Michael is playing the waltz of the flowers from theNutcracker, unusually mechanically. Mara sighs. Someone really should do something about him. She asked the Crow a few months ago, when the tannoys started crying during his solo during the Bluepas de deux, but it just smirked and rolled its eyes as if it were tired of people interceding on Michael’s behalf and went back to its tray. Tchaikovsky shouldn’t beplayed like this, like it’s the hokey-cokey. It should have some soul. Annie used to make fun of her when she said that.What, the workhorse of ballet music? Good old Pete, beloved of Christmas adverts and stupid jingles the world over?
But that was the point, they shouldn’t use theNutcrackerto sell plastic tat orSwan Laketo inject some drama into a scripted reality TV show. Some things should be sacred.
She lands the doublepirouettecleanly in fifth position. Will she still be able to do these basic movements after a year with no ballet class, two years, ten? How long does it take the muscles to forget that they were long and lithe and supple? She catches sight of Cecile, sitting on her stool with her long neck and back as straight as a poker, as she turns. How long has it been since Cecile took a ballet class? The body remembers.
It might be time to get sentimental about this ordinary combination of steps. How many more times will she do it?Chassé pas de bourreé, doublepirouette, finish in fourth. Pledge day is just before Christmas. There are between forty and fifty ballet classes and shows still to go, depending on when Belinda decides their days off will be. Forty to fifty days marked with that strange light of the blessed or the damned, she’s never figured it out, when the creatures in the audience will be able to tell that soon she’ll be out of their grasp.
It’s happened before. It happened to Charlotte a few years ago. She was forty-two and limping but still commanding on stage, and a week after Cecile called her into her office and told her she absolutely had to leave shewas snatched while walking to the Grit before class. Mara had seen the whole thing from the doorway of the Grub while she waited for Stuart. A tall figure dressed in a deep purple dress, strolling along a cobbled lane between two hay meadows, opening their arms as they came towards Charlotte. Mara had opened her mouth to call to them, smirking at the thought of what Alina would do when she discovered someone had taken one of the page costumes for a walkabout but then Charlotte had begun to shimmer and the cobbles beneath her feet glowed and she gave a fleeting glance back to the Grub, nodded, and vanished.
Mara relayed the story to Belinda an hour later, sitting in her office with the Crow perched on the desk. She’d been shaking so hard Belinda had poured her a shot of brandy.Was it because Cecile sacked her?she’d whimpered. Belinda had taken off her glasses and rubbed at the bridge of her nose.Maybe. But it could have been you, or Stuart, or anyone else. To the best of Mara’s knowledge, Cecile hasn’t sacked anyone for being old and broken since. She would rather die than admit guilt to anyone but she’s not a complete monster.
That must be what’s keeping Greg here. Really, it should have been Greg who received severance pay from the Crow – though who’s to say he hasn’t, the Crow certainly doesn’t keep Mara updated with its plans for their destinies. Greg is thirty-seven andfit only for the knacker’s yard, he says glumly when he’s had a bit too much to drink. Recently, Mara has caught Cecile watching him in class with something like pity. She imagines Cecile opening thewindow to her office at the interval to let the Crow perch on the sill.For the love of God, creature, tell him to go before something seizes him from the stage.
She still hasn’t told Cecile about the joke coin from the Crow. It won’t be real until she tells Cecile.
Mara finishes the exercise and moves into the wings, watching Cecile as the last group finish the exercise from the left. She gives no corrections, just nods and glances at her watch.
‘You know it.’ She calls from her stool. ‘Eight in first, eight in second, eightchangements, fourechappés sautés. Maestro.’
In another life, if Cecile were ten years older and Mara hadn’t been told to leave, and if she cared a fraction more about the minutiae of ballet technique and the staging of the show, Mara could imagine herself becoming the ballet mistress here. Sitting in Cecile’s office doing the casting, meetings with AJ, Mackie and Belinda, watching class with narrowed eyes, looking to see who is getting strong and competent and needs to be doing soloist roles. Maybe that’s what Charlotte was holding on for.
The men go first again and Cecile clasps her hands in her lap, eyes low and narrowed, watching the way her dancers’ feet leave the floor. Mara retreats to the back of the stage and sits on the floor under the ballet barres. From this angle she can join Cecile in one of her obsessions –I see ninety-nine per cent of injuries in the second you leave the floor –she shouts at least once a week, and she watches the feet of the three newest pledges as they spring up and down.
She winces as she sees Luke land poorly. He’s not a bad dancer, if a little shy and boring in style, but he’s a bit odd. Any conversation she’s tried to have with him in this past month since he turned up to replace Alex has petered into awkward silence. Cecile is trying to bash him into shape in the only way she knows how – by shouting at him – but Mara worries for him. He doesn’t seem to be weaving himself into the social fabric of the place. Like the straggling antelope at the back of the herd, loners get picked off onThe Apple and the Pearl. If she were Cecile she’d set Luke up with a buddy, maybe one to help him learn the choreography and another to be a mate outside of rehearsals and class. Michael, perhaps. Kill two birds with one stone.
Yes, she can imagine herself in charge here, the changes she’d make. She’d let everyone keep their baggy things on for class for a start. She would never, ever make a comment about anyone’s weight. Let everyone get as fat as they like, what do their audience care for skeletons?
But Cecile is going nowhere, and she is going home. Well, back to her mother’s house, a place which is no longer her home but will have to do until she figures something out.
But what will that thing be? What will she do with the rest of her life, where will she go? The whole wide world is hers. There are two obvious things that retired dancers do when they stop dancing and she dreads both. She could train to teach something like pilates or yoga or zumba to middle-aged men and their paunches and menopausal women and their hormones, living out the fiction that the body she’sspent more than a decade sculpting can be attained through an hour a week in a sweaty leisure centre. Or she could do a certificate to teach ballet to kids, filling draughty church halls and youth centres with toddlers in pink skirts, ten-year-olds with pushy mothers and the occasional truly talented kid who’ll she’ll have to bully and abuse into a career, completing the cycle to become everything she’s ever hated about this world.
You’re being unfair, her mother would say.To yourself and others.
She sees why everyone does one of these two things. Mara has no qualifications outside of the dance world, she knows almost nothing of how the world works. She’s never worked in a bar or a shop or a cafe, has no office skills. She has no degree, only two A levels, and her references would be who? Cecile, who would write something about how she’s worked very hard on herallegroover the years. Belinda could, at least, be relied upon to come up with something suitably corporate and dull.Mara is a reliable team player who works well within existing structures while making projects her own.
She has savings, that’s about all that can be said for her situation, a bank account fat with years of salary and little spending. And she has a mother still rattling around her childhood home, which is a stroke of luck. At least the twins will be pleased. She thinks of the messages her phone picked up this morning, long streams of frustration from her sisters.She only wants to eat toast and peanut butter and when Itold her she needs some vegetables she said she’ll do whatever the fuck she wants. The doctor said gentle exertion only but of course she was up on the ladder messing about with the wisteria.
So she’ll leave the Grub at some random station of Belinda’s choosing and get an ordinary train home to Three Bridges, where she’ll ring and ask her mother to pick her up. That home smell, the mix of furniture polish and butter, will hit her as soon as her mother opens the front door.
And then she’ll never do ballet class again.
I will never do ballet class again, she makes herself think as she watches Zuleika practice anassemblé, neatly joining her ankles in the air to land in a dainty fifth position.
One more time:I will never do ballet class again.
Yes, it’s all right. She can bear the thought so she can bear the reality. She might miss performing, she definitely won’t miss rehearsals, but yes, she will miss this daily ritual, this medicinal torture that sets her straight, this communion between her, the piano and the dance that itches inside her.
As the music starts for the nextallegroexercise, Mara goes into the wings to put her jumper back on. A tendril of guilt in her belly. With her ballet classes numbered, should she be stopping early? Shouldn’t she be squeezing every last movement out of every last moment, wringing each exercise for all its worth?
When she tells Cecile she’s leaving and it becomes common knowledge, maybe she will. Maybe she’ll let her inner child take over and she’ll be that little girl letting her feet dance to the music every single day, and she will nolonger have to worry about the old sprains on her left ankle, those aching places in her back, the sharp tugs on her knees.
She’ll tell Belinda first – no, it should be Cecile – no, telling Belinda is the smart thing to do in case there’s some admin that needs doing, in case she says something likea fifty pence piece? No, I think that means I need to give you a pay rise.And then she’ll tell Cecile, probably after class one day when she’s feeling fortified, and they’ll plan her farewell show.
She’ll ask to dance the Crow so she has one last chance to go to the caboose and say goodbye – even though it probably won’t even show up, it often doesn’t – and she’ll ask Gino to make enchiladas for afterwards. She’ll spend the day packing up her cabin and hauling her stuff along to the guest cabin that Belinda will turf her out of the next morning. She’ll go to Belinda’s office in the Grub after lunch to sign the forms and see her vial of blood destroyed and she’ll ask her, just for shits and giggles, all the questions the Crow has ignored.Doesn’t it bother you, handling the Pearl like that? What if it breaks and whatever’s inside it bursts out and spills all over you? What happens if you’re taken, Belinda, who looks out for us then? Do you feel scared of the creatures of the audience? What hocus-pocus is it that connects the guest cabins to the real world? Why did you choose me all those years ago at that audition? What the fuck will I do with the rest of my life?
The mood in the dressing room that night before the show will be charged, tearful and joyous. She’ll have all her farewell cards arranged around her dressing table, allthe heartfelt messages, all the gifts. Someone, probably Stephanie, will have written out that random little poem about the show and she’ll have to hold back the tears when she reads the line about the Crow who sings in her nest.
Alina will give her that choker to tie around her neck, that one with salt in the lining and fortified with iron studs to keep her safe, because the audience can always tell who is saying farewell to the stage that very night. That is when you are most in danger, they can smell it on you like the electrical charge of thunder in the air. And she will finish the third act Crow’s solo on one knee, the rest of the company waiting in the wings for the curtain call, everything she has been for the past decade dissolving around her.
