Milly has a swig of water and it’s cool and soothing on her throat. She chews another crust of bread. The only person she’s looking forward to telling is Gino. As the bump grows over the next five months until her pledge is up he’ll slip her cups of cardamom and cinnamon-spiced milk, and little light cakes and the sticky, burnt bits of rice at the bottom of the pan – the kind of thick, pale food the creature inside her craves. She yawns and looks at the clock. Hours and hours to go yet until the show’s over but it feels like night already. She could fall asleep in that hard plastic chair right now and not wake up until curtain down.
She sits back down at the sewing machine and finishes the seam on the tulle. She holds it up, examines the line of it. Looks good. She positions the other seam at the machine and hovers her foot on the pedal. She could tell Danny tonight. She could wait for him in their cabin after she and Alina have packed up the costume trunks, and when he comes in to change and shower she could tell him. If she times it right, he might even mention marriage. By this time tomorrow they could have told Belinda and in forty-eight hours, tops, she’ll be having cream in her porridge and perfect little slivers of ripe pear, whatever it is she fancies right at that moment, and this roiling sickness in her will be sated.
She picks up her phone from where she left it on the floor and typeshow to stop morning sickness.She reads the top results: dry crackers, sour things, keeping hydrated. Some herbal supplement that looks a bit dodgy. Some experimental drug you can only get abroad. She gets up,has another sip of water from the bottle by the door, heaves and swallows bile, lies down on the floor again, her phone cradled in her hand.
Would you just stop it, little one?she thinks.Would you just let your mum keep her lunch down, just for today?
She imagines the little being inside her, growing by the second. Now an arm, now a kidney, now ten tiny little fingernails. Soon, she’ll get one of those apps that tells her what bits of its body it’s getting week by week, comparing its size to a piece of fruit. She imagines it floating around in its salt water home. She read somewhere that the salinity of amniotic fluid is the same as the sea, but a few days ago when they last had signal she looked that up and discovered she was wrong. It was a myth, one of those things that feels right and good but is too glib and simple to possibly be true. She found out that amniotic fluid is salty, yes, but seeing as seawater varies in salinity across oceans and depths, there’s no way to say it’s the same concentration. Still, it’s the sort of thing she might tell Danny, once he’s got used to the idea. He’d like that. He’d start talking excitedly about how everything is connected and there’s a master plan – he might even suggest they watch one of those videos about pyramids and aliens together and Christ alive, she’s that tired that she might just say yes – and some of that excitement might spill over into the baby.
Poor thing. It could do with someone being excited about its presence.
Although it would be wrong to say she isn’t excited.There is something of a flutter about how she feels about this new creature. She didn’t invite it into her body, was stunned to feel it make its home in her but now – look what’s happened – she wants it. Perhaps she even loves it already, in a blurry, animal way she can’t quite grasp. She feels stupid calling this love, this odd, old, savage certainty that she would die for this being inside her that is wreaking so much havoc because right now it’s nothing but a tight waistband and this constant rising bile. But there you go, she loves it, it’s the only word she’s got for it.
They say a mother loves her children no matter what – but what will she do, how will she love her baby in her nice little post-Apple and Pearl life if it comes out scaled or winged? Violet-eyed and black-haired; cunning and sly? Well, the show will go on. Danny will leave, of course, even if she can explain to him the truth and she will struggle for money despite her savings. The child will grow and she’ll – do what with it? Send it to school for maths lessons and PE, make angel wings from wire and tinsel for the nativity play? Ignore all the other mums when they ask which grandparent has those eyes. Keep it away from birthday parties after incidents with chocolate biscuits and fizzy pop. Wait up all night while it sneaks off to thickets of hawthorn and elder, following the far-off drums and pipe music from its other people, its other kin?
She rolls onto her back, lays a hand on that low part of her belly that aches in the mornings. Maybe she’s being dramatic, thinking the worst,catastrophising again, as Alinawould say. It’s probably Danny’s. The simplest explanation is usually the right one. The Grub had stopped by a long, placid lake and Danny had been for a swim with Mackie and Charlie the deputy stage manager that afternoon. After they’d packed up the Grit they’d gone straight to their cabin for once, brushed their teeth with companionable chatter about their respective days and curled up in their bed, fingers entwined, mouths finding each other’s in the darkness, kind and familiar bodies soft to each other as the Grub began to rock.
Only three days later it was the autumn equinox and the Grub had stopped in a dense woodland of oak and hornbeam still in the full leaf of summer. Belinda was on edge all day, even writing a sign for the noticeboard:Be careful please, I will not be mounting any rescues for anyone who fancies a jaunt into the greenwood tonight.
But honestly, what could she have done? It wasn’t her fault, she wasn’t at all seduced by the dappled light. It was a forest, so what? They stopped in them all the time. She’s replayed the moments before he appeared so many times, rewinding and playing again in her head. It was not yet fully dark, as they were loading the Grub after a show, and Alina pushed a trunk of costumes to her to get onto the ramp up into a carriage and it veered off into the trees. She had to run to catch it as it slid downhill, gathering speed along the way, trying to get ahead of it although it seemed it had a mind of its own.
The trunk caught on an exposed root and she lungedfor it to grab the handle. She grunted as she wrenched it back towards her and there he was, on the other side of the trunk, black shirt slashed to the navel, slightly damp black curls tumbling into his violet eyes. She swallowed as she felt the glamour washing over her, a cold tide of dumb dread. A slow grin slid across his face and she saw a hint of his teeth, pointed and gleaming white. She knew exactly what was going to happen next.
And yes, okay, she was raped, that’s how it was, she knows it. She imagines going to the police.Hello, yes, I was raped, no you won’t find him, he’s a fairy, no I mean a literal fairy, one of the fair folk, lives in the court under the hill. No I don’t know his name.
She can’t even tell anyone here in the show. Alina would look away, tears in her eyes, then give her a brusque, squeezing hug and never mention it again. Belinda would pull her spectacles off, rub her eyes and ask her to write up an incident form. Mackie would blink and say nothing for a long time, longer than she would be able to bear standing in silence and Danny would… well, she doesn’t really know what Danny would do and that’s how she’s going to keep it for she’s not going to tell anyone. Ever. The show will go on and that’s all anyone needs to know.
Three days. That’s all there is in it. She opens her phone, types:how do you know when you’ve ovulatedand reads a couple of articles she’s read before, articles that haven’t helped her before and don’t now. She opens a new tab and types:can a human and a fairy conceive a baby?She swipesaway the page without looking at any of the results. She isn’t sure she really wants to know.
She sits up. Takes another sip of water. Yawns. It really would be better not to know.
She sits back at the machine and pulls the mannequin towards her. She checks the folder with the dancers’ measurements again, makes sure she’s got the bust and waist set to Bella’s measurements – she better not go and have a post-show encounter with a Fae prince now or Milly will have to start all over again – and pulls the half-finished costume over the mannequin’s body. She fills her mouth with pins and starts tucking in the next seam.
She will teach the baby how to sew. Girl, boy or fairy child of the Otherworld. She’ll show them how to thread a needle and stitch a neat seam, darning socks and repairing buttons. Life skills, like cooking yourself some dinner and knowing how to pay your taxes. When they’re old enough she’ll get out her knitting needles and show them knit and purl and how to follow a pattern and they can sit together on winter nights when Danny’s working and listen to music – all right, this vision does work better if the baby’s a girl but she doesn’t want to be that kind of mother, the woman that dresses her baby girl in pink things she can barely move in and lets her baby boy run riot. No pink, no blue, not for her baby. She thinks the baby will be born around midsummer – something she tries not to think too hard about – so the first thing she’ll make can be a light crocheted blanket for swaddling, white and cotton to keepthem cool and not show the milk stains. She’ll knit jumpers in sunflower yellow and scarlet and emerald for the winter and for their first birthday she’ll run up little summer dungarees in rainbow prints of dragons and tigers and trees. In fact, she’ll start now.
She spits the pins onto the table and grabs her phone. She calls up her favourite haberdashery site and starts adding yarn and fabric to a new order as if it will disappear as soon as she’s seen it, a virtual supermarket sweep, each item weighting her into this new life for herself and the baby – and Danny, as soon as he knows about it – each ball of wool and roll of cotton something that will tether her and her little family to the human world. There’s a sale on for Halloween-themed fabrics – little grinning pumpkins, skeletons and ghosts – but she doesn’t choose any of it. No need to provoke the baby into anything supernatural, it’ll have enough problems as it is.
The tumble dryer beeps and Milly pressesbuy nowon her phone. A sweeping wave of contentment washes over her, mingling with the nausea to leave her light-headed. She leaves her phone on the table and just as she crouches in front of the machine it pings with the email confirmation.
She empties the contents of the tumble dryer into two baskets, men’s and women’s. The men’s basket is a jewel-bright nest of Lycra, the women’s a tangle of pink tights and flesh-coloured polyester croptops. She sits cross-legged on the floor to separate each item and roll each thing into a ball to pack it neatly into the basket again. The laundrysmells clean, chemically fresh in a way that soothes Milly’s churning stomach and gives her a feeling of peace. The smell of the detergent that Alina orders in bulk is the smell ofThe Apple and the Pearlfor her, the smell of a job well done, dancers with clean and beautiful things to wear, the smell of the show going on as it always must, beginning all over again for another night.
Behind her, the other machine rumbles away. This is the slightly temperamental one, the one adorned with the laminated sign-up sheet for the cast and crew to do personal washing. The one that occasionally prompts Alina to furiously scribble a note for the noticeboard by the stage:JUST BECAUSE THE PERSONAL WASHING MACHINE IS LOCATED IN WARDROBE DOES NOT MEAN I AM ANYONE’S LAUNDRY SERVANT.It rumbles away with someone’s things inside, a dancer’s by the look of it, one of the younger men by the way the whites are all mixed up with the colours. She’ll make sure her baby will never do anything like that. She won’t have them walking around with pink streaks on white shirts, giving them away as someone who doesn’t know how to look after themselves.
She glances at the clock. Five fifteen, almost time to start setting costumes for the show. Two long clothes rails line the room, one for men and one for women. Milly looks at the long velvet sleeves of the pages’ costumes, the sequins dripping from the Pearl waltz dresses, the thick, black brocade of the Crow’s cloak. In a few minutes, she’llhave to take one of the copies of the casting that Alina keeps pinned to the back of the door and distribute these costumes among the dancers, tutus draped over one arm, the basket of washing balanced on a hip, up and down the stairs until everyone has all their underwear and all their headdresses and no one can blame her if they go on stage looking anything less than spectacular. She slumps back in the chair, her eyelids heavy. Exhaustion sweeps over her. She can’t do it. She’s too tired.
Listlessly, she removes the bobbin from the sewing machine and winds more white cotton around it. She threads the machine again, takes the tulle skirt from the mannequin and lines up the seam. She screws her eyes shut against the tide of nausea. How will she do this for the next five months? How does anyone carry on their lives while cooking another being like this? She feels pathetic. There are women out there running marathons, running companies, running countries, and she can’t even manage to put a few knickers away.
She closes her eyes and swallows a heave of bile. How can there be so many humans crawling all over the planet when this is the misery they bring to their mothers?
Five thirty, and Alina flings the door open. ‘Didn’t see you in the Grub, thought you might be hiding in here.’ She sees the bodice of the new White Princess’ costume on the mannequin and the layers of tulle half threaded through the sewing machine. She frowns.
‘I don’t think that’s a priority, you know.’ She puts herreusable cup down on the designated food and drink table near the door and shrugs off her coat. ‘Cecile only told us to start thinking about it.’
She opens the cup and the smell of rich black coffee wafts out into the room. Milly swallows, saliva pooling under her tongue. She is going to be sick. She swallows again and again, trying to keep her lunch down. She breathes through her teeth.
‘Oh sorry, are you hungry? Did you want me to bring you something?’
‘No, no. I’m okay. I ate earlier.’ She joins Alina at the door and has a swig from her water bottle. It eases the roiling in her belly for the moments it’s held in her mouth and as it’s slipping down her throat, but the relief soon fades.
