44
Someone was shaking Aurelia awake: gently at first, and then with a bit too much enthusiasm.
“Fezz?” Aurelia asked, still half asleep.
“No, it’s not the cat, it’s me. Wake up!”
Antonia sounded much too chipper for so early in the morning.
Aurelia looked to the clock on her bedside and saw that it was actually just past nine. Not so early, after all, though early enough given that she hadn’t gone to sleep until dawn.
“What’s going on?”
Sitting up in bed, Aurelia rubbed her eyes and tried to regain consciousness.
“We want to watch the footage from last night to see if we can spot the characters. Come on!” Antonia tugged at Aurelia’s arm to pull her up, then went out to the hallway. “Meet us in the living room. Julia’s getting the camera hooked up to the telly.”
Aurelia walked toward the door until she was certain that Antonia was no longer monitoring her progress, then stopped and looked back to confirm that Oliver’s side of the bed was empty.
She stumbled into the bathroom and, a tad more awake just a few minutes later, she joined Antonia and Julia in the living room.
Once again, she looked around for signs of her fiancé.
“Has Oliver left for work?” she asked.
“No, it’s Sunday,” Antonia reminded her. “He said he had to meet Jack to see ‘the costumer’ about their suits for the wedding,” Antonia told her.
“Oh, right. I’d forgotten that was happening this morning.”
“What’s a costumer?” Julia asked.
“Someone who designs costumes for plays—it’s one of Jack’s friends from the theater. He offered to cut them a deal on altering their suits for the wedding.”
“My imagination is running wild,” Antonia said with an amused arch to her brow.
“He promised Oliver he wouldn’t pull anything from the theater’s costume vault. Though I told him I wouldn’t mind.”
“Well, anyway, he said we didn’t need to wait for him to watch,” Julia said. “I promised we’d call him if there was anything exciting to report.”
“Right, then. Okay.”
“It’s all set,” Julia said as she settled back on her heels. “Ready?”
Aurelia searched around for a moment, feeling as though she’d misplaced something.
“There.” Antonia pointed to a mug of tea on the coffee table, and Aurelia picked it up and took a grateful sip.
“Ready,” Aurelia said. Her stomach gave a little lurch as Julia pressed play and the screen jumped to life.
Seeing the characters each night, standing in front of them in their semi-solid state, had become second nature, yet somehow the idea of seeing them projected on her television seemed entirely improbable.
Julia had queued the video up so that they were spared Antonia and Oliver’s recorded debates about whether the spot they’d chosen would show the shop to its best advantage and whether the camera was on and recording.
The first images they saw, then, were of the darkened shop.
The shop lights came on and Aurelia and Julia could be seen walking down the spiral staircase and standing near the table.
There was the phone in one of Aurelia’s hands, and there was Julia firmly clasping the other.
Antonia gave a slight start, though Aurelia didn’t have time to process what it might mean because, all of a sudden, a bright light filled the screen.
The light obliterated the camera’s view of the shop just as they heard the clock strike midnight through the speakers.
There in the living room, the three of them reflexively raised their arms and hands to cover their eyes; it was as though someone were shining a spotlight through the television.
They could hear Aurelia’s and Julia’s voices as they said hello to the characters, but—just like the telephone call and Antonia’s and Oliver’s attempted conversations from the stairwell—the character’s voices sounded almost muted so that they couldn’t make out a single word.
“Is that what they sound like to you?” Aurelia asked.
Antonia was quiet but finally answered, “It is. Yes.”
Julia fast-forwarded the footage and tried playing it at a later point: the same bright light and indistinguishable voices.
She did this again and again, finally getting to the end of the tape, her desperation evident with each passing minute of the recording.
At last, the bright light faded and the shop was once again visible under the light coming from its own fixtures, with Aurelia and Julia standing alone on the shop floor.
In the video, Aurelia put her arm around Julia as they walked up the spiral staircase and out of frame.
The shop lights went out—Aurelia had turned them off before they had walked through the door to the flat—leaving a view of a darkened shop, lit only by the soft light of dawn reaching through the mezzanine window.
The three of them sat there, watching the video of the still, quiet shop, until the footage eventually ended and left them staring at pixelated fuzz.