‘Big trouble. Bigger than you can imagine. So get yourself a watch and sync it to Belinda’s.’
Zach remembers Juliet strapping a cheap watch with a canvas strap onto his wrist the first time she took him into the Grit.Don’t take it off, don’t mess with it, if it starts to slow get a new battery from Belinda immediately. You don’t want to know what’ll happen if you’re caught out after curfew.He misses Juliet, gone off to her retirement flat in Brighton only six weeks ago. Twenty years on the show and she made it out not just alive, but thriving.I thought demons had me in their grip when I came here, young buck. Now I know the real demons don’t want anything to do with me and I’m free.
‘Sorry, Zach? I do actually need to know the time.’
Zach glances at his wrist. ‘Ten seventeen,’ he says. ‘Honestly. Wear a watch. If Mackie sees you without one tomorrow he’ll tell you one of his horror stories.’
He takes the rest of the steps two at a time and veers sharply to the right towards a rickety wooden door markedARTISTESin faded yellow paint.
‘Stage door,’ he calls over his shoulder. ‘Moves around and looks different but always to the right of the auditorium entrance.’
He pushes the door and holds it open for Lara. ‘After you.’
***
With a caw, the Crow settles on a lichen-spattered headstone engraved with the nameDesmond C Jonesand looks around the graves with satisfaction. An avenue of ivy-cloaked mausoleums, yews draped in cobwebs, holly studded with ruby-bright berries.All Souls’, the Crow thinks happily,and yes, this is the place to bring the humans to mourn their dead. A gift from Crow to her beloved cast and crew, the day of the year for the ancestors. Dead mothers, dead fathers, dead lovers, dead dreams.
She turns on the pocked stone to face the Grit and rearranges her wings.Every night the show is the same, curtain up seven thirty sharp on these old dances to older tunes, but every morning the Grit sinks itself into different earths on the thresholds of different worlds and it is Crow who guides them. Today on the day of dead things there’s a new crew member to pledge a year and a day in service of the Crow, and what does she see when she looks around her? A king and a queen – or she will tonight, when the dancers take their cloaks about them and parade afore the proscenium. Three sisters, naturally: what is a ballet without a princess poised in her pointe shoe? An orchard – no, this is the land’s winter now and there is nothing growing but poison seeds nestled in the holly and the yew. The sea – no, Crowhas brought the Grub far inland to celebrate the dead on this day. Three suitors, then? Yes, and more. A curse – oh, The Apple and the Pearlis full of them – and a quest, of course. That’s what you get when you deal with humans.
And last of all Crow, singing in her nest, bringing all these people here, luring them out of the world to presentThe Apple and the Pearl.Crow has been doing this for a long time now. Crow the impresario, Crow the mistress of the ring. With any luck that’s what they’re telling the new girl, how to do the show properly as it’s been done for hundreds of years now, how to do this show so you don’t piss Crow off because you don’t want a Crow for an enemy, girl.
The Crow looks up at the Grit, caws appreciatively and takes off into the mist with three great tugs of her wings.
***
When she hears the little sighing click, Belinda opens her arms and the Pearl falls into them. She clutches it securely to her chest and flicks on her torch to inspect every single rope, lever and pulley criss-crossing the old hornbeam joists, checking for any tears, frays or fissures. Every morning she wakes with a bubble of dread that something has gone wrong and today is one of those days she’ll have to spend in here with Mackie and the Crow while they re-knot some rope or weld some part of the chassis, but mercifully that is not to be her fate today. She steps down from the carriage and elbows the door shut. No need to lock it. It will only open for her.
She shifts the Pearl under one arm – it’s always light and cold in the mornings, its energy spent by the night’s exertions – and angles her torch to inspect the bell, mounted on the great iron frame above the engine carriage. It’s covered in dancing particles of mist and the bronze is dull in the weak winter sun, but still it glows. Belinda spots a little patch of rust on the headstock. Hmm. She will need to get in touch with the bell smith.
The crew are in the middle of unloading the flight cases from the storage carriages behind the engine, and she can see Derek wandering towards her with a toolbox balanced under each arm. She has no desire to be harassed about some irrelevant detail of what Mackie said yesterday so she quickly settles the Pearl inside its case, shuts the latches and hurries down the train just past the dining car to her cold, damp office.
Belinda locks her office door and pulls out the portable heater from under the desk. She plugs it in and sits in her chair, basking in its red glow as the smell of dust charring in the heat fills the space. She checks her watch – eleven twenty-two. Plenty of time. She likes mornings; the most troublesome members of her flock are still in bed and she stands a chance of getting something done without the constant interruptions ofsorry-Belinda-can-I-just.
She leans back and shuts her eyes, running through her to-do list in her head: chase down the last expenses forms; put in Alina’s order for pointe shoes; email that pawnbroker in Edinburgh to apologise for that amethyst necklace thatturned out to be a bit of rope; email the bell smith. All of it can wait for her to warm this mist out of her bones. The day – and night – is long yet.
All Souls’, and the year is turning to winter, everything shrinking back into its roots. Stopped in a graveyard roiling with mist around the yews of course, but the Grub likes its little jokes.
All Souls’, and still they’re safe for the year. She’s thought about writing it up in the dining car, like they do in hospitals,no deaths on this ward for 8 – 3 – 5 days!, just to focus people’s minds. She suggested it to Mackie once, in a half-joking way. He became very still, took a sip of his lager and frowned.But what of joy, Belinda? Don’t you think people deserve to just live, here and now, without fear?
She thinks back to the last incident, only forty-six days ago. A dancer, one of the young men in the corps de ballet. Alex, on his third pledge, disappeared after class. Cecile had looked a little sad for once.Excellent allegro, she’d murmured as she filled out the accident form.I’d planned for him to learn the Blue Suitor.Before that it was Bobby, that French horn taken on a rainy day in September. Stupid man. Shuffling about with his shoes undone. AJ had given her the accident form two days later.I don’t see why I have to fill one of these out every time we lose a soul, Belinda. Sometimes their luck just runs out and that’s that.They all rail against the paperwork. Cecile flounces as she takes the forms and makes her provocative sounds of disgust, Mackie gives one of his heavy sighs, and AJ fills them out in unreadablehandwriting – deliberately, she’s sure – but they take the smooth, safe passage of their lives here for granted. Either they don’t know or don’t care that she pores over each form for days after a snatching, trying to tease out any lessons she might find, wondering how to stop it happening again. But sometimes, even she has to admit there’s nothing she could have done. The dancer went back to the Grub alone – which is against the rules – and the French horn was being chased, tripped and fell into the Otherworld. Wilf saw it and spent a long hour detailing here in her office detailing every movement.He was just unlucky, Belinda, he’d said, staring out the window.Simple as that.
Replacing the French horn had been relatively simple, but hiring dancers never is. There was no time to hold an open audition; instead she wrote to an old friend who worked at a ballet school and asked her to send someone.I’ve got just the young man for you: solid, dependable, won’t set the world alight with his intellect but sweet enough. No family left, brought up by his grandmother who has recently died.Belinda winced when she read that. It makes this show seem like some kind of dumping ground for orphans and runaways, given toThe Apple and the Pearlbecause they’ve got no one in the outside world who’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Luke turned up at London Bridge the next day with a backpack and a too-big coat, smelling of mildew. The Crow had taken one look at him and rolled its eyes, though it let him pledge. Cecile had been horrified not to be consulted on his hiring, and has been making his life a misery ever since.
Belinda shrugs her coat off and switches her laptop on. As it whirrs and grumbles into life and she untangles the lead, she thinks about that silly little rhyme the dancers mumble to each other to say good luck before a show, that doggerel about the king, the queen and the suitors in a dream.Where did it come from?she asked the old company manager, Percy Montgomery, during her first week.No idea, old Montgomery had shrugged.I leave them to their superstitions. Their lives are ruled by luck, can you blame them?
Yes, there’s luck here, and you want your fair share of it, but there are also rules. Keep a perfectly timed watch, don’t move between the Grub and the Grit alone – never bloody obeyed, that one – don’t touch the Pearl, don’t look at the creatures in the auditorium. There are curfews and salt everywhere, and vast sheets of iron in the Grub and the Grit. There’s Gino to feed every single one of them exactly what their hearts desire, there’s Belinda herself, who – while she would not like to overstate her abilities – has a few tricks up her sleeve. There’s the Crow, though the vast majority of the cast and crew will never understand it. There’s a bronze bell cast by the latest scion of an ancient metalworking family—
—Ah, the bell smith. She needs to get back to him. The laptop screen blinks on and Belinda types in her password. She clicks on her email, finds the message from the bell smith and begins to write:Are you able to get to Didcot Parkway on the 12th? I’ll pick you up from the ticket office and walk you through the guest cabin, as usual. I’d like you to look atthe hinges of the bell frame which are a little rusty and you know how we feel about rust here!
***
Midday and it’s musicians’ reveille in the cabins. For Michael it sounds like a tumbling, tinkling harp but he barely hears it because his ears are plugged with foam earplugs he buys in pharmacies on days off. He doesn’t need an alarm anyway. He’s awake: he has been since the vibrations of the technical crew’s stomping boots woke him.
Like yesterday, and the day before and the day before that, he is lying in his cabin re-reading his notebooks. He flicks through the pages quickly, the words hurtling back to his mind from the forgotten place he had stashed them.
The Grub has stopped in an orchard of mulberries and quince and as they were setting up the Grit for the show we walked together among the trees, pulling fruit off the boughs and biting into it, black and yellow juice making bumblebee stripes on ourbchins.
