Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #10
‘Hold!’ Cecile calls. ‘Three and four. Use the stomach, keep the shoulders still. Bien, Harriet.’
Mara has always accepted this – the burn in the thigh, the pouring sweat, the feeling of I-can’t-go-on-I-must-go-on. The incessant practice of one tiny movement; the scrutinising of the line and form of the body in the mirror; the desperate horror of the gap between you and what you want to be.
It’s all the other bullshit she can’t accept.
The artificiality of it, the arbitrariness of the rules.
The insistence on being as bony as a corpse.
Some French king long ago liked to boogie and he had the power to make his friends do it too, and one thing led to another and now ballet is this strange, diamantine thing, made of equal parts cruelty and beauty.
The bullying passed on like a chain, each generation forging its own link, misery hooked onto misery, supposedly in the service of this thing.
The fetish of the blood pouring out of the pointe shoe; the insistence that you abdicate your selfhood to a teacher you don’t even like; the demand to punish the body for existing as it does, unforgivably imperfect.
It attracts the sadists and the masochists and now, after nine years, she’s worked out that’s why the audience of The Apple and the Pearl keep coming back.
They want to see pain and they want to see beauty and they want to sip at that space between pain and beauty.
Perhaps there’s a point to all the suffering.
She’s never found it herself, but it’s clearly there for others, some deeper meaning to the tortures they all endure.
It has been her undoing sometimes, to think but why?
When ballet teachers have acted like no one ever gets a career unless some great sacrifice is given, like you need to throw your true love down a well to be able to dance one Swan Lake, she’s just been baffled.
People lap it up: she knows, she’s seen it.
Anorexia, psychiatric units, double knee replacements at thirty-nine, and all for what?
To stand on stage and be applauded? Not that you even get that, here at The Apple and the Pearl.
For the thrill of it, to be admired, to be loved if only for the hour or two a night you spend on stage? It’s no life at all, for her.
Tell me about your parents, Annie had said one night in the Grub when they were talking about something like this.
Mara had shrugged. Nothing to say. Both nice. My dad died a few years ago. We were sad but we live with it.
There you go, Annie said. Most people are trying to fill a void in themselves, Mara. Drugs, booze, ballet. It’s all the same.
For Mara there is only one reason to dance, and it’s being beautifully demonstrated right at this moment by Michael.
He’s taken Cecile at her word and is playing the act two pas de deux from Spartacus as if his life depends on it, as if Kachaturian himself is standing next to him.
All swelling arpeggios and thundering chords, she lets her body soak it up and pour through her skin as she squeezes her back muscles to hold her arabesque a little higher, lets her arm extend from the shoulder a fraction, everything pulled and stretched like she’s on an exquisite rack strung entirely of the notes of this adagio.
She remembers a car journey as a little girl, sitting in the front seat beside her father as her mother tended to the twins in their bulky car seats in the back, wiggling her shoulders and swinging her legs in the cavernous footwell to a song with a bouncy, cheesy beat that came on the radio.
And her father asked her with a twinkling smile if she liked the music and she said, Not really, but my feet do.
And she’d thought it a reasonable thing to say, an accurate way of describing how the music moved through her body without passing by her brain or her heart, but then she had caught her father look at her mother in the rearview mirror and seen the amusement in their shared glance and felt shrunken.
She stopped swinging her legs, held herself still. It truly wasn’t a very good song.
Twenty-five years later, she thinks it would not be possible to say it any better than she did that day in the car. The music makes my body dance and I like it. That’s it.
Because they are not saving lives. They are not making history.
They are not one of those people who put their shoulders to the creaky wheel of society to shift it somewhere better.
You are the artists, her mother once said, when things were bad at ballet school and she was considering – not for the first or last time – stopping completely.
The feeling people get when they watch you is what they’re all living for.
She would like to believe that. It would make it easier.
Easier to stay, easier to leave, easier to think back fondly on this time in her life when she’s out in the world doing something else, something boring, something more necessary.
She closes her feet into a neat fifth position, rises onto the balls of her feet and turns to the other side.
The piano roars as she draws her left foot up her shin, and the stage starts to smell damp like the graveyard outside, like the lichen in the stone, like the mist dripping off the yews.
There’s a commotion in the right downstage corner, near the piano.
Growing in ripples from the vinyl dance floor are tiny mushrooms, slick and shiny, the colour of bleached bone.
All the dancers have stopped now, gazing at their feet, trying to avoid stepping on them as they sprout under the soles of their shoes.
Mara glances at Stephanie, who shakes her head with tears welling, murmuring, ‘That poor man.’ Stephanie has always approved of Michael but now he’s tragic and lost she nurses an enormous crush on him.
‘Maestro!’ Cecile shouts over the music, the only sign that she’s at all perturbed the wrinkling of her nose.
But Michael can’t hear her. On he plays, letting the piano swell and roar and Cecile walks quickly to the front of the stage where he sways on his stool, eyes shut, humming along with his music. She lays a hand on his shoulder.
‘Michael.’ He stops mid-phrase and looks up at her. With a small flick of her hand she gestures behind her, and as he sees the tiny pale globes all over the stage his face reddens. But before he can say anything Cecile claps her hands.
‘Okay, we start this side again!’ Cecile calls. At her voice the mushrooms instantly shrink and the dank smell is gone. There are quiet mutters and groans. ‘You may thank him later for giving you a few seconds’ rest.’
Mara keeps her legs low, conserving her energy on the other side of the adage exercise, and yes, it’s a privilege of seniority but she didn’t make the rules.
She remembers Michael’s ex-girlfriend vaguely – red hair, harp, seemed all right – but it would be fair to say the woman is having more of an impact on the daily life of The Apple and the Pearl in her absence than she did in her presence.
Mara imagines there are already meetings between Belinda, AJ, Cecile and Mackie.
She can almost hear their aggravated conversations.
Cecile: I cannot put up with it any longer, he is making a misery of act two for everyone.
AJ: Yes, I can see it is upsetting but I think he deserves a little understanding.
Belinda: I’ve offered her a pay rise, but she’s determined not to come back.
Mackie: I just feel sorry for the man.
‘Grands battements!’ Cecile calls from her chair at the front of the stage.
‘You know it!’ All around her are Lycra-clad legs flying past shoulder height, but Mara keeps her legs low again.
It’s only the Queen tonight. She remembers her first rehearsals for the Queen a couple of years ago.
Do not raise your legs above knee height, you are not doing the can-can! Cecile spat. You are a sovereign!
She had laughed about that with Greg and Stuart in the Grub that night because what the fuck did Cecile know about historical queens, but really it was typical of what she definitely wouldn’t miss about this place and the show.
The fake medieval shit, the artifice of it.
The storyline that doesn’t make a bit of sense, the pretence that you can even tell anything approaching a story with ballet.
Why the fuck does the Crow care about the Princesses?
She and Annie used to laugh at the ridiculousness of the show.
Where do the Suitors come from? What if they don’t fancy the Princesses when they wake up?
Greg used to shrug, a small smile playing on his lips. Just another one of those old stories. They never make sense. Doesn’t matter to me.
And then Stephanie would lean in and start talking very earnestly about Jung and matriarchal societies and Stuart would roll his eyes, pat her arm and say I’m going to get you another drink.
‘Alors!’ calls Cecile, clapping her hands. ‘We come to the centre.’
The men take away the ballet barres, lining them up neatly at the back of the stage where Mackie and Charlie will dismantle them later.
Mara, along with the other women, disappears into the wings where she left her bag filled with pointe shoes in varying stages of newness and comfort.
She changes from flat shoes into pointe shoes, quickly wrapping the rubber pad around her toes, stuffing her feet in and lacing up the ribbons.
Soon there’ll be no more pointe shoes and it won’t be a moment too soon.
No more blisters and ingrown toenails and corns. No more squashed and sweaty feet.
A tap on her shoulder.
‘Do you have a pair of scissors?’ Zuleika asks. Mara roots in her bag and hands her sewing kit to Zuleika who is sitting on the floor with one pointe shoe on and the other in her hand. A long thread dangles from the ribbon.
‘Thanks,’ Zuleika says. ‘I’ll put them in your bag when I’m done.’