“No, I’m glad you brought me,” she whispered. “This place is great.”
“It really is,” he said, allowing himself a sigh of relief. “I haven’t been up here since I was a kid. When we were little, we’d come up here once a year for a school trip, and it was always the best day of the year.”
“What did you do out here?”
“We learnt about photosynthesis and leaf litter and the native wildlife and stuff. And when we got older, about Indigenous culture and history.” Marcus thought about the kookaburras, and the old memory lapped in his chest. “Dad would take the day off work to chaperone, and he was always the only dad who came. Just him and a bunch of mums making sure no one fell off a cliff or got lost in the bush.”
Heather laughed quietly, before a heavy silence filled the tent. Marcus could hear the two girls giggling in their tent a few metres away and what sounded like Craig rolling up the picnic blankets. After a moment, Heather turned onto her stomach, closing some of the space between them, and put her chin on her folded forearms.
“Do you want to tell me about him?”
Perhaps it was because the tent was so dark, or perhaps it was because they had sworn each other to secrecy. Marcus couldn’t saywhy, but he did. He wanted to tell Heather about his dad. He wanted to tell Heather so many things.
“He was a good man,” Marcus sighed. It sounded simple and empty, the kind of platitude people had repeated to him at the wake and in the weeks that followed. He tried to elaborate. “He wasn’t shy, but he was pretty soft-spoken. I think I heard him yell maybe four times in my entire life, and one of those times was when I came home from school with a fat lip from a kid who liked to bully me for doing ballet.”
“He yelled at you?” Heather sounded alarmed.
“No, he yelled at Davo. He said Davo should have stood up for me instead of letting the kid and his mates carry on. Then he took us both back to school to make the principal promise it would never happen again.”
“Wow. How old were you?”
“About eleven. Davo was fourteen. He just wanted to be cool and hang out with his rugby team. He didn’t want his weirdo little brother showing up at school and making his life difficult. Dad wasn’t having it. He told Davo—” Marcus swallowed, the decades-old memory making the bridge of his nose tingle and burn. “—He told him he was proud of having a dancer in the family, so Davo should be too.”
“Did it work?”
“Kind of. Davo made it clear after that that anyone who gave me any shit would have to answer to him and his rugby mates, though I think it was less about sticking up for me and more about the chance to beat the crap out of someone.” Marcus shook his head. “And then when Davo left a few years before me, some of the boys tried to start up again. But by then, I knew I wanted to dance professionally, and I knew I probably could if I kept training and didn’t get hurt. So it didn’t bother me when they teased me, you know, because I knew where I was going. And I did my last two years of high school at the ANB school, dancing basically full-time.I made real friends there, guys who got ballet and got me. Never had to see those kids again.”
“You were lucky,” Heather said.
“Yeah,” he agreed quietly. “Plenty of boys don’t get that kind of support from their families. My uncle used to tease me about ballet every time he came over. He’d have a few, and then start making jokes about me wearing a tutu or a tiara or whatever.” Marcus rolled his eyes. “Oh, always as a joke, you know, ‘don’t take yourself so seriously, don’t get offended.’” To this day, the memory made his skin prickle with the same hopeless frustration he’d felt as a kid, because how could you argue with an adult, and how could you argue with a joke?
“But Dad would always tell him to cut the shit, and Uncle Gary would, most of the time. I think Dad realised there were going to be lots of reasons for me to drop out of ballet, and he didn’t want a lack of support from him to be one of them.” Marcus swallowed again, harder this time. “He never let me forget he had my back and that he was proud of me. And now he’s gone, and it’s just me and Davo.”
Heather didn’t say anything in response, and Marcus shifted on his pillow, wondering if he’d let the conversation get too deep. But after a moment, her sleeping bag rustled and she placed one hand between his shoulder blades, sliding her palm lightly, reassuringly, over his hoodie. He felt his shoulders release under her touch, and the rest of his body stilled. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply into his back, into her hand.
“I think he would have liked you,” Marcus murmured. “He liked stubborn women. It’s why he loved my mum so bloody much.”
Heather gasped and pulled away, a cold patch blooming where her hand had been a second ago.
“I’m not stubborn,” Heather whispered, sounding faux-scandalized. He could just make out her face in the dark, her eyes wide and her mouth open in objection.
“Yeah, you are,” he said, reaching towards her in the dark and pulling her against him. He wanted her hand back on him, wanted more of her warmth. Heather gasped again, this time with what sounded like surprise and delight. “No one becomes a principal dancer without being bloody stubborn. You can argue all you want, and you don’t have to believe in horoscopes—I sure as shit don’t—but I think you’re adventurous and brave, too. And a little impulsive. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be here. And I’m really, really glad you’re here.”
“I can’t argue with you without sounding stubborn,” she whispered, and her warm breath flickered across his face.
“That’s a real shame, because I love when you argue with me,” he whispered back, and he leant forward and kissed her.
In another world, in another lifetime, perhaps Heather could have been convinced to like camping. There were New Yorkers who loved to get out of the city and go on hikes, who left Friday evening to hike state parks, carrying tents on their backs, returning Sunday afternoon sunburned and stinking and glowing with the smugness that came with being outdoorsy. Her schedule had never permitted her to try, but now, Heather knew it wasn’t for her.
Her hip felt like one enormous bruise, and her neck had practically frozen solid in the twisted position she’d found herself in when she woke up Saturday morning. For a moment she lay on the thin excuse for a mattress with her eyes closed, grateful that, aside from her nose and cheeks, she was warm. The morning light seeping in through the fabric of the tent bathed everything in a faint green glow, and last night’s silence was replaced by birdsong. Heather listened intently, picking out a plaintive cawing and an exuberant, chattering chirp. She could hear what sounded like human movement outside the tent, too.
Barely a foot away, Marcus was deep in sleep, looking otherworldly in the pale green light. He lay on his side, his curls mussed on the pillow and his lips slightly parted. She noticed for the firsttime that he had a thin white scar above his top lip. She thought about last night’s whispered conversation and wondered if that had been a bully’s doing.
Heather would never envy Marcus’s grief at losing his father, but it was hard not to let a sense of wistfulness nip at her when she thought about how fiercely the man had insisted on the value of his son’s ballet training. Heather had never met her father, and since she’d never known his presence, she hadn’t thought much about his absence. But she knew enough to realize how much easier her mother’s life would have been if he hadn’t left when she was five months pregnant, and if he’d paid child support like he was supposed to.
Heather had grown up knowing her mother was doing her best to do the work of two parents. She’d tried to be understanding when her mother didn’t have time to help out backstage atThe Nutcrackerlike the other moms, or when she needed reminding yet again what a particular French term for a ballet step meant.
There had certainly been times when Heather was grateful not to have a pushy, over-involved ballet mom—the horror movies and reality shows exaggerated the intensity of dance moms, but only a little bit. When she and Jack started getting serious, Heather had let herself imagine she might end up with a ballet mother-in-law, someone who had walked this career path and understood it intimately. She imagined Jack’s mother giving her advice, regaling her with anecdotes about what it was like to debut the roles Heather now danced at NYB a generation later.
