Juliet in drag

The Dying Duck used to be on the high road, at Anselm's Corner, but then they changed the road layout a little, and now it's on the short-cut between the high road and the old Croydon road.  The traffic going past has gone up by about 400% and the number of HGV's has quadrupled as well.  Donovan, the proprietor of the Dying Duck, talks moodily about the number of people on the council who don't like him, but he's not about to close the pub down.  Despite the 'new' location, despite the increase in traffic, and despite the fact that the toilets usually break at about 9pm every evening, he's got a full house most nights, and has to turn people away when the drag act is on.
The drag act is called Juliet.  She's tall, thin, cycles a lot, and absolutely no-one in the Dying Duck believes that she's anything other than a woman.  Donovan even complains now and then, usually to drunks at the bar, that if she's supposed to be a drag act he'd like to see in her drag sometime.  "Even if it's just one of those nineteen-twenties Lesbian suit things," he said.  "Like the missus used to wear when I'd gone and annoyed her again."
Donovan's missus is a woman of legend, not least because none of us have ever even seen her, let alone met her.  Donovan clearly can't run the pub by himself, and someone is definitely changing the barrels over of an evening, and cooking the pub menu (available between 5 and 7:30 only; chips are served in the house style and if you don't like it you can get out), but somehow they manage to stay invisible.  Now and then he refers to her in the past tense, but that soon passes and she's present in everything but body again before long.
Juliet strode onto the stage, two strides enough to take her to the centre, where the microphone was waiting.  She checked it, and found that as usual, it was unplugged.  She cursed, a string of blue-tinged epithets that could wake a sailor from his grave to stare and take surreptitious notes, and strode off stage again to plug it in.  No-one groaned, but there was that feeling in the air.  Juliet can't sing, but she feels that a drag act has to have at least one song in it, and despite all the hints that have been dropped over the last few years, continues to plug the microphone in and subject us to whatever she thinks is right for the night.  Lately it's been Harry Connick Jr, but I've been switching her sheet music for Tom Waites every chance I get.  I think there's at least some match between their voices.  She strode back on to the stage, and tapped the microphone, which popped obligingly, explosively.
"Lay-deez and Gennel-men," she slurred, "Welcome to the Dying Duck.  I shall be your whore for tonight, and you may call me... Juliet in Drag!"  There was a scattering of applause, which quickly cut off as she launched into "Autumn in New York."
Three minutes later and she halted, and the audience slowly, ready to reverse their movements at the hint of another song, pulled their fingers from their ears.
"I know," she said, sounding slightly more drunk than usual, "my singing's so astonishing that sometimes people forget to clap until the end of the next song."  I smiled; someone, somewhere laughed (sounding relieved), and she started in on the jokes, acid observational humour, and occasional embarrassing anecdote.
"Who is she?" said a man next to me, apparently talking to me.  I looked at him in case this was his opening line to start chatting me up: he was slightly shorter than me, besuited and be-booted, with a little Charlie Chaplin moustache that must take twenties minutes care every morning.  It looked waxed.
"She's Juliet," I said.  "She's the drag act."
"She's astonishing," he said, and I nodded carefully, wondering if he was talking casually or precisely.  'Do you know if she's got representation?"
"She definitely represents," I said, hiding a half-smile by reaching up to scratch my nose, "But if you're asking after her management, I think you'd have to talk to her herself."
"Right.  Where's her dressing room?"
I checked my watch, it was half-past eight.  I reckoned the toilets would break before she left the stage, so she'd have to get changed round the back in what used to be a beer garden before Donovan decided he'd go all Time Team on it.
"I'd just take her elbow as she leaves the stage, mate," I said.  "Carefully though, it's sharp and she knows how to use it."
He looked a little blank, and I started to wonder if he was in the right place.  "Who are you, friend?" I asked, squeezing his bum gently by way of a hint.  It was completely lacking in muscle tone, and he flinched like I'd goosed him.
"I'm Romeo," he said.  "Romeo Malparaisant.  I –"
"Went to school with Simon Cowell!" I forgot myself and squeezed his bum again, and regretted it again.  "I hope you bullied him."
"How... how do you know that?"
I was saved from answering by Juliet shocking the life out of me, so much so that I actually fell backwards and had to be caught by a fireman I had no idea was standing behind me.  While I was trying to find an excuse not to stand up without his help again, Juliet finished her announcement.
"...to conclude this evening I'm trying a new song: Romeo is Bleeding, by Waiting Tom."
"So close," I murmured, and the fireman, misunderstanding, pulled me in.
As Juliet finally sang a song whose extent matched her vocal range, Romeo Malparaisant headed to the stage to try and make a star of her, and I swooned a little more dramatically than I really needed to.  Somewhere behind the bar Donovan dropped what sounded like a dishwasher tray full of glasses, and what could only the voice of his legendary wife boomed down the stairs demanding to know what idiocy he'd done this time.
It was, by far, the strangest night ever at the Dying Duck.

Short fat Romeo

He was a short, fat Romeo, stood outside a tenement block whose residents were once all on welfare, shouting up at a rusted iron balcony. I couldn't understand what he was saying; the echoes on the estate distorted his whiny little voice, and the roar of traffic in the distance was still trying to lull me to sleep. I suspected he was calling out a name, trying to summon a friend, or at the very least an acquaintance, to hang around with him until it was dark enough to sneak back into his mother's flat and hope she was too drunk to care. There was no response from the balcony, not even a response from the tenements. I wondered briefly if perhaps he was calling for someone who'd lived there before everyone died, and then wondered for longer why I cared.
When did everyone die, and why hadn't I remembered that before? The thought stuck in my head like a soldier ant stuck in amber, angry and pulsing, trying to get free. Everyone had died, there'd been a chemical leak from the plant a half-mile away. A great invisible cloud of gas had gone up, floated along a little way, and then come down again as it reacted with water in the atmosphere. It had descended like a heavy wet sponge and suffocated the life out of everyone in the building.
Short fat Romeo was shouting again, longer sentences this time, but still too distorted to understand. I opened my eyes at last, looking up at a cracked ceiling. Cockroaches skittered across it, and for a moment I was confused, and then I remembered that I was lying on the ceiling and the cockroaches were skittering on the floor. My hand, the one that still worked and wasn't black and swollen, scrabbled at my chest and found the restraining strap. It released it, and I fell to the floor, squashing a cockroach or two, but more of them survived. Another rib cracked.
Short fat Romeo was shouting louder now, his voice stronger, and I started at last to recognise the words. Immediately I wished I hadn't; he was shouting in Enochian, the language of the angels, and I understood that he was beseeching Metatron.
It wasn't Metatron who answered, there's been no direct route to the angels from this part of London in over fifty years, but something did; something caused a cloud like a stink of swamp gas to lift from the ground and let oxygen bleed back in. Something prowled the rooms and corridors of that tenement, hunting for the preserved and corrupted bodies left there, and something breathed into them; a fiery, sparkling breath that lit strange lights behind their eyes (those that still had eyes) and stood them upright and bade them walk once more.
I clutched at my ribs with my good hand, and pulled myself up to my feet and made myself run. This was no place for the living now if the dead were returning. Behind me, short fat Romeo finished his shouting, unaware that he'd been heard.