It began with a single note. One low, humming note from a forbidden piano, and from that afternoon on I was a trespasser.

The Regent Theatre had stood at the top of our town for as long as anyone could remember, its doors boarded over, its posters faded to ghosts behind cracked glass. Walking home from school, I used to stare wistfully up at it and imagine the shows that must once have played there. Then, one blowy October afternoon, I saw that the little stage door in the side alley had swung open on a broken hinge, and I stepped inside without stopping to think.

What I found was a place of vast crumbling grandeur. Nobody had bought a ticket at the Regent for thirty years (nobody had swept its steps in all that time, either), and the neglect did not stop at the building. The small garden square in front of the theatre had been surrendered to nettles and bindweed, and its iron railings wore thick coats of rust.

The theatre crowned the hill, its front facing the market square, so that from the round window of the upper foyer you could see the whole town spread out below: rooftops, chimneys, the grey ribbon of the river. Backstage, the wardrobe rail groaned under its load of velvet cloaks and sequinned gowns. Behind the building, walled in on three sides, lay a tiny courtyard where the air always hung still and warm, out of reach of the wind. To me the whole place was a treasure box — gilded balconies, golden tassels on the great curtain, and, wherever my torch beam wandered, glints of emerald carpet beneath the dust.

You might think that, after so many visits, I would have made myself at home. I never quite did. I tiptoed down the aisles, spoke only in whispers, and closed every door softly behind me, as though the theatre disliked being disturbed and might take offence at any rudeness.

The auditorium should have been a dismal place. The seats of the stalls slept under grey dust sheets; the boarded windows kept the foyer in permanent dusk; my torch stirred up slow clouds of dust wherever it turned; and over everything lay a patient, waiting sadness. And yet, to me, it felt kind. The Regent was like a great ship resting in harbour, waiting for its crew to come home.

Our flat above the bakery was never quiet — the radio, my three brothers, the clatter of trays from four in the morning — and somehow all that noise still left me feeling invisible. In the Regent, where I was more alone than anywhere else on earth, I never felt invisible at all. I would sit at the grand piano in the centre of the stage and play to the empty rows, daydreaming that the seats were filling up, row after row, with an audience in their best clothes. For two whole terms after that first note, I came back nearly every day. Slowly, the old building and I became something like friends.

Then came the Friday of the storm — the day I first heard them.

All afternoon the rain lashed the high roof, and the wind battered the boarded windows until the whole building seemed to tremble. I was at the piano, deep inside a waltz I had almost mastered, and the storm swallowed every other sound. It was only when I lifted my hands from the keys that I heard it.

Voices.

Not the wind. Not the rain. Voices, down in the foyer.

Somebody was in the theatre. Somebody had come back at last.

I sat frozen on the piano stool, my last chord still fading in the air. Footsteps crossed the foyer. Footsteps started up the centre aisle towards the stage. Nearer. Nearer still.

Then the beam of a stranger's torch swept across the stage — and stopped on me.

Glossary
foyer: the entrance hall of a theatre or cinema
stalls: the seats on the ground floor of a theatre
bindweed: a fast-growing climbing weed