Right. This is what we’ll do. I’ll make something just for you every day after the show, something simple, not too fancy, and you tell me how it makes you feel. And if it upsets you I’ll remember and I won’t make it again.
Romero felt a sudden stab of what he assumed was hunger, something he hadn’t felt for years and years, at least since he’d lived with his aunt and the monster had started to nibble at him.But why would you do that?
Gino turned away and busied himself with tidying the herbs he’d set out.Did you make a pledge on your first day here?
Yes.
Well, everyone’s pledge is different, and this is mine.He held open the door to the kitchen.Come back tomorrow night and I’ll have something ready for you.
His costume is driving him mad, itching the tender skin over his ribs and he stops by the noticeboard to scratch and adjust it. He holds the door to the stage open for Milly who is jogging towards him with a threaded needle in one hand and the other on her chest.
‘Ta,’ she pants as she passes him, and he follows her into the blackness of the wings.
The temperature on stage is balmy, the lights exuding heat in all directions. Shirley the assistant stage manager is sweating as she wraps Benji in the red cloak of the Suitor. Romero goes to stand next to him, ready for Shirley to fuss around him with the blue cloak next.
‘Good luck, mate,’ Romero whispers to Benji as Shirley trots back to the props table. ‘You’ll be great. Just keep breathing.’
Benji gives him a wan smile. ‘Cecile told me this morning that she should have given me an extra week to rehearse. She said it like she was telling me someone had died.’
Romero rolls his eyes. ‘That’s the sort of thing she says when she has full confidence in you. Honestly, you’ll be great.’
The Pages march off stage and for a moment Shirley is distracted by gathering up their decorative swords and shields and placing them carefully within their marked-out places on the prop table.
On stage, Greg and Mara are sweeping around each other in the mock courtly dance of the King and the Queen. They’re Romero’s favourite couple to watch in these roles – the command in the breadth of Greg’s shoulders and the aristocratic way Mara holds her head. They’re his favourite dancers to watch in almost any role. Theirs is the kind of charisma you simply don’t have at the beginning of your career, no matter how easily you turn five pirouettes, no matter how fresh the line of yourarabesque.It’s as if everytime you step on stage you accrue a little more magnetism, until your knees are shot and your hips creak and your back is crooked but no one can take their eyes off you. Romero can feel it happening to him, a slow build-up of glamour that glitters on the skin under the glare of the stage lights. It makes him feel powerful, but it’s not without its dangers. He’s noticed the haze that rises from the auditorium during curtain calls lingers for a fraction of a second around Greg and Mara – and Stephanie and Stuart too – no matter what roles they’re dancing, even if they’re only in the corps de ballet that night. It’s dangerous, in a thrilling and glamorous way. Charlotte used to have the little speckles of light in the haze dancing around her head for a full minute before they were drawn to the back of the stage and into the Pearl on its podium, and look what happened to her.
Shirley returns to his blue cloak – which she pleads for them not to attempt to wrap on their own as Alina is very insistent on how they should fold and drape – and Stuart, dressed in the glittering cream jacket of the White Suitor, appears by his side with a waft of aftershave.
Stuart slaps Benji on the shoulder. ‘Here we go, mate. The three that lie in a dream. We’ll be looking out for you, just enjoy yourself.’
Benji looks a little green. Romero remembers the first time he danced one of the Suitors – it was the Red one, which is the easiest although it’s tricky on the stamina going straight from the solo to thepas de deux– he had thought he was going to throw up. Gino had made him a sweet potatocurry spiced with lemongrass for courage and cardamom for spring in his feet and Cecile had told him that he’d be a passable Suitor if he learned to land histourscleanly.
The trumpet blares, loudly pulling his attention back to the show currently in progress, announcing the entrance of the Crow. Romero leans to one side to see Josh saunter out onto the stage with his black cape billowing behind him and the sleek black feathers of the headdress gleaming under the lights. A familiar stab of envy twists his stomach. He’d love to dance the Crow one day but he’s afraid of that headdress. He knows it will itch him on the soft places behind his ears and under his jaw. He’s seen the way the others groan when they take it off in the wings, their hair dripping with sweat, their foreheads dented by the rim. He imagines the glue melting into his face as he starts to sweat, the heat releasing the intimate odours of everyone else who has ever worn it: their skin, their hair, their teeth. It makes his stomach roil. He both longs for and dreads Cecile beckoning him with one red-tipped finger to tell him to start learning the part. He hasn’t decided yet if he’ll tell her he doesn’t want to or if he’ll try and wheedle a new headdress out of Alina. Maybe he’ll try that first. If Alina says no, which he can imagine her doing, with that sardonic so-you-think-you’re-better-than-anyone-else-who’s-worn-this-monstrosity eyebrow, he’ll ask Gino to have a word with her. He doesn’t do that often, throw his weight around as the beloved of the most important person in the whole company, but when he does it works. There is no peace for you on board the Grub if Gino is not happy withyou. Maybe that’s why Cecile is such a bitch. Gino won’t talk about their long-running feud.Our pledges are opposed to each other, is all he’ll say.Just another of the Crow’s tricks.
Romero doesn’t have a favourite dancer as the Crow: everyone who performs the role teases out something different. Stephanie is the most birdlike – the way she cocks her head and preens the feathers on the costume, she sometimes seems uncannily like a real, giant bird. Mara is cold and glamorous and fierce – she could be on a catwalk. Stuart is an alpha, dancing it like the kind of bird that would piss all over your lunch and laugh about it. Greg doesn’t dance the Crow anymore because his knees are giving up on him but when he did he played it for laughs, hamming up the leering at the Princesses and cavorting like a kind of gremlin. Josh, on stage now, gives the Crow something wistful and haunted, like he’s flown a hundred leagues to be here and has seen things you can’t imagine.
It’s the only part Romero can think of in any classical repertoire that can be performed by a man or a woman. The rest of ballet is so rigidly gender-defined, so stiflingly segregated that just the fact that the role exists thrills him and goes a long way to healing the bruising from all those jobs he didn’t get, all those directors who looked past him as if he was invisible. He has to get Alina to make him a new headdress. He can’t retire without dancing that role.
Josh finishes his solo, standing with his back to the audience, with one hand held out towards the wing where the three Suitors wait. A rolling arpeggio of the harp andthe cellos start the Suitors’ theme, slow and steady and noble. Romero holds onto his cape with one hand and places the other on Stuart’s sequinned shoulder. Benji’s trembling hand lands on his, and they all walk out of the wing together, chins held high, a carefully neutral expression on each of their faces because they’re supposed to be a vision the Crow has conjured for the court.
He always finds it hard to tell when he’s no longer in the wings and is now on stage. Since his first show that border space has fascinated him. A tiny tear in the fabric of time and space, a liminal moment between being hidden in the blackness and being bared, exposed for all the audience to see. Just a step, a small shuffle from dark to light. He wonders if there has ever been anyone who has fallen inside that gap between the wings the way you can fall into the gap between tolls of the midnight bell.
The Suitors’ first dance is solemn and proud. Swathed in those carefully draped cloaks, they parade slowly around the Princesses. Benji’s doing well, his steps perfectly in time with the music and matched to him and Stuart. He no longer looks nervous; he looks like a prince. Romero can sense a couple of particles of that charismatic glitter alight on his skin.
The three Suitors stop at the back of the stage, poised in perfect stillness gazing out across the auditorium. He remembers the first time he’d looked out there, on his second week with the company. He’d been a Page escorting the Blue Princess and as he took Stephanie’s warm hand andstepped into the light, the force of the fair folk’s combined glamour hit him like a brick wall. He’d stumbled and Stephanie had gripped his hand to keep him upright.You’re okay, just push through it and don’t look too closely, it happens to everyone, she’d whispered as they paraded around the stage, her regal smile fixed as Romero pulled himself together.
Now, as Josh cavorts around them, Romero looks determinedly at the gilding of the balcony and counts the round bobbles there to distract himself. He feels Benji’s shoulder stiffen under his hand and he gives him a squeeze, to reassure him, to keep his attention here on stage and not out there in the horrors of the auditorium. He thinks of the lunch Gino made him, still lining his belly. Avocado, for the feeling of stretching arms and legs in bed on a lazy morning when you don’t have to set an alarm, mashed with sun-dried tomatoes for thirst slaked, and basil for a message from a long-lost friend. All spread on a slice of brown toast, for the feeling of unexpectedly hearing the first few bars of a favourite song. He thinks of the two and a half arancini waiting for him in the dressing room. He thinks of Gino, chopping and frying and stirring and mashing, alone in the Grub, pledged to keep each one of them here fed and watered until their own pledges are over.
The violins start. Greg and Mara lead the court in a slow, mournful dance around the three still Suitors in the middle of the stage and the danger is past. Now he lets himself watch the other dancers moving past him. Harriet is doing well in her first show as the Red Princess, confidentand calm. The scarlet of the costume suits her. Luke, the newest pledge, fluffs a lift, tripping over his own feet and Romero hears Zuleika the Blue Princess hissSort yourself out. Another crime on Luke’s rap sheet, which, judging by the way Cecile shrieked at him this morning in rehearsals, is getting longer and longer. Now he’s pissed Zuleika off and she’ll be tense and nervous – even more tense and nervous than usual – for theirpas de deux.
The court exits stage right and the three Suitors pause in a tableau of lowarabesques, still joined hand to shoulder, until Josh banishes them with a flick of his cape. Romero follows Stuart into the stage right wing as Josh walks to the back of the stage and breathes deep into his belly. The first solo is a killer on the lungs, they all say.
The wing is busy with Shirley buzzing around Greg and Mara to remove their crowns for safekeeping, Danny hauling the second act set into place and Anita marking the Crow’s solo with one eye on Josh to prepare for her first show in the role, whenever Cecile decides she’s ready. Romero tries not to be jealous of her, getting to dance the Crow before him. She’ll be good at it. She’s got a strong jump.
Zuleika grabs Luke by the sequinned jacket and pulls him away from the stage.
‘That was not fucking acceptable,’ Zuleika whispers as Josh begins his solo, standing on her toes to bring her face close to his. Luke is looking stricken, opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish. ‘You were late, you were off the music and you didn’t know what you were doing.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Luke says, his chin wobbling as if he is trying to hold back tears. ‘I won’t do it again.’
