Chapter 66
WITH A BANG
I felt out of step with reality: the quotidian reality of morning class, and the reality we constructed for performances.
I was also out of step in the literal sense – during rehearsals I was late to cues, struggled to switch from left to right when steps had to be repeated in different directions, misjudged the run-up for lifts; even when I managed on the third or fourth try, staying up there, whether in Stephen’s or Max’s hands, was hard work.
My limbs felt as heavy and numb as they were meant to be during Romeo’s final pas de deux with Juliet, when he finds what he thinks is her corpse and miserably tries to dance with it.
‘It’s been a long season,’ Mariska said charitably. ‘You’re tired.’
Everyone else – blissfully ignorant of Sander’s disappearance – agreed, but I knew what they were really thinking: twelve BCBC seasons were finally beginning to take their toll. I only had so many miles left.
‘Any more headway with the note? The music?’ Fiona asked, even though she knew I’d hit a dead end.
She asked because she didn’t know what else to do, and I was grateful she asked, because it meant I wasn’t alone, but I was also beginning to wish I hadn’t worked so hard to make Sander’s memory stick.
I carried my grief around my neck every day, and felt physically run down for the first time in years.
But what sort of dancer would I be if I let that stop me? Fonteyn kept dancing even after her husband was left paralysed from an assassination attempt; I’d danced on toenails that came clean off after removing my pointes. I could dance through heartbreak. I had to.
* * *
In the last week of Swan Lake rehearsals before the season wrapped, I went into morning class with a niggle at the back of my right knee, my preferred supporting leg for développés and fouettés.
By the end of the grand battement, there was a long strip of heat up the back of my leg.
I soldiered on, dabbed the sweat off my face, and changed into my pointes.
One of the ribbons got caught under my heel, so I took a few seconds longer than usual to get ready, and was quick to stand when Mariska clapped her hands to refocus everyone’s attention. As I stood, there was a loud bang.
I looked around the room for the source and wondered why no one else seemed to have heard it. Then I was in a heap on the floor.
Nick told me later he’d heard my scream from his office, which was directly above our studio.
When the paramedics arrived, the first hit of nebulised pain relief didn’t feel like relief so much as a flimsy layer of cotton wool around the white-hot twist of barbed wire that was my ACL, which had ruptured.
I was scheduled for a reconstructive operation at a hospital in Marylebone the next day, and told that I wouldn’t be able to go back to work until after Nutcracker at the absolute earliest.
When Nick rang my hospital suite and asked if there was anything he could do to cheer me up, I asked only that he made sure there were no lilies in Fiona’s Swan Lake bouquets, because they made her sneeze.
After the op, my parents drove me back to their house in South Kensington, where they insisted I stay for the full length of my recovery and rehab – my flat was up too many flights of stairs.
When Mum went over there to collect some of my clothes and toiletries, I asked her to bring the shoebox from my coffee table labelled “Sander”.
She didn’t ask who or what that referred to; I didn’t tell her to open the lid and see for herself.
That summer, instead of gazing out of aeroplane windows, I parked myself in front of the sitting room window and listened to my Frankenstein’s monster of a mixtape on headphones, sometimes hoping for a belated epiphany, more often as a form of self-harm.
Over time, as the nights drew in, it became an odd source of motivation: I had failed Sander, but I could not, would not, fail the BCBC. It had always been my anchor, and I needed it more than ever.