Well, I’m off away on a new show, Pa, a touring one so I won’t be around for a bit.His father had made a noise of approval: he agreed with the travelling life even if it wasn’t done in the traditional ways, thought it unnatural to stay in one place.You’ve two legs for a reason, boy, he used to say.You ain’t a tree.
Whereabouts are you playing then?his father had asked, and Mackie had swelled a little with the satisfaction of saying,Well the show’s calledThe Apple and the Pearl,Pa, so we’ll be playing in all sorts of places.
He could imagine the expression on the old man’s face, a glow of pride and not a little jealousy, and when the old man had said,I never knew you had it in you boy, you go on there with my grace, Mackie had felt released from his father’s long grip at last. He knew the old man thought there was nothing more he could tell or teach him and never expected to see him again, and he left that life behind scoured of guilt, every scrap of longing for his father to see and hold him gone.He thinks the fair folk have got me now, he told Belinda in one of their moments of quiet understanding.And he was glad and proud. He’s old-fashioned like that.
There has been no one else, all these years. No oneunless you count Juliet, which he doesn’t, because when Juliet beckoned you to her cabin and took you to her bed you did as you were told and were pleased about it. It wasn’t love, it was barely lust, it was something else, some kind of tribute to an ancient queen, a tithe, a toll paid on this long, ancient road the Grub chuntered along.
He pulls the cursor to hover over the thumbs-up icon. He presses it. He imagines Helen opening up her blue screen of dissatisfaction in a few minutes or a few hours or a few days and seeing that he, Mackie, that man she used to love, has given his thumbs-up to the picture of her and her daughters and he imagines that she will know he was thinking of her, that he was regretting her, that he was acknowledging all the years that lie between now and the time in which they loved each other, the only force of nature not even the Fae can escape no matter how long they delay it. That he was saying – clumsily, with a garbled language of cartoon pictures – how much he wished it had been him who had put those babies in her belly and watched them grow beside her.
‘Mackie!’ Shirley the assistant stage manager, calling him with something approaching panic in her voice, although that doesn’t mean much, she’s a bit highly strung and that’s just how she sounds. ‘Could you just come and have a look at this on the act one backdrop please?’
He quits the screen with the photos and shuts his laptop. The show is about to start and for the next few hours he won’t have time to sit and moon over a woman who probably hasn’t thought of him in years, he’ll be rushing from wingto wing, headset hot on his ears, the familiar tides and eddies of the score flowing around him. Then, as soon as the curtain hits the stage for the third time, he’ll lead the swarm of his crew all over it, dismantling the gear and the set, ready to pack in the Grub again, and of course he has to go to Belinda’s office to do his pledge again. And his life here will continue the way it always has, the way it has to be because he’s the one, the only one, who knows how to check the salt grains in the curtain.
‘Coming.’
***
Twenty-five past seven and Charlie calls beginners on the tannoy. The orchestra is all assembled in the pit. They are only waiting for Max, one of the second violins, to slip past the tuba, dodge the forest of woodwind pipes and plonk himself on his seat behind Michael.I need the adrenaline rush, he says every time Jean complains that he puts her on edge.
Once Max is settled, they all reach for their handfuls of salt and scatter them on the ground. AJ enters the pit, the pockets of his jet-black jacket reliably weighted with salt, and the musicians get to their feet. A normal audience applauds the conductor, but this audience don’t care. A conductor is just another mortal nobody to them and so they continue their languid conversations. Everyone in the orchestra is used to that now. It’s the smallest of the odd things about this show.
He nods to Jean, who raises her oboe to her lips and playsan A. Michael tunes to her, head cocked to grip his violin under his chin, one hand on the peg and the other on his bow, this wordless, discordant song they sing each and every night. Then the woodwind and brass join to match them both, their hot breath blowing a hurricane through the pit to make a tendril of AJ’s silver hair quiver. Finally the strings take their bows to their instruments and the Grit is a glorious roar of perfectly jarring notes that roll and tumble over and around each other until each instrument falls off and the cacophony fades into a silence as beautifully tense as an arched bow ready to loose its weapon.
Up on stage, the sound of the orchestra tuning sets the dancers to a fever. The show is about to start and although they are all buttoned and zipped up in their costumes and everyone who performs in the first act is present on stage, they still wish for a few more minutes, a couple more practices of that tricky pirouette, a moment longer just to retie the ribbon on this pointe shoe. The wings thrum with last-minute action: a checking of the props table; a spanner on a bolt of a boom; a whispered question on a headset to Zach up in his salt-strewn lighting box.
AJ, the ninetieth conductor ofThe Apple and the Pearl, raises his baton and there is finally a hush from the auditorium. Jean puts her mouth to her reed, AJ brings his baton down and the Grit fills with the unearthly sound of her instrument, a note that sounds like a seed awakening in the earth at the beginning of spring, unfurling towards the gathering light.
Charlie says, ‘Curtain’, and the plush red velvet curtains that look so soft but would crush you dead if you stood beneath them, lift away from each other to frame the proscenium like plump, stained lips that would suck the meat from your bones and kiss your skeleton later.
***
As he hears that first sinuous note of the oboe, Romero is in his dressing room pulling on the white tights of his costume. The mirror before him is speckled with droplets of hair gel and it’s refracting his image slightly. The tights fuzz and blur as he moves them over the soft brown hairs on his thighs and up over his buttocks to his waist. He tucks them into the thick band of his jockstrap and reaches for his boots before he can look too hard at the tiny ledge of displaced flesh around his waist.
On the table behind him is a bowl of three still-warm arancini with molten mozzarella at their cores. Gino sent them over from the Grub with Charlie, nestled with a napkin in a little warming tray and a dish over the top to keep the heat in and the hairspray out. He’s nibbled half of one; he’s saving the other half for the first interval. He’ll eat another half at the second interval and another half just before the third act wedding dance for a little kick of energy, which leaves him a whole arancino to look forward to as he’s wiping his make-up off and getting changed after the show.
The subtle fragrance of saffron lingers in the air, mingled with sweat, lightbulb-singed towels and the spraycleaner Alina uses on their beaded jackets that can’t be spun in the washing machines. Romero swallows, just to taste the pollen of it on his tongue again. The dish is carefully crafted just for him. Gino only uses ingredients he knows Romero can bear and only in combinations he knows will sing a sweet music together. Saffron, to feel the sun on your face on the first days of spring. Sticky rice, for the feeling of lying down to sleep, sated and happy. Breadcrumbs rolled in olive oil, for the crunch of warm boots in fresh snow. Mozzarella, for the gentle nuzzling into a baby’s soft neck.
Tonight he’s dancing the Blue Suitor. As he manipulates the soles of the boots to warm the leather, he pedals through his feet slowly to stretch the tendons under his arches and warm them through. He imagines his muscles stretching like the mozzarella, soft and elastic and filled with milky sweetness. He pulls on the black leather boots with the soft sole and fits them over his toes. He is uncomfortable, as always. The seam of the tights makes an awkward ridge under his foot and he dreads putting on the itchy jacket. Costumes make everything worse. He’d be a better dancer if he didn’t have to wear this sequinned crap while trying to move.
He’s worn almost every costume by now. He started off a page, where everyone starts, and now, in the four years he’s been with the company, Romero has danced every single male part except the King and the Crow. He’s been every Page, and now every Suitor, and he’s done the orchard dance and the hunting dance and the wedding over and over again. Some dancers find it boring, doing the same showevery night – those are the ones who leave after a pledge or two. But Romero’s never minded. There’s a comfort in life here, a certainty to the flow of each day. He does class, rehearsal, the show. Looks at the casting for the morrow as he leaves the theatre, he eats dinner, he helps Gino tidy up, he goes to sleep, he does it all over again.
He arranges the dance boots over his calves. He’s got these ones perfectly broken in now, moulded to his feet and comfortable to wear, but it won’t last. Three more weeks, he estimates, before the leather starts to wear through at the big toes and he has to start all over again with the blisters and callouses of new boots.
He pulls on the sequinned jacket of the Blue Suitor with an itchy squirm and does up the hooks squinting in the mirror. He covers his arancini with a napkin and leaves the dressing room, shutting the door carefully behind him.
The door to the women’s dressing room next door is framed by a row of battered pointe shoes propped up on their toes. The ribbons are spilling everywhere, the smell of hot glue and sweat wafting along the corridor. He nudges the ribbons out of his path with one leather-tipped toe, and when one shoe tumbles onto its side he quickly props it back up again. Moving someone’s shoes would be like eating the food Gino made only for him. You learn quickly what’s communal and what’s someone else’s territory here, and if you take a while to get it right then Cecile’s shouting and the passive-aggressive sneers of the other dancers will usually see to it that you learn how to rub along.
Romero had been determined to rub along. There was no other option, he had nowhere else to go. He’d been cut in the first few rounds of every other audition he’d been to;The Apple and the Pearlhad been his only chance at employment as a dancer. He’d watched class, rehearsals and the show on his first day, taken his pledge that evening and tried his best to disappear into background and give no one an opportunity to take against him. He wasn’t sure if anyone other than Michael the violinist, his pledge-mate, noticed he was even alive for the first three weeks and he was fine with that, until the chef – he didn’t know his name yet – caught him in the corridor just before the midnight bell.
Okay, Gino had said, blocking his way through the corridor. He’d only just finished up for the night and his forehead was beaded with sweat from his ovens and his white jacket was covered in splashes of sticky scarlet sauce, but he was intent. Whatever he wanted to say was bursting out of him.I’ve given you long enough, now you need to tell me why you don’t eat.
Romero was skewered like a chicken for the spit.
I do eat.He remembers the panicked shame fizzing in his chest as he glanced over the chef’s shoulder to the door that led towards the cabins. His feet itched, he wanted to run.
Gino had clasped his turmeric-stained fingers and raised his eyebrows.
What exactly is it that you eat? Grass? Flakes of paint from the set? Air?
