‘All right. All right. We heard you.’ He walks over and carefully places the vape in front of it. ‘Bad for me anyway.’ He smiles at Jean again, tips his head in a little nod and disappears back inside the Grit, letting the stage door slam behind him.
Another caw, an indignant nudge. Jean reaches into her pocket and pulls out the crust of toast she always saves from breakfast for encounters like this and a two-penny coin. She lays them both on the ground and the Crow hops down onto the bottom step to peck at the crust. Jean watches.
‘Should I write back, do you think? Is there any point? I’m stuck here anyway.’
It flies back to the balustrade, picks up the vape in its claws and hops back down to the crust of bread.
‘You’re not going to tell me, are you? You don’t give a shit.’
The Crow stops pecking and looks at her with a long, cool stare that Jean returns, although her eyes start to itch.
‘Of course I won’t break my pledge.’ She wants to look away but she feels the need to meet this challenge, to live up to whatever it was the Crow liked about her mother. ‘I spoke to my father today. He was talking about you. He thinks of you often. Thank you for saving my mother, by the way.’
The bird’s gaze softens and Jean cannot bear that flicker of tenderness. She looks away. ‘Fine,’ she says. ‘I can see your point.’ It gobbles down the crust and then grabs the coin in its beak, the vape in its claws and with two tugs of its great black wings, flies away over the graves, back to the warm shelter of the Grub.
She starts to climb the steps of the Grit, her boots echoing on each stone stair. She thinks of climbing these steps with Toni and Beryl, arm in arm, the three of them batty old women giggling at clouds, only she knowing the sweet ache of being pressed against their bodies.
But as quickly as it began, it was done. They only stayed for one pledge. They didn’t even tell her they weren’t going to pledge again. She found out like everyone else, when Belinda put the notice on the board. It was as if all those nights in their cabin had never happened, like they’d been some kind of sad, erotic dream. They said goodbye with a kiss on each cheek in front of everyone and she had to smile and wave as they walked off the Grub at EdinburghWaverley, like they had been nothing but two other sounds in the orchestra, two other beating hearts to keep safe with salt and iron.
She pushes the stage door open and the stuffy, warm air of the Grit hits her. It smells like hairspray, sawdust and stale tomato soup as always, no matter how it’s rearranged its corridors overnight. She unzips her coat as she glances at the noticeboard by the door to the stage, scanning it for anything interesting or important. Tonight’s casting, a handwritten note from Mackie inviting everyone to drinks tonight to celebrate his new pledge, a sign from one of the dancers asking if anyone’s seen a certain green coat. Nothing for her.
The door to the stage opens and Derek emerges, whistling the tune to the orchard dance in a faintly menacing way. Jean stares at the noticeboard, hoping he will glide on past her.
‘Good afternoon, Miss Jean.’ No such luck. She pretends to look very closely at the sign advertising the fire safety procedures.
‘Hi, Derek.’
‘Lighting a candle for anyone today?’
The cheek of the man. As if she’d discuss something as intimate as her own dead with this troll.I will never let him near me again!Toni muttered, horrified, after he cornered her in the Grub one night and asked her if she’d ever had a boyfriend.
‘No one in particular. They went into the Pearl a long time ago.’
‘My condolences.’ Derek simpers and bows as he backs away. ‘May their memories live long.’
Oh fuck off, Derek, she thinks as she grabs the handrail to climb the stairs to the green room, suddenly weary. Sometimes she lies in her narrow single bed in her single cabin and thinks about Toni asking her to come with them.We’ll get a small flat, pool our money, teach and record. We’ll stop touring forever, we’re all getting too old for it.She thinks about packing up her cabin and walking off the Grub at Liverpool Street again, maybe Marylebone, wherever they’d have wanted. Walking out into the train station, ignoring the way all the other passengers’ eyes slide off the iron of the Grub lingering on the platform, pretending she can’t see it either as she walks away into a – another – new life. She thinks about having her father’s piano delivered, sitting at it each morning –See if you can breathe the notes in through your eyes, Jeanie –having Sam round each Sunday to feed him, listen to him play, hear stories about what he’s been up to.
As she touches the door handle of the musician’s green room it twists under her hands and opens. Michael is standing on the other side, his satchel over one shoulder and his jumper baggy around his chest. She feels that twinge of pity that the sorry sight of him always provokes in her these days.
‘Did you know there’s phone signal today?’ Jean says. She tells him more to be polite than anything else. Like everyone else, she struggles to know what to say to Michael since Evelyn left. The miasma of misery that floats around himalmost stinks of something rotting, and although she wants to be kind it’s been months now, and still he goes around with those plugs in his ears for whatever the Crow’s doing to him, and still his second act solo is making the tannoys weep, and still she has not seen him smile, not even once.
He looks back at her blankly. ‘Yes. I know that.’
He pauses on the threshold of the doorway before he passes her, his face in shadow.
‘How’s your dad?’
A flicker of the old Michael, the gently charming young man who strung his heart with his violin.
‘He’s well, thank you. Quite lucid today, actually.’
And Michael nods, pleased to hear it and strides past Jean towards the stage. On the tannoy she can hear Cecile clapping her hands. ‘Alors, mesdames et messieurs!’ she cries. ‘Break time is over!’
Wilf, Steve and Jasper are playing cards in a corner and give Jean a cheery wave as she passes them. She nods a brisk hello to Henry the second violin, but he ignores her the way he ignores everyone, and she sits in an armchair to pull her phone from her pocket.
Henry’s practising a small section of the Red Suitor’s solo, playing the same couple of bars over and over again, but he’s getting it wrong each time with a discordant note in the middle of the phrase that he can’t seem to hear to correct. She types:How lovely to hear from you. We are stopped in a graveyard – yes, I know it’s All Souls’, you know what the Grub is like with a metaphor—
She stops. Henry plays that discordant note and makes a growl of frustration. She deletes the message. She types:I have been thinking of you both endlessly. I am heartsick and soulsore and no one cares because Michael goes about like he’s condemned—
