Greg nods.
Cecile swallows a sob. ‘Tell me what he looks like.’
‘Little blonde head, brown eyes. Playing with a rubber snail. Chubby. Looks like a baby, really.’
Idiot. He was almost three, not a baby at all.
‘On y dansé, on y dansé,’ yells Antoine but she notices with a bubble of panic that his voice sounds muffled now. She needs to get rid of Greg, he’s ruining everything.
‘Greg.’
He turns to her, with difficulty, and a dim part of her notes with pleasure that it is as difficult for him as it is for her to tear his gaze away from the spirit.
‘Get out.’
Greg nods. He opens his mouth to say something, thinks better of it, then shuts the door gently behind him.
But the click of the door has disturbed her son’s spirit because the singing stops and he calls
‘Maman?’ and there is a tremor of petulance in his voice that used to make her panic, the prelude to a tantrum that would have him beating his fists on the floor, throwing his head from side to side and screaming until he gasped for air, all while she sat next to him, trying to hold him, wondering what she had done wrong to induce such rage into such a little body, wondering if there was something monstrous writhing inside him trying to get out.
‘I’m here,’ she says, and she sings again, slightly desperately. ‘Sur le pont…’
‘Maman!’ he cries again and now there is the echo of a scream behind his voice, the flump of a soft flesh on metal, a screech of tyres. It gets louder and louder in her mind, drowning out Antoine’s singing, and now she can’t sing back, her throat is ashes. This is how it always goes. First there is the beauty of him, back again, then there is the cruelty of reliving what took him away.
She calls out to him but his voice gets more agitated. She realises he can’t hear her anymore, he’s leaving her. Again.He’s been with her no more than ten minutes, interrupted by that dolt, but she has never been sure what time means to Antoine, to anyone on the other side. A few years ago she read that the physicists no longer reckon time as one straight line but rather a looping river of eddies and pools, and as soon as she saw the words she knew that’s where she is, stuck in one of time’s eddies, drifting around this tiny corner of the universe, waiting for something, anything of her dead son to appear to her.
He’s gone. There is only the sway of the cello of the Blue Suitor’s solo and the soft thump of Romero’sjetéslanding on the stage floor. She reaches into her desk drawer and pulls out the bottle of cognac and a glass. She pours herself a couple of fingers and downs it.
Greg is a kind and gentle man, and truly a talented dancer, but she will never forgive him for this. These past couple of years his body has reminded her of a beloved old labrador, blind and limping with farts that stink of death, but pity has held her back.
The last time she tried to sack someone for being too old it was Charlotte, and not even a week later she was snatched before ballet class. Mara, tear-stained in Belinda’s office, her accusing, sharp gaze.She just disappeared, went into the cobbled path like it was water!
Now she thinks she would enjoy seeing that happen to Greg. She should call him back, do what she hasn’t done for fear of the fairy creatures – tell him his days here are over and that he has to leave at his next pledge. Then she can waitfor one of those creatures to notice that he’s slow and old and leaving the show, and let it take him. She would have to have a meeting with Belinda and fill out those ridiculous forms but he would be gone. For good. Before he has the chance to whisper about what he’s seen to Josh, who will tell all the other dancers, who will tell the wardrobe mistresses, who will tell the stage hands, who will tell the drunken musicians, who will tell AJ.
She pours herself another slug of cognac and tips it down her throat. The walls of her office blur pleasantly.
Why was he knocking on her door? Why the fuck would any of the dancers, let alone one who has known her for so long, do that? What could be so important that tonight of all nights Greg had to climb the stairs to her office, a place she cannot recall him ever even walking past, to speak with her?
She hears the violins start for the Bluepas de deuxand the tannoy begins to crackle. It starts to drip salt water onto the floor and she groans. She does not want to know of Michael’s grief; tonight of all nights she might succumb to it. She has asked AJ to do something about him over and over again but he’s always demurred, saying the Crow is dealing with him in its own way. But every night, all throughout the theatre at this point in the show, the tannoys start to weep and the keening of Michael’s violin dredges everyone’s memories and lovingly serves them their deepest, saddest heartbreaks. She pushes aside the completed casting, puts her head on the desk and squeezes her eyes shut against the unbidden memories.
The screeching tyres of the lorry lurching across the road, the flump of his soft body on steel, her scream, the sirens, the beeping in the hospital, the silence of the funeral parlour, the spade slicing through frosted earth. The tinkling of the piano on her first class for three years, her hot tears of shame as she looked at herself in a leotard and tights, the pouch under the navel, the heavy thighs, the drooping breasts. A mother’s body with no child to show for it. Her scream, the sirens, the silence.
Thedrip drip dripof salt water stops with the last note of the Bluepas de deuxand there is a pause before the timpani starts up the first wild rhythms of the Crow’s solo. Cecile lifts her head off the desk, wipes at her face with the heels of her hands and sniffs. She tucks the completed casting into her handbag and stands up, slipping her feet into her shoes.
All Souls’ and Antoine has been and gone and she is a whole year away from having him back again. All Souls’, the day of the dead, and once more that much-discussed veil between worlds has drifted closed again, obscuring him from her. There is always this moment of black despair every year when she knows she must endure a whole year’s worth of filling in this piece of paper in ever-different ways until she can have him again. But it is getting worse. Her grief is as fiercely edged as ever, the platitudes are wrong and time has done nothing to blunt it.
She wonders if it’s the modern world of antibiotics and sanitation that’s done this to her. Her ancestors would have thought nothing of losing a single child. They swamin death, they were intimate with all its faces. Death on a cough, a sneeze, a dirty fingernail. Death lurking inside a wildly multiplying cell, death hiding inside the irregular tick-tock of a stuttering heart. Death in deep water, death in a mug of dirty water. Death in the empty belly, death in the fall, the trip, the stone-struck skull. Death at birth, death a couple of minutes after birth, death as your only companion, your only solace through all the brief moments of life.
Her feet have brought her to the noticeboard at the side of the stage. There is no one about and she is glad. She feels exposed, like the tender underbelly of her is bared to the whole world. What if Greg went straight back to the dressing room to tell the others?You will never guess what was in her office tonight. No, honestly. Turns out thereissomething she cares about.
She could do it now. Call him out of the dressing room, tell him in the corridor, claim it’s because of his weakening body, because he can no longer perform half the roles in the show and doesn’t justify his salary. Of course, AJ would tell her not to be vengeful, but he always is the better part of her. He would ask her to consider that perhaps Greg, too, has yearly multi-sensory hallucinations of someone he’s loved and lost and that’s why he’s sticking it out here in this half-world, even while his knees beg him to retire.
She takes four golden pins from the cork and holds them lightly in her palm. She’d like just to post and go but something heavy has infected her limbs and keeps her stuck to the spot. She looks at her own handwriting scrawled over the paper and the letters swim as her eyes film over with tears.
Just like it does every night, the signal that the casting’s up travels through the theatre like the mysterious scent that draws the dung beetle to a fresh pat of cow shit in a meadow. Before she’s even turned away from the board, she can sense bodies hovering behind her. Three corps de ballet girls lurk at the bottom of the stairs, already dressed in their orchard dance costumes, trying not to catch her eye as she walks away. The dancers are obsessed with the casting: they treat it like the entrails of a goat that can divine the future. Idiots. She posts it as late as she can just to fuck with them. It’s one of the few pleasures she can count on all year round.
She grips her handbag as she makes her way back up the four flights of stairs to her office to wait for AJ who usually comes to see her in the second interval to share a thimbleful of cognac,Just enough to keep the chill of the curtain call out of our ageing bones.
