Glancing in the mirror, Carly saw that her hair had frizzed out from her nape, like it always did when she didn’t wrestle it into a bun and subdue it with hairspray. She was flushed and her upper lip was beaded with sweat, and she hadn’t enjoyed barre this much in ages.
They were just stretching in deep post-battement lunges, throwing in some ports de bras—with some help from Beyoncé—when a woman stuck her head in the door. Heather stood up hastily, her face sobering, and Carly took that as a cue to grab her phone and turn the music off. Judging by the sheet music tucked under her arm, this was the rehearsal pianist. Heather stood up straight and schooled her face into a serious professional expression as the accompanist walked into the room, eyeing them with bemusement.
“Everything all right in here?” she asked. “That’s not music you hear every day at the ballet.”
Right. Australian National Ballet’s artistic director might be a reformer, but ballet still loved its traditions. And “Lean Back” was not exactly traditional barre music.
“Hi, Kimberly,” Heather said. “We were just getting warmed up. Er, I was. I’m ready whenever Marie gets here.” Kimberly nodded but didn’t say anything. She looked over Heather’s shoulder and ran her eyes questioningly over Carly. “And this is my best friend, Carly, visiting from New York.”
“Hi,” Carly waved at Kimberly, who didn’t wave back. Time for Carly to make herself scarce. She pocketed her phone and went to retrieve her bag from the side of the room, while Heather sat down and busied herself with her pointe shoes and ouch pouches. “I’ll go explore the neighborhood and come back in an hour, okay?”
“Sounds good,” Heather said quietly. “Sorry we had to cut the party short.”
“Don’t be, you’ve got stuff to do. And that was hard work. I’m sweating. Like, it’s dripping, all the way down my—”
“Oh my God, stop,” Heather said, fighting a laugh.
Carly stuck her tongue out at her, then hoisted her bag over her shoulder. In the doorway, she stopped. “Hey, Kimberly, what are you rehearsing today?”
Kimberly looked up from her pile of sheet music and spoke over her shoulder. “Firebird,” she said tersely.
Suppressing a grin, Carly met Heather’s eyes. “Oh,” she said, eyes wide and innocent, voice as even as she could keep it. “So, Stravinsky, then?”
The last thing she saw before she ducked out into the hallway was Heather snorting a laugh into her hand.
Nick rang Marcus’s doorbell and smiled at the little golden plaque beside it. The sign was fashioned to look like the ones you saw on grand old-money Sydney houses, except he was fairly sure this one was a joke. The house was a one-storey brick place and one of the last unrenovated homes on the block, and it was called, the sign informed him, Sand Castle. All around it were hulking white concrete compounds and Hamptons-style beach houses in various stages of renovation and expansion, but this little brown house seemed to sit, calm and stoic, amid the madness.
He’d walked to his friend’s place via the beach, kicking off his shoes to pad along the water’s edge and feel the dense sand squish beneath his feet. Freshwater Beach was as beautiful as he’d remembered, the deep turquoise waves rolling in steadily, breaking on the jagged cliffs, and splashing water into the swimming pool cut into the rocks on the north side. He stood between the fluttering red and yellow flags and gazed out towards the Pacific Ocean, thinking about the famous ode to Australia’s dramatic landscapes that he’d had to memorise in Year 4. Nick had loved it so much his mum had found a copy and hung it up in the house.I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea /Her beauty and her terror—the wide brown land for me.He’d thought about that poem a lot in his first few years away, and it always brought a fond, sad smile to his lips. It did again today as he stood on the sand, letting white foam fizz around his ankles. You couldn’t do that on the banks of the Seine. Well, you could, but you’d probably contract some kind of infection.
Marcus’s place was a few blocks from the beach, and Nick had been glad for the chance to stretch his legs a little after such a long flight. But now he was hot and thirsty and eager to get indoors. He was about to ring the bell again when the door swung open and Marcus appeared, a wide grin on his face.
“You made it!” Marcus said, opening his arms and pulling Nick into a hug.
“I made it,” Nick confirmed, squeezing Marcus’s shoulders tightly. He hadn’t been able to come back for Marcus’s dad’s funeral a few years ago, and it had gutted him at the time. Richard had been about as good a ballet dad as a boy could ask for, and Nick had always liked coming to stay at Marcus’s place when he wanted a break from school housing.
He’d dreaded picking up the phone and telling Marcus that he couldn’t be there to support him, especially since Marcus had been badly injured around that time, and Nick knew that being left alone with his brother Davo wouldn’t have made things any easier. But the company had been in the middle of its Paris season, and there was no way they’d let him fly to the other side of the world at such short notice.
Marcus gave him one last pat on the back and then released him. Nick looked him over. Marcus looked more tan than he remembered, and somehow just as lean as he’d been when he was dancing. If Nick had to guess, he’d say Marcus had taken up running or some other outdoor exercise. He didn’t quite look like a dancer any more, but he looked fit as hell.
“You look great, mate. What have you been doing?”
“Surfing, every morning,” Marcus smiled, gesturing Nick down the hallway to the back of the house. “It was the only thing I wanted to do once my Achilles was healed. And living down the road from the best beach in the city, it would be a waste not to.”
Nick looked around the kitchen at the back of the house, which was familiar even under the fresh coat of mint green paint Marcus and Heather had given it. The old pine table still stood in the dining area, scratched and dented and bearing decades’ worth of water marks. Nick had eaten many a meal at that table, when he came home with Marcus for holidays and weekends because it was too far for him to go home to the mountains. The table gleamed in the light that streamed in through the back windows, through which Nick could see the back veranda and the garden where he, Marcus, and Marcus’s brother had fought pitched water gun battles in the summer and camped out under the stars in the winter.
Marcus went to the sink and filled a glass of water, handing it to Nick before throwing himself into one of the chairs. Nick sat down and took a grateful gulp.
“How was your flight?”
“Awful, thanks for asking. I swear, the older I get, the longer those flights are. And I have no idea what time it is in my body.” He yawned.
“Best not to think about it,” Marcus replied, catching the yawn from him. “Sorry, I was up late going over my notes from last semester. The new term kicks off next week. We tried to schedule the wedding around it, but between my classes, the ANB season, and the NYB season, it was all a bit of a nightmare.” When he’d retired from dancing, Marcus had decided to become a physio and was now a few years into a five-year degree. “But we could have picked you up from the airport, you know. Carly’s flight can’t have gotten in much later than yours.”
“That’s the maid of honour?”
“Mmhmm. She got in this morning, then went to the studio to watch Heather rehearseFirebirdfor a bit. They’ve got Heather in rehearsal basically every day until the week before the wedding, so we need all the help we can get from you and Carly. They’ll be back from the studios in a sec, and the four of us can talk about how to divide up the wedding tasks. Heather’s got the master list around here somewhere, I’m sure.”
“The master list?” Nick asked.
