If You're Happy and You Know it, Stop!

If someone had told Ria she had died and was on her way up to heaven, she would have believed them. The stage lights gleamed in her face and her heart soared as she imagined it was those warm, golden eyes who owned the voices cheering the performance she had just shared with them for the first time. Two hands clasped her own on either side, lifting her floating arms higher still towards those blinding lights before pulling her back down and up again.

When the lights suddenly blinked off, Ria hardly noticed. She had soaked up too much of their glorious luminescence to be stranded in the darkness now surrounding her. Forth, towards that festive roar the light had left behind, she flew; if she were swallowed whole by it, she would only rejoice all the more.

“Ria, where are you going?” Even the sound of her name barely penetrated her consciousness.

She didn’t use the stairs to get off the stage. Forgetting they were there at all, she simply burst through the rippling curtains and jumped down onto the floor, drowning herself in the flood of spectators who were only just beginning to tire of their applause. Now there weren’t just two hands grasping for hers. Seeing the star in their midst, hands reached from all sides as she weaved her way through rows upon rows of seats – smiles, waves, and an unintelligible chorus of praise both greeting and farewelling her with every feather-like step she took.

If she had been on her way to heaven earlier, now she had finally arrived.

Until a different hand – a claw was what it felt like compared to the rest – suddenly gripped onto her wrist and yanked her to the side before she could be engulfed by the next row. A door gaped open, she was thrown in, and then it was slammed shut.

Her sojourn in paradise had been far short of eternity.

Hungry to return, Ria scrambled to her feet and hurled herself towards the door, but the claw squeezed and pulled, flinging her down the hallway in close procession behind its owner. “Let me go!” she rasped, but neither her protests nor her struggling won her freedom.

At any other time on any other day, this same warmly lit aisle with the deep purple velvet floors and walls would have inspired a delicious excitement as the thrill of the approaching performance began to bubble inside her. But now she was being half dragged down it. This sort of thing wasn't supposed to happen on the path heading up to the stage. It was supposed to happen on the stage to someone she was only pretending to be. Somehow, it wasn't quite as exhilarating when it happened in real life.

Another door gobbled her up, though not the one which led down to the change rooms backstage. She was being taken upstairs to the offices. Her stomach twisted inside her.

“Ria Yoshen. Our star performer. What a performance you put on tonight.”

Ria was standing in the cold, bare office of the artistic director – the new artistic director as of two weeks’ ago. Jen Muff.

It had taken the Muff half a day to strip the once plush, ornamented room to its mere bones. Down with the photos of past productions, out with the trophies of decades of accomplishments, no more books to stack on shelves, shelves to shield the walls or even wallpaper to hide the bricks. The patterned carpet warming the floor had suffered the same fate, as had the crystal globe that once housed the lightbulb within. A single grey desk now sat in the self-imposed cell, measured by the millimetre to sit in the centre of the nail-exposed floor. And behind that desk towered the Muff. She was tapping her fingers lightly on the surface of the table – the only movement at all visible in her entire body.

“Do you recall our last meeting, Ria?” If the Muff had any talent at all, it was the ability to move her paper-thin lips without disturbing any other muscle in her face.

“I remember it,” replied the young actress and made a particular effort to intensify her glare in the absence of expression in her counterpart.

The faintest hint of a smile deepened the shadow in the Muff’s smile lines by a fraction of a shade. “Then I trust you will not be surprised when I tell you that you will no longer be playing the role of Rosalind.”

Ria stifled her sharp gasp as soon as it arose and forced herself to meet the Muff’s snakelike gaze with as much steel as she could muster. “Yes, I am,” she said, and congratulated herself for saying so with such vigour.

The Muff raised her pencil eyebrows and cleared her throat. “I see. You would rather be cut from the entire show. I did fear that might be so.”

“You can’t cut me.”

A snort burst forth from the Muff’s throat.

“I’m the only one who can play that role. Even you know that.”

The snort broke into an ugly cackle. “Oh? And what makes you so sure of that, little Ria?” Only the Muff could laugh without smiling.

“Do you know anyone else who can hit that high D? Anyone else who can cry on demand? Anyone else who can remember five page-long monologues and deliver them without sounding like they’re reading from a newspaper? Anyone else who doesn’t—”

“Yes,” said the Muff. “I know of plenty of others who can do all those things and they have been moved on. As will you.”

Even Ria could hardly tell whether she was trembling from the cold draught creeping through the gaps in the floorboards or the anger burning within her. She tugged her bare arms into her light dress and forced herself not to glance over at the empty fireplace, now just a sad, dark hole in the wall.

The Muff finally sat down behind the desk with a long sigh and straightened the pen lying in front of her. “I did warn you not to show passion in your performance, so I don’t know what you’re glaring at me for.” She opened a drawer and produced a document, which she laid flat beside the pen.

“Passion is what people want to see in a performance,” Ria spurted icily.

“It is a fantasy, and you are cruel for showing people something they cannot have. You will sign this contract stating that, should you show so much of a hint of enjoyment while performing any role, you will be banned from appearing on this or any stage in the future.”

Ria’s skin itched at the sound of the paper sliding across the desk towards her. “And if I don’t sign?”

“Then tonight was the last performance of your life.”

There was a moment of silence.

Then a shriek of rage.

Ria leapt forward and snatched the contract off the table, shredding it to pieces in her shaking hands and stamping them into the floor.

A statue would have reacted more to this fierce show of rebellion than the Muff did. She watched the show, unblinking, for precisely three seconds before opening the drawer again and pulling out another document, exactly the same as the first – only this one she kept safe within her own grasp. “You seem to be living in a dead past, little Ria,” she drawled when the show had subsided to mere heavy breathing and severe glaring. “You might be putting on a fictional performance on stage, but that does not exempt you from the standards we hold in society today. Do you realise how many people you offend by showing them that you enjoy your profession? Do you ever stop and think for a moment about all the audience members who despise their jobs and perhaps even their lives also, and consider how hurt they must feel when they see how happy you are? What you did tonight was despicable. Not only did you disgrace yourself and this theatre; you victimised your audience by asserting your happiness over their misery. If you weren’t already irredeemable, I would order a written confession and apology along with the contract. Now sign it.”

And that was how it happened. That was how she signed away her happiness. That was how she ended up walking through the park a week later towards the river: past the old couple staring glumly at the ground as they took their stroll, past the young woman yelling into her phone on the park bench, past the father and his daughter ignoring the delighted panting of their Border-Colley prancing about in pursuit of his ball, and past the birthday party with the monotone rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’.

In reality, it might have been midday on a radiant spring day, but in the performance that everyone was taking part in, they were all stuck inside the dim, draughty cell the Muff had created for herself.

Ria stared down at the rippling image of herself in the water, then at the rocks waiting above the surface to ensure she joined her reflection in the swiftest way possible. “How many seconds would it take to reach those rocks?” she wondered. “Five? Seven? Or perhaps as few as three?” She couldn’t decide whether she wanted a long or short time in which to regret her decision before the end.

Her foot dangled over the edge of the railing. Feet were always the most daring parts of the body. Now all she needed was a slight propulsion from her knee or a little lean forward from her chest and she was set to go. Should she count, perhaps? That might make it easier. “Three…” It wasn’t exactly her original plan for entering heaven, but it would just have to make do. “Two…” If only the Muff was here to take down with her, it would be so much more satisfying. “One—”

A small hand clasped onto her ankle, followed by a faint cry. “Wait!”

Ria swayed forwards, almost past the point of no return, then bent herself back towards the voice, finally toppling onto the ground, just missing the little girl behind her who now appeared in Ria’s view as she looked up in a daze.

“Are you the lady from the theatre?”

Ria frowned and nodded as best she could while laying flat on her back.

The little girl’s eyes lit up in a gorgeous flash of hope, and she beamed with a delectable display of joy. “I want to be like you one day. Will you teach me?” And as though presenting her first offer of payment, she held out her uneaten piece of birthday cake – chocolate, her favourite – for Ria.

If someone had told Ria she had already died and was now being sent back to life for a second chance, she would have believed them. Lifting herself off the ground and up onto her knees, she closed the little girl’s outstretched hands over the precious piece of cake and pressed it to her young heart. “I would love to teach you,” she whispered, and wrapped her arms about her second chance as she began to shake with tears.