He knows about not writing poems. He knows about all the times he sat down to write something when he was a kid – about his mum, his dad, the streets of Wembley where he grew up – and nothing came. Or, what came was triteand flat, nothing that anyone would want to read. He knows about not-writing from when he was working sixteen-hour days on panto with two toilet breaks.
Since starting atThe Apple and the Pearl, he has become even more expert at not-writing. The notebooks that he’s filled with observations and anecdotes after the show that end up shredded into tiny flakes of paper scattered all over his cabin in the morning. The notes he’s taken on his phone that make the software glitch, the error messages he gets until he does a factory restore that mysteriously retains everything but the hastily typed messages. The emails he’s tried to write himself from other people’s phones and laptops that refuse to send. He really doesn’t know why he told Bella all that this morning. It just came out. Something about the way her body was turned to him made him want to dredge his secrets and pour them at her feet.
‘Heads up!’ comes the shout, and Kavi only just turns in time to catch the flight case trundling towards him, about to crash into his legs. He stops it with a foot and almost tumbles into the stack behind him.
‘Sorry mate,’ Derek calls from down by the track. ‘Got away from me.’
The case is labelledSTAGE RIGHT PROPSin Shirley’s neat handwriting. Kavi holds up a hand to show no hard feelings, but it’s difficult not to suspect Derek of shit-stirring whenever something goes even a tiny bit wrong. He’s just got that air about him of wanting to mess with you, almost in revenge for something you’re yet to do to him.
Kavi wheels the case into place and fastens the straps around it. He wonders where Bella is right now, if she’s planning on staying in the dining car long enough to join in the pledge day drinks, but the thought skitters in his mind. All the ways the night might go, branching away from him as he thinks about her orange-clad legs under the props table: she doesn’t stay for the drinks; she stays for the drinks and he smiles from across the room, saying and doing nothing; she stays for the drinks and he finds some courage from somewhere, the bottom of a can of Stella, perhaps, and he talks to her. More branching fates from there: another can of Stella; an offered hand; a slow walk along the corridors to one of their cabins.Hold on, he thinks as he fastens a strap around a flight case labelledSTAGE LEFT PROPS. Hold on. You aren’t there yet, and you might never be.
Because there’s something he needs to do before he goes to the pledge day party and if Bella’s gone by the time he gets there it can’t be helped. He needs to dump these words that have been rising in him all day, like a burn of indigestion making its way up from his stomach to his throat. One more of his never-ending questions: why does the Crow make my words hurt me if it won’t let me get them out?
He’s nowhere near answering this one, but he has found a way to trick the Crow and it seems to be working. After the cargo carriages are packed he leaves the Grub – and of course he knows it’s a risk, but he cannot bear the rising tide of words – and he finds a place to write something. He uses his fingers in sand or mud, or he arranges leaves, orhe carefully places pebbles. He doesn’t take a photo. That makes his phone glitch too.
Then on days off, when he’s far from the Grub, he buys a cheap notebook, finds a cafe, gets a cup of coffee and a sandwich and sits there for hours until all the words jumbling in his head that the Crow won’t let out, and all the poems he left in earth and water and stone, are safe and on the paper. He sends it to his mum, with a letter inside for her, and a few days later he gets a text thanking him for the letter and renewing her promise that she hasn’t looked inside and is keeping the notebooks safe in a box under his bed.
One day, he’ll go home and lock the door to his childhood bedroom and sit with those scraps of paper and make something of them. He won’t come out until he has enough for a book, like a writer in a film. He’s going to call itThe Apple and the Pearl. And although nobody will read it, although he has little idea how to go about getting anyone to read it at all, he will know it exists and – perhaps – that will be enough.
They’re starting to load the last cargo carriage now. The costumes are done and Milly and Alina are gone, safe into the warmth of the Grub and the comfort of the smells wafting from the dining car. Charlie and Mackie wrestle the ramp into position, swearing when it gets stuck. Danny and Shirley wait with the last of the flight cases, those last, unwieldy pieces of set packed away neatly inside, and Zach stands behind them with the new girl, muttering and pointing down the train. Kavi, waiting in the carriageand adjusting the straps that hang from the iron to be ready for when the ramp is in place, hears Belinda’s voice call through the mist.
‘Mackenzie! It’s gone eleven and I still don’t have the Pearl.’
Mackie says a quietfuckunder his breath and finally clicks the ramp secure.
‘It’s coming, Belinda, we’re almost done here.’
He always has the urge to stand a little straighter when Belinda’s around. Or hide, whichever is easier. She comes to stand beside Shirley, the lapels of her smart black coat turned up against the mist, and Kavi shrinks into the shadows of the carriage. He has the feeling that if she were to catch sight of him, she’d see right through his – let’s be honest – somewhat dubious intentions towards Bella and chase him with a broom.
Mackie and Charlie jump up into the carriage and Danny shoves the remaining flight cases up the ramp towards them. There are two hard clicks and two triangles of light disappear back into darkness. Shirley comes with the floodlights packed away and hands them up to Kavi for stowing.
There is one flight case left by the tracks, labelledPEARLin Mackie’s scrawl. Mackie jumps down from the carriage and flicks open its latches. As if reaching into a cradle, he picks up the teardrop-shaped thing that sits atop a podium in the last act, a spotlight trained on it. On his first day Danny told him that Belinda fines you three days’salary if you touch the Pearl and as he’d lifted the lid of the flight case to show him the thing, glowing in its nest of black sponge, Kavi had instinctively reared away from it. No fear, he’d never touch that thing. The eerie smoothness of its skin, the way no shadow ever fell over it, the faint smell of smoke.
Where does Belinda take it?Kavi whispered to Zach a few weeks after his first pledge as they packed away the third floodlight and slammed the last carriage door shut.
To the engine, Zach had replied.How else d’you think we’d get anywhere?
And although Kavi had felt a hot and cold tingling all along his spine, he’d only shrugged and turned away, though really he’d wanted to slump onto the grass beside the tracks and think about what Zach had just implied. That the Grub powered its movement not on anything so ordinary as diesel, or as retro as coal, or as futuristic as solar panels, but whatever was contained inside the Pearl. Which was not discussed – at least in the circles he moved in – but seemed likely to be the essences of whatever soared above the auditorium during the curtain call, which it didn’t take Kavi long to realise is dead people.
Amazing, how that’s bothering him less and less. That’s how it happens, that’s how you stay here for years and years. You get friendly with the dead, with the idea of them, with the sight of all those streaming wisps of souls above or below you during the curtain call. Nice, in a way, of the Crow to offer answers to other questions even as itgives you more to think about.What happens when you die?said the little boy to his mother as they walked home, hand in hand after his father’s funeral. Well, now he knows.
With Belinda gone and the last floodlight packed away, Kavi jumps down from the carriage into darkness and shivers.
‘Good work everyone,’ Mackie says, laying one hand on the side of the Grub tenderly, as it were a horse. ‘Go and get your dinners, and remember it’s pledge day drinks tonight, if any of you are up for it.’
He follows Zach and the new girl back along the carriages, stumbling in the darkness.
‘Done your pledge already?’ he asks the new girl as they follow the light on Zach’s phone along the Grub. Lara, her name is. He should use her name, he’s going to be working day in day out with her for the next year. ‘Belinda capture a piece of your soul?’
She laughs. ‘Yeah, it was a bit like that.’
Kavi would like to say something else, practice a little of that small talk he’s going to try out later tonight on Bella, but now they’re at the dining car and Zach is saying, ‘Fuuuuuuck I’m hungry,’ and pulling Lara and Kavi up the steps and into the warm hubbub of the dining car.
Kavi peers in as Zach and Lara go straight to the serving counter and looks at the dancers and musicians and crew assembled, the noise already raucous. Vagabonds and wanderers all, the kinds of people who would have been burnt at the stake, branded and outcast in centuries gone by.Jasper, with his one eye turned towards the ceiling as if he can see patterns in the stars. Wilf holding the two sides of his woollen cardigan over his protruding belly with one hand, mouth agape as he holds his beer to his lips with the other. Lance and Steve huddled over a phone, leering over whatever they see there. AJ and Cecile sitting quietly in a corner, Cecile’s eyes uncharacteristically unfocused as she glares at Stuart, who is plugging in a speaker. Romero behind the counter with Gino, wearing an apron and a fixed mask of politeness as Derek leans towards him and waves a fork around. Mackie concentrating on his dinner with a pint in front of him. Danny pulling out the chair next to him. Alina, sipping on a glass of white wine, sitting with Sandra the clarinet who is knitting something in a violent shade of orange. Belinda weaving between the tables with her clipboard tucked under one arm and her handbag swinging on the other.
And there, at the other end of the dining car sitting with two other dancers, Bella. A mug of tea in her hands, legs tucked underneath her, hair wet and dripping down her back. He stands at the doorway, aware he only has seconds to decide what he’s going to do. In a moment or two someone, hopefully not Derek, will see him and shout across the dining car to pull him into the drinking, shouting, table-thumping testosterone vortex that will be tonight’s pledge party and he will lose his chance.
But what exactly is the plan? To walk over there, sit down next to her with the other girls smirking at him, theirbarely suppressed titters shrivelling his balls to dust? To wave from afar while some fucker like Lance the trumpet sidles up to her and whispers something irresistible? To grab her hand, lead her out of the dining car and into the night to lunge at her in the darkness? He imagines her cringing away from him, murmuring in that worried, trying-not-to-offend way girls have:Sorry, I think you’ve misunderstood, I like you just as a friend.
