Everyone will know that he’s an idiot by the half tomorrow. Danny will shake his head, wincing,You fucked it up mate, you really did.Derek will be vibrating with glee. Mackie will beckon him over to the prompt desk in the second interval,Belinda says I’ve to have a chat with you about sexual harassment in the workplace, and all the dancers – in disgusted, disapproving solidarity with Bella – will simply look past him like he doesn’t exist.
No. He’ll leave. Now, while no one’s clocked him.
He turns quickly, lets the door click softly behind him. He’s hungry but there’s a curdle of nausea in his belly he has to deal with first. If Bella is still in the dining car when he comes back then great, but he won’t be able to concentrate on anything – let alone a girl – while there’s all this pressure building up inside him.
He jumps down from the Grub and stumbles away through the mud. He swipes the torch open on his phone. Eleven thirteen. Plenty of time. He holds the light out in front of him, illuminating the droplets of mist and his other, groping hand, seeking the cool, rough dampness of a grave.
His fingertips brush against soft, spongy moss and he stops, runs his hands over the pocked stone. The grave bears the name of Desmond C Jones and as he digs inside his jacket pocket for a screwdriver and starts to work away at the stone, he silently thanks whatever remains of Mr Jones for his understanding. Bits of stone crumble in his hands and fall away onto the crunch of needles underfoot. His mother would flinch to see him.Desecrating a grave, beta? Surely you’re not in so much pain as that.
But it doesn’t feel like a desecration, honestly it doesn’t, although he would say that, wouldn’t he, to justify what he’s doing so he can keep on doing it. It feels like giving this hunk of stone an afterlife, something else to commemorate other than the poor soul long returned to ashes beneath it.
He tucks the screwdriver into his pocket and feels with his finger for the hole he’s been working in the pitted stone and kneels in the mulch of leaves at the ancient grave’s base. Dampness starts to spread through his jeans, up his thighs and down his shins into his socks and as the wet rises so do the words, up from whatever’s left of the body decaying in the soil beneath him, through his skin and into his belly, up his gorge until he thinks he’s going to vomit and he opens his mouth and whispers into the hole he’s made in the limestone.
And all the things that have happened this short day and long night of the dead come flooding out of him: the spooky gothic vibes of the Grit this morning, looming through the mist; the message from his mum thanking him for themoney; the feeling of his fingers tingling as they thawed when he got inside the Grit; the bubble of guilt that floated in his belly as he ducked into the wings rather than stop to exchange small talk with Derek; the violent longing rising from the root of him at the sight of Bella’s orange-clad legs under the props table; the way he’d had to clutch at his jeans to stop himself from running his palms up her thighs; the garbled idiocy of the things he ranted to her about; the ache of pleasure as he noticed their bodies leaning towards each other; the little stalks of mushrooms Mackie made him pick out from the edges of the dance floor this afternoon; the softening of Zach’s mouth as he handed the new girl his spanner; the way the second act violin solo made him think of the smell that pervaded his house in the weeks after his father’s death, that sex-and-death stench of lilies, decaying in their vase; Michael’s flood of grief washing up the memory of his mother chanting when he broke his arm; her prayers in Hindi, English, Sanskrit, a trifecta of languages woven and threaded through him from babyhood, words knotted in his every cell so tightly that no one would be able to unravel him, no matter where he went in his life,No racist, no thug, no belittler, no boss will ever silence you in this world, beta;the rawness of his palms after a show; Mackie handling the Pearl with devotion, like it was a holy relic; the way his own mind can’t quite hold thoughts of the Pearl, sliding and skating all over the attempts to work out what exactly it is or is not; the openness of the secrets here, the way you can think you know everything about the show but there’s always somepart of it you can’t see, some further mystery you’re blind to; his hunger; his lust; his wonderings about which is stronger right now; the thought that he needs to reply to a text from his cousin; the chill on the back of his neck as tendrils of fog reach through the gaps in his clothes; his hunger; his lust; the vague idea that he would like to elevate both of those feelings and make something new of them, something that does not shame him like these stuttering attempts at something like intimacy.
Emptied, as though he has truly vomited everything inside him up to and including the bile, Kavi pulls some mud from the ground and presses it into the hole on the gravestone. He wipes his hands on his jeans and tucks the screwdriver up his sleeve. Steel wouldn’t do much more than irritate anything lurking in the shadows, but it might buy him time to run.
He turns the torch on his phone back on and holds it up to where he thinks the Grub should be. There it is, fuzzy squares of light dotted along its length, muffled sounds floating between the deadening droplets of water in the air. Voices, the hiss of a shower, the dripping of the drains and quiet, tinny music from a speaker.
He loves this feeling, this ache of the stranger, the yearning you get when you’re on the outside in the dark, looking in at life going on in the cosy yellow light and you know all you have to do is step over the threshold, that there is a place for you somewhere inside one of these squares but still you linger in the cold. How many pledges does it takebefore that feeling leaves you, before you can no longer look at the Grub as it rests in the darkness and feel all the weight of its strangeness, of its occasional and inexplicable hostility, of its essential not-you-ness?
He slips the screwdriver out from his sleeve, nestling it into his pocket, and his fingers curl around a piece of paper there. He pulls it out, holds it under the light of his phone and brushes off the smears of mud. He sees his own scrawl, reads something about starlings in a hay meadow, chittering in a belligerent gang.
He remembers scribbling this, from his second or third week here when he was still trying to figure out what was happening, starting to choke on the welling up words.
And I think Derek thinks he’s some kind of oracle, he reads, but really he’s more of a jester, a holy fool on a good day, but I’ve heard him come out with some blinders and it’s as if something’s speaking through him, moving his mouth with words that make you stop dead still and think. This morning, during get-in: Mackie telling Danny that when he retires he’ll be free to stay in bed all morning, but until then he needs to get his arse out of bed and get to work; Danny muttering something foul from under the shadow of his hangover; Derek, hanging the act two backdrop with me, like he’s soliloquising at the RSC. ‘The problem with humans – well, there’s a lot of problems with humans but this is one of the biggest – is that you don’t know you’re free. You parcel up the land and say you own it and you draw lines on maps and you say you can’t come here or there and you shut yourselves up inside boxes of bricks and you say we envy the birds their wingswhen all the while you could be flying.’ Of course I didn’t know what to say. And even though I’ve been thinking about it all day, I still don’t.
A slam of a door to the Grub, footsteps, and his heart lurches. He stuffs the paper into his pocket and crouches behind Desmond C Jones’ gravestone, swiping the torchlight off.Fuck fuck fuck, Belinda will kill me, he thinks, but how stupid to think of her first. Belinda in full, raging wrath will be nothing next to the horrors that await those – like him, it seems – stupid enough to get caught out near curfew.
There is a rustle of someone sitting down and rooting in a bag. A humming, and it’s the tune to the Pearl waltz if he’s not mistaken, and the sound is so human that Kavi relaxes. A triangle of light beams up through the mist and there’s a sound of teeth crunching on biscuit. Kavi peeks over the stone to see Michael sitting on the steps to the Grub, eating from a napkin in his lap. Fuck.
Kavi checks his phone. Eleven thirty-two. He can still make it. He’ll have to just brazen it out, wander up to Michael, nod a casual hello and brush past him onto the steps to go and get his dinner.
And if Michael asks him what he’s doing out so close to curfew Kavi will ask him the same question and he’ll give him a conspiratorial grin and saywell I won’t tell Belinda if you don’t, and then they’ll be locked in the complicity of this against-the-rules secret and tomorrow night he’ll have to do something else, go somewhere else and make sure he’s nowhere fucking near Michael and his death wish.
All right. Michael isn’t moving. He’s still sitting on the steps, munching his way through what seems like a whole sodding pack of biscuits, still humming. The White Suitor’s solo now. Eleven thirty-six. He really should go.
But then the door behind Michael opens and there’s a man silhouetted there against the warm yellow light inside the Grub and Kavi swallows his groan.
‘Oh. Hi.’ says the man. Squinting into the light from Michael’s phone, Kavi can see it’s another musician, one of the second violins. That creepily handsome guy who follows Michael around.
‘Late, isn’t it? Mind if I join you?’
Michael murmurs something and shuffles over on the steps, offering a biscuit.
Fuck. Two of them to get past now. It’s not a disaster, not yet, he can try and get in at some other door. He’ll just have to stay close enough to the line of the Grub not to lose it in the mist. He takes the screwdriver out of his pocket and wraps his fingers around the cold steel.
There’s a tinkle of bells in the distance, not like the loud, deep clang of the curfew bell but the jangle of a tambourine. Hoof-beats. Starting faintly then drumming louder, vibrating through the mud and up through the stone of Desmond C Jones’s grave. The soles of his feet start to tingle. He knows that if he doesn’t go now he will be caught, and it will not be what they call a close shave, he will not even get back to the Grub to tell this tale.
Voices. At first he can only hear the faint murmur ofsomeone talking but they come closer and he can make out each word, though the speech is odd, sing-song.
‘And there you go, we are not too late. We will not be disappointed, not tonight.’
‘One of them stinks of melancholy. Quite exquisitely.’
‘Do you want it?’
Kavi hears the soft pad of feet on the needles. It makes him think of a tiger. Can’t Michael hear this? Of course not, he goes about with those bloody ear plugs. Well, ignorance is bliss until it isn’t. Fuck. What about the other guy? How can he warn them, how can he get their attention?
