various implements which had been emptied of their dead décor and pilfered for long forgotten coin hoards before making their way to be cleaned, and kept in the cupboard under the sink until the next closing performance filled them with a thousand scents and colours.
“Then finally,” he mocked Ruby by putting on her voice and folding his arms over his chest, “the plates, trays and stained equipment which has been burnt to a cinder, caked in fat and left to rot.” Whatever the troupe had prepared for the previous evening’s meal, which needed to feed twenty eager, hungry, famished mouths had, from the smell and the thick inch of grime, contained fish, butter and oil. Duffy had prodded it with a weary finger before giving in and leaving them at the very far end of the long work surface. He hoped to think up a reasonable enough excuse by the time he got to them to get out of having to sully his clothes and skin with the corrupting fluids they contained.
He did not remain optimistic, or focussed on the task. Whatever reason he gave Ruby, it would not be good enough. Women had the odd and special ability to drown out anything other than what they wanted to hear. When she likely retorted with a ‘what’, it was not because she had not heard Duffy’s excuses…it was because she was gingerly offering him a chance to tell the truth, and to tell it with ample amounts of grovelling.
Without further ado he drove his hands into the warm froth and starting to rummage for his first victim. Even though he was a man, who naturally meant he loathed domestic duties he was not being paid for, Duffy found a strange sort of contentment in the task once it was underway. He could think, without interruption, as everyone knew to avoid another troupe member doing chores, lest they get roped into helping. Given what was to come for the troupe over the next few hundred years, he was glad for any moment’s peace, no matter how fleeting. It would be a high rise quick fall escapade of rehearsal, performance, adventure, baby puke and death before they could truly gain the respite from life they had dreamt of since they had broken free of their overlord, the dark bard Lucian.
It was a sad fact, when the gods themselves wished to die.
“Still,” he tried to cheer himself up with a particularly enthusiastic attempt at removing rock hard mash from a serving spoon,” there’s a good few years left to make the most of our opportunities.” His words bounced damply onto the foam which bobbed in the motions of his attempts to clean and then patter pattered against the tiles before fading into oblivion. The conviction was lacking in his assertions, the determination weak and feeble, limp and moist.
There was a good few years left to wash up and clean and iron clothes, too, but the domestic part of the grand adventure that was the Thayne Tantalus’s time on Althanas would not be remembered in the songs of ages, nor would the hours spent stitching double hemmed robes and gluing feathers to caps be recounted in taverns for millennia to come – no songs would be sung of the mopping or the brushing, only of the salvation, the greatness, the joy he brought to Scara Brae and its people.
That was the only thought that kept Duffy scrubbing.
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