Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #33
Gino frowned and looked down at the tiny flecks of green on the chopping board. He picked up the slim stem of a chive and handed it to Romero who nibbled on the end.
The feeling of being so drunk you can’t feel your legs and you’re not sure if you’re standing up or not.
Gino folded his arms and leaned against the counter.
How long have you experienced food like this?
All my life.
And it’s worse here?
Romero nodded. Since taking his pledge it was as if the dial had been pushed past the maximum. He found himself weeping with terror from the smell of a pinch of cinnamon in a bowl of porridge, or trying to hide a painfully swift erection from a single sip of orange juice.
Okay, said Gino. Is there anything that doesn’t make you feel bad when you eat it?
Crackers and apple rings.
Gino suppressed a shudder. Anything else? Any real food?
Romero had shrugged. The monster made it too difficult to try.
Right. This is what we’ll do. I’ll make something just for you every day after the show, something simple, not too fancy, and you tell me how it makes you feel. And if it upsets you I’ll remember and I won’t make it again.
Romero felt a sudden stab of what he assumed was hunger, something he hadn’t felt for years and years, at least since he’d lived with his aunt and the monster had started to nibble at him. But why would you do that?
Gino turned away and busied himself with tidying the herbs he’d set out. Did you make a pledge on your first day here?
Yes.
Well, everyone’s pledge is different, and this is mine. He held open the door to the kitchen. Come back tomorrow night and I’ll have something ready for you.
His costume is driving him mad, itching the tender skin over his ribs and he stops by the noticeboard to scratch and adjust it. He holds the door to the stage open for Milly who is jogging towards him with a threaded needle in one hand and the other on her chest.
‘Ta,’ she pants as she passes him, and he follows her into the blackness of the wings.
The temperature on stage is balmy, the lights exuding heat in all directions. Shirley the assistant stage manager is sweating as she wraps Benji in the red cloak of the Suitor. Romero goes to stand next to him, ready for Shirley to fuss around him with the blue cloak next.
‘Good luck, mate,’ Romero whispers to Benji as Shirley trots back to the props table. ‘You’ll be great. Just keep breathing.’
Benji gives him a wan smile. ‘Cecile told me this morning that she should have given me an extra week to rehearse. She said it like she was telling me someone had died.’
Romero rolls his eyes. ‘That’s the sort of thing she says when she has full confidence in you. Honestly, you’ll be great.’
The Pages march off stage and for a moment Shirley is distracted by gathering up their decorative swords and shields and placing them carefully within their marked-out places on the prop table.
On stage, Greg and Mara are sweeping around each other in the mock courtly dance of the King and the Queen.
They’re Romero’s favourite couple to watch in these roles – the command in the breadth of Greg’s shoulders and the aristocratic way Mara holds her head.
They’re his favourite dancers to watch in almost any role.
Theirs is the kind of charisma you simply don’t have at the beginning of your career, no matter how easily you turn five pirouettes, no matter how fresh the line of your arabesque.
It’s as if every time you step on stage you accrue a little more magnetism, until your knees are shot and your hips creak and your back is crooked but no one can take their eyes off you.
Romero can feel it happening to him, a slow build-up of glamour that glitters on the skin under the glare of the stage lights.
It makes him feel powerful, but it’s not without its dangers.
He’s noticed the haze that rises from the auditorium during curtain calls lingers for a fraction of a second around Greg and Mara – and Stephanie and Stuart too – no matter what roles they’re dancing, even if they’re only in the corps de ballet that night.
It’s dangerous, in a thrilling and glamorous way.
Charlotte used to have the little speckles of light in the haze dancing around her head for a full minute before they were drawn to the back of the stage and into the Pearl on its podium, and look what happened to her.
Shirley returns to his blue cloak – which she pleads for them not to attempt to wrap on their own as Alina is very insistent on how they should fold and drape – and Stuart, dressed in the glittering cream jacket of the White Suitor, appears by his side with a waft of aftershave.
Stuart slaps Benji on the shoulder. ‘Here we go, mate. The three that lie in a dream. We’ll be looking out for you, just enjoy yourself.’
Benji looks a little green. Romero remembers the first time he danced one of the Suitors – it was the Red one, which is the easiest although it’s tricky on the stamina going straight from the solo to the pas de deux – he had thought he was going to throw up.
Gino had made him a sweet potato curry spiced with lemongrass for courage and cardamom for spring in his feet and Cecile had told him that he’d be a passable Suitor if he learned to land his tours cleanly.
The trumpet blares, loudly pulling his attention back to the show currently in progress, announcing the entrance of the Crow.
Romero leans to one side to see Josh saunter out onto the stage with his black cape billowing behind him and the sleek black feathers of the headdress gleaming under the lights.
A familiar stab of envy twists his stomach.
He’d love to dance the Crow one day but he’s afraid of that headdress.
He knows it will itch him on the soft places behind his ears and under his jaw.
He’s seen the way the others groan when they take it off in the wings, their hair dripping with sweat, their foreheads dented by the rim.
He imagines the glue melting into his face as he starts to sweat, the heat releasing the intimate odours of everyone else who has ever worn it: their skin, their hair, their teeth.
It makes his stomach roil. He both longs for and dreads Cecile beckoning him with one red-tipped finger to tell him to start learning the part.
He hasn’t decided yet if he’ll tell her he doesn’t want to or if he’ll try and wheedle a new headdress out of Alina.
Maybe he’ll try that first. If Alina says no, which he can imagine her doing, with that sardonic so-you-think-you’re-better-than-anyone-else-who’s-worn-this-monstrosity eyebrow, he’ll ask Gino to have a word with her.
He doesn’t do that often, throw his weight around as the beloved of the most important person in the whole company, but when he does it works.
There is no peace for you on board the Grub if Gino is not happy with you.
Maybe that’s why Cecile is such a bitch.
Gino won’t talk about their long-running feud.
Our pledges are opposed to each other, is all he’ll say. Just another of the Crow’s tricks.
Romero doesn’t have a favourite dancer as the Crow: everyone who performs the role teases out something different.
Stephanie is the most birdlike – the way she cocks her head and preens the feathers on the costume, she sometimes seems uncannily like a real, giant bird.
Mara is cold and glamorous and fierce – she could be on a catwalk.
Stuart is an alpha, dancing it like the kind of bird that would piss all over your lunch and laugh about it.
Greg doesn’t dance the Crow anymore because his knees are giving up on him but when he did he played it for laughs, hamming up the leering at the Princesses and cavorting like a kind of gremlin.
Josh, on stage now, gives the Crow something wistful and haunted, like he’s flown a hundred leagues to be here and has seen things you can’t imagine.
It’s the only part Romero can think of in any classical repertoire that can be performed by a man or a woman.
The rest of ballet is so rigidly gender-defined, so stiflingly segregated that just the fact that the role exists thrills him and goes a long way to healing the bruising from all those jobs he didn’t get, all those directors who looked past him as if he was invisible.
He has to get Alina to make him a new headdress.
He can’t retire without dancing that role.
Josh finishes his solo, standing with his back to the audience, with one hand held out towards the wing where the three Suitors wait.
A rolling arpeggio of the harp and the cellos start the Suitors’ theme, slow and steady and noble.
Romero holds onto his cape with one hand and places the other on Stuart’s sequinned shoulder.
Benji’s trembling hand lands on his, and they all walk out of the wing together, chins held high, a carefully neutral expression on each of their faces because they’re supposed to be a vision the Crow has conjured for the court.
He always finds it hard to tell when he’s no longer in the wings and is now on stage.
Since his first show that border space has fascinated him.
A tiny tear in the fabric of time and space, a liminal moment between being hidden in the blackness and being bared, exposed for all the audience to see.
Just a step, a small shuffle from dark to light.
He wonders if there has ever been anyone who has fallen inside that gap between the wings the way you can fall into the gap between tolls of the midnight bell.