Mad Evie

The first blow came the moment the door opened.

It had only been a year since Isabel had seen her cousin Evie, but she looked way better than Isabel remembered.

Isabel studied her as she dragged her wheelie bag over the threshold of the Ponte Theatre's oddly bland foyer and down a tiled hallway.  

What was it about Evie that had changed, she wondered. She was still six feet tall and way too thin. Still the same square jaw and wide mouth, disproportionate to the very narrow neck, making her head look like a box on a stick. But her clothes. Her hair. Once a dry-brush frizz, it was now expertly styled and glossy. She walked differently too, with a little sway, so that the legs of trousers swished around her long legs. She looked fashionable. No, even worse. She looked attractive.

It was only the change in lighting that caused Isabel to finally stop and look around. They'd stepped through a wide set of sliding steel doors and into an entirely different kind of room, one that was infused with a neon blue glow.

Suddenly tense, Isabel sat down on the white stool Evie pulled out for her.

"Koffie?" Evie pointed to the pot in front of them.

Isabel nodded.

"We're so thrilled you could take the job," Evie said. "Lots of people would have been put off by the virus. You're braver than me, travelling all the way to over here from London."

All the way over here! Evie was such a gigantic wimp, Isabel thought. 

Isabel thanked her for the compliment. "So what's this room for?" she said.

Evie laughed. "It's the theatre. Is it not what you expected?" Her Dutch accent had almost completely disappeared over the years; now she spoke English with a deliberate, la-di-da pronunciation. "You don't look very approving. The style is very "cool". The audience like it a lot."

Isabel felt herself almost shudder. Like Evie would know anything about what was cool. It was pure luck that she'd even got this position at the theatre. Pure luck that ever run into her theatre-owning husband who'd clearly been too high on drugs to think clearly. More to the point though – the place wasn't cool at all, it was straight out of a nightmare and the anti-thesis of what a theatre should be.

She gazed around the vast space, trying hard to hide her disgust.

Rectangles of concrete covered the walls, drilled into place with huge bolts that ran down them in seams like buttons on a waistcoat. Ornate black pillars dotted the floor in all directions, reminding Isabel, rather obscurely, of the labyrinth in the story of the minotaur.

It was more like the carpark next door to the theatre, she thought. In fact, the only real difference between this and a carpark were the scattered seating areas and the mountains of junkie objects that looked like they'd be dragged straight from Roland Gaunt's Needful Things.

She examined them one by one, trying to find a common theme amongst them. A life-sized stag. A thicket of real silver-white birch trees on stands. A gargoyle face on the wall. A cuckoo clock. A gargantun bear skin complete with its head sprawled across the floor. There was rusted machinery whose purpose she couldn't begin to imagine. It was a living nightmare. A museum of weird shit. She hated museums. And weird shit.

Only one redeeming feature stood out: a fluorescent white bar.

"Have you got anything stronger to drink?" Isabel asked.

"At 11am?" Evie laughed.

"Yes of course. Proscecco? Wine? Biertje?'

"Anything, let's celebrate."