She remembers the week she spent with Percy, shadowing him as they moved from forest to moor and back again, walking all over the Grit and the Grub, himtalking at her without pausing for breath.I know everyone else gets a day to find their feet, he told her,but your job is more complicated.
He showed her the ledger and the chest and the bank records and the engine carriage and the bell. They sat in the caboose and leaned over the railings and waited for the Crow, came back the next day and the next until the creature showed up, all black wings and sparking eyes and a voice like a scream in the distance and teeth stained with dark, old blood. Putting on a show just to mess with her. The next time she saw it, the creature was just a large black bird with a twinkle of mischief in its yellow eye. They watched the beings in the audience every night and Percy Montgomery put his curiosity about Belinda’s lack of curiosity in a pocket to look at later. And all the while, he talked. Snippets of gossip, nuggets of wisdom, old tales she’s never forgotten.
Recruitment will be far and away the hardest bit. Always has been. It won’t be the best dancers and musicians who see your job adverts, only the ones with something missing. A cast and crew of misfits and mavericks, that’s what this place is.
And afterwards? Do they just go back into the world after all they’ve seen here?In those days Belinda found that hard to believe.
Oh yes. I have a PO box in Birmingham that gets filled with Christmas cards from ex-musicians and dancers ofThe Apple and the Pearlevery December.
And those that end up in Fae?
He sighed.They represent our failures. Sheep lost to the wolves. The Crow relies on you to make sure that doesn’t happen.
And so, at the end of that week, as Percy Montgomery stood on the platform at Liverpool Lime Street station at dawn and waved at the cast and crew who were sorry to see him go, she stood here in this office and decided to make changes.
Barrels of salt. A blacksmith to repair the rusted hinges on the Grub’s carriage doors. A new curtain.
She learned it all from her mother, and her preparations each year for Belinda’s annual summer holiday with her father. Each July she packed Belinda a suitcase with changes of clothes (please always be presentable and do me proud) books with reading and maths activities (we don’t want you forgetting everything you’ve learned this year at school, do we) a packet of salt (you never know) plenty of soap (it will annoy them if you’re smelly, please wash at least twice a day) and an iron padlock with a screwdriver(please install this on your door as soon as you arrive and do not forget to lock it each and every night).
Her mother would drive her to the country park after dinner, park the car and lead her along a bridle path to a thicket of gnarled hawthorn. They’d wait, her carefully packed suitcase at her feet, watching for sunset. At last she’d hear hoof-beats, first distant and then nearer and nearer and her mother’s face would set hard but implacably reasonable.
The first sight of her father was always a shock.The glow of him, the way his horse danced and snorted in the twilight, that shifty twinkle in his violet eyes. He would hand her mother a clinking bag which she would reach into, take a coin from and bite before accepting it with a tight smile. She would kiss Belinda on the forehead, hoist her up onto her father’s horse and say, ‘The first of September, Linden, not a day later’. Her mother never, ever used her father’s title or honorifics and these days Belinda understands that is part of how she corralled him. A named thing is a tamed thing. Belinda never asked how she knew that.
But her mother died when she was twenty, and she never thought to ask the other questions that now itch at her each night. Like how she kept her father – Earl Starmist, Prince of Vryders Heath, Duke of the Moorlands – half tethered to mortal time. Like how she ensured that not a single Fae in the court, from the Queen to the lowliest scullery maid, treated her with anything less that polite respect. Years ago, she began to suspect her mother only managed it because she was not entirely human herself, but she doesn’t dwell on the thought, for fear of what that makes her. Percy Montgomery, in one of his retirement letters to her after he had worked it out:Advisable to keep your family situation under wraps, I think. I know you’re the best for the job, and so does the Crow, but one little doubt is all it takes to foment a mutiny.
No matter. She hasn’t seen her father since her mother’s death and hasn’t been to Fae for at least two decades. She would not be able to find her father’s queendom without an invitation. And if someone finds out, or the changelingviolinist unmasks her, or Derek shows his hand, so what? They’re like children here, helpless little sheep. Are they going to pay themselves? Make a rota to take care of orders and deliveries? Collect the take at the end of shows, transport the Pearl to and from the Grub, form a committee to deal with the Crow?
Perhaps they might surprise her. People often do, she’s found. They might be accepting, ask her questions, try to understand. She imagines them all assembled on stage, fifty faces turned warily to her, one hand up at a time.What’s it like there, Belinda? Cold and glittery, with everything slipping away as you try to hold it. What do the humans do there? Play music and dance, much like you do here. What do you eat there? Pear and mallow fruit and honeycakes. Can you go in and fetch Alex or the French horn or Charlotte or Bob the technical manager or Mungo St John Fitzwilliam back again? I have never tried, and yes, that weighs like a sin on my conscience.
A slam of the connecting door to the carriage brings Belinda to herself. She pulls open the drawstring of the canvas bag, settles the ledger on her lap and moves her chair over to the chest. It will take her until past the midnight bells to account for everything left in the Grit as payment. She must record everything in the ledger, even what she discards as nothing more than beans coated in pollen and glamour, and make sure all of it goes neatly into the chest. In ten days’ time, when they stop at Didcot Parkway for the day off, she’ll stuff the contents of this chest into a duffel bag and haul it into a taxi to take it to Oxford, slipping thedriver an extra tenner to wait for her while she empties the bag all over the counter of some pawnbroker who will stare for a long moment at the heaped gold and jewels before him and then go to the door to turn the sign toClosed.
She’ll take the cash, deposit it at the post office and, free at last from her responsibilities and swinging the empty bag from her wrist, she’ll find a restaurant and sit with a glass of Rioja and stare out of the window at the world going by, letting the wine dull her senses until she can lean back with her eyes half closed and feel the thrum of the land through the soles of her feet.
***
The flood-lights make triangular glows across the graves, tendrils of mist swirling between each lichen-ridden stone, and Kavi thinks,you got to hand it to the Crow, it knows how to do atmosphere. He’s wondering how he would describe this scene without cliché – he imagines a reader turning a page and tutting, thinkingwe get it mate, it’s really foggy –when Danny, bundled up in a grey parka jacket with the hood pulled over his head, steps into the light.
‘Kavi, mate, could you yank that door? This bastard won’t budge.’
He puts his shoulder to the edge of the door and heaves. The iron of the Grub cuts into his coat and onto the sharp places of his bones and the creak and whine of the carriage door as it moves makes him shiver. There is something in the Grub that protests against this nightly ritual, some grumpydistaste Kavi feels in its metal skin every night as they pack away parts of the Grit inside it. He imagines the theatre and the train as an ancient couple, married so long they know each seam on each other’s skin, bickering every evening as they get into bed and breathe on each other all night until the sun comes up.
Danny fixes the ramp in place and thumps it twice with his fist to tell Charlie it’s good to go. Charlie and Shirley start to push flight cases of scenery and lights up the ramp and into the carriage where the new girl and Zach stand ready to strap them to the walls.
Every night they do this, a dance as tightly choreographed as anything the dancers do on stage. Wheeling flight cases along mud and sand and stone paths, heaving them up to the Grub, tightening the straps, slamming the doors shut behind them, leaving the show to do whatever it does in the dark when no one can see it. There is a comfort to it. A few months ago he didn’t see how anyone managed to stay here for all the long years of Mackie or Belinda or AJ – the man first set foot on the Grub over fifty years ago, although fair enough, he’s come and gone since – how anyone could bear to do the same thing over and over again with nothing to distinguish the days except the passing of the seasons and then the years, but now he begins to see it. The familiar grooves of habit, and the enduring perfectionism of theatre folk.
The first cargo carriage is full, so Charlie shouts to Danny to move the ramp. Kavi slides the door until he hears the click of the lock and they move down the train to thenext carriage where Mackie’s waiting with the next set of flight cases.
He sees now that it’s – at least partly – all the unanswered questions that keep you coming back and the one that pushes itself to the front of his mind now, as he struggles with the stiff handle on the next carriage is: what exactly isThe Apple and the Pearl? What is the show made of? Is it the melodies of the score? But what is the score if it’s not being played? Just a heap of black marks on a heap of paper? Same thing with the choreography – if it’s not being danced right at that moment, is it really there? It’s just some information encoded into twenty dancers’ synapses. So is the show the material things, the pieces of painted MDF and fireproof backdrops that lie disassembled in the flight cases they’re shoving around? The sequins and the Lycra of the costumes?
He asked Danny this, once, after a few pints in the dining car. Haltingly, his words skipping and sliding about in his mouth, some sense of recklessness propelling him on, almost not caring if there was something to the magic here that punished you if you spoke of it.
But Danny had frowned and shrugged.Dunno mate. Just what you do, isn’t it? Set up, pack away. I try to not think about what the show is or what Grit gets up to after curfew or those things in the auditorium to be honest. Makes me come over all funny.
And that’s Danny all over, a straight-up, honest bloke who seems to genuinely be able to turn his mind away from anything that might unsettle it and still go about hisdaily business. Kavi envies it, but he can’t leave it there. He worries away at his questions like a gap in the gum and this is the one that troubles him most because it’s one that applies to all the shows in all the world, not just the eeriness of whatever happens in the Grit each night.
He catches the flight case Charlie shoves up the ramp and wheels it over to Zach. He wants to stop and grab a pen to write some of these questions down, but he knows better than that now. Seven months he’s been here and the Crow hasn’t let him write anything more than a text message to his mum since he took his pledge.
He hadn’t meant to tell Bella that this afternoon. He hadn’t even meant to talk to her at all, let alone go on like a proper dick about poetry and dance and whatever he was gobbing on about. He feels his face redden in the dark thinking about it. He’d been taking a shortcut past the stage on his way back to the Grub for lunch and he’d seen her orange-encased legs poking out from under the props table and he hadn’t been able to stop himself. What had he said? Some bollocks about ballet being different from music and poetry. His memory of the conversation is hazy, missing detail and sense, like he was ill or drunk or high as it happened. Poetry! Bloody poetry! What was he thinking? What the fuck does he know about poetry?
