urgently at the boards overhead.
"You mean Corporal Nobbs? The little ... man with the spots?" said Sally.
"We"re not under a Watch House, are we?" said Angua, looking around in panic.
"I don"t think so. Someone"s dancing, by the sound of it. But look, how can you smell one human in the middle of all ... this?"
"It never leaves you, believe me." The smells of old cabbage, acne ointment and non-malignant skin disease became transmuted, in Corporal Nobbs, into a strange odour that lay across the nose like a saw blade on a harp. It wasn"t bad as such, but it was like its host: strange, ubiquitous and hellishly difficult to forget.
"Well, he"s a fellow officer, isn"t he? Won"t he help us?" said Sally.
"We are naked, lance-constable!"
"Only technically. This mud really sticks.
"I mean underneath the mud!" said Angua.
"Yes, but if we had clothes on we"d be naked underneath them, too!" Sally pointed out.
"This is not the time for logic! This is the time for not seeing Nobby grinning at me!"
"But he"s seen you when you"re wolf-shaped, hasn"t he?" said Sally. "So?" snapped Angua.
"Well, technically you"re naked then, aren"t you?"
"Never tell him that!"
Nobby Nobbs, a shadow in the warm red gloom, nudged Sergeant Colon.
"You don"t have to keep your eyes shut, sarge," he said. "It"s all legit.
It"s an artistic celebration of the female body, Tawneee says. Anyway, she"s got clothes on."
"Two tassels and a folded hanky is not clothes, Nobby," said Fred, sinking down in his seat. The Pink PussyCat! Now, fair"s fair, he"d been in the army and Watch and you couldn"t spend all that time in uniform without seeing a thing or two - or three, now he came to recollect - and it was true, as Nobby had pointed out, that the ballerinas down at the opera house didn"t leave a lot to the imagination, at least not to Nobby"s, but when all was said and done ballet had to be Art even though it was a bit short on plinths and urns, on account of being expensive to look at, and moreover ballerinas didn"t whizz around upside down. And the worst of it was, he"d already spotted two people he knew in the audience. Fortunately they hadn"t seen him, which was to say that whenever he"d sneaked a glance their way they were looking in completely the opposite direction.
"Now this bit is really hard," whispered Nobby conversationally.
"Er ... is it?" Fred Colon closed his eyes again.
"Oh, yes. It"s the Triple Corkscrew-"
"Look, don"t the management object to you coming in here?" Fred managed, shifting even further down in his seat.
"Oh, no. They like having a watchman in, "said Nobby, still watching the stage. "They say it makes people behave. Anyway, I only come in so"s I can walk Betty home."
"Betty being - ?"
"Tawneee"s actually only her pole name," Nobby said. "She says no one would be interested in an exotic dancer with a name like Betty. She says it sounds like she"d be better with a bowl of cake mixture."
Colon shut his eyes, trying to banish a mental conjunction of the bronzed lithe figure on stage and a bowl of cake mixture. "I think I could do with a breath of fresh air," he groaned.
"Oh, not yet, sarge. Broccolee"s on next. She can touch the back of her head with her foot, you know-"
"I don"t believe that!" said Fred Colon.
"She can, sarge, I"ve seen-"
"I don"t believe there"s a dancer called Broccoli!"