My arch pulses beneath the zinc oxide tape, a persistent ache that started halfway through company class this morning. I pushed through, of course. For professional dancers, pain doesn’t mean stop. It means suck it up.
We are illusionists. We turn agony into art. The trick is to keep your face blank and let your body scream quietly.
Turns out that skill transfers.
My phone lights up on my thigh. I ignore it, but I know it’s Nevin. He thinks I’m wrapping up at the Tramway in Glasgow. He expects me to be in the studio and then on the M80 home to Stirling. Not here, slumped in the dark, watching some tooth-rottingly sweet romcom all by myself.
My heart does a double-beat, a distinct thud-thud.
I haven’t told him about today’s injury yet. As soon as I tell him, he’ll hijack it to smother me. He is going to treat me like an incapable child so he can inflate his own sense of power.
By lunchtime, I had to stop ignoring that something was wrong with my arch.
And then I was sitting in the Green Room at the Tramway, my foot propped up on a chair and a compression wrap numbing my arch, when our head of Performance Medicine pulled up Dr Menzies’ report on her tablet. Only one and a half hours after I had been whisked to the Nuffield hospital for the MRI.
Posterior tibial tendon strain.
‘You can walk, that’s fine,’ she said. ‘But no dancing for a wee while. I’m sorry, Ava. I know it’s a nightmare.’
Understatement of the millennium. Four to six weeks of physio and rest. The tissue is under constant stress in every landing, every plié, every relevé – every single thing that makes what I love possible.
Yesterday, I was Marzipan, one of the Mirlitons in The Nutcracker. First Artist. Named in the programme. A visible role I had fought for. Now they’ll bring in the first cover. Someone younger, whose tendons don’t strain and complain.
Twenty-four years old. In professional ballet terms, my window to prove I’m more than corps material is closing. Scottish Ballet is full of nineteen-year-olds with elastic bodies and endless potential. One week out feels survivable. Maybe two. But six? That’s enough time to become a memory. A name crossed off the daily cast list on the board, replaced by someone with more facility.
I’ve danced since I was four. Twenty years of missed birthday parties, weekends, boyfriends who couldn’t deal with the schedule. Every choice bent toward this career, this company, this life.
I want the Sugar Plum Fairy. The Snow Queen. I want the spotlight that makes everything I’ve given up make sense. It’s my turn to get a principal role.
My phone hums again. Longer this time.
Not a text, a call.
My thumb moves on its own, declines it, and switches it off. The blue light dies. He’ll ask why I didn’t answer. I told him a thousand times that phones must be in silent mode during classes and workshops. He never listens anymore.
But he used to.
I met Nevin seven months ago in April at my best friend Laurel’s cousin’s wedding in Edinburgh. He knew everyone, made the aunties laugh, kept my glass topped up without asking.
At some point during the reception, he leaned close and muttered, ‘Mum keeps asking when I’m returning to medicine. As if rugby’s a gap year or a stupid delusion.’
It was the only time he lost that cute, boyish grin that day.
I squeezed his arm without thinking. It seemed vulnerable, sharing that. Like he chose me to trust me with something real.
That was the Nevin I thought I was getting. The one who admitted he was bruised somewhere too.
After the party, he drove me home – even though it was over an hour out of his way – and texted first thing the next morning.
By September, I had given up my room in Laurel’s flat in Pollokshields and folded my life into Nevin’s place in King’s Park. From Glasgow to Stirling, all in the name of whirlwind love. I’m commuting now. Forty minutes each way if the motorway is clear. Nevin said it made sense to live together, since we don’t have much time outwith rugby and dancing. He reminded me that he wanted us to have more time together. Wasn’t that why I had moved in?
What he didn’t say: I would be further from the other dancers. Further from anyone who might ask why I had stopped meeting them for coffee.
That I would be lonely. Isolated.
Laurel’s in Hong Kong, the flat is sublet, and I’m officially out of escape routes. I’ve never lived on my own, and I don’t know anyone in Stirling except Nevin.
The film’s score swells over a romantic montage, strings, and synthetic hope. I wish I could bottle it and take it home to drown out my actual life.
