Just before midnight the cast and crew of The Apple and the Pearl are aboard their train, not a one among them left by the boulder-strewn river where last night’s performance took place. The shriek of a whistle – the very last warning call to stragglers – and the train starts to heave itself along the track, a groaning moaning sound of carriages awakening, spitting and spluttering as they gather speed. The chug chug hisssssss of the curved steel on the track. The sigh of cool air on the nose of the locomotive as it hurries through the darkness, its lurching the loudest thing in the night. A hunting owl’s wings brush the air; tiny icicles dangle from the fir trees growing a hair’s width every hour as the snow water drip drip drips; a fox cub snuffles as he digs at a hedgehog nest.
Now the bell rings, tolling in the new day and bidding farewell to the old. It rings loud outside the train, echoing solemnly in the valley.
A clang for the King, a clang for the Queen,
three clangs for the sisters never to be seen.
In the first carriage, behind the set and costumes and paraphernalia a touring ballet takes on the road, a woman named Belinda sits with a heavy hidebound ledger open on her lap. She scrawls down the columns quickly, dropping coins and earrings and watches and tiny gleaming jewels into the iron-bound chest at her feet. As the fifth bell tolls she puts the ledger in the chest, locks it and puts the key on a chain around her neck.
A clang for the orchard, a clang for the sea,
three clangs for the suitors who lie in a dream.
In the dining carriage in the middle of the train, the cellist, the percussionist and the bassoonist are drinking, sipping from shot glasses and slamming on the tables in syncopated rhythms. They hum Verdi and Puccini as they get drunker and drunker, and when the tenth bell comes they weave its note into their wobbly melodies and toast the coming of the new day.
A clang for the curse, a clang for the quest,
The sleeping cabins in the back half of the train are filling up with those who hear the curfew of the midnight bells with relief rather than as a challenge. Yawning, the assorted dancers and stage managers and woodwind and strings spit out toothpaste, pull pyjamas out from under duvets and slip on eye masks, rolling out their shoulders and necks from another day of leaping and turning and humping and hauling and blowing and plucking to sink into the soft lull of the train gently rocking their tired bones.
And one last for the crow who sings in its nest.
off the deck, a broom across her lap. She wears a voluminous dress of black serge and hums a little tune as she points her toes and swings her legs. Beside her is a tray bearing a half-finished plate of garlic risotto, a few crumbs of a shortbread biscuit and two empty shot glasses. She watches the dark hills of the day dissolve as the train staggers into a new landscape, and with the toll of the thirteenth bell she opens her beak and caws out into the night.
* * *
Nine o’clock in the morning is the first reveille on the Grub. For most, it sounds like a light burble of running water; it’s cheerful piano scales for those who do not consider themselves morning people; and for Zach, the lighting director, it’s a foghorn that sounds over and over like a ferry in a storm until he gets up out of his bunk, opens his cabin door and presses the button above the door two cabins over. By that time, standing barefoot in the corridor with his hair rumpled, a pillow crease on his cheek and last night’s garlic risotto wafting out from between his molars, he is fully, furiously awake and swearing at the cacophony that yanks him this way from the sweet oblivion of his dreams every single morning.
‘Fuck you, Grub,’ he mutters, as behind him Alina the wardrobe mistress leaves the bathroom and the pungent, lavender-scented steam of her shower seeps out into the corridor.
‘Morning Zach!’ she calls brightly as she squeezes past him. ‘It’s a beautiful day to put on a show.’
He pulls up the closest blind to see that it isn’t a beautiful day at all. He drags a finger through the condensation on the window to see fine, drizzly mist. He lets his forehead fall onto the cold glass and watches as Belinda marches past, with one gloved hand gripping a tray bearing an empty plate and two shot glasses, and the other clamped around the Pearl. Already he can hear the doors of the cargo carriages creaking open; Danny shouting to Charlie as they unload the first of the crates containing the set; the hiss of the hydraulic lifts and the thump thump thump of the broken wheels of the stage left props crate. The musicians are still in bed, the bastards. Maybe he should learn to play an instrument, the drums or something: that can’t be too hard. Then he’d get a blasted lie-in for once in his life.
He needs a shower. A coffee. A double helping of whatever Gino’s doing for breakfast today, more coffee and an extra jumper because it’s bound to be cold in the Grit today with that creeping fog out there.
Belinda is waiting for him in the dining car, gloves tucked away, her clipboard clutched tight.
He holds up one hand. ‘I haven’t had any coffee yet, Belinda, so if you’re coming at me for that expenses form I’m just going to grunt until you give up and go away.’
‘Good morning, Zachary,’ Belinda says smartly. ‘May I introduce you to Lara.’
He squints at the blonde woman beside Belinda, dressed in a black t-shirt and black jeans with her hair tied in two long plaits over each shoulder. The dress code makes things tricky here, especially as he’s not great with faces. Everyone dressed in raven black but the dancers, who all look the same to Zach anyway with their hair slicked off their faces and their sharp, sticky-out bones and their turned-out, froggy feet.
tonight and be your new lighting assistant.’
‘Am I being promoted?’
Belinda raises one eyebrow. ‘Do keep up, Zachary. Juliet left six weeks ago and you’ve had your pay rise for at least a month, so I hope you’ve been doing the job I’ve been paying you for.’
He pulls the lever on Gino’s coffee urn and watches it splash into a mug.
‘Joking. Everything’s under control.’
Belinda hands Lara a thick black folder. ‘Here’s your contract and code of conduct. Have a little look at it when you get a chance today and ask Zachary or Mackenzie if you have any questions. I’ll keep your things in my office. After the show Zachary will bring you back and we can see what you want to do.’
The blonde girl nods. She looks composed enough but a little twitch in her top lip gives her away. Belinda sweeps out of the dining car, leaving an awkward silence behind her. Zach wonders where to start.
‘Have you had breakfast?’ Zach asks, finally. He’d like to be a good boss, and as far as he’s concerned a good boss concerns themselves with their employees’ stomachs first.
‘I’m not hungry. Thanks.’
‘Right. Well. Hold on while I get something.’
Gino, who never seems to have the problems with mornings Zach suffers from, greets him cheerily.
‘I’ve made your favourite, Zachary, and I’ll keep some aside until lunch if you fancy a snack.’
He passes a plate of pancakes and blueberries drenched with shiny rivulets of golden syrup across the serving hatch and Zach’s mouth waters.
‘You’re a god among men, Gino, I really mean it.’ Gino has given Zach extra helpings since his very first day. Gino had raised his eyebrows, looked the almost seven feet of length of him up and down and made an Italian sound of admiration. You’ll need quite a bit extra to keep that frame going, he’d said. Do not go hungry, you hear me? If I am starving you, ask for more.
Zach takes his plate and coffee to a booth on the other side of the dining carriage. Lara follows him, the ring binder tucked under her arm, hovering awkwardly by the booth.
‘Sit.’ Zach gestures to the bench opposite him and she perches on the corner. ‘Have some pancakes.’ He pushes his plate towards her and she tentatively tears off a corner of the dough and holds it lightly between her fingers.
‘Where did she pick you up from?’
She stifles a yawn. ‘Southampton.’
‘Have to get up early?’
Lara nods, a wry smile beginning on her lips. ‘Left my mum’s at four thirty. It’s not always this bad, is it?’
Zach wants to tell her no. He wants to say that today will be the hardest day she’ll ever do on The Apple and the Pearl, even if she stays another ten years. And in some ways that will be true. But he can’t lie. So he makes the kind of non-committal grunt that used to have Juliet throwing her hands up in frustration – Are you an animal? Fucking communicate, please! – and tears off another corner of pancake to pass to her.
‘So how much did Belinda tell you in your
interview?’
Lara shrugs. ‘She mainly asked me things about my life and my experience. She said it was a ballet and we travel from venue to venue on a train.’
Zach spears a pancake with his fork and eats it in one bite.
‘Anything else?’
‘She asked me if I’d had any contact with the supernatural.’
Zach cocks his head. ‘And have you?’
‘My auntie Doreen was a medium. She ran seances in Nana’s front room. After a few years she’d earned enough to buy the house off the council and Nana was thrilled. But then my granddad turned up and started throwing things about because he was a union man and he didn’t agree with privatisation. So we moved, but he followed us.’
Zach wrinkles his nose. Sensible, really, how this show attracts people who are already acquainted with the workings of other worlds. He thinks of his own mother, picking mugwort and elderberries on the common behind their house, muttering under her breath as she stirred that sludge in the saucepans.
‘Is that what this show is?’
Zach takes another bite of a pancake. ‘Sort of. A bit weirder sometimes, but that’s the general gist.’
He watches Lara’s face for a moment to see if she’s afraid. A flicker of curiosity, but otherwise she seems admirably composed.
‘Right. Well, I think the easiest thing to do is for you to stick by me.’ He has a gulp of coffee that almost scalds his throat but feels good – he needs that warmth in his bones to get them going. ‘Ask me any questions you like but I might not know the answers.’
empty plate for two more plates stacked with pancakes and a fresh mug of coffee.
Gino nudges the jug of milk towards him. ‘Lighten it up a bit to stop the jitters?’
Zach grimaces. ‘No thanks. Milk’s always dodgy these days, Gino. No offence.’
He brings his plates back to the booth and pushes one towards Lara.
‘Eat. You’ll need it.’
She pokes her plate with a fork but she doesn’t put it to her mouth. Zach wonders where he should start. On the day of his first pledge – almost eleven years ago now – they had stopped in a deserted seaside fairground with water slides and sandpits and a lagoon filled with pedaloes and dinghies. Juliet had pointed to the Grit, wearing the gaudy colours of a Neapolitan ice cream, and told him that nothing else mattered but the show. All the rest, she said, is noise.
Zach wonders if Juliet ever thinks of him now, knowing it’s unlikely. ‘First I’ll tell you about the show. Have you ever worked in ballet before?’
‘This is my first job. I saw an advert in The Stage, I rang the number and now I’m here.’
‘Right.’ Zach feels a little pang of disappointment, although he knows everyone’s got to start somewhere. ‘Well, ballet’s tricky because the buggers move around, but it’s fun. This show is a dream to light, really. LX department is you, me and Derek the follow spot, but in the mornings and before the show he does stage set up, and he spends most of act three in the stage left wing.’ Which is a blessing, really, Zach thinks. He won’t scare her off yet. Plenty of time for her to learn about Derek.
Zach spears another pancake, eats it in two bites. He tries to finish the whole mouthful before he starts talking again. Your table manners are atrocious, Juliet used to laugh.
‘Mackie’s our direct boss, he’s a good egg. Knows the show inside out, has our back when Belinda goes on the warpath. We set up in the flies, wing booms and footlights, but sometimes the Grit fucks around and we lose a few wing flats if it decides to be smaller that day.’
Lara stares at him, a fork poised in her hand, the honey on her pancakes glistening undisturbed on her plate.
‘You look like you’ve got a question.’
He can see her thinking back over everything he’s just said, trying to find something to latch on to that she can make sense of. ‘What’s the Grit?’
‘Ah.’ Zach finishes his mouthful and drains his coffee. ‘Bring that plate and follow me.’
He fills a mug again from the urn and bounds down the aisle between the booths. He’s starting to feel like himself, more than himself really, with someone to watch him. He’s putting his best foot forwards, as his mum would have said, showing himself to his best advantage. He feels self-consciousness settle on him. He better not fuck it up, as his mum would also have said.
‘Ta, Gino,’ he calls as he slides his plate across the serving hatch. ‘We’ll bring hers back at lunchtime.’
Gino gives a mock salute as Zach pulls open the door to the carriage and holds it open for Lara behind him. He jumps down from the train and turns to see her gazing out at the mist. He wonders if he should offer his hand to help her down or if she would consider that patronising. If he’d offered to help Juliet she’d have taken his hand and crushed it. He settles for taking
Lara’s plate and folder from her and standing aside in what he hopes is a gallant manner. She jumps down, landing clumsily on the carpet of evergreen needles.
‘Okay, I know you asked something else but we’ll start here. This is the Grub, our train. Home.’ He gestures towards the carriage behind him, sleek and shiny and speckled with condensation. Today it appears as an old-fashioned steam train, painted forest-green with little black bolts holding each iron sheet in place. He can just about see the bell frame through the mist, a large bronze bell hanging in a grid from a gigantic iron scaffold above the engine car at the front.
She looks sharply at him, fear starting to shadow her face.
‘Did it look different to you earlier?’
Lara nods.
He sighs. How did Juliet describe this to him? He can barely remember now. Something about the way that although everyone’s dreams are different they all share symbols.
‘Don’t worry, it does that. It plays all kinds of tricks and it pisses us all off but you get used to it. We call it the Grub because it’s the ugly side of things, the maggot in the fruit.’
He gives her back the plate of congealing pancakes and beckons for her to follow him. He walks confidently into the mist as he sips at his coffee, his warmth dissipating the water vapour. After a few paces Zach trips and smacks his knee on a boulder sticking out of the ground.
‘Fuck!’ He holds on to the offending stone to rub his knee and groan a little.
‘Is this a graveyard?’ Lara asks, her knuckles white around her plate. ...
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