Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #8
As she puts her left hand back on the barre and Michael plays the first chord, she shuffles into fifth position with an automatic squeeze of the glute muscles to protect her knees.
She stretches her right leg in front of her, to the side and behind, always half a beat behind Jessica because she’s copying her.
Tendu and fifth, tendu and fifth. The music is always a little too fast at this point in the class.
She’s not ready to move quickly yet, she needs more time to luxuriate in the movements.
Ideally, she’d like to do the exercise half time but Cecile would not be amused.
You think you know better than me? she’d drawl, with one long, painted fingernail shot in her direction.
You’d think after nine years and having danced every role in the repertoire she’d be allowed a little bit of autonomy, a little bit of trust to know what’s best for her own body, but no.
Ballet is obedience, often blind, to an authority often taken by force and Cecile is as bad as any other ballet mistress for her insistence that things happen as they have always happened, because they always have.
Mara’s lucky. She’s never been on Cecile’s really bad side, never been reduced to tears in rehearsals – except that one fucking awful rehearsal of the Crow, but rehearsing any part of the Crow’s sections of the show always puts Cecile in a foul mood – never been beckoned to the front of the stage, flicked on the stomach or thighs and told to stop eating dinner.
Although, to be fair, that’s hearsay, from Cecile’s first pledge as ballet mistress.
Apparently she hasn’t tried that one in a good few years.
Gino put a stop to that. That’s why they don’t talk.
There are privileges she has earned. Like her baggy woollen trousers and jumper.
Jessica hasn’t, not yet, and she stands in leotard and tights so that Cecile can see and comment upon every twitch of every muscle.
A strange kind of privilege, to have the privacy and warmth of your clothes, but there you go. Batshit. Ballet.
Mara can’t say when exactly she started wearing her baggy things during class.
Sometime after she was regularly dancing each of the three Princesses and the Crow but before she did her first Queen.
She thinks about the icy way Cecile would glare if one of the new pledges in the corps de ballet were to get to the end of class still swathed in a tracksuit.
None of them ever do. They’re too well trained from ballet school.
Your bodily autonomy is something you’ve got to prove you deserve, and it’s toxic.
In this world you’re nothing but your body and everyone knows it.
There have been days in the winter when the mercury in the Grit was stuck at ten degrees and Cecile made Mackie drag out the heaters and blast them from the wings rather than let the corps de ballet stay in their tracksuits.
Lazy clothes, lazy muscles she’d trilled and wandered among them draped in her cashmere shawl as they shivered.
‘Glissés!’ Cecile calls, demonstrating with neat, tight movements as her feet leave the floor just a couple of inches.
She must have been a beautiful dancer, Mara’s always thought.
A bitch, but wonderful to watch. Michael starts to play something a bit too plinky-plonky for Mara to really get into and she yawns a little, watching Jessica’s sharp feet fly in and out of fifth position.
All too fast, Mara grumbles as she turns to the other side to watch Ritchie, also entirely too perky, do the exercise half a beat ahead of her. Please just let me wake up.
Cecile marks through a rond de jambe exercise and Mara watches upside down as she stretches her hamstrings.
This is the point in the class when Mara starts to feel her body come alive, the point where her muscles start to glide over each other and her joints become silky again.
She never used to take such care with her body, oiling it and tending to it like a precious car.
She could just throw her shoes on and bounce into class.
But she’s thirty now and that’s what? About a hundred and ten in ballerina years, Josh said the other day with a smirk.
She won’t pledge again. She’s decided. She celebrated her birthday a couple of months ago with the Grub stopped in a field of freshly cut hay bundled in golden stacks.
After ballet class everyone gathered outside the Grit, waiting for Gino to bring out one of the cakes he only makes if you’re having a birthday with a zero in the number.
That day the Grit sported hanging baskets of pink and white petunias and she stood between Cecile and AJ on the steps while Gino carried the cake towards them.
The whole scene was a perfect version of itself.
The haystacks absorbed the slanted September sunlight until they glowed, the shards of grass stubble shone, blackbirds pecked softly at the earth.
It is as if Monet is in our minds, painting all that we can see, AJ had murmured and he was exactly right.
It was a gift from the Grub, this kind of place, the kind of gift the train gives them sometimes just to fuck with them.
Saying – cackling – look what beauties it’s in my power to gift you, and you’ll never know why I choose not to do this every single day.
Gino lit the thirty candles on the cake and the dancers, tech crew and musicians all mumble-sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in various keys while lights flickered at the edges of their vision as they always did at times like these.
Harmless enough at the minute, Mackie had said when the flute and the trombone started to get twitchy.
They just know we’re here having a good time.
She sliced her cake and she smiled until her mouth twitched but something was flailing inside her. Thirty. She knew she wouldn’t have long left. She had the sensation that with every movement of the knife she was severing everything she had built around this show for the past nine years.
That night she danced the Crow, and when she took the tray to the caboose after the show she waited until she heard a loud caw. She turned to see a huge black bird on the railing.
Mara carefully pulled a slice of birthday cake wrapped in a paper napkin out of her pocket and put it on the tray.
It’s my birthday. One with a zero. Gino made a cake for me.
But the bird had not even glanced at it. Instead, it hopped over to her and dropped something at her feet that made a small clinking sound.
Oh. She picked it up and turned the coin over in her fingers, let her hands warm the metal. It was an ordinary fifty pence piece. She had known exactly what it meant. I get it. Redundancy pay. The Crow often had a sense of humour.
The bird said nothing. She turned to face it to find it staring at her, the black eye gleaming even in the dull light of the lantern swinging from the ceiling.
Do you know what? she said, trying to hold back the tears.
I’m actually grateful. I’ve always wanted to retire at my peak, you know?
Not hang on when I’m long past it. I had this ballet teacher at school once and she said that dancers are the only artists who destroy their instrument.
I mean, mine’s not entirely destroyed but it’s not doing that great either.
But the bird was no longer listening, so Mara pocketed the coin and went back to her cabin.
How life changes in an instant, she thinks, lying awake all night, willing those swelling tears to come at last. Everything over, so quickly and yes, just as she has become the best dancer she has ever been.
A daylily blooming for just one day before withering, that’s her. That’s all of them. That’s ballet.
And is it worth it? she wonders, as she watches Cecile demonstrate the fondu exercise.
Have these nine years of class, rehearsal, show, class, rehearsal, show been worth it?
The question has niggled at her for years, since well before her birthday.
Worth it? What is anything worth, Mara? Stuart said, after too much wine one night. What price are you asking for?
Michael starts playing the seemingly obligatory tango rhythm that always accompanies a fondu exercise and Mara stands in fifth position. She sinks into the coupé, then extends her leg in front of her.
She kept that little silver coin. It lives in her make-up bag now. Every evening, as she gets ready for the show, she sees it and it reminds her that she’s almost done.
Done, she thinks as she extends her leg to the side. It’s almost over. And she’s found herself feeling more and more all right with that with every show that passed. I did it, I danced. I was here, and I danced and I did it well.
And wasn’t that the dream, those days when she was sixteen and turning up to ballet school each day, desperate to be one of the lucky ones who got a career?
It didn’t always seem like it was going to happen for her.
After graduating, she spent a horrendous six months in Florence doing Swan Lake, then a desperate round of auditions as she did class each day on her own in her childhood bedroom with the rug pushed back.
Eighteen and what did she know about the world?
She’d got to the point where her mother was making noises about getting a job in a cafe, not too late to go to university you know, when she saw it, scanning the noticeboard before an open class.
Open audition for The Apple and the Pearl, 4.
30. She had nowhere else to be, so she went into the room.
A woman she now knows as Belinda gave her two safety pins and a paper number 46 and told her to take a spot at the barre.
The ballet mistress – Cecile – sat silently at the front of the room, swathed in black, a notepad on her lap.