Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #12
She winces as she sees Luke land poorly.
He’s not a bad dancer, if a little shy and boring in style, but he’s a bit odd.
Any conversation she’s tried to have with him in this past month since he turned up to replace Alex has petered into awkward silence.
Cecile is trying to bash him into shape in the only way she knows how – by shouting at him – but Mara worries for him.
He doesn’t seem to be weaving himself into the social fabric of the place.
Like the straggling antelope at the back of the herd, loners get picked off on The Apple and the Pearl.
If she were Cecile she’d set Luke up with a buddy, maybe one to help him learn the choreography and another to be a mate outside of rehearsals and class.
Michael, perhaps. Kill two birds with one stone.
Yes, she can imagine herself in charge here, the changes she’d make. She’d let everyone keep their baggy things on for class for a start. She would never, ever make a comment about anyone’s weight. Let everyone get as fat as they like, what do their audience care for skeletons?
But Cecile is going nowhere, and she is going home. Well, back to her mother’s house, a place which is no longer her home but will have to do until she figures something out.
But what will that thing be? What will she do with the rest of her life, where will she go?
The whole wide world is hers. There are two obvious things that retired dancers do when they stop dancing and she dreads both.
She could train to teach something like pilates or yoga or zumba to middle-aged men and their paunches and menopausal women and their hormones, living out the fiction that the body she’s spent more than a decade sculpting can be attained through an hour a week in a sweaty leisure centre.
Or she could do a certificate to teach ballet to kids, filling draughty church halls and youth centres with toddlers in pink skirts, ten-year-olds with pushy mothers and the occasional truly talented kid who’ll she’ll have to bully and abuse into a career, completing the cycle to become everything she’s ever hated about this world.
You’re being unfair, her mother would say. To yourself and others.
She sees why everyone does one of these two things.
Mara has no qualifications outside of the dance world, she knows almost nothing of how the world works.
She’s never worked in a bar or a shop or a cafe, has no office skills.
She has no degree, only two A levels, and her references would be who?
Cecile, who would write something about how she’s worked very hard on her allegro over the years.
Belinda could, at least, be relied upon to come up with something suitably corporate and dull.
Mara is a reliable team player who works well within existing structures while making projects her own.
She has savings, that’s about all that can be said for her situation, a bank account fat with years of salary and little spending.
And she has a mother still rattling around her childhood home, which is a stroke of luck.
At least the twins will be pleased. She thinks of the messages her phone picked up this morning, long streams of frustration from her sisters.
She only wants to eat toast and peanut butter and when I told her she needs some vegetables she said she’ll do whatever the fuck she wants.
The doctor said gentle exertion only but of course she was up on the ladder messing about with the wisteria.
So she’ll leave the Grub at some random station of Belinda’s choosing and get an ordinary train home to Three Bridges, where she’ll ring and ask her mother to pick her up. That home smell, the mix of furniture polish and butter, will hit her as soon as her mother opens the front door.
And then she’ll never do ballet class again.
I will never do ballet class again, she makes herself think as she watches Zuleika practice an assemblé, neatly joining her ankles in the air to land in a dainty fifth position.
One more time: I will never do ballet class again.
Yes, it’s all right. She can bear the thought so she can bear the reality.
She might miss performing, she definitely won’t miss rehearsals, but yes, she will miss this daily ritual, this medicinal torture that sets her straight, this communion between her, the piano and the dance that itches inside her.
As the music starts for the next allegro exercise, Mara goes into the wings to put her jumper back on.
A tendril of guilt in her belly. With her ballet classes numbered, should she be stopping early?
Shouldn’t she be squeezing every last movement out of every last moment, wringing each exercise for all its worth?
When she tells Cecile she’s leaving and it becomes common knowledge, maybe she will.
Maybe she’ll let her inner child take over and she’ll be that little girl letting her feet dance to the music every single day, and she will no longer have to worry about the old sprains on her left ankle, those aching places in her back, the sharp tugs on her knees.
She’ll tell Belinda first – no, it should be Cecile – no, telling Belinda is the smart thing to do in case there’s some admin that needs doing, in case she says something like a fifty pence piece?
No, I think that means I need to give you a pay rise.
And then she’ll tell Cecile, probably after class one day when she’s feeling fortified, and they’ll plan her farewell show.
She’ll ask to dance the Crow so she has one last chance to go to the caboose and say goodbye – even though it probably won’t even show up, it often doesn’t – and she’ll ask Gino to make enchiladas for afterwards.
She’ll spend the day packing up her cabin and hauling her stuff along to the guest cabin that Belinda will turf her out of the next morning.
She’ll go to Belinda’s office in the Grub after lunch to sign the forms and see her vial of blood destroyed and she’ll ask her, just for shits and giggles, all the questions the Crow has ignored.
Doesn’t it bother you, handling the Pearl like that?
What if it breaks and whatever’s inside it bursts out and spills all over you?
What happens if you’re taken, Belinda, who looks out for us then?
Do you feel scared of the creatures of the audience?
What hocus-pocus is it that connects the guest cabins to the real world?
Why did you choose me all those years ago at that audition?
What the fuck will I do with the rest of my life?
The mood in the dressing room that night before the show will be charged, tearful and joyous.
She’ll have all her farewell cards arranged around her dressing table, all the heartfelt messages, all the gifts.
Someone, probably Stephanie, will have written out that random little poem about the show and she’ll have to hold back the tears when she reads the line about the Crow who sings in her nest.
Alina will give her that choker to tie around her neck, that one with salt in the lining and fortified with iron studs to keep her safe, because the audience can always tell who is saying farewell to the stage that very night.
That is when you are most in danger, they can smell it on you like the electrical charge of thunder in the air.
And she will finish the third act Crow’s solo on one knee, the rest of the company waiting in the wings for the curtain call, everything she has been for the past decade dissolving around her.
And as the first group of men leap across the stage in the grand allegro, Mara wipes away the first tear she has shed since the night the Crow gave her that coin.
Dance only exists in the single instant of the dancer moving.
Before it is only potential, an itch in the muscles, a yearning between two bodies.
Afterwards it’s at best a sheen of sweat on the skin, panting breath and the music lingering in your fingers.
There is nothing else. If you are not dancing right now, perhaps you are not and never were a dancer. Until you dance again.
And if you never do? she wonders as she watches Romero soar into the air in the jeté. One day you dance and so you’re a dancer, and the next day you don’t and so you’re a… what? She’ll find out soon. In forty to fifty days, depending on when Belinda arranges their days off.
‘Thank you, everyone,’ Cecile calls. ‘Good work. Take fifteen and I will see tonight’s cast of the court scene back here.’
Blast. That’s her.
* * *
Two thirty, and downstairs in the musicians’ green room Henry sits on the edge of a chair with his score spread on the table in front of him and his violin on his lap. He follows a few bars with his fingers, shakes his head and tuts, goes back to the beginning of the page.
The door opens and Henry looks up expectantly, although he knows exactly who it’ll be. He has been waiting for him to finish playing for ballet class and come here for the break before rehearsals.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he asks, rubbing rosin on his bow. ‘There’s a bit in act three I find a bit tricky.’
Michael sits down in a chair by the door and pulls out his notebook. ‘It’s fine. I have these.’ He rummages in his pockets, pulls out his earplugs and presses them into his ears.