‘Have you told Cecile?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Well, don’t leave it too long. She’ll want to know so she can mope.’ Belinda takes off her glasses and rubs at the indent on the bridge of her nose.
‘Remind me again of your pledge date?
‘Twenty-second of December.’
‘Your family will be pleased.’ Belinda smiles and turns her chair a little away, letting Mara know the audience is up. ‘Home for Christmas for once.’
She pauses, and for a moment Mara thinks she’ll say more. But Belinda shrugs, puts her glasses back on and reaches to her desk for a pen. She’s dismissed.
And that’s it. Mara feels that burning itch at the bridge of her nose that means she’s about to cry as she shuts Belinda’s office door behind her. She’ll leave the Grub the morning after her last show and later that day she’ll be sitting in her mother’s living room with the gaudy Christmas treeblinking in the corner, the rest of her life stretching in front of her. Something splinters in her heart. Sitting on her mother’s sofa in front ofThe Sound of Musicwith a bellyful of over-boiled Brussels sprouts is not where she belongs. It’s too late to take it back. She leans her forehead on the window. The Crow won’t have her anyway. It’ll throw her things onto the tracks, change the locks, reject her like an unwanted transplant.
Footsteps. She takes her forehead from the cool glass and brushes tears from her cheeks. Zach the lighting guy is blundering down the corridor, waving his hands at the blonde girl following him, listening intently and frowning. He ducks under a light, sees Mara and waves.
‘Hey Mara, this is my new assistant, Lara – hey, you two should get on, your names rhyme!’
Mara smiles weakly at the girl. She hates her. About to take her first pledge, the Crow listening like a lover to the particular rhythm of her heartbeat to fold her secrets into its magics.
‘Welcome,’ Mara says as she passes under Zach’s arm in the direction of the cabins. ‘Lovely to have you here.’
She walks away and lets the carriage door slam behind her.
***
Zach stops in front of Belinda’s office door. He shoves his hands in his pockets, suddenly nervous. Until this moment he’s taken it for granted that she’ll pledge, thatshe’s as fascinated by the show as he is and will want to stay, but now he’s not so sure. She looks exhausted, with smudges under her eyes and wisps of blonde hair escaping from her plait. She looks at the door thoughtfully, and Zach realises with a physical pain in his chest that he would be strangely hurt if she chooses not to pledge.
‘You know how this morning you said I could ask you anything?’ she says quietly.
Zach nods. There’s a static between them now, of the kind he knows he is liable to misinterpret. He’s done it before. He tells himself to back off. It’s her moment. ‘I also said I might not know the answer.’
She pauses for a moment, looks up at him then back at Belinda’s closed door. ‘Is it another taboo, to talk about what happens in the curtain call, like it is to talk about someone who was taken?’
Zach swallows. That isn’t what he was expecting her to ask. ‘I don’t know how to give you a yes or a no. It’s not forbidden, but people don’t usually like to talk about it. It’s kind of terrifying, I guess, to think that one day that will be you.’
He falls silent. Lara is wrestling with something, her eyes unseeing, her thumb worrying at the cuff of her jumper. He would like to make it easier on her, he would like to strip the Grit and the Grub of all their secrets, to make her feel like she can give her pledge to the Crow and not regret it.
‘I’m not sure where the dead come from and I’m fucked if I know where they’re going but the show attracts them.’Zach says. ‘Maybe because they want to go wherever the Pearl takes them. Sometimes you can see bits of bodies and that, which is horrible, but you learn to shut it out. Some say you can recognise the people you’ve loved. The old LX lady, Juliet, she used to swear she saw her father go into the Pearl one night.’ Zach pauses. ‘It sounds a little fucked up but she said it was a nice thing. She got to say one last goodbye.’
Lara nods. She’s turned away from him and the office door now, staring out of the window past his shoulder, past her reflection and out at the huddled mass of dark, silent graves.
‘Maybe it’s the other way round.’
‘What?’
‘Maybe we do the show to release the dead from wherever they are towards wherever they’re going to, and those – creatures – are the ones tagging along.’
He stares at her. ‘I don’t know if anyone’s ever thought of it like that before.’
She shrugs, and knocks on the office door.
Zach’s belly twists with longing. This is inconvenient, at best. The last time he fell in love it was with Juliet, who took him to bed a few times and then bought him a drink in the Grub one night, patted his hand and told him it was nothing personal.I just like variety, young buck. No hard feelings, eh?He can hear Juliet’s cackle as if she could see the way he’s looking at Lara now.
‘Come in,’ says Belinda and she gives a tired smile when she sees them. She hands Zach a piece of folded paper.‘Zachary, please take this to Gino and ask him to display it in the usual place.’
Belinda’s gaze slides past Zach as footsteps echo in the corridor. ‘Ah, Mackenzie, good evening.’
