Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #27
She glances at the clock. Five fifteen, almost time to start setting costumes for the show.
Two long clothes rails line the room, one for men and one for women.
Milly looks at the long velvet sleeves of the pages’ costumes, the sequins dripping from the Pearl waltz dresses, the thick, black brocade of the Crow’s cloak.
In a few minutes, she’ll have to take one of the copies of the casting that Alina keeps pinned to the back of the door and distribute these costumes among the dancers, tutus draped over one arm, the basket of washing balanced on a hip, up and down the stairs until everyone has all their underwear and all their headdresses and no one can blame her if they go on stage looking anything less than spectacular.
She slumps back in the chair, her eyelids heavy.
Exhaustion sweeps over her. She can’t do it. She’s too tired.
Listlessly, she removes the bobbin from the sewing machine and winds more white cotton around it.
She threads the machine again, takes the tulle skirt from the mannequin and lines up the seam.
She screws her eyes shut against the tide of nausea.
How will she do this for the next five months?
How does anyone carry on their lives while cooking another being like this?
She feels pathetic. There are women out there running marathons, running companies, running countries, and she can’t even manage to put a few knickers away.
She closes her eyes and swallows a heave of bile. How can there be so many humans crawling all over the planet when this is the misery they bring to their mothers?
Five thirty, and Alina flings the door open. ‘Didn’t see you in the Grub, thought you might be hiding in here.’ She sees the bodice of the new White Princess’ costume on the mannequin and the layers of tulle half threaded through the sewing machine. She frowns.
‘I don’t think that’s a priority, you know.’ She puts her reusable cup down on the designated food and drink table near the door and shrugs off her coat. ‘Cecile only told us to start thinking about it.’
She opens the cup and the smell of rich black coffee wafts out into the room. Milly swallows, saliva pooling under her tongue. She is going to be sick. She swallows again and again, trying to keep her lunch down. She breathes through her teeth.
‘Oh sorry, are you hungry? Did you want me to bring you something?’
‘No, no. I’m okay. I ate earlier.’ She joins Alina at the door and has a swig from her water bottle. It eases the roiling in her belly for the moments it’s held in her mouth and as it’s slipping down her throat, but the relief soon fades.
Another waft of coffee makes her heave. ‘Are you drinking that black?’ Milly asks. ‘At this time of the day?’
Alina makes a face. ‘Something wrong with the milk again. Tastes fucking awful.’
Milly turns back to the sewing machine, nausea tinged with panic. When did it start, these complaints about soured milk? She thinks back to what she read online a few days ago when they last had signal: folklore about changelings spoiling milk and curdling butter is consistent between cultures.
‘Mackie’s hosting in the Grub tonight, did you see?’ Alina continues. ‘It’s his pledge day. And there’s someone on probation too, blonde LX girl.’
Milly makes a non-committal noise as she sips her water but inside her chest something folds in upon itself.
There will be drinking until long after the midnight bells, a long night of lager-swilling, whisky-gulping drunkenness and Danny will be there until the end with the rest of them.
She won’t get a chance to tell him tonight and tomorrow he’ll be too hungover.
It’ll have to be the day after. But it doesn’t really matter.
She can wait. She’s planning to take some secrets to her grave: she can carry this for forty-eight more hours.
‘Great.’ Milly says. ‘Hope the new girl pledges, we could do with a bit less testosterone around.’
Alina snorts as she drains the dregs of her coffee.
‘Won’t change anything round here. One more woman on the crew isn’t going to make your man and the rest of them magically teetotal.
’ Alina presses the pedal bin with her foot and dumps the empty coffee cup inside.
‘She may, however, have a good effect on Zach, who seems to be half in love with her already.’
Milly shrugs. ‘As long as he doesn’t do a Michael when she rejects him.’
Danny won’t drink so much in their new life, she knows it.
The others won’t be there to goad him on, the booze won’t be subsidised, they’ll spend evenings when he’s not working curled up in front of the telly or chatting about this and that.
She lets her lips part and tries to breathe through her mouth.
Easily led, is Danny. She’ll have to make sure it’s her who leads him, when they’re back out in the world.
Alina takes off her coat and hangs it on the peg next to the door. She bends forwards, shakes her long black hair into a ponytail and gathers it with one of the hairbands she keeps on her wrists.
‘Guys or girls?’ Alina asks, pointing at the two waiting washing baskets.
‘Girls,’ Milly says immediately, thinking of the stink of cheap aftershave, feet and unwashed dancewear in the men’s dressing room, never freshened, no matter how many times Alina throws the windows open, no matter where the Grit sets itself up.
‘White Princess costume looks good, by the way.’ Alina says as she plucks one of the casting sheets from the back of the door and clamps it between her teeth.
Milly follows her with the other sheet of paper balanced on the stack of underwear in the washing basket.
She’s surprised to find tears prickling at the back of her eyes.
She is so pathetically grateful to Alina for saying exactly what she needs to hear.
No one else will notice where she’s taken care not to sew any sequins or gems around the bodice so the dancer can be partnered easily about her waist, no one else will see how precisely she’s matched the pattern on the seams of the tulle, no one else could appreciate how she’s cut the hem at the most flattering point of the leg.
They’d only sniff accusingly if she got it wrong.
Not that she does this job for thanks or applause, you’d be waiting a long time if you were.
The show goes on, because it’s the most important thing, the only important thing.
It’s like motherhood, she thinks as she trudges down the stairs to the women’s dressing room.
You pour your heart and soul into making a body for another to inhabit, and if you do it right you’ll always be invisible.
A silent wind carrying your child over mountains and oceans, a weightless shield against every storm.
Before she opens the door to the dressing room she stops, puts the washing basket down and wipes her eyes.
Pull yourself together, she tells herself sternly.
And get on with your job. She stands up and feels sick.
She puts a hand on the doorknob and feels sick.
She tightens her grip on the plastic rim of the basket and swallows. The show must go on.
* * *
Six o’ clock, and the technicians fill every booth of the dining car, scraping the last smears of Gino’s lasagne onto their forks and into their mouths.
Lara sits with Zach and Mackie, eating lasagne with one hand while the other is paging through the black ringbinder she’s been carrying around all day.
‘Can I just ask about this bit here in the contract’ – she flips through the binder on her lap – ‘where it says about a forfeit if I break my pledge?’
Mackie sighs. ‘Breaking your pledge incurs a penalty. It’s decided by the Crow, with Belinda fighting your corner.
It’s a bugger, but though Belinda and the unions have been busting a gut over the years, you just can’t know what your forfeit will be until it’s asked.
It could be simple like a bit of your stuff.
Hairbrush or pair of shoes or something.
Could be a limb or seven years’ service. ’
Lara looks down at the contract in her lap. Zach sees a quick flash of fear cross her face like lightning, just like anyone he’s ever seen sitting with a contract in their lap. A limb? he can hear the girl thinking. Is he fucking joking?
A few tables away, Derek finishes his meal, belches, and passes by Kavi on his way to the counter.
He slaps him on the back and says in a stage whisper so loud the entire crew can hear him, ‘You wanna be quick mate if you’re to have a chance with the new girl.
Seems like Zach is mooning after her too. ’
Kavi reddens as he gets up from the table, Zach chokes on a piece of roasted pepper and Charlie says firmly, ‘See you up in the Grit, Derek.’
Danny stands before Derek has a chance to turn to him, still chewing his pasta, and returns his tray to Gino. He follows Kavi out of the dining car and jumps down beside him onto the dark earth.
A shriek in the stillness, followed by an answering howl.
Kavi starts, stumbles into him. ‘What was that?’
‘An owl, mate.’ Danny kindly, firmly, rights him, gives him a pat on the shoulder. ‘Get your torch out and let’s get up to the Grit. Quick, before Derek catches us.’
* * *