Luke’s heard the supposedly inspirational quotes about talent being only a tiny fraction of anything, but nothing in his life has ever suggested they’re right. Everything suggests the most important factor in your success is whatever the fairies doled out to you at birth. Perfectly arched feet, a supple back and hips, an easy jump. An attractive face, finding maths easy, perfect pitch, the ability to make strangers laugh. None of which he has. He’s not sure if any fairies turned up to his birth at all. He could put a sign up outside the Grit one night before the show –WANTED: fairies who gave me my talents.He’d be waiting a long time.
When he puts it like that, he should feel lucky to have this job, any job at all. And he tries to be grateful, really hedoes. He knows all about how thanking something for the fact that you woke up this morning is good for your brain, but some days – like today – he’d just like a little something more to be grateful for than the fact that he’s still alive.
Twenty years and three months old and his life stretches ahead of him like an endless, featureless road, cobbled and potholed for maximum discomfort. Everything he owns could fit in his backpack. Everyone he knows either dead or having to think for a moment to remember him at the mention of his name.
He has nowhere else to go. He remembers watching the show on his probation day, standing between Belinda with her clipboard clamped to her chest and Charlie at the prompt desk, knowing he would dance this show no matter what horrors it contained. He saw it then – that he was not the only lost and lonely soul here. He saw that all of them – even the really cocky ones – were here because they had for whatever reason snipped themselves – or been snipped – out of the web of obligation that tethered you out in the real world and were now floating, free.
Silence as Benji and Harriet finish theirpas de deux, her perched high above Benji’s head. Luke watches Benji as he walks slowly off stage bearing his Princess, sweat beading on his face and neck. Of all the strange things aboutThe Apple and the Pearl, perhaps it’s the silence that greets each dance that’s the hardest to get used to. The idea that all that effort is not acknowledged. Whoever choreographed the show – and Luke’s not actually sure if anyone actually knows whodid – didn’t take that into account. They made the ballet as if it were going to be presented to ordinary audiences in an ordinary theatre. But, he has to admit, there are some parts of the show that emerge as powerful when they happen in silence, like this part, the end of the Redpas de deuxas the Red Suitor carries the Red Princess off stage with slow, deliberate steps, both of them staring off into the distance.
As soon as Benji and Harriet are in the wings, AJ raises his baton and calls the trumpets. Here we go, he thinks, his chance to redeem himself after the fiasco he made of the first act. Zuleika’s not around to see it but Cecile is so he’d better not fuck up. He stands straighter, pulls up his chin and runs onto the stage with Matty and Theo, landing the firstjetéwith the timpani.
Trouble is, as soon as he lands and faces the auditorium he sees the creature again, the same one that distracted him before. It’s sitting in the stalls, the third or fourth row and it’s luminous, like it’s covered in glow-in-the-dark paint.
One of the only nuggets of wisdom anyone passed on to him was the thing about not looking at the auditorium. Stuart, with a hand on his shoulder before his first show.It’s kind of freaky out there, mate. Don’t look too hard.
But of course he had. Hadn’t been able to resist. The wonders out there, who alive could say they’d seen what he has in the space of only one month? They look nothing like the fairies in the books he used to read when he was a kid, sitting on the floor in the children’s section of the library. Those were all plump cheeks and cute wings and neat littlewands they’d use to do good, useful kinds of magic. The things that sit on the plush red seats in the Grit are savage and gorgeous. Their skin shimmers in shades of blue and green and their hair is gold or silver like coins. You can see the sharpened points of their teeth glint in the glow of the footlights. Those who have wings sit with them cramped and folded above their heads like enormous feathered parasols, and those who have horns paint and polish them until they shine. They wear dresses made of fish scales and acorns embroidered with shells and beads of sea glass, and Luke hasn’t yet worked out if they’re like human audiences and dress up to come to the theatre or if this is the way they dress all the time. He’s sure Derek’s got something to say about that.I should ask him, he thinks as he steps intoarabesque–arms go through first, he reminds himself – and the thought makes a bubble of laughter rise in his belly.
But the creature that shines at him from the stalls has long silver hair studded with tiny droplets of something, dew, diamonds, the tears of a wolf perhaps. She – and he thinks it is a she because of something soft around the jaw – is draped in a cloak made of what looks like moss and as he follows Matty in thejetésequence in a circle he realises that the creature reminds him of his grandmother. The stillness, the flint of her gaze and the icy cast of her skin. He sneaks another glance at the glowing thing in the auditorium as he prepares for thepirouette. Yes, there really is something uncanny in it.
Now she’s dead, he thinks of his grandmother as a kind of monumental ruin, a lightning-struck oak in the middle ofa fallow field that takes four grudging centuries to rot into the earth. In his memory, she’s sitting on a kind of throne she’d carved for herself into the foam of her armchair with the remote on the armrest, the numbers on the buttons worn away from the years of pressure of her thumbs.
This Fae creature has a sour look on her face. Perhaps she’s not enjoying the show. It’s the sort of look his grandmother used to wear at parents’ evening, sitting opposite the polite teachers who needed their notes to remember his name, holding her handbag like a grenade. On the bus on the way home:Why do I struggle and sacrifice if you’re going to throw it back in my face like this?
I’m sorry, Granny. I’ll try harder, I promise.But it had never been in his power to promise anything to her and he had drifted like an abandoned crisp packet through school, and now life. His grandmother had come to see the end-of-year ballet shows and sat in her best coat, thunderous.Didn’t I tell you they’re hiring at Boots in the high street?
He’d felt like he was standing in front of his grandmother again this afternoon as Cecile was shouting at him.I’m sorry, Cecile. I’ll try harder, I promise.
He lands from atourcleanly and with some relief –We are changing it to a single until our new recruits are able to accurately perform the choreography, Cecile had said, bitchily, although he knows histoursaren’t that bad – and sees that the glowing creature is staring at him. A second of eye contact –Fuck, that’s not good– and then he turns for the final sequence ofpirouettesof the dance. It had only been amoment, just a second of connection but still he could swear he saw his grandmother in the creature’s eyes.
Six months dead and the old woman haunts him, following him here and thrusting her soul inside some supernatural being. He’d thought there was nothing left she could cling to, the contents of her house gone to the charity shop, the lease back to the council. Derek’s voice drifts through his mind as he stands in fourth position for the very lastpirouette;Happy All Souls.Fucking thrilled indeed, Derek.
He follows Theo as the three of them run off stage with the last blast of the trumpet and before he can get away Derek’s right there in his face, wagging a finger.
‘Tut tut, you naughty boy,’ he says, and there is a leer in his eyes that makes Luke’s palms itch, wanting to shove at him and send him flying into a lighting boom with a crunch of bone.
‘What are you talking about?’ Luke whispers, trying to sidestep him, wishing he hadn’t said anything at all, just ignored him. He thinks of his grandmother, quietly shutting the door to his bedroom.When you learn how to speak to people properly you can come out.He understands that he wants to hurt Derek because he can’t punch Josh or Zuleika or Stuart or – heaven forbid, Cecile – and he understands everyone onThe Apple and the Pearluses Derek this way, as a kind of violence extractor fan. Which hardly makes it right.
But still.Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?his grandmother used to say, usually after a smackfollowing some minor mischief. And he’d think sullenly,Can’t I be both?
But the existence of Derek seems to prove you can’t, at least not onThe Apple and the Pearl. Really, the man deserves it, even seemed to relish it. The unwashed stench of him, that manic, high-pitched giggle, the way he has of sneaking up by your side and saying something so foul or so bonkers or so totally irrelevant that it takes you a few long moments to work out what he’s just said, precious moments you could be using to get away from him. Nothing is off limits to Derek, no subject too delicate, no thought too banal. The rest of the crew joke that he’s more like a species of gnome than a human – and when he saw him in certain lights, Luke wonders if that might not be so far from the truth.
‘I saw you, having a good old gander at the audience, that’s not recommended, didn’t they tell you that?’
Luke tries to go the other way past him.
‘Seriously now, I’ll stop mucking about. That’s fucking stupid, mate. You don’t look too long or hard, or something will notice you and come for you. Eight years on this show and I’ve seen things to make your hair stand on end.’
‘Thanks, Derek,’ he murmurs, the music for the Whitepas de deuxstarting. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ He tries to push past again but Derek puts a hand on his shoulder.
‘You’re a human fucking sacrifice, mate, you know that? That’s what this whole thing is. They dangle a little meat in front of them to keep them out of the real world.’
He could punch him, he really could. He really should,if only to put a stop to this nightly barrage of nonsense. But punching Derek is not likely to win any respect. In fact – and this would be just his luck – it might create sympathy for him and then, horror of horrors, recast Luke himself in the place Derek currently occupies in the hierarchy ofThe Apple and the Pearl. He can imagine Josh’s sneer in the dressing room –Clearly the man’s got a problem, why would you treat him like that?
‘Right,’ Luke says, finally getting past him. ‘Thanks for the heads up, but I’ve got to get changed for the wedding dance or them out there’ll be the least of my problems.’
The door into the corridor is heavy and cool on his sweaty hands and he can feel Derek’s eyes on him, that vile smirk, that goblin-like pleasure in causing discomfort.
A human sacrifice, he thinks as he walks up the stairs, unbuttoning his jacket.Of course we are, and you and me more than most, mate. We’re the first they’d offer up if the audience were ever to rush at the stage, Belinda would be there saying,No! Take Luke and Derek, we shan’t miss them!and he’d find himself trapped for all eternity with that blasted man and wouldn’t that be the best way to end this entirely unpromising start in life.
