…and he gave us Belinda’s number.
The pair of them smiled at her like one being and Jean felt something move in the pit of her stomach. That night she’d thought it was jealousy, to have someone to go through life with, to lean on when the wind almost blew you down, to keep the chill of loneliness at bay. Now she thinks of it as something awakening, stirring. An ember of a long-dampened fire kept smouldering in a ball of kindling, finally given air.
And what about you?Toni had asked.How did you come to be here?
A lie would have been so easy, so quick and clean.
I was born here, she said.
Toni’s mouth fell open and Beryl’s perfectly painted eyebrows shot into her hairline.
My dad was first violin, my mum was clarinet. Apparently I used to spend shows in a basket in wardrobe and my mum used to feed me during the intervals. They left when I was about a year old so I don’t remember a thing.
But that wasn’t strictly true. Jean did remember. Or her flesh did, that deep place inside us which music is the first to fill and the last to leave. She knew all the melodies, could hum them perfectly, knew she’d have no need of her score by the end of the week.
And how did they keep you, you know –Beryl waved her hand vaguely at the window –safe?
Salt scattered around me and thirteen horseshoes sewn onto the mattress. There was a picture in my parent’s house when I was growing up.
It sat in a silver frame on the mantelpiece, the colours fading a little more each afternoon when the sunlight streamed in through the window. Now the photo sits on a chest of drawers in her father’s room and he makes the carers dust it every single day. Sam said that he tells them the photo is of his daughter, his granddaughter or Queen Mab, depending on his mood.
Well, we’re very pleased to meet someone of such distinguishedpedigree.Beryl had said, and their curiosity about her was sealed. Jean basked in it, discreetly. It was the only interesting thing about her.
Her father had pledged with AJ as second violins. Just the two of them standing in the old company manager’s office, their violins propped against the wall. They sat next to each other night after night, bows gliding in perfect synchrony, until her father was promoted to first violin.
Then the old conductor had been taken during the curtain call. As her father told the story, Mungo St John Fitzwilliam – cellist, conductor, pinewood-whittler, Morris-dancer and Welsh folklore enthusiast – placed his baton upon the music stand as the dancers bowed and bowed and bowed and the musicians stood in silence. And in the blink of an eye, something from the audience reached into the pit and took him. The last thing seen of him in this world was the oily shine of his patent leather shoes.
The next morning Percy Montgomery, the old company manager – dark circles under his eyes and a scent of pungent fear-sweat wafting whenever he moved – called her father and AJ into the office with the Crow glowering in a corner.
And I never knew, Jeanie girlie, if our names were already in a kind of hat for the job, if the Crow had only whispered to him that very morning, or if there were other voices he had to kowtow to, but we were there in front of him, and he said, ‘Gentlemen, I would like to ask you both to sing me a song.’ And I don’t know what I expected but it certainly wasn’t that.
He’d told her this with his soft hands in hers, just before she left him at Hillview to get the taxi to Liverpool Street station. At the time she had treasured it as a moment of lucidity, but now she understands that he had saved the story all these years for this very moment, the time she left to return to the place of her birth. So that she would understand, so that she would truly know the stakes as her father and mother had known them, surviving through multiple snatchings and attempted snatchings, a show every night with hundreds of creatures from the Otherworld in the auditorium licking their glistening lips.
So I sang‘The Skye Boat Song’, he said, his gaze somewhere over her shoulder.I don’t know why, it was just the first thing that popped into my head, and Aleko sang‘Greensleeves’and old Percy Montgomery just looked at the Crow and then at Aleko and said, ‘Congratulations, you are the ninetieth conductor ofThe Apple and the Pearl.’And of course I was disappointed, though I hadn’t ever thought of conducting before, but a month later your mother told me she was carrying you.
She flicks the other latch on the oboe case and puts her handbag over her shoulder. She remembers AJ smiling at her on the morning after her pledge, his delicately veined hands folded over three copies of the score as she sat with Toni and Beryl in the musician’s green room.Warmest of welcomes to you all.And then he’d turned to Jean and searched her face for traces of his old friends, her parents.And welcome back to you, Jeanie.
She walks a little stiffly up the main avenue, borderedby mausoleums, towards the Grit. The drizzle thickens and she pulls up her hood.
It started only a few weeks later. They shared a bottle of wine in the dining car after the show and Beryl bought two more.It’s a celebration!she’d said. Toni had leaned forwards like a conspirator:Would you like to come back to our cabin to finish this off?And something in her belly had answered, like a hibernating snake opening one yellow eye to the spring, something shocking but unmistakeable. It had been so long, and it had never been a woman, let alone two.
The oyster taste of pussy, the softness of limbs in the bed, the way flesh yielded under the gentlest of pressure from her fingertips. The laughter, the languid stretch of skin, the sneaking back to her single cabin in the early hours, holding onto the dark windows to steady herself against the swaying of the carriage, her skin fizzing like seafoam, salty with sweat, slick with longing.
The memory of it makes her dizzy; the shock of it gone winds her. She stops, staggers a little like when her blood was still going topsy-turvy with menopause. She leans against the cool pink marble of a crypt, shivery and flushed.
Her body had opened to them like those seeds that lie dormant in the desert for forty years and then sprout and bloom within a week. She was greedy for them both – the long, elegant curve of Beryl’s waist, the weight of Toni’s breast in her hand. She had no idea if anyone else knew. Once or twice she’d thought there was something leering and knowing in Lance’s eyes, but now she thinks he’sjust that sort of man, the sort Ricky used to be. A tomcat prowling alleyways, yowling for sex.
She pushes herself off the pillar, grips her oboe case and carries on up the avenue of the dead towards the Grit. She keeps her eyes on the theatre. It looks like a haunted house today, the spires piercing the grey clouds like swords. You could never accuse it of failing to dress for the occasion.
She was born in her parents’ cabin aboard the Grub. Percy Montgomery, the old company manager had found a midwife – how, she’d never quite figured out – and two replacement musicians, and given her father two weeks’ paternity leave and her mother three months on full pay.That’s why you pay your union subs, Jeanie girlie, so that they see you as a living, breathing human first and a music-maker second, her father had said. Born during the Crow’s second act solo, cord cut as the curtain came down, taken to the caboose to be presented to the Crow just before the midnight bells.Has this ever happened before?her father reportedly asked old Montgomery.Any legends about this or what it might mean? Not that I know of, Montgomery said.Your girl there is one of a kind.What bullshit. She’s turned out to be as ordinary as a drop of rain in April, entirely failed to live up to anything spectacular her birth might have foretold.
The stage door opens and Mackie shuffles out, rummaging in the capacious pockets of his cargo trousers.
He nods hello, makes a wry, slightly embarrassed face at the slim silver bar in his fingers. ‘Gave up years ago, couldn’t afford it. Couldn’t get them regularly when I cameto work here, and you know what Belinda would say if you were trying to stash weeks’ worth of fags in your cabin. But I still like stepping out for a break every now and then, you know? Gives you something to do with your hands while you have a little think.’
Jean smiles. ‘Don’t mind me.’ She’s always liked Mackie. She should have married a man like that. Kind, slightly shy, competent enough under his bumbling. Too late now, of course. She can’t sleep with a man again, even if a candidate did present himself.
A caw catches their attention. The Crow is perched on the stone balustrade, which is chipped and mossy and moody today. The huge bird gleams although the afternoon light is sludgey. It gives another caw and Mackie chuckles.
