Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #40
Pull yourself together, he thinks, the voice in his head belonging to his grandmother.
I cannot abide snivelling. The trumpet sounds a trill and Dan leaps onto the stage, runs to Anita and takes her waist to lift her.
Another trumpet trill and Solomon leaps, runs to Bella and lifts her.
The third trumpet brings Ritchie on to grab Jessica, and Luke creeps forward, craning his neck to see.
This is why he hangs about in the wings every night to risk getting ensnared in Derek’s personality disorder; he has to learn this dance, and since nobody will teach it to him at the pace he needs he’s going to have to keep showing up and watching it from different angles until he’s got it.
Tonight he’s focusing on the part Ritchie’s dancing.
He almost knows it, although he’s never done any of the partner work or lifts, and Cecile will inevitably shout at him when he gets the spacing wrong.
He’s hoping Cecile will call a rehearsal for him to practice, though that might be a little optimistic.
He needs one of the girls to guide him through it but the thought of going to one of them to ask if they could spare half an hour to help him makes him feel sweaty.
He imagines Zuleika curling her lip. Ten minutes, new boy. I’m busy.
Ritchie flings Jessica up into the air and catches her in arabesque in his arms. Luke leans to see how his left arm is holding her but they’re spinning and he can’t see, and by the time they’re facing him again Jessica is starting the sequence of pique pirouettes away from him. Shit, he’s missed it again.
The three couples of the orchard dance run off stage hand in hand as Benji walks on and stands in the stage left corner to begin his solo.
Luke wants to creep forward again so he’s as close as he can be without actually being on stage but he’s afraid people in the wings will think he’s trying to learn the Red Suitor too.
Sort yourself out in the corps before you get ideas, he can imagine Josh sneering.
He will probably never dance the Red Suitor.
He’s simply not talented enough, and although that thought used to smart, he’s accepted it now.
Since he first arrived at ballet school and found that he was merely a mediocre dancer, pleasant enough to watch, he’s been taking out that knowledge from the shameful part of himself where he hides it and examining it from different angles, until it no longer hurts.
Benji is what you’d call talented. His lines are clean and he moves like water.
Technically accomplished, but not prodigious, he has a way of moving his head and shoulders that makes you sigh a little, like you’re watching something beautiful that will soon fade – a sunset or the blooming of a flower.
He finishes his solo and Harriet comes on stage.
They smile at each other, a private acknowledgement of all the hours of rehearsal that have led them here, and Harriet drops into a deep curtsey to begin their pas de deux.
Luke’s heard the supposedly inspirational quotes about talent being only a tiny fraction of anything, but nothing in his life has ever suggested they’re right.
Everything suggests the most important factor in your success is whatever the fairies doled out to you at birth.
Perfectly arched feet, a supple back and hips, an easy jump.
An attractive face, finding maths easy, perfect pitch, the ability to make strangers laugh.
None of which he has. He’s not sure if any fairies turned up to his birth at all.
He could put a sign up outside the Grit one night before the show – WANTED: fairies who gave me my talents. He’d be waiting a long time.
When he puts it like that, he should feel lucky to have this job, any job at all.
And he tries to be grateful, really he does.
He knows all about how thanking something for the fact that you woke up this morning is good for your brain, but some days – like today – he’d just like a little something more to be grateful for than the fact that he’s still alive.
Twenty years and three months old and his life stretches ahead of him like an endless, featureless road, cobbled and potholed for maximum discomfort.
Everything he owns could fit in his backpack.
Everyone he knows either dead or having to think for a moment to remember him at the mention of his name.
He has nowhere else to go. He remembers watching the show on his probation day, standing between Belinda with her clipboard clamped to her chest and Charlie at the prompt desk, knowing he would dance this show no matter what horrors it contained.
He saw it then – that he was not the only lost and lonely soul here.
He saw that all of them – even the really cocky ones – were here because they had for whatever reason snipped themselves – or been snipped – out of the web of obligation that tethered you out in the real world and were now floating, free.
Silence as Benji and Harriet finish their pas de deux, her perched high above Benji’s head.
Luke watches Benji as he walks slowly off stage bearing his Princess, sweat beading on his face and neck.
Of all the strange things about The Apple and the Pearl, perhaps it’s the silence that greets each dance that’s the hardest to get used to.
The idea that all that effort is not acknowledged.
Whoever choreographed the show – and Luke’s not actually sure if anyone actually knows who did – didn’t take that into account.
They made the ballet as if it were going to be presented to ordinary audiences in an ordinary theatre.
But, he has to admit, there are some parts of the show that emerge as powerful when they happen in silence, like this part, the end of the Red pas de deux as the Red Suitor carries the Red Princess off stage with slow, deliberate steps, both of them staring off into the distance.
As soon as Benji and Harriet are in the wings, AJ raises his baton and calls the trumpets.
Here we go, he thinks, his chance to redeem himself after the fiasco he made of the first act.
Zuleika’s not around to see it but Cecile is so he’d better not fuck up.
He stands straighter, pulls up his chin and runs onto the stage with Matty and Theo, landing the first jeté with the timpani.
Trouble is, as soon as he lands and faces the auditorium he sees the creature again, the same one that distracted him before. It’s sitting in the stalls, the third or fourth row and it’s luminous, like it’s covered in glow-in-the-dark paint.
One of the only nuggets of wisdom anyone passed on to him was the thing about not looking at the auditorium. Stuart, with a hand on his shoulder before his first show. It’s kind of freaky out there, mate. Don’t look too hard.
But of course he had. Hadn’t been able to resist. The wonders out there, who alive could say they’d seen what he has in the space of only one month?
They look nothing like the fairies in the books he used to read when he was a kid, sitting on the floor in the children’s section of the library.
Those were all plump cheeks and cute wings and neat little wands they’d use to do good, useful kinds of magic.
The things that sit on the plush red seats in the Grit are savage and gorgeous.
Their skin shimmers in shades of blue and green and their hair is gold or silver like coins.
You can see the sharpened points of their teeth glint in the glow of the footlights.
Those who have wings sit with them cramped and folded above their heads like enormous feathered parasols, and those who have horns paint and polish them until they shine.
They wear dresses made of fish scales and acorns embroidered with shells and beads of sea glass, and Luke hasn’t yet worked out if they’re like human audiences and dress up to come to the theatre or if this is the way they dress all the time.
He’s sure Derek’s got something to say about that.
I should ask him, he thinks as he steps into arabesque – arms go through first, he reminds himself – and the thought makes a bubble of laughter rise in his belly.
But the creature that shines at him from the stalls has long silver hair studded with tiny droplets of something, dew, diamonds, the tears of a wolf perhaps.
She – and he thinks it is a she because of something soft around the jaw – is draped in a cloak made of what looks like moss and as he follows Matty in the jeté sequence in a circle he realises that the creature reminds him of his grandmother.
The stillness, the flint of her gaze and the icy cast of her skin.
He sneaks another glance at the glowing thing in the auditorium as he prepares for the pirouette.
Yes, there really is something uncanny in it.
Now she’s dead, he thinks of his grandmother as a kind of monumental ruin, a lightning-struck oak in the middle of a fallow field that takes four grudging centuries to rot into the earth.
In his memory, she’s sitting on a kind of throne she’d carved for herself into the foam of her armchair with the remote on the armrest, the numbers on the buttons worn away from the years of pressure of her thumbs.
This Fae creature has a sour look on her face.
Perhaps she’s not enjoying the show. It’s the sort of look his grandmother used to wear at parents’ evening, sitting opposite the polite teachers who needed their notes to remember his name, holding her handbag like a grenade.
On the bus on the way home: Why do I struggle and sacrifice if you’re going to throw it back in my face like this?