Men With Ven
Mar. 22nd, 2009 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purple_pen“I’m a cat,” Nick says, and it might not be the thing that *should* bring the meeting to a grinding halt, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is.
“A cat,” Ling echoes, looking over at him from her position at the head of the table. Well, as much as it can be called a position when the table is a battered chip board thing tucked in the furthest corner from the window, behind boxes of memorabilia stacked twelve high. One day, she’s going to hire on for a production that actually has money, one that isn’t being coordinated out of the backroom of a club tagged for demolition in a matter of weeks.
Today is not that day. She likes to think that tomorrow looks better; sadly, the slogan ‘today is not your day; tomorrow doesn’t look good either’ could have been written about her life.
“Shouldn’t you have, like, pointed ears and a tail and shit?” Marcus asks, unwinding from his curl in a chair that really isn’t made for curling and leaning across the table to poke at Nick’s thick black hair, covering his decidedly non-pointed ears.
Nick bats his hand away with a flick of one finger that reminds Ling of nothing so much as a cat batting away a fly. She decides to keep this observation to herself. “Not a literal cat,” he says, rolling his eyes in the direction of Maggie, head of their lighting crew and the lust object of half the straight male members of the stage crew. Ling kind of gets it: Maggie’s t-shirt is a fraction too tight, and she hefts bits of lighting rig across the half-built stage like they’re nothing, and she doesn’t talk to any of them. Without any actresses around to do the ignoring, Maggie’s slid into that roll like she belongs there. “A figurative cat. Like, no worries, no stress, I’m a cat. Chilled out.”
Ling thinks seriously for a minute of asking what the hell he’s been smoking, and why he’s been doing it before the tech heads meeting. On the other hand, what she doesn’t know, she can’t be asked to testify about in court. “Great. So glad we had this little diversion.” She uses her pen to nudge her glasses back up her nose rather than peering over them like a pissed off school teacher. “But this show opens in three days, the first bands are coming in to start rehearsal *tomorrow*, and we don’t even have a complete stage yet. So a few less cats and a few more –“
“Dogs?” Marcus offers. “Faithful, willing, always friendly?”
“Elephants?” Tom adds, looking up from the list of the backing groups’ requirements for once. “Good at heavy lifting.”
“Mice?” Nick puts in, apparently keeping up the cat-related metaphor he’s got going.
“People!” Ling’s hands jerk up without her conscious intention. “Hard-working, dedicated, efficient –“
Marcus snorts his derision, and Jenni-with-an-i from wardrobe starts laughing, and Ling puts her head down on the cracked table, giving up.
*
Men With Ven are headlining the opening weekend of the city’s Summer Months of Music Festival, as much as it’s possible to headline a festival that includes no less than four different performances from local school choirs, and they’re most of the reason for Ling’s stress levels hitting points not seen since the last days before finals, six years ago. She’s not quite hit the point where she starts living on Diet Coke and Dairy Milk, for the caffeine and the sugar, but she knows that day can’t be far away. If they don’t get the stage up before dark, that day will be today.
She’d never even heard of MWV until she got hired on as the technical director for the event, at which point she hit youtube and myspace, link-hopping through the blogs of a dozen different people who prided themselves on loving such an obscure indie-rock-punk-glam-kind-of-country-if-it’s-Tuesday group. Ling doesn’t really see the appeal, and she really doesn’t see why they’re coming to Coventry for the festival, but tickets sold out weeks ago, so she’s apparently in a minority there.
“So, just out of idle curiosity,” Maggie says, suddenly at Ling’s side where she’s watching the six person construction crew swarm across the metal struts that will eventually, please God, hold her stage, armed with drills and drivers and alarmingly large bolts. “Am I likely to get on that stage sometime today, or should I just take the lighting team and go home?”
Ling checks her watch – 4.30, and it won’t go dark for another five hours, if they’re lucky. So far the clouds are holding off, and the twice daily weather forecasts being texted to her phone seem to think this is going to last. She’d cross her fingers, if they weren’t currently occupied with a pen, a screwdriver, two clipboards and the ear piece of her headset, which has stopped talking to the head of site security, again. “Keep ‘em around,” she says, shoving the pen behind her ear so she can flip through the papers on the second clipboard. Somewhere, there’s a copy of the rehearsal schedule, she knows it.
“You do know that they don’t get paid if they go home, right?” Maggie persists. Her black hair is coming loose of the bandana tied round it, falling over her right eye. Ling’s fingers itch with wanting to push back, but she still doesn’t have a hand free. Also, Maggie will probably slap her if she tries. It’s what she did to their last artists’ caterer, which is why Ling spent three hours on the phone last night until she managed to bribe someone into taking it on.
“Yes, I know that they don’t get paid, and I know that I’ll have to pay them to stick around, but I’m banking on the fates smiling on us and the stage going up in the next hour, so it’ll be worth it.” She grins at Maggie, who just raises one eyebrow back. So much for female-bonding. She’s got a better chance with Jenni-with-an-i, who still thinks Ling speaks English as a second language after three weeks of explaining that no, really, her parents were born in Britain and so was she; she has an accent because she grew up in Yorkshire, not because she grew up in Beijing. “Seriously, we’ll be up and running in no time, and then you can put ladders wherever you like. I’ll even clear the stage for you for a couple of hours. Just don’t let your crew leave.”
“You’re in charge,” Maggie says, sounding like she finds this either deeply mystifying or deeply troubling. Possibly both.
“So they tell me,” Ling agrees, and heads over to sound to find someone to fix her ear piece, before she yells herself hoarse trying to get Jake’s attention.
*
It takes slightly more than the projected hour before the construction crew declare the stage fit for Ling to sign off on actually using it, but not so long that the sun’s started to set, so she’s totally calling it a win.
Standing up there, it’s hard to imagine that this will be the centre of a music festival in a couple of days. The chipboard needs painting black, the backdrop isn’t up yet, there’s nothing on the stage but a pile of drop cloths, and, fifty feet in front of the stage, traffic is slowing up to gawk at what they’re doing. The road’s being closed off for the actual day, but until then, they’re doing everything with an audience.
“Looks good to me,” she says to no-one in particular, and squints for Maggie’s red bandana. “Anyone seen the lighting crew?”
She gets well and truly ignored by everyone; apparently all it needed was a completed stage to get everyone moving, if the sudden air of intent work is anything to go by. Who knew?
She reaches round for the power pack to her ear piece, clipped at the back of her jeans where it won’t fall off, but also where she can’t really reach the talk button all that well. “Maggie? Yo, Maggie, you wanted on the stage –“
“Um, Ling?” Jake puts in, finally reconnected with the rest of her crew. “She left about twenty minutes ago, took all the lighting crew with her.”
“Of course she did,” Ling mutters, too quiet for the radio to pick up. “Okay, mate, thanks.”
One of the reasons that Ling keeps getting hired to work shows like these, where no-one’s worked together before and the pay is crap, is that she knows how to pull people into line. With that in mind, she gets out of the way of four guys with massive speakers, shuffles the two clipboards, additional ring-binder (which also doesn’t contain the rehearsal schedule), set of knitting needles (yeah, she doesn’t know either) and two pens into one arm, and digs out her mobile phone.
Maggie picks up on the second ring. “He-“
“Did I,” Ling says before she can get any further. “Or did I not, tell you to keep your crew here? Did I not say that we’d have the stage up in time for you to rig? Did I not say that you could have total access to it if necessary? Did I not mention that I’m in charge around here?”
“I thought –“ Maggie starts.
“And truly, there are days when I wish everyone around me would just let me do that for them,” Ling says, because it’s harsh but it’s also, God, so true. “Get your crew, get your gear, and get yourselves back to my damn staging ground in the next twenty minutes, or I swear to God, I will fire the lot of you and make the sound team rig my show from scratch.”
She snaps the phone closed before Maggie can do more than draw breath on the other end, and looks up to find ten different people staring at her from behind equipment. “Do you not have work to do?”
“Just taking a moment to appreciate a master craftsman at work,” Tim says, grinning.
“We all have our areas of expertise,” Ling says easily, offering a grin in return. “Admiration time’s over.”
She’s so deep in a debate over whether they can risk painting the stage when there’ll still be work to be done in the morning, that she doesn’t even register, ten minutes later, the return of the lighting crew. The first thing she notices is Maggie’s voice in her ear, saying, “Back in half the time, does that mean we get a bonus?”
She looks up, searching for the familiar flash of red, and finally spots Maggie up on stage, spot light in one hand, the other resting on the truss she’s about to climb up. She’s looking right at Ling and grinning, and it’s the first time she’s ever made a joke in Ling’s hearing.
“Rig it before dark and we’ll talk,” she says, and does not think about the kind of bonus she’d like to offer.
Apparently, the crew boys aren’t the only ones with a bit of a crush.
*
The thing is, Men With Ven may not be Ling’s thing, and they may not be at Take That (original version, not reunion) levels of fame, but they’re still the headline band for this thing. They’re four guys who must be ten years older than her, and in every picture of them, they’re wearing long black coats and serious expressions, and the worst thing is, all the arrangements have been made through their agent, so there’s literally no-one working the festival who’s ever met them. They could be absolute angels who like nothing more than a cup of tea and a Hobnob, dinner-time catering requirements notwithstanding, but she doubts it. For one thing, it’s such a pretentious name; she’s all for clever language jokes, but ‘ven’ doesn’t make her think ‘plural of van, like plural of man’, it makes her think ‘stop putting on that dumb faux-German accent.’
Of course, she’s not their target audience, just the woman who’s probably going to be the first person they meet when they rock up sometime tomorrow morning, given that the organizer has never yet shown up on time for anything. And she can admit it – she might have been doing this for six years, but she’s never comfortable around the artists until they’re on her stage and under her control, whether they see it that way or not.
Sadly, the presence of artists is a necessary evil when it comes to being a technical director, and at least there’s only four of them, not like the eighty-three-but-subject-to-change primary school kids she’s got coming in the week after next.
The day’s sliding rapidly towards dusk, most of the off-stage crew already gone for the night. Eventually they’ll have big free-standing lights around the site, but they’re being hired in, complete with their own installation team that isn’t coming until the morning, so Ling makes her rounds squinting slightly to avoid tripping on any trailing wires. She’s back to one clipboard, the rehearsal schedule having apparently gone the way of the dodo, sure to turn up three days after the festival starts; half a page of reminders scribbled on the back of the safety check certificate for the speakers, the list only getting longer:
The stage crew need another half hour to lock down the last of the equipment on stage, then they’re heading to the pub.
The backdrop is three inches too long, which they didn’t find out until they’d already hung it, so two kids from wardrobe are hemming it and trying not to trip anyone from sound.
The stage is being painted the next night, when no-one will be going up ladders or shoving around boxes; Ling can’t help thinking it might have been easier to paint then set, but who is she to argue with the whims of stage crew? They promise faithfully not to get black paint on any of the equipment.
Sound are doing the last of their wiring, then heading back to the base with half a dozen bits of kit that worked when we tested them earlier, swear, Ling. They assure her they’ll be in at first light to do the last of the wiring up, which is great in theory and a sign that Ling, too, will be in at first light in reality.
Jake and the night security guards are setting up around the site, including one guy who’s going to sit on the stage and guard their equipment or cover it up if the weather does break.
Give it forty-five minutes, and Ling can shut the site down for the night and go home.
“Twenty minutes?” Maggie says from the top of a lighting truss, holding a spot while Max fixes it in place, when Ling asks how long she needs. “Half an hour, tops, to finish rigging.”
“But?” Ling asks, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“I want to run a few sequences once it gets dark,” Maggie says, her mouth twisting in something that Ling might almost think was apology if she didn’t know better. Maggie doesn’t apologise for anything. “Just to check everything’s working okay.”
“And of course you couldn’t do it in the morning, when I have to be here anyway,” Ling mutters, stepping aside as Kevin barrels by with his arms full of cables. She’s seriously thinking of just bringing a sleeping bag down; the nights are generally warm, and she can catch a shower at the leisure centre on the other side of the square. “Fine. Great. Knock yourself out.”
She casts around for Nick, finally spotting him squinting at a sheaf of papers in the fading light.
“You’re in charge,” she tells him, dropping her clipboard on the edge of the stage and unclipping her headset. “I’m making a run to Sainsbury’s.”
She checks her back pocket for her wallet, and gives in to the inevitable: Diet Coke and Dairy Milk.
*
When she gets back, everyone’s clearly made use of her temporary absence to skip off for the night. She thinks about calling them all up and telling them to get their asses in for first light along with her and sound, but that sounds kind of tiring, and, if she’s honest, the people with stuff still to do will show up whether she yells or not.
Besides, she’s distracted by the light show playing out on her mostly-empty stage. She’s seen the plans for the lighting, of course, but she’s never really been great at visualising this stuff from diagrams and numbers. In reality, it looks great.
They’ve got ten spots on two trusses, cutting diagonally upstage, and Maggie’s got pattern filters running on them, stars on the right and spirals on the left, red and pink and the middle of both in blue so pale it’s nearly white. It totally shouldn’t work, but it totally does.
Something moves on the stage, making Ling check for Jake, deep in a paper cup of coffee ten feet away. The traffic’s died down now the work day is over, and the whole site is quite enough that she can hear the lights as they swivel.
Before she can send Jake up to check who’s there, Maggie steps out from behind a fixed truss, spanner in one hand, roll of duct tape in the other. Ling really hopes she hasn’t been doing anything with a spanner while all the lights are on.
“Someone there?” she calls, shading her eyes against the light.
Ling steps up to the edge of the stage where she knows Maggie will be able to see her. “Just me.”
She expects Maggie’s usual quick dismissal, but it doesn’t come. Instead, she crosses to where Ling’s standing and holds out a hand. “Want to come up?”
What Ling really wants is to go home and crash for a few hours before she has to come back, but this is the nicest Maggie’s ever been to her, and she doesn’t want it to stop. She grabs Maggie’s wrist and hauls herself up onto the stage, the real world disappearing under the dancing lights. “Shouldn’t there be someone controlling this?” she asks.
“Nah,” Maggie shrugs, taking Ling’s hand, still in hers, along for the ride. Ling waits for her to let go, but she doesn’t. “It’s all pre-programmed at this point. Just checking it looks okay.”
“From on-stage?” Ling asks, sceptical.
Maggie heads upstage, duct tape on her other wrist, Ling’s hand still in hers. Ling would almost believe she hasn’t noticed, but Maggie doesn’t touch anyone. She certainly doesn’t hold their hands, and Ling doesn’t really want to let go. Wants to know what’s coming, because the air, heated under the lights, is humming with anticipation. “I like to see what the performers are seeing,” she says.
And then she hops up to sit on one of the speakers, drawing Ling close between her legs and kissing her, full on the mouth, still holding her hand.
Ling’s like everyone else on the show, been wanting to do this since Maggie walked into the first planning meeting and ignored them all. She rests her hands on Maggie’s denim-covered thighs and kisses back and back and back.
“Mm.” Maggie breaks the kiss, sliding her mouth along Ling’s jaw as she shudders. “Been wanting to do that all evening.”
“All –“ Ling starts, then gets it. “Since I called you and yelled?”
Maggie nips at her skin, not quite hard enough to leave a mark. “That was so hot,” she mutters. “When I got back, you were all – all lit up, God, I wanted…”
Ling drags her back round, cuts her off with another kiss, warm and close and, yeah, okay, maybe she doesn’t need sleep after all. It’s dark round back of the stage, and Jake’s guys are professionals, they know not to come –
“Ling?” Jake asks, sounding awkward.
Or not.
She steps back from Maggie, shading her eyes in an attempt to see Jake against the lights. “Can you turn those off?” she asks, Maggie scrambling down immediately. “What’s up, Jake?”
Something clicks, and the lights swing round so they’re covering the first few feet in front of the stage, as well as Ling. Jake’s leaning one elbow on the staging, four guys standing behind him, looking up at Ling with expressions ranging from amused to carefully blank, hands tucked into the pockets of black coats, and she feels her stomach start to sink.
Jake grins. “I just thought you might like to know that Men With Ven are here.”
“A cat,” Ling echoes, looking over at him from her position at the head of the table. Well, as much as it can be called a position when the table is a battered chip board thing tucked in the furthest corner from the window, behind boxes of memorabilia stacked twelve high. One day, she’s going to hire on for a production that actually has money, one that isn’t being coordinated out of the backroom of a club tagged for demolition in a matter of weeks.
Today is not that day. She likes to think that tomorrow looks better; sadly, the slogan ‘today is not your day; tomorrow doesn’t look good either’ could have been written about her life.
“Shouldn’t you have, like, pointed ears and a tail and shit?” Marcus asks, unwinding from his curl in a chair that really isn’t made for curling and leaning across the table to poke at Nick’s thick black hair, covering his decidedly non-pointed ears.
Nick bats his hand away with a flick of one finger that reminds Ling of nothing so much as a cat batting away a fly. She decides to keep this observation to herself. “Not a literal cat,” he says, rolling his eyes in the direction of Maggie, head of their lighting crew and the lust object of half the straight male members of the stage crew. Ling kind of gets it: Maggie’s t-shirt is a fraction too tight, and she hefts bits of lighting rig across the half-built stage like they’re nothing, and she doesn’t talk to any of them. Without any actresses around to do the ignoring, Maggie’s slid into that roll like she belongs there. “A figurative cat. Like, no worries, no stress, I’m a cat. Chilled out.”
Ling thinks seriously for a minute of asking what the hell he’s been smoking, and why he’s been doing it before the tech heads meeting. On the other hand, what she doesn’t know, she can’t be asked to testify about in court. “Great. So glad we had this little diversion.” She uses her pen to nudge her glasses back up her nose rather than peering over them like a pissed off school teacher. “But this show opens in three days, the first bands are coming in to start rehearsal *tomorrow*, and we don’t even have a complete stage yet. So a few less cats and a few more –“
“Dogs?” Marcus offers. “Faithful, willing, always friendly?”
“Elephants?” Tom adds, looking up from the list of the backing groups’ requirements for once. “Good at heavy lifting.”
“Mice?” Nick puts in, apparently keeping up the cat-related metaphor he’s got going.
“People!” Ling’s hands jerk up without her conscious intention. “Hard-working, dedicated, efficient –“
Marcus snorts his derision, and Jenni-with-an-i from wardrobe starts laughing, and Ling puts her head down on the cracked table, giving up.
*
Men With Ven are headlining the opening weekend of the city’s Summer Months of Music Festival, as much as it’s possible to headline a festival that includes no less than four different performances from local school choirs, and they’re most of the reason for Ling’s stress levels hitting points not seen since the last days before finals, six years ago. She’s not quite hit the point where she starts living on Diet Coke and Dairy Milk, for the caffeine and the sugar, but she knows that day can’t be far away. If they don’t get the stage up before dark, that day will be today.
She’d never even heard of MWV until she got hired on as the technical director for the event, at which point she hit youtube and myspace, link-hopping through the blogs of a dozen different people who prided themselves on loving such an obscure indie-rock-punk-glam-kind-of-country-if-it’s-Tuesday group. Ling doesn’t really see the appeal, and she really doesn’t see why they’re coming to Coventry for the festival, but tickets sold out weeks ago, so she’s apparently in a minority there.
“So, just out of idle curiosity,” Maggie says, suddenly at Ling’s side where she’s watching the six person construction crew swarm across the metal struts that will eventually, please God, hold her stage, armed with drills and drivers and alarmingly large bolts. “Am I likely to get on that stage sometime today, or should I just take the lighting team and go home?”
Ling checks her watch – 4.30, and it won’t go dark for another five hours, if they’re lucky. So far the clouds are holding off, and the twice daily weather forecasts being texted to her phone seem to think this is going to last. She’d cross her fingers, if they weren’t currently occupied with a pen, a screwdriver, two clipboards and the ear piece of her headset, which has stopped talking to the head of site security, again. “Keep ‘em around,” she says, shoving the pen behind her ear so she can flip through the papers on the second clipboard. Somewhere, there’s a copy of the rehearsal schedule, she knows it.
“You do know that they don’t get paid if they go home, right?” Maggie persists. Her black hair is coming loose of the bandana tied round it, falling over her right eye. Ling’s fingers itch with wanting to push back, but she still doesn’t have a hand free. Also, Maggie will probably slap her if she tries. It’s what she did to their last artists’ caterer, which is why Ling spent three hours on the phone last night until she managed to bribe someone into taking it on.
“Yes, I know that they don’t get paid, and I know that I’ll have to pay them to stick around, but I’m banking on the fates smiling on us and the stage going up in the next hour, so it’ll be worth it.” She grins at Maggie, who just raises one eyebrow back. So much for female-bonding. She’s got a better chance with Jenni-with-an-i, who still thinks Ling speaks English as a second language after three weeks of explaining that no, really, her parents were born in Britain and so was she; she has an accent because she grew up in Yorkshire, not because she grew up in Beijing. “Seriously, we’ll be up and running in no time, and then you can put ladders wherever you like. I’ll even clear the stage for you for a couple of hours. Just don’t let your crew leave.”
“You’re in charge,” Maggie says, sounding like she finds this either deeply mystifying or deeply troubling. Possibly both.
“So they tell me,” Ling agrees, and heads over to sound to find someone to fix her ear piece, before she yells herself hoarse trying to get Jake’s attention.
*
It takes slightly more than the projected hour before the construction crew declare the stage fit for Ling to sign off on actually using it, but not so long that the sun’s started to set, so she’s totally calling it a win.
Standing up there, it’s hard to imagine that this will be the centre of a music festival in a couple of days. The chipboard needs painting black, the backdrop isn’t up yet, there’s nothing on the stage but a pile of drop cloths, and, fifty feet in front of the stage, traffic is slowing up to gawk at what they’re doing. The road’s being closed off for the actual day, but until then, they’re doing everything with an audience.
“Looks good to me,” she says to no-one in particular, and squints for Maggie’s red bandana. “Anyone seen the lighting crew?”
She gets well and truly ignored by everyone; apparently all it needed was a completed stage to get everyone moving, if the sudden air of intent work is anything to go by. Who knew?
She reaches round for the power pack to her ear piece, clipped at the back of her jeans where it won’t fall off, but also where she can’t really reach the talk button all that well. “Maggie? Yo, Maggie, you wanted on the stage –“
“Um, Ling?” Jake puts in, finally reconnected with the rest of her crew. “She left about twenty minutes ago, took all the lighting crew with her.”
“Of course she did,” Ling mutters, too quiet for the radio to pick up. “Okay, mate, thanks.”
One of the reasons that Ling keeps getting hired to work shows like these, where no-one’s worked together before and the pay is crap, is that she knows how to pull people into line. With that in mind, she gets out of the way of four guys with massive speakers, shuffles the two clipboards, additional ring-binder (which also doesn’t contain the rehearsal schedule), set of knitting needles (yeah, she doesn’t know either) and two pens into one arm, and digs out her mobile phone.
Maggie picks up on the second ring. “He-“
“Did I,” Ling says before she can get any further. “Or did I not, tell you to keep your crew here? Did I not say that we’d have the stage up in time for you to rig? Did I not say that you could have total access to it if necessary? Did I not mention that I’m in charge around here?”
“I thought –“ Maggie starts.
“And truly, there are days when I wish everyone around me would just let me do that for them,” Ling says, because it’s harsh but it’s also, God, so true. “Get your crew, get your gear, and get yourselves back to my damn staging ground in the next twenty minutes, or I swear to God, I will fire the lot of you and make the sound team rig my show from scratch.”
She snaps the phone closed before Maggie can do more than draw breath on the other end, and looks up to find ten different people staring at her from behind equipment. “Do you not have work to do?”
“Just taking a moment to appreciate a master craftsman at work,” Tim says, grinning.
“We all have our areas of expertise,” Ling says easily, offering a grin in return. “Admiration time’s over.”
She’s so deep in a debate over whether they can risk painting the stage when there’ll still be work to be done in the morning, that she doesn’t even register, ten minutes later, the return of the lighting crew. The first thing she notices is Maggie’s voice in her ear, saying, “Back in half the time, does that mean we get a bonus?”
She looks up, searching for the familiar flash of red, and finally spots Maggie up on stage, spot light in one hand, the other resting on the truss she’s about to climb up. She’s looking right at Ling and grinning, and it’s the first time she’s ever made a joke in Ling’s hearing.
“Rig it before dark and we’ll talk,” she says, and does not think about the kind of bonus she’d like to offer.
Apparently, the crew boys aren’t the only ones with a bit of a crush.
*
The thing is, Men With Ven may not be Ling’s thing, and they may not be at Take That (original version, not reunion) levels of fame, but they’re still the headline band for this thing. They’re four guys who must be ten years older than her, and in every picture of them, they’re wearing long black coats and serious expressions, and the worst thing is, all the arrangements have been made through their agent, so there’s literally no-one working the festival who’s ever met them. They could be absolute angels who like nothing more than a cup of tea and a Hobnob, dinner-time catering requirements notwithstanding, but she doubts it. For one thing, it’s such a pretentious name; she’s all for clever language jokes, but ‘ven’ doesn’t make her think ‘plural of van, like plural of man’, it makes her think ‘stop putting on that dumb faux-German accent.’
Of course, she’s not their target audience, just the woman who’s probably going to be the first person they meet when they rock up sometime tomorrow morning, given that the organizer has never yet shown up on time for anything. And she can admit it – she might have been doing this for six years, but she’s never comfortable around the artists until they’re on her stage and under her control, whether they see it that way or not.
Sadly, the presence of artists is a necessary evil when it comes to being a technical director, and at least there’s only four of them, not like the eighty-three-but-subject-to-change primary school kids she’s got coming in the week after next.
The day’s sliding rapidly towards dusk, most of the off-stage crew already gone for the night. Eventually they’ll have big free-standing lights around the site, but they’re being hired in, complete with their own installation team that isn’t coming until the morning, so Ling makes her rounds squinting slightly to avoid tripping on any trailing wires. She’s back to one clipboard, the rehearsal schedule having apparently gone the way of the dodo, sure to turn up three days after the festival starts; half a page of reminders scribbled on the back of the safety check certificate for the speakers, the list only getting longer:
The stage crew need another half hour to lock down the last of the equipment on stage, then they’re heading to the pub.
The backdrop is three inches too long, which they didn’t find out until they’d already hung it, so two kids from wardrobe are hemming it and trying not to trip anyone from sound.
The stage is being painted the next night, when no-one will be going up ladders or shoving around boxes; Ling can’t help thinking it might have been easier to paint then set, but who is she to argue with the whims of stage crew? They promise faithfully not to get black paint on any of the equipment.
Sound are doing the last of their wiring, then heading back to the base with half a dozen bits of kit that worked when we tested them earlier, swear, Ling. They assure her they’ll be in at first light to do the last of the wiring up, which is great in theory and a sign that Ling, too, will be in at first light in reality.
Jake and the night security guards are setting up around the site, including one guy who’s going to sit on the stage and guard their equipment or cover it up if the weather does break.
Give it forty-five minutes, and Ling can shut the site down for the night and go home.
“Twenty minutes?” Maggie says from the top of a lighting truss, holding a spot while Max fixes it in place, when Ling asks how long she needs. “Half an hour, tops, to finish rigging.”
“But?” Ling asks, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“I want to run a few sequences once it gets dark,” Maggie says, her mouth twisting in something that Ling might almost think was apology if she didn’t know better. Maggie doesn’t apologise for anything. “Just to check everything’s working okay.”
“And of course you couldn’t do it in the morning, when I have to be here anyway,” Ling mutters, stepping aside as Kevin barrels by with his arms full of cables. She’s seriously thinking of just bringing a sleeping bag down; the nights are generally warm, and she can catch a shower at the leisure centre on the other side of the square. “Fine. Great. Knock yourself out.”
She casts around for Nick, finally spotting him squinting at a sheaf of papers in the fading light.
“You’re in charge,” she tells him, dropping her clipboard on the edge of the stage and unclipping her headset. “I’m making a run to Sainsbury’s.”
She checks her back pocket for her wallet, and gives in to the inevitable: Diet Coke and Dairy Milk.
*
When she gets back, everyone’s clearly made use of her temporary absence to skip off for the night. She thinks about calling them all up and telling them to get their asses in for first light along with her and sound, but that sounds kind of tiring, and, if she’s honest, the people with stuff still to do will show up whether she yells or not.
Besides, she’s distracted by the light show playing out on her mostly-empty stage. She’s seen the plans for the lighting, of course, but she’s never really been great at visualising this stuff from diagrams and numbers. In reality, it looks great.
They’ve got ten spots on two trusses, cutting diagonally upstage, and Maggie’s got pattern filters running on them, stars on the right and spirals on the left, red and pink and the middle of both in blue so pale it’s nearly white. It totally shouldn’t work, but it totally does.
Something moves on the stage, making Ling check for Jake, deep in a paper cup of coffee ten feet away. The traffic’s died down now the work day is over, and the whole site is quite enough that she can hear the lights as they swivel.
Before she can send Jake up to check who’s there, Maggie steps out from behind a fixed truss, spanner in one hand, roll of duct tape in the other. Ling really hopes she hasn’t been doing anything with a spanner while all the lights are on.
“Someone there?” she calls, shading her eyes against the light.
Ling steps up to the edge of the stage where she knows Maggie will be able to see her. “Just me.”
She expects Maggie’s usual quick dismissal, but it doesn’t come. Instead, she crosses to where Ling’s standing and holds out a hand. “Want to come up?”
What Ling really wants is to go home and crash for a few hours before she has to come back, but this is the nicest Maggie’s ever been to her, and she doesn’t want it to stop. She grabs Maggie’s wrist and hauls herself up onto the stage, the real world disappearing under the dancing lights. “Shouldn’t there be someone controlling this?” she asks.
“Nah,” Maggie shrugs, taking Ling’s hand, still in hers, along for the ride. Ling waits for her to let go, but she doesn’t. “It’s all pre-programmed at this point. Just checking it looks okay.”
“From on-stage?” Ling asks, sceptical.
Maggie heads upstage, duct tape on her other wrist, Ling’s hand still in hers. Ling would almost believe she hasn’t noticed, but Maggie doesn’t touch anyone. She certainly doesn’t hold their hands, and Ling doesn’t really want to let go. Wants to know what’s coming, because the air, heated under the lights, is humming with anticipation. “I like to see what the performers are seeing,” she says.
And then she hops up to sit on one of the speakers, drawing Ling close between her legs and kissing her, full on the mouth, still holding her hand.
Ling’s like everyone else on the show, been wanting to do this since Maggie walked into the first planning meeting and ignored them all. She rests her hands on Maggie’s denim-covered thighs and kisses back and back and back.
“Mm.” Maggie breaks the kiss, sliding her mouth along Ling’s jaw as she shudders. “Been wanting to do that all evening.”
“All –“ Ling starts, then gets it. “Since I called you and yelled?”
Maggie nips at her skin, not quite hard enough to leave a mark. “That was so hot,” she mutters. “When I got back, you were all – all lit up, God, I wanted…”
Ling drags her back round, cuts her off with another kiss, warm and close and, yeah, okay, maybe she doesn’t need sleep after all. It’s dark round back of the stage, and Jake’s guys are professionals, they know not to come –
“Ling?” Jake asks, sounding awkward.
Or not.
She steps back from Maggie, shading her eyes in an attempt to see Jake against the lights. “Can you turn those off?” she asks, Maggie scrambling down immediately. “What’s up, Jake?”
Something clicks, and the lights swing round so they’re covering the first few feet in front of the stage, as well as Ling. Jake’s leaning one elbow on the staging, four guys standing behind him, looking up at Ling with expressions ranging from amused to carefully blank, hands tucked into the pockets of black coats, and she feels her stomach start to sink.
Jake grins. “I just thought you might like to know that Men With Ven are here.”
