On the upside, safest place after a lightning bolt is under the storm-struck tree, Derek had said the next evening in the dining car.
What the fuck is wrong with you?Danny had snarled and Milly had put a restraining hand on his arm.
Alina had drained her gin and tonic and slammed it onto the table. She put her clenched fist over her mouth as if stopping herself from saying more and strode out of the dining car. It has always been the most egregious insult onThe Apple and the Pearlto wish a snatching on someone, and Mackie was grateful to Alina for holding herself back and saving him from the inevitable – and in this case, unfair – disciplinary procedure.
Mackie looks up from his laptop screen again to see Derek fiddling with a wing flat on the other side of the stage, a power drill tucked between his knees and Danny beside him, violently pointing at the frame. He sighs. Where in any of the available worlds did Belinda find Derek?
He knows that every snatching makes Belinda publicly furious and privately heartbroken. She makes him, AJ or Cecile fill out those blasted forms, she gets a bottle of wine from Gino to take back to her cabin and she hires someone new. After the dancer lad had been taken, Belinda had been red-eyed for days.I had to tell his parents that he’d fallen from a tree, she’d said to Mackie a few days later.The Crow will get me some kind of body to send them for a funeral.Mackie always feel intensely sorry for her on those occasions. He brings her a drink after the midnight bells and tries to gauge if she wants company as she drowns her guilt or if she wants to rage in solitude. After Alex’s snatching, Belinda had sat in her coat with the open ledger in front of her for a good halfan hour before Mackie had been able to persuade her to get the whisky down.And the worst of it is that I’m not surprised, not at all. Good-looking, talented. They take the best of us and leave the oafs here to rot.
To be fair, not every snatching makes her cry. She really hadn’t seemed to care much about Bobby the French horn. He’d been a shambling, musty kind of bloke whose face was set in a permanent sneer.
Zach bounds over, trailed by the new lighting assistant, a blonde girl whose name Mackie knew this morning but has now forgotten. ‘Any joy on that upstage light?’ he asks.
‘I’m thinking leave it off for tonight and reposition the ones next it.’
He turns to the blonde girl and smiles. ‘How’s your day been? Has Zach explained how things work around here?’
She looks uncertainly at Zach, who nods at her encouragingly. ‘He’s told me quite a lot, yeah.’
‘Has he let you know about our audience? How to stay safe?’
The new girl glances at Zach and nods. Zach shuffles and shoves his hands in his pockets.
‘Well, it’s my pledge today too, so hopefully I’ll see you in the Grub later.’ He looks back at his laptop, and Zach, who does at least know when his presence is no longer required, withdraws, holding out his hand to float protectively behind the new girl’s back like he’s leading her across a ballroom floor. Mackie sighs. He could do without Zach falling in love, to be honest.
His nineteenth pledge. How did that happen so fast? He’s done all the jobs on the technical team except anything in wardrobe – you wouldn’t trust him with a needle and scissors – but this is his seventh pledge as the boss. He knows the show better than anyone, even better than Cecile and AJ. They’re blinkered by their devotions to the dance and the music, but Mackie can’t afford that. He can’t play any instrument, but he can hum the whole score and he knows each one of the dancers’ cues, although you’d not want him anywhere near a pair of tights.
He pulls up his internet browser. He’s got almost nothing done today because of the distraction of it, those three little lines lit up on his screen beckoning him to check on the outside world. He reads the news – still a shitshow out there, like it was this morning and last Wednesday when they last had signal – then he clicks onto one of the social sites he lurks on whenever there’s enough signal. He’s lost count of how many times he’s seen that blue screen today. It gives him no nourishment at all, yet he finds himself returning again and again to take little sips of this slow acting poison, nosy envy that dissolves a little more of whatever pride he used to take in this job every time he drinks.
There’s a steady parade of photos from the lives of people he used to know but hasn’t seen in years: the beach holiday of his second cousin; the puppy of one of the set builders from his first job; eleven albums of photos ofThe Apple and the Pearl’s last assistant stage manager’s house renovation. The photos are sunny, smiley, carefully edited to show nothingbut contentment. They make him feel a kind of panicked uselessness. What can he post from here? How would he describe this life to those who have never lived it, or even the peculiarities of this show to those who do know what it is to dedicate your youth to the darkness behind a stage? The constantly refreshing feed is filled with pictures of blokes he used to know who now alternate their winters between panto andNutcrackers, spending summers working festivals or on Asian tours with ageing rock stars, playing the same circuits over and over again with nothing changing but the songs and the pain in their backs when they lay down in their beds. A part of him wishes he was doing that too. Or that he could have got a job in a regional producing theatre, something with holiday pay and a pension, bought a house to live in all year round and pottered in the garden on Sundays. Perhaps it’s not too late to do that. Pledge day comes around so quickly, you never get enough time to really consider if this is what you want to spend another journey round the sun doing.
‘We’re ready for curtain check, Mackie.’ Charlie hovers by a wing flat, headset already in place. The stage behind him is empty but for Belinda waiting at the bottom of the ladder side of the tallescope, clipboard in hand, kicking one toe absently at the braked wheels. The rest of the crew are loitering in the wings as they always do at this time, carefully busying themselves with minor tasks or chatter, so they don’t watch him and wonder too hard what exactly is in that curtain that stinks of the sea. He knows some of them think this is some kind of magic spell that got solemnlyhanded to him when he made his first pledge as the boss, but that tongue-twisty-tying thing the Crow does makes him unable to explain that all you have to do is feel along the line of stitches near the top of the curtain for the rough little grains of salt in there and check there’re no gaps. He’ll have to tell one of them one day – if he had to take a bet on it right now he’d say it would be Charlie – and perhaps there’ll be a little puff of disappointment in his heart that it’s no more complicated or arcane than that.
The first time he’d had to get up on the tallescope ladder to check the salt lining himself he’d felt a little dizzy and it was nothing to do with the height. He was terrified of missing something, leaving a hole in the protections that a rogue imp could slip through and run amok through the cast and crew.This is management now, Belinda had huffed as she waited at the bottom.You’ve got to take responsibility for all these souls.
And as he climbs each rung now, hoping his trousers don’t split at the groin and give Belinda something to cackle about, he thinks of Juliet saying,You listen to your elders and betters when they tell you what to do to get the show on, and when it comes time for it you tell the young ones what you were told and anything else you’ve learned in the meantime. It’s a chain, Mackie, right back to some poor bastard packing a wagon with a load of pipes and harps and drums.
Belinda nudges the brakes off and starts to push the tallescope along the stage, as Mackie reaches for the curtain, groping for gaps in the salt. His fingers do this now withouthim thinking about it – like most things here, it’s best not to think too much about it – and he deftly rearranges it. Every few weeks he takes a carton of table salt from Gino and pours a little more inside the lining. He’s got no idea why it needs replacing, he does it because seven years ago Juliet told him he should – she hadn’t ever done it herself, she was just the most senior member of the crew left when Bill the old technical manager lost himself in the greenwood one June afternoon. That one had hurt Belinda. Now, whenever they’re stopped in a forest with dappled green light and softly scented air, she puts a notice on the board, demanding everyonebe careful. As if that will change anything, as if Belinda’s stern words could be worth as much protection as all this salt and iron.
On the day Bill disappeared, it was chaos. The locked dressing rooms, the furious Crow, Belinda rubbing her temples later that night in her office, Mackie’s hastily repeated pledge as the new technical manager and Juliet at his shoulder every day for a month,Absolutely not, I’d never want to be the boss, me and the Crow see eye to eye on that at least, but I’ve watched old Bill for ten years or more and I’ll help you find your feet.The show was a shambles for a couple of weeks before Mackie got everything under control. Including the curtain.
Mackie grew up in fairgrounds and carnivals. He’s always known about doorways sprinkled with salt and iron horseshoes and a shirt worn inside out on Mayday. He remembers parking the van at a stopping place near Nottingham one summer and sleeping out in a field wild with cow parsley and buttercups. His father made a fireand his mother tuned her fiddle and his uncles sat around smoking and playing cards while the children played in the hedgerows and the aunties pulled food out of baskets and cold boxes. And all the while Mackie could hear the swifts shrieking and he could see the air hazing at the edges of the field where they were visited by creatures attracted to the music and the fire and the laughter and the sense of freedom under the sky. They kept their distance, adding only a quiet song to the swifts’ cries that spoke to Mackie of that sweet melancholy of late summer, the sensation of everything ripened to such a fullness that the only way for them to grow was into rot and ruin.
But in the morning the camp was surrounded by men with glittering eyes carrying bats and spades and a taut, gleeful threat of violence. His father had looked at them for a long moment and given the signal to move on. In minutes they were on the road, leaving nothing but flattened grass and the itch of a fight left to dissipate into the air rather than pound into bones.
Listen, his father said later that day, smoking his cigarette after they’d set up the dodgems and the helter-skelter.There’s been argy-bargy between travelling and settled folk since the time someone first scattered some seed in a field and stuck about to watch it grow. They’re frit of us because we’re closer to the fair folk than they. They think we step between worlds, and they love us and hate us for it.
‘Done.’ He calls down to Belinda, and Zach strides onto the stage, new girl scurrying behind him, to wheel thetallescope away upstage to fix his light. As he climbs down the ladder he hears Charlie muttering into his headset, asking Kavi to drop the curtain and raise the safety. He hurries back to his abandoned laptop in the wings to get another little shot of poison from that seductive, destructive screen just as Charlie says, ‘Ladies and gentlemen ofThe Apple and the Pearl, this is your quarter-of-an-hour call, you have fifteen minutes, please.’
The feed has refreshed itself again, innocently churning out more saccharine photos of people from his past. The first thing he sees when he opens his laptop is the face he’s loved for decades, a face he still sees in dreams when the Crow is particularly restless, a face he once hoped to look at for the rest of his life. He clicks on the image to make it bigger. Helen, twenty years older than the woman who shows up in his dreams, with lines around her mouth and eyes and speckles of grey in her glossy black hair. She’s got her arms around two teenage girls with eyes exactly her shade of green, like the dappled light in an oak canopy. He scrolls down to read the comment.My beautiful girls on my birthday, it’s been the privilege of my life to be your mother! xxx
She never used to be so sappy, he knows it’s the necessity of gilding your life for this monstrous thing that’s made her write something like that. He scrolls down to more comments;Best mum ever! xxxxandGorgeous as always mum! xoxoand thumbs-up and hearts and smiley faces and because it is hurting him somewhere high up in his ribs to see this, he clicks on Helen’s name to see more pictures ofher. At the beach, on a clifftop, holding a cake filled with candles, lounging in a garden among sunflowers, dressed in a ski suit, over and over Helen’s face which torments him like a million tiny poison pinpricks.This is what you gave up to sit in a black box with a pocketful of salt, he thinks.
He clicks back to the picture of her with her daughters. He tries to see the girls’ father in their faces, to unpick the mix he made with Helen and edit his own face onto theirs, to make the young women he might have had with Helen if only he’d been able to stay put. The daughters he might have cradled and sung to and ridden a bike with and stood helplessly by as they cried over a boy or a girl or a piece of homework and there is such a pain in his chest now, such a bright flash of agony that he clamps his mouth shut to stop himself making a keening noise.I can’t be on my own anymore, Mackie, she’d said as she pulled his ring off her finger and laid it on the path between them.You belong to the theatre, not to me. I want to love a man who lives in my house without itching to be out of it.
And he could have said,No, put your ring back on, I’ll only go back into work to give in my notice, I’ll stay here with you and get a settled job.
Instead he had turned away, left the ring on the ground and done another three months on that musical, he can’t even remember what it was called now, it was shit anyway, telling himself she had already made her choice. When he’d woken too many times with beer-stink vomit down his front and an empty ache in his belly, he realised enough was enough and sat in the greenroom of the Alhambra in Bradford witha copy ofThe Stageand a pen. He rang the number on the ad for a stage hand on a touring ballet, spoken to a curt woman who turned out to be Belinda, and found himself at Leeds station at dinnertime on a Tuesday. Change clinked in his pocket and he used it to call his father from one of those old payphones that linger like archaeological artefacts in public places no one can be bothered to renovate.
