Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #5
Michael takes his plate and moves away without a thank you or a sorry.
He’s a landmine these days, that trips only explosions of grief inside him.
He sees Henry the second violin in a booth, both hands clutched around a mug of herbal tea.
Perhaps Michael should like him more, as one of the only people here who didn’t know him as Evelyn’s other half, but there’s something both cold and over-eager about him that is exhausting.
He clearly wants to be Michael’s friend – or something more – but Michael can’t imagine getting through a conversation about the weather, let alone explaining that he’s flattered, but not interested.
Henry smiles but Michael pretends he hasn’t seen him and sits in a booth at the far end of the carriage with his back to everyone.
He alternates sips of coffee and spoonfuls of soup because everything tastes like sawdust. He’s only eating because hunger is one pain too much to deal with and because Gino would know if he didn’t and tell AJ.
The black tuxedo he wears for shows hangs on him as if on a wire hanger, his skin is sallow and flakey and his hair is lank.
He stares at the fogged windows, all that water condensed on the glass from cooking and breathing and the spray of taps and the steam of tea.
He reaches into his satchel to take out his notebook and pen and writes:
I wonder if any of this water passed through her body to become a little bead on this window, or if there’s no longer anything here in the Grub which she once touched.
He returns his plate and mug to Gino, smiles contritely and pulls the door to the gangway open.
The air outside is chilly and damp, mist curling between the cars.
He jumps the three steps down from the Grub and lands with a squelch in wet, loamy soil covered in a carpet of rotting evergreen needles.
Instantly, the distant hum of harps is gone, and Michael pulls the plugs out of his ears and stuffs them into his pocket.
Before him is a graveyard straight out of a storybook, the most misty, overgrown, haunted-looking graveyard he could ever have imagined.
It likes a sense of theatre, Michael remembers writing in the diary of his first pledge, it sucks at the essence of what you think a place is like and spits it out at you in technicolour.
Michael wanders among the graves, picking his way between the drooping yews and the ivy creeping over the stones tumbling this way and that like the earth beneath them is buckling, trying to release the bodies buried within.
Wandering alone like this is against the rules but he’s beyond that now, even Belinda would agree.
Damp spreads inside his shoes and his skin pimples with cold and something else, an eerie sense that come seven thirty tonight the dead could heave themselves out of their coffins and come shuffling into the auditorium just as they are, flesh falling off bones, formaldehyde leaking from their skulls.
He turns onto a wide avenue flanked by marble mausoleums, and the Grit looms out of the mist at him. He sees a familiar black-clad figure standing in the middle of the avenue, fog curling like ghostly hands around his ankles.
AJ’s brilliantined silver hair is speckled with dew and he wears a black suit with a mandarin collar and black patent shoes with gleaming white spats.
Michael has never seen him in anything else, except for the time when there was a fire scare before reveille and they all stood in a dark field waiting for Belinda in her hi-vis jacket to inspect the Grub, where he waited next to Cecile in a wine-red velvet dressing gown and matching monogrammed slippers.
Michael comes to stand next to him.
‘A little melodramatic today, don’t you think?’
AJ gives his enigmatic little smile.
‘It’s All Souls’, Michael.’
‘Oh yes,’ he murmurs, a little ashamed. He wants people to think he’s recovering and coming back to himself, and he especially wants AJ to think that, but losing track of the date is a clear sign he’s still floundering.
For Michael, there is no difference these days between the dead and the plain gone.
He should light a candle for Evelyn, the way his mother will be lighting one tonight for his grandparents.
Let the wick make a deep well within the wax and splutter into darkness.
‘Too on the nose.’ AJ sighs. ‘The Grub’s always been obvious in its metaphors and mockeries.’
Michael thinks of the harp music and the vibrato that plays over and over and over until everything in him is jangling with the note.
Not everyone can feel it, you know. AJ said when he’d tentatively broached the subject with him in the first month of his pledge.
For some the Grub is just a train and the Grit just a theatre and the only thing unusual about this job is the audience.
Evelyn was the only person — other than AJ – who’d felt it as he did.
He’d been sitting in the dining car after the show, the crew pulling the Grit apart and hauling it back to the cargo carriages with the Grub nestled peacefully in a dark valley blanketed with snow. Everyone was drinking aniseedy liqueurs from the bottle. He felt a light tap on his shoulder.
He looked up from his notebook to see the new harpist standing by his booth, clutching a glass of red wine.
His fingertips started to fizz at the nearness of her.
He’d been with the company for two years and in that time he’d lived in shy, bewildered celibacy, watching Lance work his way through the dancers, orchestra and most of the crew, standing alone on the edges of a raucous, never-ending game of musical beds.
Hi. I’m Evelyn. AJ sent me to you.
He’d known her name. Her first show had lit him all over with electric pleasure.
Her playing was exquisite. She drew tones from the score he’d never heard before and he’d fallen halfway in love with her before he’d even seen her face.
A few days later, Lance had hurried into the dressing room at the five-minute call, grabbed his laundered shirt from the rack and kicked his trainers off in a huff.
New girl’s not for playing, although I don’t know why I’m telling you that.
Maybe she just doesn’t want to play with you?
No. Lance had looked genuinely horrified. Not possible.
With Evelyn in front of him, smiling, her fringe falling deliciously across her face, the Grub had started to play wheeling, spitting fireworks in his ears, so loud he could hardly hear her.
A swelling in his trousers and a twisting in his belly, the agony of the humiliation – he felt fourteen again.
Can I ask you a question? she’d said.
Of course. His heart soared and plummeted at the same time. The fireworks kept sparking, mockingly. He thought she’d probably ask him if her tuning was right in the third act, which it was, or something about per diem payments. She slid into the seat opposite him and put her glass on the table.
What do you hear when you’re in the Grub?
A thrill slid through his blood that she heard it too, this beautiful woman with hands that pulled such grace from her instrument, so near to him, asking him something so intimate.
He smiled broadly to mask his nerves and clasped his hands tight in his lap, hoping to hide his ridiculous hopes.
Right now I can hear a mash-up of the John Lee Hooker my dad used to play and the hello song from a music class my mum used to take me to when I was three.
But I’ve got used to it. I just ignore it most of the time.
That was a lie. He never managed to ignore it and there was no way he was going to tell her truth; that the fireworks were blasting, and that as she flicked her hair over her shoulder and he got a waft of some kind of fruity shampoo he heard a long, low blast of a saxophone, like a joke sexy noise, that went straight into Marvin Gaye.
He wished he could have painted her face, the delight, the relief. That was when he fell the rest of the way in love with her.
But that’s so nice! She took a swig of her wine and it left a purple stain on her lips that made his groin twitch. I hear nothing but these hokey old Irish folk songs I used to have to play for weddings when I was a teenager.
I used to do weddings too, he said. I don’t ever want to hear that Mendelssohn march again.
Something bitter passed across her face and she took another gulp of wine.
Yeah. My mum pretended she was my agent.
She booked me almost every weekend for years and years and when I asked for the money to go to Guildhall she told me to leave and not come back until I was grateful for her sacrifices.
There had been a moment of awkwardness. She had cracked open a little door of honesty and he wanted to stick his foot in it to wedge it open.
He could feel the smirks of Steve the bassoonist and Wilf the cellist burning into his back, and the fireworks spitting and shrieking in his head were starting to make his temples throb.
Do you want to get some air? he’d asked. It’s really noisy in here.
A couple of weeks later they discovered that if their bare skin was touching they could hear each other’s private music, and the more of themselves they pressed together the louder it was.
They’d lie entwined in his cabin after curfew, the movement of the Grub rocking them like babies, and they would listen to the music it played them and giggle together at the cacophony.
At those times it was like the Crow was playing along, the jester to their king and queen, telling jokes only for them.
He had never been so bare, so raw. The Crow teased out every loving, obsessive, jealous, doting thought of her, gave it melody and played it to her.
But Evelyn would say, I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stand this, Michael. It’s only in here with you that I can get any peace.