SPIKE BY SNOWLIGHT

* 

Snow Time

They made it just before curtain.  They were just relaxing into their seats as the lights dimmed and the curtain parted and Spike muttered.

Please stake me now if this is a neo futurist version of a Dickens classic say in--spacesuits or some such rot--

Buffy ‘sshh’d’ him and remarkably he stayed ssh’d. This was a theatre after all; a holy place in his heart and it was easy to be respectful.   

Fine.  Fine.  But that wouldn’t prevent him from going to work on plan B for besting Buffy.

He took her hand in the dark and interlocked her fingers with his, gently rubbing his thumb over her knuckle. 

hee hee.

He had discovered--it wasn’t the place on her body or the intensity of the touch, it was how he touched her...it was the intention behind the touch.  If he thought ‘sex’ when he touched her...it was conducted to her like electricity through water. 

hee hee.

He figured, she’d last the first act and maybe...maybe into the second but never to the third.

She leaned in toward him as if to whisper something and then kissed, licked and dipped her tongue into his ear.

His body jolted, and the people in the nearby seats turned to stare at the disturbance.

Buffy murmured, “I’m not gonna tell you what to do--but if you don’t play fair--I will make you embarrass yourself right, here, right now...”

Spike growled low  “Thas’ not a threat, thas’ a treat...”

“Oh, god...you’re right...”  Buffy considered and then asked simply.  “We both know you can reduce me to jelly blubber within five minutes--please let me watch the play?”

Spike suddenly sobered stopped and leaned in to kiss her cheek, “Sorry luv...really...”

“Watch the play...you might like it.  Look, cool costumes, great set--an 18...uh forty something trip down London memory lane.”

An elderly matron leaned over and looked pointedly at the two lovers...she loved to see young people come to the theatre but really...they had to learn the rules...

Buffy mouthed ‘sorry’ and Spike nodded apologetically and they settled back to watch the talented company wag Dickens’s tale.

*

Trip down memory lane. 

Bloody hell.

It had begun well enough.  The set was extraordinary.  Spike studied the details and could find no fault with the historic accuracy.  None.

Did it begin with images?  The clothed figures walking huddled against the cold all out and walking on a London street.  They even got the detail of how slow everybody walked.  The tempo of the time.  No one bustled by as they did post 1940.  Maybe that’s what hooked him, deeply worked him and his memory.

Someone had a vision to be sure, to recreate old London 1843.  Granted it was twenty years or so before he had been born, but London was a very old city and the very old, once so old, change very little.  The set looked real, not the cleaned up cartoon cut out for a comedy or a musical, nay this was gritty, black residue from air saturated with coal residue.  This was the portrait of fine architecture dipped in a toxic time.

Was it the costumes?

The lights, the actors, the accents?  Or some combination of all twisted together until it turns the screw in him.  Turns the screw lefty for loosey.  Turn the screw to get in to let it all out.

Was it the narration? 

Not the common phrases used from the text of the story running strictly to plot points. 

No.

Some crazy adapter went at the whole project sideways--taking the prose that seemed incidental to plot but in fact in the telling told more, dug in deeper past flesh level to the talking bones--this play rattled and shook your own bones back at you saying ha!  Ha!  And it was funny, it was, the way Dickens was, but serious too, because--hey those are my bones and I’m gonna need them back!

Was it the words?

“Oh!  But he was a tight fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge!  a squeezing, wrenching, gasping, clutching covetous old sinner!  Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret and self contained, and solitary as an oyster.  The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue, and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.  A frosty rime was on his head and on his eyebrow, and his wiry chin.  He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge.  No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he; no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.  Foul weather didn’t know where to have him.  The heaviest rain, and snow, and hall, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect.  They often came down handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you.  When will you come to see me.”  Even the blindmen’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag tails as though they said, “No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!”

(“That’s not you...” she said.  The words were soft and far away and came to join the swirl of his mind as the small warm hand slipped into his)

The words were working on him, in him.  Churn burning through tissue and linings, no respect, no respect completely disregarding the borders between bowels.  And like a child at the sight if creamed corn touching beans running into tasting like turkey, it was abhorrent to almost upchuck and like a child trying to explain why the food should never touch.  Spike was engaged with feelings of nostalgia coupled with fear touched madness with anger tangled lust and...guilt, guilt, guilt guiding the melee to a mission statement.

It was like being digested to cohesion.

Gentle touch, Buffy beloved hands, knuckles pressed up against, a little more firmly up against the back of his neck.

She didn’t speak but fingers said asked.  ‘I’m here, I’m here...you o.k.?’

Who could say?

His soul was speaking up had found another voice, a voice breaking from the chorus of love for Buffy for a solo song and he was compelled to listen to the conflicting notes of guilt almost avant garde. 

The confusion was pain, painful, but there was something in it that felt like reaping, like surgery.  The pain of digging through a word for the cause, for the beginning.

“You want to leave?” Her voice was quiet, more than a little worried--‘that’s it’ she decided, “We’re leaving...”

He puts his hand on hers and holds on.

“No Luv, no...I want to see what happens...”

“It’s hurting you, I can feel it.”

“Yeah, yeah...but...”   What could he say? Yeah my guts are being ripped out but let’s wait to see if it dusts me?

“There...that’s it...listen...” he nodded toward the stage.

It was Scrooge talking, grousing in an excellent Standard English accent.

“If I could work my will every idiot who goes about with merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through the heart he should!”

Alright.  That’s it. This play was not Spike friendly and we are out of here--Buffy tightened her grip and Spike could feel her gather her energy to rise and pull him out, drag him if necessary out of the theatre...he tightened her grip--wait:

Buffy looked at the stage and saw the glowing actor playing Scrooge’s nephew gather himself to speak--he wore spectacles and had sandy brown hair hanging in almost unruly curls. 

It was Fred speaking and it could have been William it could have been.

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,  But I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round--apart from the veneration due its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that--as a good time: a kind, forgiving charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut up hearts freely and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave and not just another race of creatures bound on other journeys.  And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good and I say God bless it!”

The actor playing Bob Crotchett burst into applause along with several audience members and Spike used the noise as cover to whisper to Buffy.

“Amazing piece of writing just amazing--they are actually doing this play the way Dickens wrote it Buffy...”

Well, he was talking in a full sentence so she felt a little better but not much--Spike had been through a lot this past week, and having found each other in such a way put more pressure on possibly losing each other too.  She had caught him slipping in and out of awareness this past week--wasn’t even sure if he knew this himself and no way was she going to let his whole soul fully ensconced send him into catatonia land--great writing or no--wait Spike was tugging on her finger--

Fred was talking

“Don’t be angry uncle.  Come!  Dine with us to-morrow.”

Scrooge stared blank faced at his Nephew and Fred exclaimed:

“But why?  Why?”

“Why did you get married?”

“Because I fell in love.”

The actor delivered the line with such simple sincerity the audience warmed to him and laughed in a show of support.

Buffy relaxed...well all right...this was better...talking about love (and getting married) is good. 

“Because you fell in love!  As if that were the only thing in the world more ridiculous than a merry Christmas.  Good afternoon!”      

More laughter from the audience.  Buffy noticed the other people around her looking at each other and nodding their heads, they way people do in community.  Of a common mind.  God she loved people.  People are wonderful.

She felt a kiss on the knuckle of the hand that had been gripping Spikes and she eased next to him, pushing her shoulder up against his, well, as much as the seats would allow. he put an arm around her shoulder and they settled down to await Marley and the rattle bang of past deeds and like the chickens coming home to roost and get roasted it would come and Spike would just have to ride it out, he wanted to ride it out.  He was no chicken.

“Mercy! Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?”

“Man of the worldly mind!  Do you believe in me or not?”

“I do. I must.  but why do the dead walk the earth and why do they come to me?”

“it is required of every man, that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life it is condemned to so after death.  It is doomed to wander through the world -- oh woe is me! -- and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!”

“You are fettered. Tell me why?”

“I wear the chain I forged in life.  I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”

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