Chapter 70 #2
‘Not that much.’ Fiona looks down her champagne flute, which is still half-full.
She takes a breath. Maybe she needs to say this before the clock strikes midnight, so she can begin the new millennium with a clear conscience.
‘Trix… sometimes I wished you would get injured. Nothing career-ending, God. But just once, just something that would give the rest of us – all right, me – a chance. I had to battle through sprained back muscles, a dodgy metatarsal, that hernia after Romeo and Juliet in ’85.
And there you were, indestructible. The Swiss Army knife. ’
I wait for something acrid to rise in me, but her words land softly. The difference between who I was then and who I am now used to drag me down, but tonight, I can almost laugh at it.
‘You must have been pleased when I got my dues in the end.’
She gives me a diamond-hard stare. ‘Of course I wasn’t.
I was devastated for you. We all were. You were in so much pain, and I don’t just mean your knee.
Do you remember when I brought that vat of chicken soup round to your parents’ house?
I tried to think of things to talk about, tried to make you laugh.
But you seemed dead set against ever laughing again. ’
I do a cursory sweep of my brain, but can’t find any memory that matches her description.
Unsurprising, but shameful all the same.
That I was still invited to her wedding in 1993 speaks to the power of time, the formative years that can catch two people when the strength of their adult friendship falters.
‘Even before that, during the 1990 run of Romeo and Juliet, it was like something in you had died. I could feel you drifting. What happened, Trix? Why wouldn’t you talk to us about it?’
This was why I hadn’t sent my RSVP for the party until the last possible moment. I suspected this might happen, amidst all the end-of-year reflections, the musing on what could have been, and what we’ve been through. What we’re still trying to make sense of.
‘And don’t say I wouldn’t understand,’ she adds. ‘Please. We’ve been there for too much of each other’s lives for that to be true.’
Don’t make me look back. Don’t make me wade through the fog of that lost year and try to salvage meaning from it.
‘I’m sorry, Fee. I’m sorry it took so long for me to come back to myself…
well, to something like myself. I just…’ Moments like these make me wish I smoked, just for something to steady my hands.
‘Ballet was all I had. All I was. Without it, the world became so… grey. I felt like an imposter out in public, as if I’d never learned how to be an ordinary person and it was too late to try.
But I couldn’t bear to come back here, either.
’ I sweep my hand behind me, encompassing the rooftop, the smiles of dancers old and new. ‘It hurt too much.’
Why does that first year give me such grief, even now? Is it the way time misbehaved, becoming slippery and frayed?
‘Dancers aren’t supposed to sit still by themselves too long. Even after they hang up their pointe shoes.’
Fiona takes a breath, then decides against whatever she was going to say.
‘Do you still think of yourself as a dancer?’ I ask, so that we don’t have to carry the question between us into the small hours.
Her mouth twists in thought, nose twitching like a rabbit, and she’s twenty-five again. ‘I think we always will be, for better and for worse. I still catch myself waiting at zebra crossings with turned-out feet.’
‘Rising on demi-pointe when switching out lightbulbs.’
‘Waking in a cold sweat from nightmares about the Shades from La Bayadère,’ Isabel pipes up, her body forced up against ours as more people come onto the roof.
We have inadvertently found the best seats in the house for the fireworks, which are due to kick off in ten minutes.
The power of midnight, and a new millennium.
I hold Fiona’s chilly hand and breathe in the smoky, river-tinged breeze as a way of staving off tears. ‘I wish I hadn’t left it so long to come back here. I’ve missed this old hall.’
Fiona pulls me into her suede coat, putting on a high-pitched, children’s puppet voice. ‘The hall says, “I’ve missed you, too!”’
‘Wouldn’t a three-hundred-year-old building have a bit more gravitas?’
‘Ahem.’ Fiona lowers to something like George’s baritone. ‘“I’ve missed you, Errington.”’
‘Hey hey hey, there you are!’ Charlie exclaims, reaching into the packed crowd and extracting Jamie and Lorenzo. ‘Thought we’d never find you before midnight.’
‘Sorry, we got talking to Ray and lost track of time,’ Jamie says. ‘That boy’s still such a shameless flirt.’
‘Nice to know some things never change,’ I say.
‘Nice to know some things do,’ Fiona says, smiling at me. Her shoulders look more relaxed for getting her younger self’s jealousy out of her system at last.
I huddle into my friends, not just for refuge from the air’s midwinter bite.
The countdown begins. For ten extraordinary seconds, all of central London becomes a choir, and when Big Ben strikes midnight, I’m convinced the rooftop garden will come crashing down and take us with it.
The majesty of it all convinces me that the spell – my unspoken, makeshift, muddled little spell – has worked.
That by stepping across the threshold of the Dance Hall after all these years, I can let my past go in peace.