Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #29
Anita is writing a card for Harriet, who is making her debut as the Red Princess tonight.
She writes out the little rhyme, three sisters never to be seen, but she has to stop when she gets to the last line about the Crow who sings in her nest, because her eyes are filling with tears and she doesn’t want to smudge her writing.
Alex wrote her a card before her first Red Princess with this rhyme in and she still has it, although you’re supposed to give everything left behind to Belinda so she can destroy it.
She gave Belinda the toothbrush he kept in her cabin and a couple of pairs of socks, then wrapped everything else – all the letters, the cards, the presents, the photos – in a package and sent it to her mum’s house.
Milly and Alina are moving between the dressing rooms and wardrobe, each with a cast sheet clamped between their teeth and arms full of costumes on hangers.
Cecile is in her office, working on tomorrow night’s casting.
AJ is in his dressing room, humming through the orchestral arrangement for Glazunov’s Raymonda, which he does not think much of as a score but finds relaxing in a mind-numbing way before a show.
Charlie the deputy stage manager arrives at the prompt desk and settles himself in his chair. He checks he has everything he needs: headset charged, score all correct, lighting and set cues all there. He takes a swig of water, checks his watch, waits for the minute hand to catch up.
Outside the Grit it is raining. A mizzling kind of rain that leaves everything glistening wet and dampens all sounds.
The bell, when it comes, is muffled and sluggish.
It rings once, twice, three times, then pauses as if fatigued.
Once, twice, three times again and the Grub shudders with the vibrations.
Once, twice, three times again and the mist clears a little around the Grub, the droplets of water juddering as they meet the iron.
Nine more peals sound solemnly into the night and the last takes a while to fade completely, still echoing on the mossy gravestones as Gino shuts and bolts the window of his kitchen, turns on his extractor fan and starts chopping carrots.
Five minutes to seven, and on stage inside the Grit Zach is showing Lara how to angle the downstage lights on the act one backdrop.
‘And of course the folder with the lighting cues is the most important thing to follow but you never know what’s going to happen on this show so Juliet always used to tell me to rely on the rhyme the dancers say.’
‘What rhyme?’ Lara cocks her head.
‘Okay, it’s stupid but it does help.’ Zach clears his throat.
‘King, queen, sisters never to be seen – I don’t know what that’s about, maybe they’ve just got to stay inside, you know what fairytales are like – orchard, sea, suitors in a dream – because the princesses go to rescue the princes, right, that’s kind of interesting, I guess?
And then orchard, quest, the Crow in its nest.’
Just downstage of them, Danny mutters to Kavi up in the flies as he lowers the safety curtain along the line of the proscenium arch.
Belinda stands behind them, droplets of rain dripping from the hem of her black coat.
Charlie watches the sheet of iron as it touches the stage and presses the call button.
The light that tells him he is broadcasting to the whole company shines scarlet.
A crackle of static, a whistle of his breath echoing throughout the backstage area.
‘Ladies and gentlemen of The Apple and the Pearl, this is your half-hour call. Thirty minutes, please.’
* * *
‘House is open, Mackenzie,’ Belinda calls from the stage. He looks up from the image of the lighting rig on his laptop screen.
‘And everyone in?’ he answers, as he does every night. Belinda nods tightly, as she does every night, and walks away across the stage, her shoes squeaking a little on the vinyl dance floor.
You’re told on your first day here about the curfews, the bells before the show and the bells at midnight.
But Mackie knows that not everyone really understands the consequences of being outside either the iron walls of the Grub or the salt-sprinkled stage of the Grit by the time Charlie comes on the tannoy until they’ve experienced what Belinda calls an incident.
When Alex the dancer lad disappeared a month or so ago, they were not what Belinda would call tight.
There were too many new pledges who hadn’t seen the aftermath of a snatching, hadn’t been locked in dressing rooms or cabins until Belinda could count everyone, hadn’t witnessed the Crow shrieking as it wheeled around the Grub, hadn’t felt the leaden weight of the now-forbidden name on the tongue.
After Bobby the French horn tripped over a tree root on the way back to the Grub after a show and fell into the Otherworld last September, there had been a flurry of new pledges.
The new harp; the new flute; three new violins; a new French horn; a new cello; Kavi – though he had no worries about him, sharp as a tack; and three or four new dancers looking pretty wet about the ears.
Then Alex didn’t turn up to rehearsals, the Grub and the Grit were locked for a couple of hours, the Crow keened. And those new pledges went about with a dazed look for a week or so, their induction into the world of The Apple and the Pearl truly complete.
On the upside, safest place after a lightning bolt is under the storm-struck tree, Derek had said the next evening in the dining car.
What the fuck is wrong with you? Danny had snarled and Milly had put a restraining hand on his arm.
Alina had drained her gin and tonic and slammed it onto the table.
She put her clenched fist over her mouth as if stopping herself from saying more and strode out of the dining car.
It has always been the most egregious insult on The Apple and the Pearl to wish a snatching on someone, and Mackie was grateful to Alina for holding herself back and saving him from the inevitable – and in this case, unfair – disciplinary procedure.
Mackie looks up from his laptop screen again to see Derek fiddling with a wing flat on the other side of the stage, a power drill tucked between his knees and Danny beside him, violently pointing at the frame. He sighs. Where in any of the available worlds did Belinda find Derek?
He knows that every snatching makes Belinda publicly furious and privately heartbroken.
She makes him, AJ or Cecile fill out those blasted forms, she gets a bottle of wine from Gino to take back to her cabin and she hires someone new.
After the dancer lad had been taken, Belinda had been red-eyed for days.
I had to tell his parents that he’d fallen from a tree, she’d said to Mackie a few days later.
The Crow will get me some kind of body to send them for a funeral.
Mackie always feel intensely sorry for her on those occasions.
He brings her a drink after the midnight bells and tries to gauge if she wants company as she drowns her guilt or if she wants to rage in solitude.
After Alex’s snatching, Belinda had sat in her coat with the open ledger in front of her for a good half an hour before Mackie had been able to persuade her to get the whisky down.
And the worst of it is that I’m not surprised, not at all.
Good-looking, talented. They take the best of us and leave the oafs here to rot.
To be fair, not every snatching makes her cry. She really hadn’t seemed to care much about Bobby the French horn. He’d been a shambling, musty kind of bloke whose face was set in a permanent sneer.
Zach bounds over, trailed by the new lighting assistant, a blonde girl whose name Mackie knew this morning but has now forgotten. ‘Any joy on that upstage light?’ he asks.
‘I’m thinking leave it off for tonight and reposition the ones next it.’
He turns to the blonde girl and smiles. ‘How’s your day been? Has Zach explained how things work around here?’
She looks uncertainly at Zach, who nods at her encouragingly. ‘He’s told me quite a lot, yeah.’
‘Has he let you know about our audience? How to stay safe?’
The new girl glances at Zach and nods. Zach shuffles and shoves his hands in his pockets.
‘Well, it’s my pledge today too, so hopefully I’ll see you in the Grub later.
’ He looks back at his laptop, and Zach, who does at least know when his presence is no longer required, withdraws, holding out his hand to float protectively behind the new girl’s back like he’s leading her across a ballroom floor.
Mackie sighs. He could do without Zach falling in love, to be honest.
His nineteenth pledge. How did that happen so fast?
He’s done all the jobs on the technical team except anything in wardrobe – you wouldn’t trust him with a needle and scissors – but this is his seventh pledge as the boss.
He knows the show better than anyone, even better than Cecile and AJ.
They’re blinkered by their devotions to the dance and the music, but Mackie can’t afford that.
He can’t play any instrument, but he can hum the whole score and he knows each one of the dancers’ cues, although you’d not want him anywhere near a pair of tights.