The Front Row

Mila set three chairs in front of the wooden frame and sat in the middle one. From here, you could see past the edge of the puppet theatre and straight into the old kitchen. She moved the chair on the right a little to the left. Whoever sat there ought to see as much as everybody else.

Aron held a tin over her head and tipped something round inside it. It sounded like gravel sliding across the ceiling.

‘Can you hear what's different from Sunday?’ he asked.

‘Quieter?’

He tilted it again, more slowly. Now Mila heard gentle pattering. Without thinking, she looked towards the high windows of the hall.

Aron grinned. ‘Less rice. Before, it sounded like somebody tipping their teeth into a bucket.’

‘No tins over the guests' heads,’ said Ilyas, crossing the floor with a cable cover. ‘And let's not trip anybody up.’

He laid the cover over the work lamp's cable. The broken stage lamp stood to one side with a note for the technician; the appointment had been postponed. They had already charged the large cloth outside and brought it in on the smooth rollers. While Grandma lined the kitchen section up with the opening, Mila had fetched the chairs. Behind her, the table where she'd stood yesterday was glowing.

There was no drop of glue on that table. The room in the cloth was older than her lighthouse.

She took a folded sheet of paper from her pocket. At the top was the opening she'd written at home. She wouldn't need to keep checking it. That would make her sound more confident.

The woman who sewed the curtains arrived first, with a leek sticking out of her shopping bag. Sometimes she served squash at the shows too. Behind her came the sound man, straightening a poster on his way in, and the woman with the programme diary. All three had been there on Monday. Ilyas showed them the chairs and asked them to watch for ten minutes, then say what worked and what didn't.

‘We don't have to learn anything by heart?’ the man asked.

‘Just when to clap,’ said Aron.

Mila laughed a fraction too late. She stood beside the opening, just beyond the edge of the light.

‘This was my grandma's house,’ she began.

‘Kitchen,’ Grandma said.

‘Yes. This is the kitchen. You can actually go inside. Only don't touch everything.’

Grandma looked up. Mila noticed and quickly added, ‘The things made of light, I mean. You can't bring them out.’

She stepped through the opening. The kitchen rose around her. The glowing tabletop gave a little under her hand. On the old stool, which she'd never seen in the real house, was a fixed white stain with no smell at all.

‘Grandma was always making things here,’ Mila said. ‘And her mum too. You wouldn't ever have needed to give up this kitchen if you could keep it.’

A chair creaked in the hall.

‘Hang on,’ Grandma said.

Mila turned. Through the opening, she could see Grandma with her hands resting loosely in her lap.

‘That wasn't why I moved.’

‘No, but now you can still—’

‘Some days all I came in here to do was peel the potatoes. Then it was just a kitchen.’

The woman with the leek nodded. Mila looked at the borrowed back door. There hadn't been any potatoes in the opening she'd written. Grandma was supposed to have said something quite different. That she was glad the table still existed, perhaps.

‘You can try it yourselves,’ Mila told the guests.

The sound man put an arm through first, then a foot. He looked down at his shoe as though he expected it to have changed colour. Then he stepped right through. The two of them stood beside the table.

‘Can I bring my shopping bag?’ the woman asked.

‘It's real,’ Grandma said. ‘It stays yours.’

The woman came in, leek and all. She bent over the cold shape of the cooker, touched it and drew her hand back. ‘My mother would still manage to burn her pancakes on that.’

The other woman only wanted to watch. Mila hadn't expected that. She didn't budge, even when Mila told her nothing could happen.

‘I can see perfectly well from here,’ she said.

Ilyas asked the two visitors to come back so they could slide the next room into place. The woman brought her bag with her. Nothing caught. Mila let go of the table and stepped out last.

Aron was ready with his rain tin.

‘The sewing room first,’ Mila said.

‘We said we'd do the conservatory.’

‘That's afterwards. Otherwise the house doesn't make sense.’

‘It isn't a house,’ he said quietly. ‘It's three bits.’

Grandma kept the centre clear while Ilyas turned the roller. The kitchen slipped sideways. For a moment there was only a thin strip of light; then Lena's sewing room appeared in the opening. By this point, a child watching the show might already want the octopus back. Mila could tell from the way the man crossed his ankles.

She began talking about the windowsill and the lovely wood. Aron waited with the tin against his stomach. Only when she'd finished did they slide the cloth on to the conservatory.

At once, he made it rain.

Soft taps filled the hall. The woman who hadn't wanted to go inside sat up straighter. Aron brought the fisherman into view at the edge of the opening. The puppet peered at the motionless garden beyond the borrowed glass.

‘Just my luck,’ he grumbled. ‘All I wanted was a dry sandwich.’

The woman with the leek spluttered. Mila wanted to explain that you couldn't really go through the conservatory window, but Aron had already gone on. He made the fisherman cautiously reach out of the pretend window, then snatch his hand back as if it were soaking wet.

Then he looked at Mila. She didn't know what he wanted. Not until he tilted the tin again did she remember she was supposed to rustle the newspaper. She picked it up too late. The storm arrived when the fisherman was already on his way home.

Afterwards, the sound man said it was remarkable. Then he asked how long they meant to spend on each room.

‘Not very long,’ Mila said.

‘I liked the fisherman,’ said the woman with the diary. ‘But at first I thought you'd invited us to look at photographs of the move.’

Mila folded her sheet into quarters, exactly along its old creases.

Ilyas asked the guests to look at the painted scenery in the side room. They followed him out. Grandma stayed by the wooden frame to help Aron straighten the outer roller, which had shifted.

‘I didn't know you were going to say that,’ she said to Mila.

‘What?’

‘That I needn't have left.’

Mila looked at her folded paper. Fold it any smaller and it would turn into a hard lump in her pocket.

‘I meant it was nice there.’

‘I heard that. And I know it was.’ Grandma put her hand on the outer roller. ‘Give me a hand this side.’

Mila went over. Aron stood opposite her. His rain tin was on the floor, safely beside the wall. She hadn't said anything about his new rain yet.

‘My bit doesn't have to be squashed between two rooms,’ he said.

‘It was between them because we had to slide the cloth.’

‘That's not what I mean.’

She kept the cloth smooth while Grandma took its edge. Behind Aron stood the conservatory, still and bright, without rain or fisherman. Little patches of moonlight fell on the three empty chairs. Mila had lined them up so neatly. Now she wanted to put them away at once.