One Perfect Pirouette

by Sherryl Clark

  ‘Seriously, you should have lessons,’ I said.

  His face went pink. ‘Oh yeah, I can just see my mates loving that.’

  ‘Male ballet dancers are usually beating girls off them.’

  ‘Really?’ He twirled round. ‘Might be worth it, then. If I could afford it.’

  ‘You can always practise with me, but you’d have to do all of it, right from the warm-up.’ I wondered if he would. ‘Come on, let’s pirouette together, across the room. I can fit four into the space, but you might only do three. You’ve got longer legs.’

  The fact that he was watching and following me made me concentrate better on my own turns, and I managed four without a mistake. He finished just after me and said, ‘Cool. So what were the steps you were doing before?’

  ‘They’re for my audition on Saturday, for a special class. I’ll show you.’

  We worked through the sequence, with me adjusting his arms and feet, counting the beats to stay together, repeating it until we were both dripping with sweat.

  ‘Man, this is hard work,’ he said.

  ‘Yep, but the party’s over. It’s five-thirty.’ I wiped my face with my towel, then threw it to him. ‘Better put the tables back before that guy comes and tells me off for going over time.’

  We soon had things back to normal, then Ricky climbed through the window and met me out the front. ‘You want to practise with me on Friday – the whole lot?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ he said, but from his voice I knew he’d be there. He walked me to the corner of my street. ‘Cool – see ya Friday.’

  He ambled off, bouncing his basketball, and I arrived home just as Dad pulled into the driveway. I wondered if he’d seen me with Ricky, but he didn’t say anything – just asked if I’d managed the tables all right and I said yes, someone helped me. I didn’t want him worrying about me again.

  After dinner, Mum lay on the floor in the lounge, going through all her leg exercises, and I read in my room. The book I’d chosen for my school review was boring, but it was too late to pick another one. Maybe I could write a review about why I hated it. Reason One: it wasn’t about ballet! There was a light knock at my door and Mum came in. ‘Phone for you. Lucy someone.’

  I jumped up. ‘Lucy is in my class at school, and she goes to Ms Ellergren’s, too.’

  When I picked up the phone, Lucy said, ‘I still can’t get those steps right, you know, for Saturday.’ I could hear tears in her voice. ‘Can you please go through them a couple more times with me tomorrow?’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ I said. ‘We can do it at lunchtime.’

  ‘Oh, that’d be great,’ Lucy said. ‘See you then.’

  I hung up. ‘Is she in the netball team, too?’ Mum said.

  ‘No, she’s like me. She doesn’t want to play competition games in case she gets hurt and can’t go to ballet classes.’

  ‘So who’s in this team then?’ Mum was picking at her nail polish – something she did when she was thinking through a decision. The last thing I wanted was her coaching Jade’s team, but if she thought I was being nasty, she’d be upset with me.

  ‘It’s just a school team,’ I said at last. ‘Nothing special. But there’s one girl in it who is really fanatical. Like, she’s always mad at me and Lucy for not playing and she’s – mean about it.’

  ‘Oh,’ Mum said. ‘That’s a shame. You know what I feel about attitude and how important it is.’

  ‘You’re going to say no, aren’t you?’

  She jerked round to face me. ‘Probably. I might call the school, or I might not. I’ll see how my leg is by the end of the week.’ She stretched her arms above her head. ‘Time for a cuppa and a quiet sit in front of the telly, I think.’

  After she’d gone, I kept thinking about the netball team. Maybe my whole problem with it was Jade. If Mum did decide to coach the team (please, no!), I’d see a lot more of Jade and I didn’t trust her.

  Was Lucy like Jade? Would she only hang with me as long as I helped her with the dance steps? What would she do when I turned up at the class try-out on Saturday? Why couldn’t I be honest with her? I was such a wuss sometimes! I promised myself that I’d tell her as soon as I could. I had to.

  At lunchtime the next day, Lucy and I found a quiet spot in the corridor outside the library and I showed her the steps yet again. She followed me as I went through them first, then I watched as she did them on her own. She made a couple of slips and I thought her feet positions needed correcting, but she was a thousand times better than the day before.

  After a small stumble, she said, ‘I’ll get it right by Saturday. I will. Don’t you think?’

  I swallowed hard; my mouth was dry. ‘You’ve improved lots. It’s nearly perfect. And – I’ll be there, too, so I’ll, you know, be able to cheer you on.’

  She stopped mid-step, her head shooting up, her mouth turning down. ‘I thought you weren’t allowed to try out.’

  ‘Um, well, Mum changed her mind. But she said I wasn’t to get my hopes up.’ I couldn’t hold her gaze – her eyes were like bullets. ‘Okay, let’s go over the steps again.’

  ‘What’s the point?’ she snapped. ‘It’s obvious you’ll get into the class and I won’t.’

  Heat rolled up my neck and into my face. Yep, Lucy was just like Jade, but I wasn’t going to let her pull me down. ‘Hey, don’t tell me you’ve been sucked in to what Stephanie said. You’re better than them. You just have to get in there and show them. And Ms Ellergren.’

  ‘You think so?’ Her face had transformed from furious to hopeful. She was as desperate to make the class as I was, but if she couldn’t get the dance steps right, she was going to have no hope. I tried hard to keep that thought from showing.

  ‘Sure. You know that practice is 95 per cent of what it takes. The Silhouettes have probably done ten minutes’ worth, if that.’

  ‘Yeah, probably,’ she said. ‘I’ll go over everything again tonight, at home. That’ll make all the difference.’

  ‘It sure will.’

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  I nodded. I wondered what was coming. Not the netball team, please.

  ‘What does your mum think about your ballet? Like – your future.’

  I folded my arms. I wasn’t sure how much to tell her or how much I’d already revealed. ‘She wants me to do well, to – achieve what I want, I guess.’

  ‘What would you say if I told you –’ She scuffed her shoe along the floor. ‘My mum thinks I’m wasting my time.’

  ‘But she pays for your classes at Ms Ellergren’s,’ I said.

  ‘She’d pay for me to learn piano, or do art classes, or even stupid yoga, if I wanted.’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘I want to audition for the National Ballet School. Mum says it’s a waste of time. But I’m going to anyway, even if she says no. I have to.’ Her voice was so intense and serious that I didn’t know what to say. ‘It’s my secret,’ she went on. ‘You’re not allowed to tell anyone.’

  ‘I won’t.’ This absolutely was not the right time for me to tell her my special dream.

  ‘Mum doesn’t think I’m good enough. She says stuff like, “Don’t be too disappointed if you don’t make it” and “If you set your sights too high, you’ll fall an awfully long way”. It’s like she’s already decided I haven’t got a chance and she’s trying to prepare me.’ A tear dribbled down her face and she brushed it away roughly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I had no idea what else to say.

  Lucy chewed on her thumbnail. ‘I’ll do what you said – I’ll practise all night tonight and every possible moment. Then I’ll get it perfect. And Ms Ellergren will tell Mum I’m good enough to audition.’ She straightened up and smiled at me hopefully.

  The bell saved me from having to say any more.

  chapter 15

  It was lino practice night, but the wind in the garage whistled through the door gap and swirled around like invisible snow. I shivered and headed back t
o the lounge room, but it was too hard to get my feet to move on the carpet, so I pushed the kitchen table to one side and did the exercises there, in front of Mum’s mirror. Once I’d warmed up, it was a good opportunity to check my head and arm positions. And I remembered something I’d read once – to get your arms moving correctly, pretend you’re swimming in peanut butter! That was fun to imagine and it helped.

  Mum came home just as I was finishing with arabesques; you needed grace and balance for them. A silver cord.

  ‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘Pity our kitchen’s so small.’

  She helped me put the table back and sat down. ‘I’ve been thinking about your netball team.’

  ‘It’s not my team! I don’t want to play.’ I tugged at the ribbons on my shoes, and one immediately went into a knot. ‘Stupid thing!’ I muttered, pulling harder and making it worse.

  ‘Here, let me' Mum said. She crouched down next to me and picked at the knot with fingers that were so rough they snagged on the satin. Finally, the knot unravelled. ‘There.’ As she stood up again, she groaned. ‘That’ll teach me. I need to work on my flexibility, don’t I?’

  ‘Try yoga,’ I said, untying my other ribbon more carefully.

  ‘I thought I’d quite like to coach again,’ she said. ‘And a school team wouldn’t be too tough or competitive.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ I said. ‘Jade’s like a bulldozer: she won’t stop for anything.’

  Mum tilted her head from side to side. ‘Yeah, she’d be a challenge. But if someone doesn’t teach her now how to behave on the court, she’ll never make it later on.’

  ‘Who cares? She’s rude and aggro and I wouldn’t play against her if you paid me.’

  ‘That’s not like you.’

  Mum was doing her be-nice-to-everyone-and-they’ll-be-nice-to-you act, but I didn’t buy it anymore. ‘She’s not like anyone I know, Mum. She’s –’ I couldn’t think of a word I was allowed to use. ‘Awful.’ That barely covered it.

  ‘I haven’t decided yet,’ she said. ‘So don’t say anything at school. I’ll make my mind up tomorrow, after I’ve watched them. All right?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I muttered. ‘I’m not playing.’ But it burned me that Mum would give her time and energy to someone like Jade, despite what I’d said. If Mum wanted to coach someone, why didn’t she coach – well, Ricky? That idea hit me like a kick in the head and I opened my mouth to suggest it. But what was the point? Ricky didn’t have a team to play in – he was just messing around on the court by himself. Where would coaching get him?

  I didn’t know enough about him, either, but I vowed to find out as soon as I could.

  Mum had rearranged the chairs, unaware of the ideas spinning through my head. ‘Now, let’s get cracking with dinner,’ she said. ‘Orrin will want something hot when he finishes tonight. It’s cold enough out there to snow. And Tam’s ringing later to tell us how he’s going.’

  I changed out of my ballet gear and went back to the kitchen, stirred a pot of soup while Mum grilled chops, and watched the peas and carrots swimming round in the brown mix. Why wasn’t Ricky playing for another team? Surely losing a venue wouldn’t stop him? Maybe it was a territory thing and no one else wanted him. My brain skipped on to Lucy, and I visualised her feet moving through the dance steps, stumbling, in the wrong position. No, it was practice – she was committed. She said so. And if she did well on Saturday, she’d make it into the class and convince her mum.

  Who was I kidding? The awful feeling in my stomach was right. Lucy wasn’t going to be in the class. Maybe I wasn’t either. After all, why should I get in?

  Because I was determined to be chosen, that was why. I’d dance till I dropped for Ms Ellergren, if that was what it would take!

  I gave the soup another big stir for luck.

  When Ricky climbed through the window the following afternoon, I thought he’d chickened out of dancing with me. He wore a blue puffy jacket and a bulky sweatshirt, with huge thick-soled runners on his feet and I couldn’t see him moving at all in those clothes. But once we’d moved the tables, he took off the jacket and runners and grinned at me.

  ‘Hey, I wasn’t gonna wear skinny little tights on the way here. Apart from the fact that they’d freeze my you-know-whats off, my mates’d all cack themselves laughing if they saw me.’ He lifted his sweatshirt. ‘See? T-shirt. And my socks can come off if they’re too slippery.’

  ‘Okay. Cool,’ I said. ‘Let’s warm up.’

  He stood behind me, slightly to one side with one hand on a chair like me, and I talked him through what I was doing. I wasn’t going to correct him like Ms Ellergren did or we’d be there all night. I went through the feet positions and arm positions and then, with each exercise, I told him where arms and legs should be and left it up to him to follow. Every now and then I turned around, but each time he seemed to be doing the movements correctly, if a bit awkwardly.

  ‘I feel like a girl,’ he said.

  ‘Trust me, you don’t look like one,’ I said. As his body warmed up, he’d taken off his sweatshirt and he definitely wasn’t a skinny weed. ‘Now, centre exercises.’

  ‘When do we get to dance?’

  ‘Soon. You’ve got to warm up properly, especially in the cold weather, or you can injure yourself.’

  ‘Okay, Ms Teacher.’

  From the centre, we went on to pirouettes. To my horror, I overbalanced on the second turn and stopped abruptly in the middle, so that Ricky nearly bumped into me.

  ‘Hey, you’re supposed to keep going!’

  ‘I did it wrong,’ I muttered.

  ‘So fix it,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

  We went back to the side of the room and started again. This time I waited, took a couple of breaths and concentrated on feeling where my body was, what was out of line, and on flowing up, around and down. One, two, three, four. Perfect!

  I watched Ricky behind me, completing three before he hit the wall on the other side. ‘Not enough room,’ he said.

  ‘Do them in the one spot. Like this.’ I showed him how to pirouette without taking big steps forward. It always seemed harder to me to do it that way. He did five before he had to stop, shaking his head.

  ‘Dizzy. Forgot to look at one place, like you said.’

  I shook my head. ‘You are amazing. You did all of those without overbalancing or anything.’

  ‘Cool, huh?’ He beamed. ‘It’s basketball, see, moving the ball around and jumping and stuff.’

  ‘That’s not all it is. You catch on really fast, and you get the arms and feet positions, too. Most beginners take forever to put them together.’

  He shrugged. ‘How about those dance steps now?’

  We went through the sequence from Ms Ellergren’s six times, and I wished I had music to dance it to.

  ‘What next?’ he said.

  ‘That’s all she showed us. That’s all I need to do for Saturday.’

  ‘Yeah, but –’ He frowned. ‘There must be more. What would you do next? What steps would you add?’

  That stopped me for a few moments. ‘I’m not sure. Um –’ I thought about what we’d done so far. Here, I’d been wishing for music, but what music would go with steps like these? Not Swan Lake. Maybe something lighter like The Nutcracker, which was Tchaikovsky. I hummed some of it softly. Yes, that worked.

  ‘Maybe something like this?’ I said. Still humming, I danced the first steps, then added more – petit allegro, an arabesque – trying things out until I found steps that fitted together and flowed. I tried my sequence again, adding a couple of things. ‘How did that look?’ I said.

  ‘Hey, how would I know? Good, I guess. It matched the first bit.’

  ‘Come on, then, follow me.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  We danced the full sequence twice and then collapsed on our chairs.

  ‘This dancing thing’s hard,’ he said. ‘Worse than PE at school.’

  ‘Errm, school. Does that mean you’re going?�
�

  He pulled at his bottom lip. ‘Yeah, worse luck. What good’s learning about the environment gonna do me? I’m not gonna be a scientist.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know why we’ve got global warming? Or what you can do about it?’

  ‘What difference does it make? We’ve got water restrictions. I’ve got to bucket shower water out to Mum’s garden. That’s bad enough, without seeing a million photos of pollution and melting glaciers.’

  I couldn’t figure out how to convince him that if everyone knew about global warming and, more importantly, cared, maybe we could do something. I thought about it as we put the tables back and when we met outside to walk home, I said, ‘Where does your family come from?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘No – your father, grandfather and great-grandfather.’ He laughed sourly. ‘Mum’d just like to know where Dad is now – never mind where he came from!’

  ‘Come on, tell me. Where?’

  ‘Grandad came from Italy. He always had his homemade grappa happening. That stuff’d blow your head off’ He glanced at me. ‘Why’re you asking?’

  ‘I was just curious. You know about where I come from.’ It was much easier to talk to Ricky than Lucy and ask questions like this. He was so straightforward.

  I huddled down into my coat and tucked my hands deeper into my pockets. Big drops of rain started to fall and splattered on the footpath. ‘Maybe your great-grandfather was a famous dancer and you never knew about it.’

  ‘As if.’ He laughed, then he was silent and I wondered if he really was thinking about it, or whether he was more worried about getting wet. We reached the corner of my street and he pulled his jacket hood over his head.

  ‘Hey, listen, you kill ’em in that audition.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘You do more than try.’ He pointed his index finger at me. ‘You blitz them.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ I saluted and laughed, and watched as he ran off, trying to get out of the rain before it really pelted down. I jammed my backpack under my arm and raced to my own house, arriving just as the big drops turned into a downpour. No way Ricky was going to make it home in time. I hoped he’d found a big tree or a doorway.