Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #20
And I never knew, Jeanie girlie, if our names were already in a kind of hat for the job, if the Crow had only whispered to him that very morning, or if there were other voices he had to kowtow to, but we were there in front of him, and he said, ‘Gentlemen, I would like to ask you both to sing me a song.’ And I don’t know what I expected but it certainly wasn’t that.
He’d told her this with his soft hands in hers, just before she left him at Hillview to get the taxi to Liverpool Street station.
At the time she had treasured it as a moment of lucidity, but now she understands that he had saved the story all these years for this very moment, the time she left to return to the place of her birth.
So that she would understand, so that she would truly know the stakes as her father and mother had known them, surviving through multiple snatchings and attempted snatchings, a show every night with hundreds of creatures from the Otherworld in the auditorium licking their glistening lips.
So I sang ‘The Skye Boat Song’, he said, his gaze somewhere over her shoulder.
I don’t know why, it was just the first thing that popped into my head, and Aleko sang ‘Greensleeves’ and old Percy Montgomery just looked at the Crow and then at Aleko and said, ‘Congratulations, you are the ninetieth conductor of The Apple and the Pearl.’ And of course I was disappointed, though I hadn’t ever thought of conducting before, but a month later your mother told me she was carrying you.
She flicks the other latch on the oboe case and puts her handbag over her shoulder.
She remembers AJ smiling at her on the morning after her pledge, his delicately veined hands folded over three copies of the score as she sat with Toni and Beryl in the musician’s green room.
Warmest of welcomes to you all. And then he’d turned to Jean and searched her face for traces of his old friends, her parents. And welcome back to you, Jeanie.
She walks a little stiffly up the main avenue, bordered by mausoleums, towards the Grit. The drizzle thickens and she pulls up her hood.
It started only a few weeks later. They shared a bottle of wine in the dining car after the show and Beryl bought two more.
It’s a celebration! she’d said. Toni had leaned forwards like a conspirator: Would you like to come back to our cabin to finish this off?
And something in her belly had answered, like a hibernating snake opening one yellow eye to the spring, something shocking but unmistakeable.
It had been so long, and it had never been a woman, let alone two.
The oyster taste of pussy, the softness of limbs in the bed, the way flesh yielded under the gentlest of pressure from her fingertips.
The laughter, the languid stretch of skin, the sneaking back to her single cabin in the early hours, holding onto the dark windows to steady herself against the swaying of the carriage, her skin fizzing like seafoam, salty with sweat, slick with longing.
The memory of it makes her dizzy; the shock of it gone winds her. She stops, staggers a little like when her blood was still going topsy-turvy with menopause. She leans against the cool pink marble of a crypt, shivery and flushed.
Her body had opened to them like those seeds that lie dormant in the desert for forty years and then sprout and bloom within a week.
She was greedy for them both – the long, elegant curve of Beryl’s waist, the weight of Toni’s breast in her hand.
She had no idea if anyone else knew. Once or twice she’d thought there was something leering and knowing in Lance’s eyes, but now she thinks he’s just that sort of man, the sort Ricky used to be.
A tomcat prowling alleyways, yowling for sex.
She pushes herself off the pillar, grips her oboe case and carries on up the avenue of the dead towards the Grit. She keeps her eyes on the theatre. It looks like a haunted house today, the spires piercing the grey clouds like swords. You could never accuse it of failing to dress for the occasion.
She was born in her parents’ cabin aboard the Grub.
Percy Montgomery, the old company manager had found a midwife – how, she’d never quite figured out – and two replacement musicians, and given her father two weeks’ paternity leave and her mother three months on full pay.
That’s why you pay your union subs, Jeanie girlie, so that they see you as a living, breathing human first and a music-maker second, her father had said.
Born during the Crow’s second act solo, cord cut as the curtain came down, taken to the caboose to be presented to the Crow just before the midnight bells.
Has this ever happened before? her father reportedly asked old Montgomery.
Any legends about this or what it might mean?
Not that I know of, Montgomery said. Your girl there is one of a kind.
What bullshit. She’s turned out to be as ordinary as a drop of rain in April, entirely failed to live up to anything spectacular her birth might have foretold.
The stage door opens and Mackie shuffles out, rummaging in the capacious pockets of his cargo trousers.
He nods hello, makes a wry, slightly embarrassed face at the slim silver bar in his fingers.
‘Gave up years ago, couldn’t afford it. Couldn’t get them regularly when I came to work here, and you know what Belinda would say if you were trying to stash weeks’ worth of fags in your cabin.
But I still like stepping out for a break every now and then, you know?
Gives you something to do with your hands while you have a little think. ’
Jean smiles. ‘Don’t mind me.’ She’s always liked Mackie. She should have married a man like that. Kind, slightly shy, competent enough under his bumbling. Too late now, of course. She can’t sleep with a man again, even if a candidate did present himself.
A caw catches their attention. The Crow is perched on the stone balustrade, which is chipped and mossy and moody today. The huge bird gleams although the afternoon light is sludgey. It gives another caw and Mackie chuckles.
‘All right. All right. We heard you.’ He walks over and carefully places the vape in front of it. ‘Bad for me anyway.’ He smiles at Jean again, tips his head in a little nod and disappears back inside the Grit, letting the stage door slam behind him.
Another caw, an indignant nudge. Jean reaches into her pocket and pulls out the crust of toast she always saves from breakfast for encounters like this and a two-penny coin. She lays them both on the ground and the Crow hops down onto the bottom step to peck at the crust. Jean watches.
‘Should I write back, do you think? Is there any point? I’m stuck here anyway.’
It flies back to the balustrade, picks up the vape in its claws and hops back down to the crust of bread.
‘You’re not going to tell me, are you? You don’t give a shit.’
The Crow stops pecking and looks at her with a long, cool stare that Jean returns, although her eyes start to itch.
‘Of course I won’t break my pledge.’ She wants to look away but she feels the need to meet this challenge, to live up to whatever it was the Crow liked about her mother. ‘I spoke to my father today. He was talking about you. He thinks of you often. Thank you for saving my mother, by the way.’
The bird’s gaze softens and Jean cannot bear that flicker of tenderness.
She looks away. ‘Fine,’ she says. ‘I can see your point.’ It gobbles down the crust and then grabs the coin in its beak, the vape in its claws and with two tugs of its great black wings, flies away over the graves, back to the warm shelter of the Grub.
She starts to climb the steps of the Grit, her boots echoing on each stone stair. She thinks of climbing these steps with Toni and Beryl, arm in arm, the three of them batty old women giggling at clouds, only she knowing the sweet ache of being pressed against their bodies.
But as quickly as it began, it was done.
They only stayed for one pledge. They didn’t even tell her they weren’t going to pledge again.
She found out like everyone else, when Belinda put the notice on the board.
It was as if all those nights in their cabin had never happened, like they’d been some kind of sad, erotic dream.
They said goodbye with a kiss on each cheek in front of everyone and she had to smile and wave as they walked off the Grub at Edinburgh Waverley, like they had been nothing but two other sounds in the orchestra, two other beating hearts to keep safe with salt and iron.
She pushes the stage door open and the stuffy, warm air of the Grit hits her.
It smells like hairspray, sawdust and stale tomato soup as always, no matter how it’s rearranged its corridors overnight.
She unzips her coat as she glances at the noticeboard by the door to the stage, scanning it for anything interesting or important.
Tonight’s casting, a handwritten note from Mackie inviting everyone to drinks tonight to celebrate his new pledge, a sign from one of the dancers asking if anyone’s seen a certain green coat. Nothing for her.
The door to the stage opens and Derek emerges, whistling the tune to the orchard dance in a faintly menacing way. Jean stares at the noticeboard, hoping he will glide on past her.
‘Good afternoon, Miss Jean.’ No such luck. She pretends to look very closely at the sign advertising the fire safety procedures.
‘Hi, Derek.’
‘Lighting a candle for anyone today?’
The cheek of the man. As if she’d discuss something as intimate as her own dead with this troll. I will never let him near me again! Toni muttered, horrified, after he cornered her in the Grub one night and asked her if she’d ever had a boyfriend.
‘No one in particular. They went into the Pearl a long time ago.’
‘My condolences.’ Derek simpers and bows as he backs away. ‘May their memories live long.’