All Souls’, he writes,and I had forgotten, but it makes little difference to us. The show is the same.
That was something Evelyn had hated, the way the day started again and again with the same shape to it – set up the Grit, ballet class, rehearsals, show, pack up the Grit, get moving, do it all again.
We play the same thing over and over and over and the tunes are boring, Michael, don’t you think? Don’t you yearn for some complexity, something other than waltzes and marches, something just to sink your teeth into?
He had tried to understand, he really had. Taken her on fun, unexpected dates on days off, tried to be spontaneous, tried to make things exciting. But then they came back to the Grub, to the Grit, to the show. To their lives.It’s a ballet score, Evie, he’d said with impatience one night off after they’d been to see a kora-harp fusion band in Liverpool.You can hardly expect it to be avant-garde.
She’d made a face and turned away. He was worried. Two weeks off her next pledge and she was saying she didn’t want to renew, making noises about them leaving the show together and going back into the world, teaching maybe. She wanted to record, she wanted to compose, she said performing was becoming like a chain to her, tying her down.
I don’t want to teach, Evie, I want to stay here.
But what do we make here, Michael? What do we create, what do we leave behind us?
You could compose here.He had been baffled by her restlessness, but he hadn’t known what to do about it. Now that’s what wakes him early in the morning and stops himgetting back to sleep, all the things he should have said to her. He writes them down instead.
Let’s ask Belinda for a couples cabin and those stupid songs won’t bother you so much.
What can I do to help you? I couldn’t bear it if you left.
Why don’t you write down the things that lurk and hurt you and we can exorcise them and get them out of your head so the Crow can’t reach them?
Maybe she was right to leave. Writing down his heartbreaks isn’t making him feel any better and it isn’t starving the Crow of ammunition. He doesn’t know why he thought it might have helped her.
Twenty-five past one and Cecile sweeps onto the stage from the prompt corner surrounded by her usual haze of lily-of-the-valley and hairspray. She reminds Michael of a bat. Skinny limbs swathed in black – black legwarmers and a long black skirt, and a black silk blouse held at the throat with a string of pearls. Michael shuts his notebook and slips it into his satchel. The dancers clamber to their feet, pull their hair into ponytails, peel stripy woollen leggings from their thighs and push their insteps into their pointe shoes.
Cecile sits on a stool and raises one hand, fingers poised to click the rhythm she wants for the first exercise. Michael pulls up the piano lid and places his hands on the keys. He closes his eyes. A tune comes to him for the warm-up stretches and he feels a tiny rush of warmth in his fingers. The closest thing to joy he feels these days is the flicker of gratitude that, no matter what else has gone, he is still ableto conjure melodies from the strings hidden in this box and the strings under his hands on his violin.
Cecile has a voice like a frog but still she sings to count Michael in and her words are a spell, drawing a soothing balm from the bare, black box of the Grit to tend to the dancers’ aching muscles and swollen joints.
‘Five,’ she croaks. A slow, echoing click of her fingers.
‘Six.’ Click.
‘Seven.’ Click.
‘Eight. Maestro.’
***
Four bars of introduction while Mara lets the sound of the piano seep through her skin and into her bones. The music is the spark that lights the engine: she can go nowhere without it. The first soft notes soothe the roughness in her muscles and then, like a marionette, she finds herself moving, pulled by the invisible strings of melody that stream across the stage. She stands facing the barre, toes squashed into still-too-hard pointe shoes, pedalling through her feet, releasing each raw muscle.
She stretches one calf and then the other. They ache from the Achilles tendon to the back of her knees. She danced the Red Princess last night and all those balances on the right leg are now etched into the meat of her. It will take until the end of the class to wipe them away, to erase all yesterday’s aches and set herself straight again.
She sweeps her arm over her head and bends, first to oneside, then the other. The feeling of release in her middle is never enough, she yearns to stay curved until whatever tightness lingers in the muscles holding her ribs to her spine has eased away. She rolls her neck and shoulders, and reaches her hands up to the flies to greet the familiar grid of the backdrops and the lighting rig. She stretches, hears little cracks and pops in her spine, and dives to press one hand against the cool vinyl of the stage floor and knead her aching calf.Here we go again, she thinks. Another morning, another day.
‘Now we go intopliés,’ calls Cecile over the music and there’s a shuffling as everyone moves to place their left hands on the painted steel of the barre. Mara brings her heels together to stand in first position. Jessica stands in front of her in exactly the same position, the delicate blonde hairs on the back of her neck a little lifted against the chill of the Grit.
Every day the same start to class, every dancer everywhere reciting their alphabet anew each morning, the basic bend-and-stretch that sits underneath all the complex grammar of classical ballet.
Bend the knees, straighten – in first, second, fourth and fifth. Swoop and stretch the arms, extend the right lega la secondeand pull up the muscles on the standing thigh. A gentle curve in the arm, keep the neck long, relax that supporting hand on the barre, track the knees over the toes. She turns to the other side to place her right hand on the barre and stare at the back of Ritchie’s head. Everyone stands in the same places every day, one of those bullshittradition things she’s tried to persuade everyone out of, though she might as well have been trying to make sheep somersault for all the luck she’s had.The dancer is a creature of superstitious habit, she imagines the narrator of a nature documentary whispering,and instinctively hierarchical. There is a feeling – unsubstantiated but present nonetheless – that a comfortable spot for daily ballet class can make or break a show.
That means Mara has spent quite a while contemplating first the fine golden necklace Jessica wears, and then the fluctuations of Ritchie’s hairstyles. She stood here on her first day because it seemed like there was a space and she’s been stuck here singing the ABCs of ballet ever since.
Michael finishes thepliémusic with a flourish; Cecile stands from her stool and places one delicate hand on the barre at the front of the stage to mark through atenduexercise.
Mara barely watches. It’s an easy day for her, only the Queen tonight. Not that the Queen is an easy role. You’re on stage a lot and Mara always has the feeling that she’s holding the show together, like she’s its seams. But physically she can relax. There are no pointe shoes, no jumping, no holding it all in for endless lifts and turns in thepas de deuxthat leave her ribs and hip bones raw. She’ll take class easy, maybe skip the jumps, keep her pointe shoes off for the centre. Chill.
As she puts her left hand back on the barre and Michael plays the first chord, she shuffles into fifth position with an automatic squeeze of the glute muscles to protect herknees. She stretches her right leg in front of her, to the side and behind, always half a beat behind Jessica because she’s copying her.Tenduand fifth,tenduand fifth. The music is always a little too fast at this point in the class. She’s not ready to move quickly yet, she needs more time to luxuriate in the movements. Ideally, she’d like to do the exercise half time but Cecile would not be amused.You think you know better than me?she’d drawl, with one long, painted fingernail shot in her direction.
