***
Josh hangs upside down, stretching his hamstrings with his towel draped over his neck and his washbag at his feet. He pedals through his arches, releasing one tense calf muscle at a time, listening for the sound of the shower in the bathroom cabin switching off. Really – and it isn’t just him who thinks so, loads of the guys moan about this – there should be a strict policy about who can shower first and it should go: principals, soloists, corps de ballet, finishing with the newest pledges who did nothing more challenging in the show than standing around holding hands. That’s how it used to be, seven years ago when he first pledged. He remembers getting into his bed salty from sweat, leaving black smudges of eye make-up all over his pillow, getting up early to shower the previous night’s show off him before he went up to the Grit to class.
But now it’s a new, egalitarian era.We’re getting rid of that toxic shit, Mara says, jabbing her finger whenever the subject comes up,the only fair way is first come first served.Fine. It’s socialist showers, whatever. But it doesn’t actually makethings easier. There’s a stampede for the Grub as they leave the show, especially on a night like this where the water ran cold in the dressing rooms in the Grit and no one could even have a strip wash to get the most offensive funk off them at the sink, and now the corridors of the Grub are filled with dancers in varying states of undress, stretching aching muscles in the steam that seeps from the bathrooms.
The sound of shower spray stops and he stands up. Whoever’s in there better be out in a few seconds or he’s going to start banging on the door: maybe he’ll even pull rank, sod Mara, she can’t hear him. Behind him one of the corps de ballet girls is on her phone, the key sounds left on so it beeps with every touch. The noise is beginning to get on his nerves. He’s always sensitive to sounds after dancing the Crow. It’s all that intense concentration on the irregular rhythms, all that furious counting. The others say after a few months of shows even the Crow’s music comes naturally to you and you stop having to count your way through the entire show, but that’s not happened to him yet. Tonight was his fifteenth show of the Crow and still he was in his head the whole way through, relying on the memory of Cecile’s voice shoutingun-deux-trois-NON!at him during the weeks and weeks of rehearsals.
The bathroom door opens and Ritchie comes out, towel wrapped around his waist and clothes slung over his arm. He sees Josh and his face falls blank as he presses his naked back to the fogged-up window to let Josh past. Josh murmurs, ‘Thanks,’ and shuffles past him into thebathroom with his gaze squarely on his feet so there’s no chance he might catch Ritchie’s eye again. Josh shuts and locks the bathroom door behind him and the phone beeping in the corridor fades to nothing.
The water is still running hot and he gets under the stream, turns it up hotter, and lets the water sweep everything away. All the tension from his back, all the thick, black make-up on his face and shoulders, the sudden rush of desire at the sight of Ritchie’s bare, dripping torso. He squeezes his eyes shut and leans on the tiled wall behind the shower, letting the almost scalding water pummel his back.
A rhyme his grandfather used to mumble comes into his mind, something about pigeons and crows and seeds growing. It puts him in mind of the Saturday afternoons when Mum was working at the Woolworths in town and Dad was at the scrapyard. Josh was judged too young either to tag along with them or do his own thing, so he’d have to go down to the allotment with his grandfather. In the summer it was golden, squeezing raspberries between his thumb and forefinger until he could feel the give of the sweet, pink juice in each cell of the fruit, carting watering cans from the tap to the tomatoes with cold, dank water slopping onto his trainers. In autumn he was put to work, digging up carrots and building net cages and hoeing up potatoes. In winter it was boring, sitting in the cold shed with icy fingers and toes while Grandad sipped on whisky and told the same three stories about the war. But the best days on the allotment were in spring, those weekends wherethe light was eager and new, with the daffodil trumpets proud on the verges and the hawthorn hedges shyly unfolding their emerald buds. That’s when his grandfather would haul himself off his stool, open the twists of brown paper with his fumbling, arthritic fingers and pour a tiny pile of last year’s saved seed into Josh’s waiting, careful palms.One for the pigeon, one for the crow, one to rot and one to grow, his grandfather would murmur like a prayer to the earth, as he’d point to where Josh should press the seeds into the cold ground. Years later, after Josh had swapped Saturdays at the allotment for ballet classes, he stood by his cousins and his dad as the undertakers lowered his grandfather’s coffin into the waiting grave.One to rot and one to grow, he’d whispered, feeling like the ponce his family accused him of being, but knowing Grandad, wherever and whatever he now was, knew exactly what he meant.
He turns off the shower and grabs his towel. He’s hungry now, the adrenaline of the show seeping out of his blood and leaving behind it something clawing in his belly. He presses his face into his towel, trying to wipe Ritchie’s face from his mind. That disapproval, that sting of hurt, that sense that he’s carrying that night like a bomb he could drop at any moment.
He leaves the bathroom without looking at the girl still waiting and goes directly to his cabin where he dresses hurriedly. Now something for the pigeon, the greedy, gobbling thing that lives inside him and makes him do stupid things from sheer appetite. He pulls the door tohis cabin shut and shrugs a jumper over his head. It smells musty, like all his clothes, but the personal washing machine in the Grit is fully booked for tomorrow. He’ll just have to wait and smell in the meantime.
Like every night, the dining car is full of musicians starting on their second bottles of wine and dancers sitting cross-legged on chairs pushing food around their plates. Lance the trumpet is nuzzling Yolanda’s neck but as he takes a sip from his beer Josh notices him glance at Mara, deep in conversation with Stuart. Michael sits on his own, writing in a notebook with his empty plate pushed aside and in the next booth sits Henry the new violinist, who is staring at Michael with that usual hungry gaze. What exactly is it about Michael that has driven this extremely good-looking man to distraction? What is it about the earplugs, the greasy hair and the weird shit like the mushrooms earlier that gets Henry’s blood going when he could have almost anyone on the Grub? Perhaps it’s the helplessness that’s a turn-on, the tragedy of it, the sheer magnitude of the love Michael must have borne for the old harpist that makes Henry a fool. If only Michael was like Anita, locking up his old love behind a wall of silence and taboo. That’s the proper thing to do with feelings. Tie them up in a bin bag and give them to Belinda for her to take to an incinerator on the next day off.
The queue moves slowly and Josh glances around the dining car. The feeble attempts at decorating the carriage for Halloween are still up: the four plastic skeletons looming over them in each corner; the orange and black streamersstrung with Sellotape from wall to wall; and a pumpkin squatting on an empty table without its candle. Two nights ago a few of the corps de ballet girls were wearing nylon witches’ hats and he was genuinely amazed by the sight of them. Is there not enough spooky shit going on here? Tonight the fancy dress has disappeared and everyone is miserable again. Good.
But Josh remembers seeing something on the notice-board about a pledge party and he curdles. Sod that. He’d rather go to bed and browse bullshit on his phone while Greg reads his boring books about anatomy – he’s studying to be a massage therapist after he retires, following the obvious route off the stage for a lost and limping ex-dancer, and God forbid he should actually do anything out of the ordinary – and they both pretend to be sitting in companionable silence.
The hunger in his belly is beginning to sour into a bad mood. Shouldn’t he be able to go straight to the front? To walk past all these others and get a tray of something hot and filling and eat it wherever he likes? He’s the Crow, tonight at least. He’s been here for seven years, obeying the rules, paying his dues. This place is constant lines and sharing and trying not to get in anyone else’s space. It’s like nursery school without the naps and gold stars. He watches Luke meander through the booths with his full tray, looking for somewhere to sit.Just sit the fuck down, Josh thinks viciously. Why does that kid wind him up so much?I seem to remember you also found the orchard dance hard inyour first couple of months, Greg had said mildly last week at breakfast and Josh had ignored him so as not to throw his cereal at the wall.
He shuffles forwards in the queue as Gino doles out steaming plates of food and all around him the noise of the dining car drifts like smoke from its little islands around the tables and booths. Just in front of him is the table where the three musicians sit each evening, holding court on any and every topic under the sun, especially those they know little about. Wilf the cellist and Steve the bassoon and Jasper the timpani, who he feels as if he knows well now, after the traditional rehearsal with just him, Jasper and Cecile, counting and stamping out the irregular rhythms of the Crow’s solos. They remind him of his granddad and great-uncles, sitting in the kitchen or on the patio or on the fold-up chairs at the edge of the common, the whisky draining from the bottle, the years-old conversations, the jokes, the soft silences, the hard gazes.
‘…So that’s why he’d say that there’ll never be harmony aboard this train, because we’re all trapped in a hierarchy that privileges the already powerful.’ Wilf sits back with a smirk and takes a sip of his beer. Josh tries not to listen, tries to keep his mind on the queue and the menu options but their voices boom, dominating everything. They are the lords of the Grub. The dining car is their feasting hall and they know everyone knows it.
‘But wearea collective,’ Jasper is saying as he adjusts his eyepatch, the pointed tip of his grey goatee quivering.‘We don’t have a dictatorial leader. We have customs and traditions we all follow because we want to and we see the value in them.’
‘No dictatorial leader! Have you heard the way Cecile talks to the dancers!’
‘But she’s not in charge of me, I do what I want.’ Steve sits back and folds his hands over the belly he’s cultivated over years of beer and bassoon.
‘As long as you play the right music for the show,’ says Wilf.
‘But that’s what I mean! I’m held here by the conventions of classical music, yes, but also everything that’s special about this place.’ Jasper clicks his fingers. ‘The pledge and the bell and all that, not by some authoritarian crackpot holding me hostage.’
‘I think you’re forgetting Belinda.’
‘She’s not in charge. She’s an administrator.’
‘And you’d say that to her face, would you?’
‘Come on, Belinda’s at best a lieutenant.’
‘So who’s in charge?’
‘No one,’ says Jasper.
‘The Apple and the Pearl,’ says Steve.
‘The Crow,’ says Wilf.
And just then, Josh reaches the front of the queue and Gino beckons him forward to the serving hatch. He passes the table where the three men sit each evening and as he shuffles past they look up from their table, catch his eye, and as one tip their pint glasses to him.
‘To the Crow,’ says Wilf with one of his booming chuckles.
