by Sue Woolfe
Despite such beliefs, she led a normal life, more or less. There are no police sent to round up people who live in secret terror.
Now, in the matter of her squint, she waited more tensely than ever for the end of her world.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Greg, to the troupe, hoping they wouldn’t notice her anxious blinking.
Greg acknowledged her apology with a nod.
The photographer had to be paid for another round of pictures. This time, Magdalena concentrated on not squinting but she was laggardly in her timing when they danced, there was no other word for it; when Greg, several metres away, had bowed his head to her in invitation, she hadn’t acknowledged him, as a woman should, and hadn’t even declined him.
‘I was distracted,’ she said.
‘Distracted? By?’
She had to admit it:
‘I couldn’t see your face.’
Greg was ten years younger. She was painfully aware of this. When they stepped sideways together, long-leggedly sliding up the entire beat to arrive, the moment was as sweetly stretched as toffee. But soon, she feared, he’d see her as too old. To put off the moment, she’d doubled her daily practice time, already gruelling. The trouble was, she’d had a wasted youth.
‘I’m sorry,’ she tried again. ‘My eyes have gone strange.’
‘It’ll be a cataract,’ he said. ‘Blocks your sight. My mum had one. They can be taken out.’
He often mentioned his mum. He’d been the adored only son of a wealthy widow.
Magdalena began to hear the usual clang of boots.
‘Get your eyes checked,’ he said.
An order, but his tone was, as always, amiable.
The eye doctor found a tearing in one of her retinas, and extremely dense floaters, together a rare condition but not unknown. His practice had done three of these in the past five years, he assured her, and though he hadn’t done one himself, he’d assisted in all three operations. He ordered surgery the very next day.
It was hard for her to assert herself, but there were Greg, Nadina and Esteban to think about.
‘We have a performance booked,’ she said before she’d asked if it’d hurt, or was likely to be successful, the way other patients did. ‘How long is the down time?’
‘Two weeks.’ He was sternly raised, young, slender and nattily dressed in a navy suit, white shirt and navy bowtie, which he wore with the ease of a man who always dressed. His mother was an elegant English woman whom he’d never seen in a dressing gown, his father Chinese and perpetually in suits. As a little child, the only son, he’d seldom played with other children, and the few times he had, he remembered not as events but as flashes of bright light with an explosion of joyous laughter, as if he were looking into a party through a keyhole from a dark outside. His parents had been proud that he preferred his books. His mother didn’t glance at the Australian children in the sandpit, coarse grey dirt sticking to their clothes. She didn’t understand the beach culture of Australia, she said, with all that sand.
‘It’s a fortnight before our next show. We need every minute to work. The surgery will have to wait,’ Magdalena said immediately.
Dancing was frippery, he’d always known that, probably his parents had told him, though surely no one would’ve mentioned such an unremarkable subject. There were many subjects that were unremarkable. Dancing certainly was not work; nevertheless, he demanded, as he always did with difficult patients:
‘Which is more important, your work or your sight?’
He was pleased, behind his set lips, that he’d shown such tolerance.
She paused. His patients didn’t normally pause. He saw with surprise that she wasn’t one to capitulate to what he’d assumed was a truism beneath consideration. In her pause, another man would have said she was beautiful, her black hair swinging forward in thought, the light carving out her face. Not a conventional beauty, you wouldn’t notice her in the street, her face was long, her nose bony and slightly askew, but as she leaned into his question, she charmed even him. He had never been captivated by his patients, never yet by any woman. He was married to his fixing of eyes. Now, in this disturbing moment, his fingertips brushed his desk, new, blond, shining, orderly, bought for him by his mother. A desk was for him an affirmation of what was good and true, and even messaged him so, its certainty insisting itself on his fingertips. He wasn’t going to be charmed any further by, of all things, a dancer.
But as the pause lengthened, his suddenly errant mind saw her slender body sculpting shapes like the wind does in grass and trees, and a memory silenced him – one that hadn’t emerged for years – of his grandmother’s house, windswept, somewhere in China beside a grey sea; a storm about to break, the grasses longing to flee; he must’ve been very young, surrounded by tall grasses rippling around him. Though he knew he should run back home, he was mesmerised by the black clouds and the frantic grasses lit up from behind and fluorescing yellow. Then rain came, sheeting like a cloak, and he relished the way it obscured him, as if he was running away. When at last his grandmother found him and took him home to a warm bath, she couldn’t stop him babbling in excitement. She insisted they keep his adventure secret from his parents.
‘My work,’ she decided.
She was so urgent, intent, ardent. It made him unbend a little.
‘What date is this performance?’ He tried not to put inverted commas around performance. It was like humouring someone demented.
She told him.
‘I can’t let them down.’
That made sense to him. He understood about duty – if anyone knew about duty, he did.
‘I suppose your problem won’t get significantly worse till my next surgery day, two weeks away,’ he said.
The intensity left her face; it was like the ocean ebbing. He wanted it back. She became, as he watched, like an ordinary stretch of damp fawn sand. He knew to look down at his desk.
‘Two weeks and one day.’ She smiled, assuming his agreement. ‘The show’s in Singapore’ – it was their first overseas booking, and they were all proud of it – ‘and I won’t get a flight back till the next day,’ she added. She was always worried she was taking up people’s valuable time by explaining too much, and so she never explained enough. She also knew that this man in his navy suit would never know about the clubs where her troupe performed, would never drink, eat and chat till two in the morning when the dancing began.
‘Two weeks and three days. I only operate on Tuesdays and Thursdays.’
Of all his university class, he’d never lost a patient to blindness, though probably his fellow students hadn’t met this particular challenge.
‘Thursday, in two and a half weeks,’ he said. At least that’d give him time to send for the notes of the previous patients and pore over them. Afterwards, he’d be able to write it up, a feather in his cap. He’d been behind this year in publications.
He consulted the diary on his shining desk. He named the date, glad to be firmly in charge of this at least, a man with days accounted for. He didn’t take holidays, and never slept in after the dawn light crept under his blind.
‘Tell my secretary.’ A secretary was a reassuring functionary without resonances of secret storms, who inscribed his orders in an old-fashioned notebook with old-fashioned, neat handwriting. These could be depended upon.
He stood to farewell Magdalena, as he did all patients. Annoyingly, as if his mind had danced away on a solo of its own, he noticed that she came up to his heart. But only to his shirt pocket, he argued back. Where he kept only a pen, always at the ready. He wasn’t a man for cravats or flourishes, though he did allow himself the navy blue pen bought from a leather shop, by his mother, the same shade as the bowties he always wore. He liked the adjective, navy. It justified the suit, the bowtie and the pen. No other colour so justified.
Magdalena suggested Greg should bring Janette, his girlfriend, into rehearsals.
‘An understudy,’ she said. ‘Just in case.’
>
‘Because of a squint?’ Nadina was quick to be alarmed for Magdalena.
Greg was also frowning. ‘You’re talking as if we could lose you.’
‘It’s just that the show must go on,’ she said.
They all nodded then. They’d heard this all their dancing lives. The show must go on. As if the show didn’t involve people, their hearts, their fears and tragedies, as if a show were a thing with its own life, independent of them. Of course, the show must go on. It didn’t matter who the particular dancers were. Though that wasn’t true either. Was anything true?
The troupe knew that the show couldn’t go on without Greg’s money or Nadina’s dancing. Nadina had perfect posture and balance, after a childhood of somersaults and circus training, and could stand on the ball of one foot for eight beats or more while her free leg tossed around in the air, as defiant as a feather, stretching time while you held your breath in wonder. Then she’d flip that free leg so you’d laugh aloud at her cheeky freedom. She was partnered by Esteban, her mustachioed Argentinian husband, who had such a handsomely carved face that Magdalena was always taken by surprise when he spoke, or pontificated, rather. Esteban believed that Argentina had not been adequately acknowledged in the world. He taught English and American literature in a local high school, to fund, he said, his aid to Argentina.
‘Tango is the truest music in the world,’ he’d say. Magdalena would wonder exactly what he meant, but never liked to interrupt.
Esteban made them all learn Spanish, the language of tango, and was fond of pointing out that even an English poet, Robert Browning, had said about the lovely name of a flower in Spanish:
I must learn Spanish one of these days,
Only for that slow sweet name’s sake.
What was good enough for Browning should be good enough for them.
Esteban was the DJ, which gave him rights, he thought, to pause the music if they referred to the steps in English. So there was no turn, only a giro, no eight described on the floor by the woman’s foot stretched like an arrow, only an ocho.
‘Eso,’ he said when they conformed. ‘Perfecto.’
Magdalena guessed that at home Nadina, despite her cheeky free leg, would be helpless against his handsome face.
Esteban didn’t permit them to dance to any but the music of the golden era of tango. Often at their performances, he irrepressibly gave a little lecture about the composer. Greg, behind the curtain, fretted that the audience would become restless, but they always adored him. Magdalena imagined the fate of a small country were Esteban its Prime Minister; the adoring citizens would follow wherever he led; warfare, massacre, extinction.
The troupe were averaging one performance request every three months, and they were all proud of this. Magdalena felt that of everyone in the troupe, she was the one who wasn’t necessary, and that, any moment, the archangels would strike and someone would say:
‘Why is she with us?’
‘We’ll be throwing in our day jobs soon,’ laughed Nadina, who worked in a shoe shop, which enticed Esteban to talk about the virtues of Spanish leather, and how Argentinian leather made the world’s best shoes.
For the Singapore show, he’d chosen his favourite composer.
The troupe held Esteban in such esteem, they dare not, especially Nadina, mistake their Miguel Caló for their Piazzolla. Magdalena had won his lifetime approval by mentioning that Caló’s music made her want live up to it.
But when Janette, unafraid of anything, asked her what she meant, all Magdalena could manage was, ‘Oh, all the sadness. The heartbreak.’ She herself saw such swirls of meaning around words, she couldn’t quite pick and choose between them. She got up and demonstrated with her feet, humming as she moved.
‘See the anguish?’
Her concentration was so deep, the humming came out a little tunelessly.
‘A true dancer,’ said Greg, who, as leader, felt he should be the mouthpiece of the troupe in all matters not to do with Argentina. ‘Explaining by dancing.’
Everyone nodded.
‘I have trouble finding Caló’s beat,’ said Greg. ‘But of course, I do in the end,’ he added, conceding to Esteban but managing to sound heroic as well.
‘1907,’ Esteban said, turning his chiselled face towards Greg, ‘was when the greatest music was born.’
‘What happened in 1907?’ Greg asked.
‘Caló fell to earth,’ said Esteban.
Janette was in her twenties and much prettier than either Nadina or Magdalena, with a cute snub nose and shining blonde curls, which she’d dyed black to look more Latinate. Nadina told Magdalena that Janette still didn’t have the look of a dancer.
‘What’s the look of a dancer?’ Magdalena asked, worrying that she didn’t either.
‘Fonteyn,’ said Nadina. ‘Dark, foreign face, hair pulled tightly back as if nothing was going to distract her. Janette won’t pull her curls back for anything, and as for that nose!’
Magdalena was fond of Nadina, so all she said was:
‘I think it’s a cute nose.’
‘I think it’s a nose job.’
‘Luckily, I take Magdalena’s size,’ Nadina told the dressmaker. Greg liked them to have new dresses for a new show, or at least what looked like new dresses, sometimes saving the budget by recycling the old dresses but with sleeves added, or with slits.
‘I’m just bigger around the bust,’ Janette added. ‘But it’s a cowl neckline, so that’s not going to be a problem.’
The three of them were in the girls’ bathroom, trying on the bras that the new dressmaker had sewn into the bodices. She’d said the bras would improve the line of the dress.
‘But they’re not the line of my body,’ said Nadina when the dressmaker had left. ‘My breasts are shaped’ – and she sketched a sideways hyperbola in the air – ‘and the bra is shaped like an ice-cream cone.’
Magdalena, who regretted coming to dancing later than the others, had never ceased to marvel at the way dancers considered their bodies rather like the way her carpenter father considered a tool, something that, with enough skill, could create a heaven on earth.
‘Have you had implants?’ Nadina interrupted herself, gazing at Janette, who, stripped to her skimpy panties, was admiring her body in the mirror, as if it were a bauble.
‘Your nipples stick out,’ Nadina added. ‘Implants make your nipples stick out.’
‘I’ve always had big breasts,’ said Janette. ‘Are you saying my nipples are a problem?’
‘You’re perfect,’ said Magdalena quickly.
But Nadina asked, cheeky as her free leg: ‘Always? As a kid?’
Janette didn’t notice the cheekiness.
‘Always,’ she said.
Magdalena changed the subject: ‘It’ll probably infuriate Anna’ – this was their dressmaker – ‘but I’m going to do this’ – she ripped out her bra. ‘They feel like falsies. I hate anything false.’ In actual fact, she suspected the archangels would.
‘I will too,’ said Nadina. ‘You and I won’t flop.’
Janette didn’t notice this either.
Janette was a more athletic dancer than either of them, doing such high kicks Nadina muttered that one day she’d knock off her own nose. In front of them all, she practised the splits, to free her hamstrings, she said, inching forward on her bottom till her crotch almost touched the mirror. Caressed it, thought Magdalena, while Greg watched, nodding.
It came to her that Janette relied on her athleticism when she danced – and that she didn’t seem to commune with Greg.
Nadina, standing beside Magdalena, seemed to sense her thoughts, for she said quietly:
‘Janette doesn’t form a passionate connection.’
‘Why, do you think?
‘There’s a wall of chatter in her mind,’ said Nadina. ‘About Janette.’
Esteban put it another way.
‘It’s Magdalena who finds the spirit of the music,’ he pronounced late one night after a perf
ormance. They were having a glass of wine, just one, all Greg would allow them, because he said, as dancers, they had to live like athletes. ‘In fact, she is the spirit of the music.’
‘My shyness gets in the way,’ said Magdalena, unwilling to own this grandeur.
‘Not at all,’ said Esteban. ‘It’s what art does. It takes your weaknesses and uses them.’
‘The way of what?’ asked Greg of her.
‘Caló,’ was all Magdalena could think of to say.
‘Her brain is in her feet,’ Esteban reminded them.
Magdalena knew that from a dancer, this was a compliment, especially since Nadina squeezed her hand proudly.
But Greg was uncomfortable around talk of art.
‘Come off it, mate, we’re only dancing,’ he said.
Esteban was never bested.
‘Ironic, isn’t it?’
Magdalena often idly wished she had Greg’s self-belief. If she was with him, would his self-belief rub off on her, would she be surer of herself, and be able to banish the archangels? Is that why they tormented her – because she was so unsure of herself?
Magdalena had come to dancing in an odd way – but then, she came to most things oddly, and knew this, and would’ve been embarrassed to explain herself to anyone, not that anyone asked. It can happen that way if your starting assumption is imminent banishment. Throughout her twenties, Magdalena had had too many men. She had lived alone, without family, and with very few friends. Apart from in her jobs – so far, dead-end jobs in shops – she’d made few acquaintances. She’d meet a man – anywhere – in the street, on a bus, in a shop. Because she was small and slender, almost pretty, obviously vulnerable and with downcast eyes, the man, if so inclined, and many were, would take his chances and begin to flirt with her, in case this day he hit it lucky. She liked sex, which isn’t exactly true, as she was always disappointed and seldom reached orgasm, but she was excited by the hope of sex. She liked it that, before sex, the man’s eyes went dreamy, as if he loved her, and after sex, there was the hope at least of being held for a while. She knew what she really yearned for was love, oh how her whole being yearned. In her loneliness, she’d ask herself how could one ever predict the end from the most unlikely beginnings? Wasn’t it better to have a beginning, any beginning at all, just in case? So you have hope? Because she asked such abstractions into a vast silence, Magdalena had become a slut.