Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #44
Cecile and AJ are last, as always. They check the green rooms and the dressing room, and when they are empty they meet at the noticeboard, then proceed to Belinda at the stage door.
She watches them coming, raven and blackbird, AJ’s tall and lanky frame next to scrawny Cecile, and she wonders if they feel the weight of this show as she does, if they wake in the night with something black and fearful squatting on their chest.
‘?a va?’ Cecile asks Belinda as they pass.
‘All fine, thank you.’ Belinda says. She never knows whether to try to answer in French or not.
She fancies she might have a few sentences in her, just from listening to Cecile over the years, but she wouldn’t want to embarrass herself.
‘Just to say, I’ll be posting the notice of next day off later and it looks like it’ll be a station just outside Oxford if you want to make your arrangements. ’
‘Très bien,’ says Cecile and she pulls her phone out of her black leather handbag.
AJ gallantly offers Cecile his arm. ‘Goodnight, Belinda.’ he says, and they walk down the steps of the Grit and out into the night.
Belinda watches the procession of lights up the avenue towards the Grub.
She sees one light peel off from the others and zigzag through the maze of graves.
The changeling, taking his chances again.
She sighs. The Crow says to wait, Gino says please can we have milk we can drink, Derek says he’s more human than me but that’s not saying much, the bells ring kings and queens and suitors in a dream.
Likely he’ll find himself back in the Grub by midnight, ready to try again tomorrow but wouldn’t the simplest thing for him to get his wish and go to Faerie so they can all move on and forget about him?
She looks back to the train. The first musicians are there now: she can see their phone torches reflecting on its sleek surface, rectangles of light blinking on as they reach their cabins, sink onto their beds, release the tensions of another day.
Good. Inside the Grub they’re safe. If they stay there.
She turns the iron key to lock the stage door and goes back into the heart of the Grit to start the next job she has to complete before midnight.
A quick stop by her office to pick up her sack and her litter picker, and then out into the stage right wing where Shirley is flicking the clasps on a flight case, through the pass door and into the auditorium.
She starts with the stalls as always. The house lights are up so all the little trinkets glitter as she methodically works her way along each row picking them all up and dropping them in her sack.
It looks a little bizarre, this bag, with the canvas rotted and threadbare with unexplainable stains near the drawstring, but the Crow keeps it looking like an artefact from a tomb to deter light fingers.
Tonight she finds little sprays of diamonds like raindrops; turquoise earrings; silver coins that would cover her palm; an emerald as big as an egg. Some of it will be trick gold, of course, but there’ll be enough here to pay the salaries of the cast and crew and settle all the bills Gino racks up.
Percy Montgomery used to wear thick leather gloves for this task, crawling along the rows like a penitent monk, but she has no desire for the stage crew to witness her on her knees each night and her sciatica wouldn’t have it anyway.
The litter picker was ￡5.99 from Asda and the Fae-cursed trinkets are handily confused by the plastic.
She pincers a rope of dull gold coins and the thing explodes in successive puffs of green smoke. The sounds of hammering and drilling on stage stop abruptly.
‘It’s all right,’ she calls down to Mackie. ‘I’m fine. As you were.’
* * *
Josh hangs upside down, stretching his hamstrings with his towel draped over his neck and his washbag at his feet.
He pedals through his arches, releasing one tense calf muscle at a time, listening for the sound of the shower in the bathroom cabin switching off.
Really – and it isn’t just him who thinks so, loads of the guys moan about this – there should be a strict policy about who can shower first and it should go: principals, soloists, corps de ballet, finishing with the newest pledges who did nothing more challenging in the show than standing around holding hands.
That’s how it used to be, seven years ago when he first pledged.
He remembers getting into his bed salty from sweat, leaving black smudges of eye make-up all over his pillow, getting up early to shower the previous night’s show off him before he went up to the Grit to class.
But now it’s a new, egalitarian era. We’re getting rid of that toxic shit, Mara says, jabbing her finger whenever the subject comes up, the only fair way is first come first served.
Fine. It’s socialist showers, whatever. But it doesn’t actually make things easier.
There’s a stampede for the Grub as they leave the show, especially on a night like this where the water ran cold in the dressing rooms in the Grit and no one could even have a strip wash to get the most offensive funk off them at the sink, and now the corridors of the Grub are filled with dancers in varying states of undress, stretching aching muscles in the steam that seeps from the bathrooms.
The sound of shower spray stops and he stands up.
Whoever’s in there better be out in a few seconds or he’s going to start banging on the door: maybe he’ll even pull rank, sod Mara, she can’t hear him.
Behind him one of the corps de ballet girls is on her phone, the key sounds left on so it beeps with every touch.
The noise is beginning to get on his nerves.
He’s always sensitive to sounds after dancing the Crow.
It’s all that intense concentration on the irregular rhythms, all that furious counting.
The others say after a few months of shows even the Crow’s music comes naturally to you and you stop having to count your way through the entire show, but that’s not happened to him yet.
Tonight was his fifteenth show of the Crow and still he was in his head the whole way through, relying on the memory of Cecile’s voice shouting un-deux-trois-NON!
at him during the weeks and weeks of rehearsals.
The bathroom door opens and Ritchie comes out, towel wrapped around his waist and clothes slung over his arm.
He sees Josh and his face falls blank as he presses his naked back to the fogged-up window to let Josh past. Josh murmurs, ‘Thanks,’ and shuffles past him into the bathroom with his gaze squarely on his feet so there’s no chance he might catch Ritchie’s eye again.
Josh shuts and locks the bathroom door behind him and the phone beeping in the corridor fades to nothing.
The water is still running hot and he gets under the stream, turns it up hotter, and lets the water sweep everything away.
All the tension from his back, all the thick, black make-up on his face and shoulders, the sudden rush of desire at the sight of Ritchie’s bare, dripping torso.
He squeezes his eyes shut and leans on the tiled wall behind the shower, letting the almost scalding water pummel his back.
A rhyme his grandfather used to mumble comes into his mind, something about pigeons and crows and seeds growing.
It puts him in mind of the Saturday afternoons when Mum was working at the Woolworths in town and Dad was at the scrapyard.
Josh was judged too young either to tag along with them or do his own thing, so he’d have to go down to the allotment with his grandfather.
In the summer it was golden, squeezing raspberries between his thumb and forefinger until he could feel the give of the sweet, pink juice in each cell of the fruit, carting watering cans from the tap to the tomatoes with cold, dank water slopping onto his trainers.
In autumn he was put to work, digging up carrots and building net cages and hoeing up potatoes.
In winter it was boring, sitting in the cold shed with icy fingers and toes while Grandad sipped on whisky and told the same three stories about the war.
But the best days on the allotment were in spring, those weekends where the light was eager and new, with the daffodil trumpets proud on the verges and the hawthorn hedges shyly unfolding their emerald buds.
That’s when his grandfather would haul himself off his stool, open the twists of brown paper with his fumbling, arthritic fingers and pour a tiny pile of last year’s saved seed into Josh’s waiting, careful palms. One for the pigeon, one for the crow, one to rot and one to grow, his grandfather would murmur like a prayer to the earth, as he’d point to where Josh should press the seeds into the cold ground.
Years later, after Josh had swapped Saturdays at the allotment for ballet classes, he stood by his cousins and his dad as the undertakers lowered his grandfather’s coffin into the waiting grave.
One to rot and one to grow, he’d whispered, feeling like the ponce his family accused him of being, but knowing Grandad, wherever and whatever he now was, knew exactly what he meant.
He turns off the shower and grabs his towel.
He’s hungry now, the adrenaline of the show seeping out of his blood and leaving behind it something clawing in his belly.
He presses his face into his towel, trying to wipe Ritchie’s face from his mind.
That disapproval, that sting of hurt, that sense that he’s carrying that night like a bomb he could drop at any moment.