Five Minutes to Curtain

Source written for Revision Library (original, copyright-free). Fictional narrative created for 11+ comprehension practice.

Zainab Hussain had never known backstage could feel this loud in the dark. During the interval, the narrow corridor behind the wings filled with hurried footsteps, hissed instructions and the clatter of costume rails being wheeled into position for Act Two, while beyond the heavy velvet curtain the audience's chatter rose and fell like a tide she could not see. It was opening night of The Star Thief at Northgate Community Theatre, and Zainab, eleven years old and only one week into her very first job as a props assistant, still could not quite believe she was allowed to be here at all.

'Fifteen minutes,' called Mrs Adeyemi, the stage manager, without looking up from her clipboard. She had run the technical side of every Northgate production for longer than Zainab had been alive, and her calm, steady voice cut cleanly through the backstage chaos, a fixed point among all the hurry. 'Zainab, check every prop on this list against the table before Act Two starts. Nothing missing, nothing broken. Can you manage on your own for ten minutes? I have a costume disaster in the dressing room that will not mend itself.'

Zainab nodded, though her stomach had knotted itself tight with nerves. She had wanted exactly this kind of responsibility all week, ever since Mrs Adeyemi had first let her carry the prop box unsupervised, and she was not about to admit, on opening night of all nights, that the list of seven items now trembling slightly in her hands felt heavier than it looked.

The theatre itself was ninety-two years old, built in 1934, and much of what happened backstage still relied on the same rope-and-pulley systems installed when the building first opened. Nowhere was this more true than the trapdoor set into the centre of the stage, used in Act Two for the villain's dramatic vanishing trick, which was worked entirely by a single counterweight rope running up through the flies above the stage.

Zainab worked steadily down her list: the brass telescope, the folded star map, the tin lantern, the coil of silver rope, the wooden treasure chest, the glass compass, and the cloak lined with painted stars. Six items sat exactly where they should, each one checked and ticked off with satisfying precision. It was only as she reached for the seventh, tucked behind a stack of storage crates beside the trapdoor, that she noticed something else entirely.

The trapdoor's counterweight rope, thick as her wrist and usually smooth with age, had frayed almost through at one point, no more than a few threads holding the full weight of the mechanism together. Zainab crouched and touched it carefully, and a handful of loose fibres came away beneath her fingers like the last threads of an old jumper.

Her first thought was to find Mrs Adeyemi immediately, but the stage manager's voice was still audible from the dressing room corridor, tight with its own crisis, and the clock above the props table already read eight minutes to curtain. If the rope gave way mid-performance, with an actor standing on the trapdoor, the consequences did not bear thinking about. If she stopped the trick altogether without warning anyone, the whole carefully rehearsed scene would collapse in front of a packed house.

Zainab forced herself to think, rather than panic. She had spent three Saturday rehearsals watching the theatre's retired technician, old Mr Bellweather, explain exactly how the counterweight system worked, tracing the rope's path with his finger until she could have drawn the whole mechanism from memory. A spare coil of matching rope, she remembered, was kept precisely for emergencies, coiled on a hook just inside the props store.

She fetched it at a run, her heart hammering somewhere near her throat, and set to work exactly as Mr Bellweather had once shown her, threading the new rope through the pulley, tying it off with the same double, load-bearing knot he had made her practise until her fingers ached. Her hands were shaking, but she did not let herself stop to notice.

The two-minute call sounded through the tannoy just as Zainab tied the final knot and tugged it twice, hard, to test it. The rope held firm. Around her, the corridor emptied as the cast took their places, and somewhere beyond the curtain the house lights began, very slowly, to dim.

Ravi Okafor, who played the villainous Lord Vane and would be standing directly on the trapdoor within the next ten minutes, jogged past without a second glance, already muttering his opening lines under his breath. He had no idea how close his vanishing trick had come to vanishing for entirely the wrong reasons.

Act Two went perfectly. When Lord Vane's cloak swept dramatically over the trapdoor and he dropped from sight in a puff of stage smoke, the audience gasped, exactly as they were meant to, and Zainab, watching from the wings with her checklist still clutched in one hand, allowed herself, finally, to breathe out properly for what felt like the first time in twenty minutes.

Afterwards, Mrs Adeyemi found the old, frayed rope coiled neatly on the props table, exactly where Zainab had left it as evidence, with a note explaining what she had done. The stage manager said nothing for a long moment, turning the worn rope over in her hands, before looking up at Zainab with an expression she could not quite read.

'You should have come and got me,' she said at last, though her voice had none of its earlier sharpness. 'But you fixed it properly, and you fixed it in time, and I am not sure I could have done it faster myself.' She paused. 'Same time next Saturday, Zainab. I think this job suits you.'

Zainab said nothing, but as she carried her checklist back towards the props table, she found she was smiling in a way she could not quite stop, and the noise of the audience beyond the curtain, applauding a trick they would never know had almost gone wrong, no longer sounded like a tide she could not see, but like something she was, at last, quietly and properly a part of.