Curtain Call at the Lantern

You stepped onto the stage before Rook could stop you. Six pages. A microphone that had waited all evening. The ghost light made a small circle at your feet.

"Ladies and gentlemen," you read, and your own voice sounded strange in the empty theatre, "you know Sir Edwin Fairweather. Tonight, I'd like you to meet Eddie Fenn."

You read it all. The docks, the poverty, the boy with the wrong vowels. The woman with the metronome. The fork, the chair, the wine, the laugh. The years spent learning to be somebody else so perfectly that even he lost the seam. Somewhere near the end, Imogen began to cry. Anisa stood up in the stalls. Halloran, for once, wasn't writing anything.

At the last page you stopped. Crane had not moved.

"I intend tonight to thank her," you read, "and to tell you that she, and I, were both performing. And I want to say that I think we were very good. But I'm tired. And I'd like, if it's all the same to you, to go home."

Rook took her arm gently. Crane looked at you across the footlights. "Thank you," she said. It was the first honest sentence she'd spoken in forty-five years.

Jonah, in the aisle, said: "So who is he now?"

"Whoever people decide to remember," you said. "That's the thing about identity. It's never finished. It's always being negotiated."

Halloran ran the speech in full the next morning, on the front page, above a photograph of Eddie in his flat cap. If you noted the flag FAVOUR, he ran it without a single word changed. It was the only time you'd ever seen the Sentinel tell the truth on purpose.