Yes, my daughter is very much enjoying university and somewhat interested in casting, though she doesn’t quite understand the full extent of the work yet. I will see you at Didcot Parkway on the 12th and I’m very much looking forward to it.
***
Six twenty-five, and the door to the musician’s green room opens. There’s a commotion outside. Henry checks his slightly late watch – it says six twenty-three – and reaches into his bag for the extra roll he filled with a slice of cheese at lunch. A long stream of musicians wander in, lugging their instruments, brushing rain off their jackets, exhaling garlic fumes of Gino’s lasagne. There’s Jean, urgently typing a message on her phone. Max, the second violin listening intently to Ellie the viola, nodding and making little sounds of agreement. Steve roars something at Lance, who grins and goes to join the three fat musketeers, dragging David the harp along with him.
Henry takes a bite of the sandwich – it’s good cheese,he reluctantly decides, some kind of soft, herby, creamy thing – and watches Michael as he slumps in the corner among the tuxedos and evening dresses. Across the room, a conversation is beginning on a favoured topic – what the music ofThe Apple and the Pearlwould have sounded like five hundred years ago, a thousand, fifteen hundred. Lance thinks the melodies would have been the same with only the arrangements following the musical fashions of the times, while Wilf the cellist has always maintained that while the basic story has been similar, there might not have even been music in other eras, let alone something recognisable as the score they play nightly. Henry takes another bite of his sandwich. He should have made himself another one. He’s hungrier than he thought.
***
Twenty-five minutes to seven and down on the stage a broom goesswish swishacross the floor, tiny motes of dust flying from the brush into the air. A pile of splinters and dirt gathers near the footlights, awaiting the attentions of the woman clad all in black who hunches over her broom. She stops, bends slowly to peer at something she finds on the floor. She picks it up between a thumb and a forefinger and puts it in her pocket.
Light a candle for the departed on All Souls’, the Crow thinks,light a whole fucking bonfire for your dead whether you’ve seen them into the Pearl or not, but if your loved one went to sing and dance in the Otherworld then there’s no candle foryou, no body to bury, no name to speak aloud either. The poor lass whose fella got took a moon ago. Sad but she can’t show it and it breaks Crow’s heart, yes it does; and if the gates of Faerie weren’t locked to the Crow she would swoop in, yes she would, she would get the dancer lad and the French horn and any of the others taken, if still they dance and sing there. You don’t want the Crow for an enemy, sweethearts, yes, that’s what the Belinda woman tells you as she pricks your little fingers for the Grub, but who does the Crow hate among the mortals? Well that’s not a fair question, the Crow saves her bile for Fae creatures, the bastards and pledge-breaking ninnies like the fiddler. Put his heart in a stew and ate it, plopped it right in the soup the cook gave and slurped it up, now he’s bound tighter and how does he like that?
But Crow takes no pleasure in pledge-breakers, no, Crow wants to keep the artistes happy, yes she does. Tried so hard with the angel-fingered harp woman but all she wanted was to get back into a world which had never loved her, certainly not so well as Crow and the fiddler do. The Grub needs a King and the Grit needs a Queen and no, the dancers playing dress-up each night are not enough, though the Mara girl and the Gregory man will play their parts tonight as well as any others Crow has ever seen.
But to have a King and a Queen back again! A pair like Albert the fiddler and Hannah the piper who gave the nest a chick at long last – and keptThe Apple and the Pearlsafe with the blessing of a baby. The midwife brought the meat of the afterbirth to Crow that night and down it went, all that bright blood into Crow’s belly to keep Faerie at bay a little longer. Only two snatchings in the whole decade after the Jeanie girlie’s birth!Percy Montgomery had danced himself a jig but of course they got slack and Faerie got hungry. Magic got up and ran out the door, just like magic always does.
Who next to play King and Queen and give the Crow a chick? The seamstress has a changeling in her belly, more’s the pity – Crow should warn Belinda – and the dancer lad who had a noble bearing is gone. All Souls’, and Crow will let her beloved men and women of the theatre be with their dead for tonight. Tomorrow will dawn as tomorrow always does and then Crow will set about finding another belly to hatch a chick forThe Apple and the Pearl.
The wings are silent. The house lights throw a drab, murky light across the stage and the auditorium. A caw in the direction of the lighting box and the house lights brighten a little. The woman comes right to the front of the stage, and squints out at the auditorium. Her gaze roves over each row of seats, each gilded carving and piece of stucco. Satisfied, she caws again, softly. She stows her broom away behind the prompt desk and with a flurry of feathers, the black serge of her dress becomes wings and the Crow flies across the auditorium, through the open doors into the foyer and out into the night.
***
Twenty minutes to seven and all the dancers are in their dressing rooms, faces illuminated by picture frames of lightbulbs to stare into the depth of their pores, wondering how they will do it all over again and if their ankles, shoulders and hips will hold up for another three acts.Luke is smoothing his hair with a little bit of gel and going over the orchard dance, trying not to hum the melody too loudly. Greg is carefully taping his knees – King tonight, again, because he can’t do any other part any more – and next to him Josh is smearing thick black make-up over his face, neck and chest.
In the women’s dressing room, Stephanie is sewing a ribbon on to a pointe shoe and listening to her affirmations. Zuleika is texting her brother. Mara is scrolling through the news on her phone, reading aloud an article about two celebrity actors getting a divorce to the interested parties of the dressing room.
Anita is writing a card for Harriet, who is making her debut as the Red Princess tonight. She writes out the little rhyme,three sisters never to be seen, but she has to stop when she gets to the last line about the Crow who sings in her nest, because her eyes are filling with tears and she doesn’t want to smudge her writing. Alex wrote her a card before her first Red Princess with this rhyme in and she still has it, although you’re supposed to give everything left behind to Belinda so she can destroy it. She gave Belinda the toothbrush he kept in her cabin and a couple of pairs of socks, then wrapped everything else – all the letters, the cards, the presents, the photos – in a package and sent it to her mum’s house.
Milly and Alina are moving between the dressing rooms and wardrobe, each with a cast sheet clamped between their teeth and arms full of costumes on hangers. Cecile is in her office, working on tomorrow night’s casting. AJ is in hisdressing room, humming through the orchestral arrangement for Glazunov’sRaymonda, which he does not think much of as a score but finds relaxing in a mind-numbing way before a show.
Charlie the deputy stage manager arrives at the prompt desk and settles himself in his chair. He checks he has everything he needs: headset charged, score all correct, lighting and set cues all there. He takes a swig of water, checks his watch, waits for the minute hand to catch up.
Outside the Grit it is raining. A mizzling kind of rain that leaves everything glistening wet and dampens all sounds. The bell, when it comes, is muffled and sluggish. It rings once, twice, three times, then pauses as if fatigued. Once, twice, three times again and the Grub shudders with the vibrations. Once, twice, three times again and the mist clears a little around the Grub, the droplets of water juddering as they meet the iron. Nine more peals sound solemnly into the night and the last takes a while to fade completely, still echoing on the mossy gravestones as Gino shuts and bolts the window of his kitchen, turns on his extractor fan and starts chopping carrots.
Five minutes to seven, and on stage inside the Grit Zach is showing Lara how to angle the downstage lights on the act one backdrop.
‘And of course the folder with the lighting cues is the most important thing to follow but you never know what’s going to happen on this show so Juliet always used to tell me to rely on the rhyme the dancers say.’
‘What rhyme?’ Lara cocks her head.
‘Okay, it’s stupid but it does help.’ Zach clears his throat. ‘King, queen, sisters never to be seen – I don’t know what that’s about, maybe they’ve just got to stay inside, you know what fairytales are like – orchard, sea, suitors in a dream – because the princesses go to rescue the princes, right, that’s kind of interesting, I guess? And then orchard, quest, the Crow in its nest.’
Just downstage of them, Danny mutters to Kavi up in the flies as he lowers the safety curtain along the line of the proscenium arch. Belinda stands behind them, droplets of rain dripping from the hem of her black coat. Charlie watches the sheet of iron as it touches the stage and presses the call button. The light that tells him he is broadcasting to the whole company shines scarlet. A crackle of static, a whistle of his breath echoing throughout the backstage area.
‘Ladies and gentlemen ofThe Apple and the Pearl, this is your half-hour call. Thirty minutes, please.’
***
‘House is open, Mackenzie,’ Belinda calls from the stage. He looks up from the image of the lighting rig on his laptop screen.
‘And everyone in?’ he answers, as he does every night. Belinda nods tightly, as she does every night, and walks away across the stage, her shoes squeaking a little on the vinyl dance floor.
You’re told on your first day here about the curfews,the bells before the show and the bells at midnight. But Mackie knows that not everyone really understands the consequences of being outside either the iron walls of the Grub or the salt-sprinkled stage of the Grit by the time Charlie comes on the tannoy until they’ve experienced what Belinda callsan incident.
When Alex the dancer lad disappeared a month or so ago, they were not what Belinda would call tight. There were too many new pledges who hadn’t seen the aftermath of a snatching, hadn’t been locked in dressing rooms or cabins until Belinda could count everyone, hadn’t witnessed the Crow shrieking as it wheeled around the Grub, hadn’t felt the leaden weight of the now-forbidden name on the tongue. After Bobby the French horn tripped over a tree root on the way back to the Grub after a show and fell into the Otherworld last September, there had been a flurry of new pledges. The new harp; the new flute; three new violins; a new French horn; a new cello; Kavi – though he had no worries about him, sharp as a tack; and three or four new dancers looking pretty wet about the ears.
Then Alex didn’t turn up to rehearsals, the Grub and the Grit were locked for a couple of hours, the Crow keened. And those new pledges went about with a dazed look for a week or so, their induction into the world ofThe Apple and the Pearltruly complete.
