Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #2
Zach wrinkles his nose. Sensible, really, how this show attracts people who are already acquainted with the workings of other worlds.
He thinks of his own mother, picking mugwort and elderberries on the common behind their house, muttering under her breath as she stirred that sludge in the saucepans.
‘Is that what this show is?’
Zach takes another bite of a pancake. ‘Sort of. A bit weirder sometimes, but that’s the general gist.’
He watches Lara’s face for a moment to see if she’s afraid. A flicker of curiosity, but otherwise she seems admirably composed.
‘Right. Well, I think the easiest thing to do is for you to stick by me.’ He has a gulp of coffee that almost scalds his throat but feels good – he needs that warmth in his bones to get them going. ‘Ask me any questions you like but I might not know the answers.’
Zach finishes his pancakes and goes back to the serving hatch, where he swaps his empty plate for two more plates stacked with pancakes and a fresh mug of coffee.
Gino nudges the jug of milk towards him. ‘Lighten it up a bit to stop the jitters?’
Zach grimaces. ‘No thanks. Milk’s always dodgy these days, Gino. No offence.’
He brings his plates back to the booth and pushes one towards Lara.
‘Eat. You’ll need it.’
She pokes her plate with a fork but she doesn’t put it to her mouth.
Zach wonders where he should start. On the day of his first pledge – almost eleven years ago now – they had stopped in a deserted seaside fairground with water slides and sandpits and a lagoon filled with pedaloes and dinghies.
Juliet had pointed to the Grit, wearing the gaudy colours of a Neapolitan ice cream, and told him that nothing else mattered but the show. All the rest, she said, is noise.
Zach wonders if Juliet ever thinks of him now, knowing it’s unlikely. ‘First I’ll tell you about the show. Have you ever worked in ballet before?’
‘This is my first job. I saw an advert in The Stage, I rang the number and now I’m here.’
‘Right.’ Zach feels a little pang of disappointment, although he knows everyone’s got to start somewhere.
‘Well, ballet’s tricky because the buggers move around, but it’s fun.
This show is a dream to light, really. LX department is you, me and Derek the follow spot, but in the mornings and before the show he does stage set up, and he spends most of act three in the stage left wing.
’ Which is a blessing, really, Zach thinks.
He won’t scare her off yet. Plenty of time for her to learn about Derek.
Zach spears another pancake, eats it in two bites. He tries to finish the whole mouthful before he starts talking again. Your table manners are atrocious, Juliet used to laugh.
‘Mackie’s our direct boss, he’s a good egg. Knows the show inside out, has our back when Belinda goes on the warpath. We set up in the flies, wing booms and footlights, but sometimes the Grit fucks around and we lose a few wing flats if it decides to be smaller that day.’
Lara stares at him, a fork poised in her hand, the honey on her pancakes glistening undisturbed on her plate.
‘You look like you’ve got a question.’
He can see her thinking back over everything he’s just said, trying to find something to latch on to that she can make sense of. ‘What’s the Grit?’
‘Ah.’ Zach finishes his mouthful and drains his coffee. ‘Bring that plate and follow me.’
He fills a mug again from the urn and bounds down the aisle between the booths.
He’s starting to feel like himself, more than himself really, with someone to watch him.
He’s putting his best foot forwards, as his mum would have said, showing himself to his best advantage.
He feels self-consciousness settle on him.
He better not fuck it up, as his mum would also have said.
‘Ta, Gino,’ he calls as he slides his plate across the serving hatch. ‘We’ll bring hers back at lunchtime.’
Gino gives a mock salute as Zach pulls open the door to the carriage and holds it open for Lara behind him.
He jumps down from the train and turns to see her gazing out at the mist. He wonders if he should offer his hand to help her down or if she would consider that patronising.
If he’d offered to help Juliet she’d have taken his hand and crushed it.
He settles for taking Lara’s plate and folder from her and standing aside in what he hopes is a gallant manner.
She jumps down, landing clumsily on the carpet of evergreen needles.
‘Okay, I know you asked something else but we’ll start here.
This is the Grub, our train. Home.’ He gestures towards the carriage behind him, sleek and shiny and speckled with condensation.
Today it appears as an old-fashioned steam train, painted forest-green with little black bolts holding each iron sheet in place.
He can just about see the bell frame through the mist, a large bronze bell hanging in a grid from a gigantic iron scaffold above the engine car at the front.
She looks sharply at him, fear starting to shadow her face.
‘Did it look different to you earlier?’
Lara nods.
He sighs. How did Juliet describe this to him? He can barely remember now. Something about the way that although everyone’s dreams are different they all share symbols.
‘Don’t worry, it does that. It plays all kinds of tricks and it pisses us all off but you get used to it. We call it the Grub because it’s the ugly side of things, the maggot in the fruit.’
He gives her back the plate of congealing pancakes and beckons for her to follow him. He walks confidently into the mist as he sips at his coffee, his warmth dissipating the water vapour. After a few paces Zach trips and smacks his knee on a boulder sticking out of the ground.
‘Fuck!’ He holds on to the offending stone to rub his knee and groan a little.
‘Is this a graveyard?’ Lara asks, her knuckles white around her plate.
Zach looks around and sees she’s right. He has tripped over the grave of a Desmond C Jones, which is covered in patches of yellow and white lichen and half buried in brambles.
He picks his way around the thorns to find a path through the rows of graves, which stretch as far as he can see into the mist. He shrugs.
‘We stop in funny places. You get used to it.’
She follows him, her footsteps light and wary, until Zach finds himself in a patch of clearing mist on a wide, cobbled avenue between the graves.
He can no longer see the iron carapace of the Grub but he can sense its bulk somewhere behind him.
Directly ahead at the end of the avenue there is a shadow looming.
It’s the tallest thing around, spiky and threatening like a haunted house from a horror film.
And although he can’t think how he’s going to explain to this girl that their theatre doesn’t always look like that, he’s got to hand it to whatever imagination it is that powers this thing – today the Grit is seductively spooky.
Zach has the feeling it’s revelling in its uncanny new clothes.
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘That’s the Grit. It’s our theatre, and we call it that because it’s another ugly part of the show, the speck of dirt that gets trapped in the oyster shell.
We store all the set and gear in the first few carriages behind the locomotive: there’s a whole system but Mackie will tell you where to put everything. ’
Lara looks puzzled. ‘So does the theatre kind of – travel with you – or is it a completely new theatre each show?’
Zach sighs. This is why Belinda’s paying him the big bucks now.
Juliet would have known what to say. She would either have described all the specific ways the Grit disobeys the ordinary laws of the universe, or she would have told her not to worry about it with such a tone that Lara could find herself all the way at her next pledge without ever having wondered what the fuck the Grit really was.
‘Both. Neither. We take down the things inside, like the lighting rig and the stage – that definitely travels with us – but we leave the actual building behind. It turns up at the next venue a bit different but essentially the same.’
He can see by the twitching of Lara’s fingers on her plate that he’s doing a terrible job.
‘It’s like that boat.’
Lara frowns.
‘You know, the boat that has all the planks and sails and whatnot replaced. But it’s still the same boat.’
She’s still looking nonplussed and Zach feels a little bubble of hope pop inside him.
‘Look, don’t worry about it for the moment. If you think too hard about it, it’ll trip you over.’ He turns away and walks up the avenue.
‘The best way to understand is just to come inside and see. There’s a point where you have to accept it or go home. All shows have quirks, this one just has a few more than most.’
The graves lining the avenue start to become marble mausoleums, complete with rococo carving and gold inlaid writing, and Zach finds himself reading the messages etched for eternity, things about sleeping with angels and perpetual peace.
Not for the first time, he wonders if this is a real landscape.
What do you mean, real? Juliet had scoffed when he’d asked her years ago.
Real as in, it’s still here when we’re not, has a life outside what we see here on the day the Grub arrived. Juliet had shrugged. Does it matter?
Now Zach has reconsidered how he defines the word ‘real’.
He thinks about the creatures revealed as the house lights come up for the curtain call each night, the improbable shapes that flicker at the edges of your vision at dusk, all that stuff inside the box in Belinda’s office that looks like diamonds and is really only dust. He thinks of all the mischief and malevolence he’s seen from the Crow as it cavorts around the theatre and the train, and he wonders if he left everything that was ‘real’ that night when he waited at Manchester Piccadilly, or if that world had whirls of weird hiding in plain sight too.