Vivaldi in the Dark

Chapter 5-1

Chapter 5

Jayden brought coffee as a bribe.

It was the middle of October by the time he worked out exactly what idea Darren had sparked off in his brain for the play, and the cold was definitely with them. He caught the bus to The Brightside that Tuesday afternoon, and a gloom was settling over the sky by the time he shouldered his way out of Costa and headed for the theatre.

He liked to think that maybe he and Darren were friends by now. They talked on Darren’s rehearsal days. Sometimes Darren would play silly songs for him on the violin. Once, Jayden had managed to persuade him to play on the clapped-out old piano in the storage room, and Darren had surprised him with a bawdy Irish drinking song and a powerful voice. But then, Jayden had also learned that Darren had a dry, dark sense of humour that leaned toward the macabre on occasion.

On occasion. Darren had been moody the last couple of weeks, and Jayden was hoping that his hammered-out idea and a big cup of that gut-rotting espresso that Darren liked would be able to bribe him into doing what Jayden wanted him to do. Namely, perform.

His detour made him slightly late, so he missed Mr. Weber’s usual flounce out of the theatre, and by the time he exchanged brief greetings with Dwayne and slipped into the auditorium, it stood empty. From the back, he could hear the faint strains of the violin, and he dumped his gear and the coffee on the edge of the stage before going in search.

“Darren?” he called, knocking on the storeroom door before opening it. “What are you doing playing in the dark?”

Darren shrugged, framed in the light from the corridor, and said, “Why not?”

“I want to ask a favour of you,” Jayden blurted out. “Um. I brought coffee. Come out to the stage?”

“I don’t like the sound of this,” Darren muttered, but packed up anyway. He had been playing from memory or imagination, with no sheet music and no stand. He moved stiffly, and Jayden bit his lip, wondering if this was going to work. Sometimes, he thought that Darren secretly didn’t actually like music. “Before I touch the coffee, what’s the favour?”

Jayden laughed nervously and pulled him along the corridor by the sleeve. “The coffee is free. And not, you know, poisoned or anything,” he said. “I, um, I figured I could bribe you with another one, or one of their cookies or something, if you agree to my idea.”

“Now I really don’t like the sound of it,” Darren replied, but dropped his bags into one of the seats and took the coffee anyway. “Come on then, out with it.”

“Here.” Jayden rummaged through his bag and handed over the script, stapled roughly together at lunch break when he’d finished his notations. “Page nine. Um, Jacob Cooper, that’s the character. He’s nuts.”

“And?” Darren asked, flipping through it. He pulled himself up on the edge of the stage to read.

“Well, I wanted to experiment with breaking the fourth wall a little, you know, let him see things on the stage or in the audience that others can’t, because he’s mad, you know, but the lights are kind of blinding here and you can’t really see the audience, so I was maybe thinking he could see the props like props, but that’s not great for the rest of the scenes or the other actors, and then…”

“Jayden.”

“Sorry. I, um…well, I’ve never used music in a play before because we don’t have an orchestra pit here and hiring a musician would be too expensive and none of the actors play, and…”

“You want me to play for your…play?” Darren asked and winced at the poor phrasing.

“Sort of. I, um… Can you play and walk around at the same time?”

“Yes.”

Jayden blinked. “Really?”

“Yes,” Darren said flatly. “At least, the violin, because I bloody hope you didn’t just ask me to lift a piano.”

Jayden laughed breathlessly. “No, no, I…I just kind of thought that might be wishful thinking. You…really?”

“You want a demonstration?”

“Um…yeah, yeah, okay.”

Darren shrugged, abandoning the script and retrieving the violin. Jayden scrambled up onto the stage, beckoning him up, and shifted on his feet through the plucking and high clinking of Darren checking the strings. How they could be wrong when he’d just been playing was beyond Jayden, and he felt impatient to show Darren what he meant, because it would be great, and once Darren saw how cool it was, he had to say yes, right? Even if it cost Jayden another coffee and an overpriced cookie?

And he’ll have to stay for rehearsals if he says yes, that bitchy little voice in the back of his head piped up, and he squashed it. There was no point in that route.

“Okay, so I was thinking, like, if you could literally follow Pete—that’s guy who’s playing Cooper—around the stage while he does his thing? Like…if you could just…I don’t know, play anything and follow me around?”

Darren raised an eyebrow, violin and bow posed. In that graceful, arched stance under the bright lights, he looked utterly beautiful, and something alarming twisted in Jayden’s stomach. He turned away quickly to hide it, and a sharp, high note was sliced off the strings behind him. He paused.

“Like that?”

“Um…”

Jayden took another step, and Darren repeated the sharp, short note. Jayden had only heard the long, warbling quality of the violin before, and the sudden shock of it was slightly jarring. As he paced away across the stage, a note chimed with every step, running down the octave and back up. When he turned on his heel at stage left, Darren dropped a full three notes into a dark, almost threatening hum as he turned.

“Follow me,” Jayden coaxed.

As he walked back, Darren walked to meet him, speeding up the notes until they rattled off in a chattering, humming cacophony, the higher in time with Jayden and the lower in time with Darren himself. It was so quick and so uncalled for that Jayden almost laughed; as it was, he couldn’t help the smile.

“That’s…oh my God,” he said and gave in to the laugh rising in his throat. “That’s brilliant. I mean…no, I do mean, that’s…okay, um, if I read some of Cooper’s monologues…”

He darted back to where Darren had abandoned the script; Darren mocked him, he thought, with another flurry of descending notes, and he stopped and turned on him accusingly.

“Have you done this sort of thing before?” he demanded.

“No,” Darren said. “But I’m guessing you mean in the style of those old cartoons. Like Tom and Jerry or something.”

“Yeah…yeah, kind of. Um, I want to edit some of the lines, so…so Cooper actually thinks he’s being stalked by some violinist nobody else can see. So, you know, he’s going to turn round and yell at you, and all that. Um. If you could…I don’t know, like get out of the way, pull faces at him, just…I don’t know, generally act like…”

“I’m crap at remembering lines,” Darren warned.

“You don’t have to speak. Like…an exaggerated, annoying mime. With a violin. That nobody else can see.”

Darren snorted and grinned, shaking his head. “This is the weirdest play I’ve ever heard of.”

“Well, weird gets noticed, and I’m going to be famous playwright one day,” Jayden said. “So…would you? I mean, if you could come for a full rehearsal, and talk to Pete—the actor, for this guy—then we could work something out properly, and it would be amazing, it really would.”

“I can’t stay until six-thirty,” Darren warned. “I have to walk home from here.”

“Mum would drop you off,” Jayden said immediately. “I mean, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind, not if you were going to be part of the play, and it would be so good, Darren, it would be an amazing new thing to try out. Come on. I brought you coffee and everything, and we can go right now and get more coffee and a cookie if you say yes.”

“This is blatant bribery.”

“Yes,” Jayden said and clasped his hands beseechingly in front of his face. It would be perfect! Darren was so…so sarcastic, so naturally dry in the faces he pulled and the way he talked, and even his violin sounded like it was taking the piss, and it would be perfect. It would be, if only Darren would agree to it.

“If I said yes, I’m not joining your am-drams group.”

“You wouldn’t have to.”

“And I can’t be coming to every rehearsal. I don’t have time for that.”

“That’s fine. I mean, nobody else would need to rehearse with you, just Pete, and you wouldn’t need to be here to practise your music, not really, so…”

“And it would be a one-off. I don’t do acting.”

“But you perform in your orchestra.”

“Yeah, sitting down, amongst thirty other people dressed in the same uniform and not moving around. You’re lucky if your own parents can pick you out in the middle of that. I don’t do getting up and performing in front of crowds.”

“Okay. Okay, just this play, that’s fine—I mean, I haven’t even thought about what I’m going to do for the summer performance, so…”

“Fine.”

“Fine, as in…you’ll do it?”

“Yeah.” Darren shrugged. “I guess so. Couldn’t hurt.”

Jayden moved before his brain caught up with his body, flying across the stage and throwing his arms around Darren’s neck in a wild hug. The strings screeched as Darren gracelessly swept the violin out of his path, leaving them pressed chest-to-chest, and it was that violent squeal that alerted to Jayden to what he’d just done.

“Sorry!” he stammered, letting go and stepping back hastily. Darren stared at him, looking slightly shell-shocked. “Sorry, sorry, I just—I’ve been trying to work out how to really play with Cooper’s madness and this theatre’s really limited and it’s been driving me up the wall, and—um—thank you? Thank you. I mean, seriously, it’ll be great, and, um…”

His face was on fire. He couldn’t have felt any warmer if he’d doused himself in petrol and lit a match—and it would probably be less embarrassing, too. Darren was still just staring at him, and even as he regretted doing it, that stupid bloody voice in his head that Jayden swore sounded just like Charley sometimes was shrieking about how it felt to hug him.

Namely, nice.

And it wouldn’t shut up.

“Right,” Darren said slowly, and held up an index finger, the bow clamped between the others. “Never do that again. I think I had a minor heart attack.”

“Okay,” Jayden said breathlessly. “Sorry,” he said again. “I just…seriously, this is…”

“You owe me a coffee,” Darren reminded him, dropping off the edge of the stage almost casually and packing up the violin again. “And I definitely heard something about a cookie.”

“So…cookies are the way to bribe you?”

“Snack food in general is the way to bribe me, now cough up,” Darren said. “A bribe was offered, and I’m taking you up on it. Let’s go.”