Charlotte Gaspel: Demons and Ghosts

III: Good Stories

It was October, a splendid time of year. The temperature is warm, the colour palettes change, the sun is covered by grey clouds and the Halloween festivities begin.

A fair is being staged in the centre of town, and as usual, there are balloons, street tents and deadly long-term food, but the most remarkable thing is the large stage with no roof or walls in the centre of the park. It is an ordinary stage: It has wooden supports, a wide performance area, a curtain with limited space behind it for the performers, and those concrete seats that act as stairs, the kind you see on public football fields. It was a very special place, because it was never wasted. There was always a show every now and then.

Theatre is a magnificent and exciting art, but nobody was more excited about it than Jeff Gaspel. He worked as an actor and director. That was his passion. It's nice to have a job that you're passionate about, but naturally you don't support your family with a job that makes you happy. You don't feed your children with happiness; your children acquire happiness with food from a respectable salary, so Jeff had two jobs: Apart from acting in the theatre, he worked in a laundry.

Jeff washed, folded and organised around a lot of white sheets a day. Every morning he breathes in all kinds of cleaning chemicals; every day he put miles of thread into washing machines; every afternoon he is a slave of his situation. He should be grateful that he at least has a salary, even if it is a rather low one. At five o'clock in the morning he would get out of bed, at six o'clock he would head for the laundry, at three o'clock in the afternoon he would meet his team in the park and at six o'clock in the evening he would be back home so he could sleep seven hours at least. It was a tight routine, but it worked.

A week before Charlie was born, Jeff was working on the Hamlet performance. The group had half the script ready when the baby was born, so they needed Jeff to complete the piece they were going to perform, which clearly couldn't be, since he had to pull out of the show to do the parenting. Under the circumstances, Jeff had to meet with the group to inform them of his absence.

Back to the current events of the story. The mobsters leave Clara's house and close the door. Jeff was already on his way to the central park to give the good-bad news to his theatre group.

He said, "I'm afraid I will not be able to direct the show. I'm a father now and have to manage my time better."

Jeff hoped that someone would congratulate him on his new occupation, or at least show understanding. There was an odd four seconds or so of silence until one of the members asked, "So we're cancelling the show?"

Jeff replied a little quizzically: "No, you can do it without me."

There were six members not counting Jeff: a tall dork, a grumpy old man, a stuck-up fat woman, a friendly dwarf, a shy skinny woman and a blond psychopath. The one who asked the question was Mari, the shy skinny one.

Hearing Jeff's answer, Viktor, the grumpy old man, replied: "Are you telling me you're going to throw away all the work we've done so far?"

Jeff replies, "I haven't thrown anything away. I'm just letting you guys finish writing the show."

Joanna, the stuck-up woman, retaliates to Viktor, "Are you saying that what we do is crap?"

Hautel, the tall fool, joins in: "The problematic here is the lack of a director."

Emilio, the nice short one, tries to calm the situation: "We're going to be fine. Jeff was a good mentor and we can follow his example to finish the play."

When he said this, all that remained was to listen to the silence of Clyde, the blond psychopath.

Enough was enough. The group was too inconsiderate to waste any more explanations. The message had been made clear, so he was out of there.