Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #25
Don’t get involved with a man who has ghosts, girl, Auntie Doreen had told her. You want someone clean, someone unencumbered by their dead. Only invite the living into your bed, take it from me.
She looks up at Zach. ‘Have you ever met the Crow?’
He looks surprised. ‘Not really. I mean, I’ve seen it from a distance and heard it and stuff. I tend to think if it wants me, then it knows where to find me.’
Lara watches the pale shapes flitting around the graves as they come closer to the Grub. A clever girl like you, she thinks. Oh dear. She will have to watch out for Derek.
* * *
Taking her foot off the sewing machine pedal, Milly drags her chair over to the tannoy and climbs on it.
She turns the dial on the speaker right down so that Cecile’s voice becomes nothing more than a faint mutter, her tuneless, toneless counting just too quiet to hear.
She drags her chair back to the machine, brushes the dust from the soles of her trainers off the seat and positions herself over the seam again.
She lets her foot hover over the pedal and adjusts the white tulle.
The needle starts to click click clack clack and she guides the pinned seam through the needle, her expert fingers smoothing the tulle to keep it straight.
She likes the sound of the machine, its busy humming and whirring, the sounds of making something out of nothing, the music of the tiny twisted threads binding themselves together into beauty.
A wave of burning nausea swells up her chest and she takes her foot off the pedal, shuts her eyes and rubs the heels of her hands into her cheeks.
She turns away from the half-made costume in case she vomits on it and leans right forwards, her hair dangling into her face. Fuck, she thinks. Fuck fuck fuck.
Since this began – sixteen days ago and counting – the only thing she’s found that works to stop herself from throwing up is to lie flat on the floor.
She lays on her back and stares at the speckled ceiling.
The grey linoleum is cool and smells of the fabric sprays they spritz onto the Suitor’s costumes that can’t go in the washing machine.
Surprisingly, the scent eases her stomach so she turns her cheek to the cold surface and takes a long sniff.
She reaches up to the table with the sewing machine to get her phone and rolls onto her side. She calls up the calendar with her thumb, scrolls up to September, counts the weeks, and the days. It’s still the same as it was half an hour ago when she last checked.
She has to tell Danny. And she will, as soon as she’s decided what to tell him.
But, realistically, what else can she say?
Big news, but I think it’ll be okay, we’re having a baby!
And he’ll be shocked and he’ll stare at her with his green eyes wide and she’ll have to grab his hand to stop him from floating away into the sky the way men do when you say these things to them.
Especially without a ring on your finger and a piece of paper with his name on it tucked away.
And he’ll say, But we were so careful! And she’ll say, Well yes, we were a little bit careful but let’s be honest we didn’t do all that we could, and he’ll frown a little and she might joke – depending on the vibe – Well, you know what they call a couple who pull out!
And his frown will deepen, a little reproachfully, and he’ll say something like, Just give me a minute, I’m still getting used to this.
And she will squeeze his hand a little harder, to tether him, to anchor the sturdy ship of him here with her, in the port, not out there on the high seas where any rough, rogue wind can blow him off course, and she’ll say, It’s okay my love, we’ll be okay.
You know what they say, the show must go on.
They’ll go to Belinda’s office after the show to tell her, and she’ll sigh and look at them over her spectacles.
Will you leave at the end of your pledges or are you asking for me to arrange parental leave?
And she’ll probably have to hold him again, to steady him.
We’ll leave at the end of our pledges, thank you.
And Belinda will nod. You’ll always have references and our good will here.
They’ll go to stay with her parents in Leeds while they find a place of their own and Danny gets a job.
Near enough to his parents in Doncaster, too.
And she’ll set up a room in their house as a sewing room, get her machine out of her parents’ loft and put some of her savings towards some silk to make some outfits on spec to show off what she can do.
Wedding dresses and curtains, maybe set herself up with an Etsy shop.
And the show won’t go on, not exactly, but something will and that will be the point, that will be the whole story of it.
It’ll be a good little life. No shows, no magic, no glamour. But a good life nonetheless.
The nausea starts to recede so she gets up, goes to the door where she keeps her bag and rummages for the sandwich she tucked away earlier.
She tears off a dry crust and chews it. It helps, for a minute or so.
On the tannoy she can hear Cecile’s faint voice dismissing the dancers from rehearsal with that same perpetual note of disappointment.
Milly feels sorry for the dancers really, not because of Cecile exactly but because nothing they do can ever be enough.
When she makes a costume, she knows she can make it perfectly.
It doesn’t always come out perfect, but she can unpick and redo it.
The dancers never get that chance. The show goes on whether they are perfect or not and they know it.
The knowledge of it gnaws at them, fucks them up.
They stand in front of the mirror in fittings, gazing miserably at their lithe, muscled bodies, frowning at the bits they say Milly’s made look fat.
Or short, or long, or whatever. She remembers Alina glancing at her and rolling her eyes as they dressed one of the corps de ballet girls on Milly’s first day.
Can you imagine looking like that and being so fucking miserable about it all the time?
Milly has a swig of water and it’s cool and soothing on her throat.
She chews another crust of bread. The only person she’s looking forward to telling is Gino.
As the bump grows over the next five months until her pledge is up he’ll slip her cups of cardamom and cinnamon-spiced milk, and little light cakes and the sticky, burnt bits of rice at the bottom of the pan – the kind of thick, pale food the creature inside her craves.
She yawns and looks at the clock. Hours and hours to go yet until the show’s over but it feels like night already.
She could fall asleep in that hard plastic chair right now and not wake up until curtain down.
She sits back down at the sewing machine and finishes the seam on the tulle.
She holds it up, examines the line of it.
Looks good. She positions the other seam at the machine and hovers her foot on the pedal.
She could tell Danny tonight. She could wait for him in their cabin after she and Alina have packed up the costume trunks, and when he comes in to change and shower she could tell him.
If she times it right, he might even mention marriage.
By this time tomorrow they could have told Belinda and in forty-eight hours, tops, she’ll be having cream in her porridge and perfect little slivers of ripe pear, whatever it is she fancies right at that moment, and this roiling sickness in her will be sated.
She picks up her phone from where she left it on the floor and types how to stop morning sickness.
She reads the top results: dry crackers, sour things, keeping hydrated.
Some herbal supplement that looks a bit dodgy.
Some experimental drug you can only get abroad.
She gets up, has another sip of water from the bottle by the door, heaves and swallows bile, lies down on the floor again, her phone cradled in her hand.
Would you just stop it, little one? she thinks. Would you just let your mum keep her lunch down, just for today?
She imagines the little being inside her, growing by the second.
Now an arm, now a kidney, now ten tiny little fingernails.
Soon, she’ll get one of those apps that tells her what bits of its body it’s getting week by week, comparing its size to a piece of fruit.
She imagines it floating around in its salt water home.
She read somewhere that the salinity of amniotic fluid is the same as the sea, but a few days ago when they last had signal she looked that up and discovered she was wrong.
It was a myth, one of those things that feels right and good but is too glib and simple to possibly be true.
She found out that amniotic fluid is salty, yes, but seeing as seawater varies in salinity across oceans and depths, there’s no way to say it’s the same concentration.
Still, it’s the sort of thing she might tell Danny, once he’s got used to the idea.
He’d like that. He’d start talking excitedly about how everything is connected and there’s a master plan – he might even suggest they watch one of those videos about pyramids and aliens together and Christ alive, she’s that tired that she might just say yes – and some of that excitement might spill over into the baby.
Poor thing. It could do with someone being excited about its presence.