The bars over a stage carry scenery and lights and are flown in and out on counterweights, and a load cell on each one reads what it carries because an overloaded bar is a killed actor. Bar seventeen is empty. It comes in every night at two, to head height, slowly, under control, the way a bar is brought in by somebody on the rope, and its load cell reads eighty kilos, and it goes out again, and the rope has not moved.
I am the head flyman at a theatre with forty counterweight bars, and I have my hands on the ropes for every one of them, except one.
The flies.
Forty steel bars over the stage on wire, each balanced by a cradle of weights, each brought in and out by a rope on the fly floor, which is a gallery up the side wall. A load cell on each bar reads what is on it, and the reading is on a screen by the ropes, because a bar that is loaded on the stage without the weights being changed on the floor will run away and kill somebody, and has, in other buildings.
Bar seventeen is empty. There is nothing on it. It reads zero, all day.
At two it reads eighty and comes in.
The move.
Slow. The speed a bar comes in at when a flyman has it on the rope and is letting it down under control, hand over hand. It stops at about two metres off the deck, which is the height you bring a bar in to for somebody to work on it standing. The load cell reads eighty kilos, on an empty bar. The bar hangs there for about a minute and goes back out, at the same speed, to its dead, and the cell reads zero.
The rope on the fly floor, on the camera up there, does not move. The rope lock is on. The cradle of weights on the other side, which would have to move for the bar to move, does not move.
The bar moves.
What has been checked.
The cell, replaced. The bar, taken down and inspected and put back. The wire, the pulleys, the cradle, the lock. All in order. The bar comes in at two with eighty kilos on it.
The stage, at two, by me. Bar seventeen comes in above me. I can hear the pulleys. It stops at head height, in front of me, and it is a bare steel bar with the weight of a man on it, by the screen on the fly floor, and I put my hand up and touched it, and it was warm, along its length, the way steel is warm when somebody has been holding it.
Who.
I did not have to ask. Every flyman in the country knows the story of this building, because it is told on the first day of the job. Nineteen sixty something, a flyman on this floor, on this bar, seventeen, had gone out onto it. Not for a reason anybody was told. Out along the bar, from the fly floor, over the stage, twelve metres up, which nobody should and which some of them used to, to free a snag or to show off, and the bar had been loaded and unweighted and it had run, with him on it, to the deck.
He was eighty kilos or so. They all were.
What is done about it.
Seventeen is on the register as out of use. It is marked with a tag on the rope. Nothing is ever flown on it. The two o'clock move is logged as a cell fault and the inspection company has signed it off three years running as no fault found, because there is none.
What I do.
I run the flies.
I go up to the floor at two. I stand at seventeen's rope, with the lock on. When the bar starts to come in I put my hands on the rope, as a flyman does when taking a bar that somebody else has started, and I feel it come through my hands. It does not move. I feel it move. Hand over hand, the weight of a man coming down under control, and I let it, and when it is at head height I hold it, and I say, hold there, which is what you say, and I hold it a minute, and I say, taking it out, and I let it go back up, and the rope has not moved in my hands and my hands are burned the way they are from a rope.
I think he is landing it. I think a man who went out on a bar and rode it into the deck has been trying ever since to bring it in properly, on the rope, under control, from the floor, the way he was taught, and that he could not, because you cannot do that from the bar. And I think that what he needed was a flyman on the rope with him, and I am the flyman, and I take the bar, and it comes in slow, and it lands at head height where it should, and nobody is on it, and I take it out.
Some nights the cell reads seventy. Sixty. It is going down. I think there will be a night when it comes in reading zero, empty, an ordinary bar, and I will land it, and I will say, that's seventeen dead, which is what you say when a bar is out and safe, and I will take the tag off the rope.