This is the first time they have ever spoken about Evelyn, or the lack of her, and Michael is winded by it. Everyone else has done him the favour of pretending she never existed, letting her name lie silent as if she’d been snatched, at least in his morose presence, and although he knows AJ is trying to be kind, he rears away from it.
‘I have to go,’ Michael says. ‘I’m playing for class.’
‘Of course.’ AJ gives the funny little bow he does when you leave him and Michael walks quickly away, his footsteps echoing on the mausoleums, up the wide avenue leading to the steps to the Grit, leaving AJ among the graves staring up at the theatre.
It had been AJ who had suggested Michael might play for ballet class. He’d missed three shows, which everyone knew about, even Derek the follow spot operator, and he’d missed nine meals, which only Gino knew about. He knew there’d be a knock on his cabin door any moment, he just hadn’t known how to say what he was going to say when it came.
When the knock came it wasn’t Belinda but AJ, standing elegantly in the corridor, his slick silver hair glinting.
I understand you have not been well, Michael.
He could not answer. He knew he looked wretched, dismantled like a broken puppet. He had not slept, he had not eaten, he was standing in the wreckage of his room as he’d torn it apart packing everything he owned into two bulging suitcases. He coughed. There was something trying to escape from his throat, something scratching and clawing at the tender, aching skin of his gullet. He coughed again to dislodge it.
I have been sent by Cecile to ask if you are available to play for ballet class today.
He coughed again. He was trying to say,No, I am not available and by the way I cannot see out my pledge, I have toleave, I will pay any forfeit the Crow asks, thank you for everything you have meant to me, but the thing was stopping him from talking, like a plug holding back the river of tears, and he was choking on it. AJ stood watching him, inscrutable as always. Michael coughed and coughed until the thing came loose inside his chest and he hacked it up. It slid up past his tonsils and burst out of his lips to splat on the floor, right by the toe of AJ’s gleaming black patent shoe.
What is that?Michael had whispered, hoarse, dizzy.
AJ looked at the pulsing crimson thing, leaking some kind of black fluid. He sighed.
That is your heart, Michael, he’d said.A cruel forfeit but the Crow never pretended to be kind. At least you can take comfort in being safe now. Better protection than salt or iron.
And he pulled a white handkerchief out of his breast pocket and swept up the throbbing, meaty mass of it and tucked it into his pocket.Cecile will be expecting you at one thirty on stage, he said as he walked away.
Michael unpacked his notebooks. He has not seen his heart since.
He looks at his watch as he pulls open the stage door. Five past one. There are so many hours in the day now he doesn’t sleep and he barely talks, so much time to sit out and watch pass. The minutes ache, the hours stab.
He goes to the musicians’ dressing room first, where he checks his tuxedo is hanging on the hook that bears his name – it is, it always is – then brushes a bit of bow rosin from the lapel. The melancholy of the place begins to bruisehim, so he shuts the door again. He climbs three flights of stairs to the stage, pausing to look at the noticeboard in the corridor, which is more or less the same as yesterday, give or take tonight’s casting for the dancers and a handwritten note from Mackie the technical director inviting everyone to celebrate his pledge day after the show tonight –dressing up optional –and Michael sighs. Lance will escort him there and give him a beer to hold while he stands in a corner of the bar, ears plugged, ignored by everyone except possibly Gino who will offer him a slice of halva or cherry cake. Henry might try to talk to him, which will be excruciating in its own way –look, just tell him he’s not your type, or let me do it for you, Lance has said a few times,but you’ve got to let the poor man know where he stands. It’s starting to tip into stalker behaviour.Then, while Lance occupies himself with whoever he’s currently sleeping with – Yolanda the flute, if his information is still up-to-date – Michael will put the untouched beer back on the bar and slip out of the dining car and back to his cabin to lie in the dark alone, waiting for the bell to toll midnight and the soft swaying movement of the Grub to draw him into his restless dreams.
He pushes open the heavy door that separates the corridor and the stage, and lets it swing behind him. The blackness of the as yet empty theatre is comforting to his eyes. In here there is no night or day, only illusion.
The wings are crowded with the dancers’ things: canvas bags spilling over with pink ribbons; water bottles; a careful heap of jewellery on the props table; ankle supports; andback braces. The stage is criss-crossed with portable ballet barres, the dancers draped over them. He crosses to the downstage right corner where the piano is always set up and waves to Romero, who lies on his back with his legs twisted around each other, wearing that grimace all the dancers wear at this time of the day before the bending and swooping of the ballet class smooths their pains away.
He watches Anita, sitting on the floor at the back of the stage, tying her pointe shoe ribbons around her ankle. A couple of weeks ago he’d had three beers on an empty stomach after the show and when he’d passed her waiting for a shower as he went back to his cabin he’d recklessly tapped her on the shoulder.
Do you miss him?
Anita’s face had creased in panic. She looked quickly around her and shrank back towards the window, holding her towel in front of her like a shield.
Michael, please don’t—
Because you seem to be fine, yet you’ll never see Alex again and I could walk off this train any time I like to see Evelyn if the bastard Crow would let me. Don’t you long for him? Don’t you want to shout his name? Don’t you want to jump off the stage in the middle of the Pearl waltz and beg one of those creatures to take you to him?
She had covered her face with her hands but tears leaked through her fingers.Please don’t do this, Michael. I understand you’re hurting but please please please don’t do this to me.
Michael had woken up more than usually ashamedof himself. He’d written a note and put it in the cubby in wardrobe where she kept her shoes.Very sorry for my behaviour, please forgive me. I’m glad you have found some peace, I admire that very much.
‘Morning, Michael, how are you?’ Romero says brightly. He always begins ballet class right by the piano. All the dancers have their places on stage for class the way all the orchestra have their places in the pit, although it is more obvious where a new flute would put themselves than where a new dancer would. When there’s a new pledge, they hover in the wings until the very last moment to pounce on the free space, which will be theirs until someone leaves and vacates a spot. Like hermit crabs, Michael thinks.
He smiles at Romero, murmurs something noncommittal. They’d first met at Waterloo station one summer evening; Michael with his violin and two suitcases at his feet and the Kinks' song tripping through his mind, Romero sitting on a bulging backpack with his long legs stretched in front of him, toes dropped away from each other in a perfect quarter-to-three position. Michael had played plenty of ballet music at the conservatoire but Romero was the first dancer he’d really met. He couldn’t stop staring at him, the lithe lines of his body, the way he fully inhabited every inch of his skin, the catlike grace of him.
Belinda was there, handbag in front of her like a weapon.Gentlemen ofThe Apple and the Pearl?Romero had sprung to his feet and Michael had slung his instrument over his shoulder.Follow me please.
Now he suspects Romero has been deputised among the dancers to try to be nice to him, seeing as they’re pledge-mates. He is waiting for Romero to ask him some small-talky question with a tactful, sympathetic smile. Lance told him all the backstage tannoys leak salt water during his solo in the second act Bluepas de deuxand it’s annoying everyone, but Michael had told him to take it up with the Crow.Do you think this is how I’m choosing to live?
He adjusts the piano stool, sits on its padded leather and pulls out his latest notebook and a pen. He writes,We are stopped in a graveyard filled with ancient graves with moss grown in the carved names to obscure them and—He stops. It is harder and harder to know what to put in his notebooks these days. He keeps starting sentences and abandoning them, the ink trailing across the paper, his thoughts drifting to a halt. This whole notebook, the one he started after Evelyn left, is made up of sad little fragments like this, random disconnected thoughts that never connect into a text. He keeps thinking of who will or won’t read all the hundreds of pages he’s filled and what they’ll find about him. He’s settled recently on it becoming more of a record of whatever it is that powers the Grub and the Grit and so he tries to write less around the raw, jagged edges of his emptiness and more about what he sees and hears and feels. But it always ends up circling round to her, his thoughts like a hungry buzzard over a meadow.
