Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #31
She never used to be so sappy, he knows it’s the necessity of gilding your life for this monstrous thing that’s made her write something like that.
He scrolls down to more comments; Best mum ever!
xxxx and Gorgeous as always mum! xoxo and thumbs-up and hearts and smiley faces and because it is hurting him somewhere high up in his ribs to see this, he clicks on Helen’s name to see more pictures of her.
At the beach, on a clifftop, holding a cake filled with candles, lounging in a garden among sunflowers, dressed in a ski suit, over and over Helen’s face which torments him like a million tiny poison pinpricks.
This is what you gave up to sit in a black box with a pocketful of salt, he thinks.
He clicks back to the picture of her with her daughters.
He tries to see the girls’ father in their faces, to unpick the mix he made with Helen and edit his own face onto theirs, to make the young women he might have had with Helen if only he’d been able to stay put.
The daughters he might have cradled and sung to and ridden a bike with and stood helplessly by as they cried over a boy or a girl or a piece of homework and there is such a pain in his chest now, such a bright flash of agony that he clamps his mouth shut to stop himself making a keening noise.
I can’t be on my own anymore, Mackie, she’d said as she pulled his ring off her finger and laid it on the path between them.
You belong to the theatre, not to me. I want to love a man who lives in my house without itching to be out of it.
And he could have said, No, put your ring back on, I’ll only go back into work to give in my notice, I’ll stay here with you and get a settled job.
Instead he had turned away, left the ring on the ground and done another three months on that musical, he can’t even remember what it was called now, it was shit anyway, telling himself she had already made her choice.
When he’d woken too many times with beer-stink vomit down his front and an empty ache in his belly, he realised enough was enough and sat in the greenroom of the Alhambra in Bradford with a copy of The Stage and a pen.
He rang the number on the ad for a stage hand on a touring ballet, spoken to a curt woman who turned out to be Belinda, and found himself at Leeds station at dinnertime on a Tuesday.
Change clinked in his pocket and he used it to call his father from one of those old payphones that linger like archaeological artefacts in public places no one can be bothered to renovate.
Well, I’m off away on a new show, Pa, a touring one so I won’t be around for a bit.
His father had made a noise of approval: he agreed with the travelling life even if it wasn’t done in the traditional ways, thought it unnatural to stay in one place.
You’ve two legs for a reason, boy, he used to say. You ain’t a tree.
Whereabouts are you playing then? his father had asked, and Mackie had swelled a little with the satisfaction of saying, Well the show’s called The Apple and the Pearl, Pa, so we’ll be playing in all sorts of places.
He could imagine the expression on the old man’s face, a glow of pride and not a little jealousy, and when the old man had said, I never knew you had it in you boy, you go on there with my grace, Mackie had felt released from his father’s long grip at last. He knew the old man thought there was nothing more he could tell or teach him and never expected to see him again, and he left that life behind scoured of guilt, every scrap of longing for his father to see and hold him gone.
He thinks the fair folk have got me now, he told Belinda in one of their moments of quiet understanding.
And he was glad and proud. He’s old-fashioned like that.
There has been no one else, all these years.
No one unless you count Juliet, which he doesn’t, because when Juliet beckoned you to her cabin and took you to her bed you did as you were told and were pleased about it.
It wasn’t love, it was barely lust, it was something else, some kind of tribute to an ancient queen, a tithe, a toll paid on this long, ancient road the Grub chuntered along.
He pulls the cursor to hover over the thumbs-up icon.
He presses it. He imagines Helen opening up her blue screen of dissatisfaction in a few minutes or a few hours or a few days and seeing that he, Mackie, that man she used to love, has given his thumbs-up to the picture of her and her daughters and he imagines that she will know he was thinking of her, that he was regretting her, that he was acknowledging all the years that lie between now and the time in which they loved each other, the only force of nature not even the Fae can escape no matter how long they delay it.
That he was saying – clumsily, with a garbled language of cartoon pictures – how much he wished it had been him who had put those babies in her belly and watched them grow beside her.
‘Mackie!’ Shirley the assistant stage manager, calling him with something approaching panic in her voice, although that doesn’t mean much, she’s a bit highly strung and that’s just how she sounds. ‘Could you just come and have a look at this on the act one backdrop please?’
He quits the screen with the photos and shuts his laptop.
The show is about to start and for the next few hours he won’t have time to sit and moon over a woman who probably hasn’t thought of him in years, he’ll be rushing from wing to wing, headset hot on his ears, the familiar tides and eddies of the score flowing around him.
Then, as soon as the curtain hits the stage for the third time, he’ll lead the swarm of his crew all over it, dismantling the gear and the set, ready to pack in the Grub again, and of course he has to go to Belinda’s office to do his pledge again.
And his life here will continue the way it always has, the way it has to be because he’s the one, the only one, who knows how to check the salt grains in the curtain.
‘Coming.’
* * *
Twenty-five past seven and Charlie calls beginners on the tannoy.
The orchestra is all assembled in the pit.
They are only waiting for Max, one of the second violins, to slip past the tuba, dodge the forest of woodwind pipes and plonk himself on his seat behind Michael.
I need the adrenaline rush, he says every time Jean complains that he puts her on edge.
Once Max is settled, they all reach for their handfuls of salt and scatter them on the ground.
AJ enters the pit, the pockets of his jet-black jacket reliably weighted with salt, and the musicians get to their feet.
A normal audience applauds the conductor, but this audience don’t care.
A conductor is just another mortal nobody to them and so they continue their languid conversations.
Everyone in the orchestra is used to that now.
It’s the smallest of the odd things about this show.
He nods to Jean, who raises her oboe to her lips and plays an A.
Michael tunes to her, head cocked to grip his violin under his chin, one hand on the peg and the other on his bow, this wordless, discordant song they sing each and every night.
Then the woodwind and brass join to match them both, their hot breath blowing a hurricane through the pit to make a tendril of AJ’s silver hair quiver.
Finally the strings take their bows to their instruments and the Grit is a glorious roar of perfectly jarring notes that roll and tumble over and around each other until each instrument falls off and the cacophony fades into a silence as beautifully tense as an arched bow ready to loose its weapon.
Up on stage, the sound of the orchestra tuning sets the dancers to a fever.
The show is about to start and although they are all buttoned and zipped up in their costumes and everyone who performs in the first act is present on stage, they still wish for a few more minutes, a couple more practices of that tricky pirouette, a moment longer just to retie the ribbon on this pointe shoe.
The wings thrum with last-minute action: a checking of the props table; a spanner on a bolt of a boom; a whispered question on a headset to Zach up in his salt-strewn lighting box.
AJ, the ninetieth conductor of The Apple and the Pearl, raises his baton and there is finally a hush from the auditorium.
Jean puts her mouth to her reed, AJ brings his baton down and the Grit fills with the unearthly sound of her instrument, a note that sounds like a seed awakening in the earth at the beginning of spring, unfurling towards the gathering light.
Charlie says, ‘Curtain’, and the plush red velvet curtains that look so soft but would crush you dead if you stood beneath them, lift away from each other to frame the proscenium like plump, stained lips that would suck the meat from your bones and kiss your skeleton later.
* * *
As he hears that first sinuous note of the oboe, Romero is in his dressing room pulling on the white tights of his costume.
The mirror before him is speckled with droplets of hair gel and it’s refracting his image slightly.
The tights fuzz and blur as he moves them over the soft brown hairs on his thighs and up over his buttocks to his waist. He tucks them into the thick band of his jockstrap and reaches for his boots before he can look too hard at the tiny ledge of displaced flesh around his waist.