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‘Everyone, this is Anna Whitehall. She’s here to put the final touches to the routine. Iron it out before the big audition.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Anna whispered, perplexed. ‘Was that the routine?’
‘Yeah, what about it?’ A girl with a bright-orange Amy Winehouse beehive shouted from the stage, a tiny nose stud glinting as she sneered.
Anna just waved a hand. ‘Nothing,’ she said, but could feel a wave of the stifled giggles washing over her, mixing with the adrenaline of her nerves, which must have done something strange to her expression because another girl sprang forward, this one with a platinum fringe flicked like Farah Fawcett, and said, eyes narrowed, ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Well, it’s just—’ Anna glanced at Jackie and Mrs McNamara for back-up, but they both just looked at her with blank expressions. ‘Well, it has no steps,’ she sniggered, as if it was obvious. She was the first to admit that this style of dancing wasn’t her forte, but it didn’t take a genius to see it was just a hotch-potch of random jumping about the place.
‘It’s got fucking steps.’ Matt, the iPod owner said, running his hand through his dirty-blond hair and frowning, his freckle-smattered nose runkling.
‘OK, Matthew, don’t swear,’ Mrs McNamara cut in.
The flicky fringe girl pointed a finger at Anna. ‘What would you know, anyway?’
Anna raised a brow, was the girl baring her teeth at her? Christ, it was like being in the zoo. Anna shook her hair and straightened her back in an attempt to maintain her hierarchy. ‘I’m a professionally trained dancer—’ she said, and was about to add her qualifications; that she was a goddamn expert in everything from classical ballet to jazz and contemporary to bloody mime, when Jackie cut in, ‘Lucy, Anna was going to be a star!’
Anna turned to see if she had deliberately said it like that to belittle her, and from the slight tilt of Jackie’s lips, realised that that was exactly what she’d done.
‘But you weren’t? You never made it?’ Lucy’s lips pulled into a smug smile and a couple of the others giggled.
Anna swallowed. ‘I grew too tall,’ she replied quickly and too defensively, she realised. ‘I would have done. But I was too tall,’ she said again, slightly slower and with a hint more poise.
‘You don’t look very tall to me. Darcey Bussell is tall.’
Anna rolled her eyes. ‘TV makes you look taller.’
‘What’s your excuse then?’ some little wavy-haired shit called from the back and they all laughed.
‘Billy!’ Mrs McNamara said with a warning tone, but even her lips twitched.
Anna ran her tongue along her bottom lip, furious. As they all eyed her with delight, she just managed to stop herself from retaliating. She was better than this, than them. She glanced up at the ceiling. There was no marble ceiling rose here, no golden cherubs carved into the plaster, no fleur-de-lis in the arched moulding, no giant spotlights or even a lighting rig, no royal box with duck-egg-blue furniture and velvet drapes. No, this was nothing.
She surveyed the motley crew, all attitude, Beats headphones round their necks and low-slung tracksuit bottoms. She thought of her stars at the Opera House ‒ their elegant grace, their long limbs like gazelles as they stretched, their fluid beauty as they poured themselves into yards of net and tulle that shone and frothed and flickered as they danced. She thought of sitting in the stalls, watching with her notepad, pen poised for notes, swallowing down the giant lump of envy, of failure, of disappointment, lodged in her throat.
She didn’t have to do this.
She glanced across the row of them as they flopped down on the edge of the stage, at the spots, the barely there stubble and the Wonderbras, and shook her head as if to say that they were lucky to have her, and then made the movement to turn and walk away but, as she did, she saw the chin jut out of Farah Fawcett Lucy and was catapulted back further, to exactly where she hadn’t wanted to go: to her interview at the English Ballet Company School. Her hands shaking and sweaty as she’d passed the state-of-the-art, air-conditioned studios, head down, eyes glancing furtively to the left and seeing only the unwavering confidence reflected off the faces of the dancers in the three-sixty wall of mirrors.
‘You will give your life, Anna, and most probably fail.’ Madame LaRoche had said, her black cigarette pants and spotty scarf making Anna feel like Audrey Hepburn was sitting crossed-legged in the chair in front of her, cigarette dangling between her red lips. ‘Less than one percent make it, Anna. And you are already old. Already you will have to catch up. One percent.’ She held her fingers close together to show the tiny amount. ‘Are you in that one percent?’
Anna hadn’t answered.
‘Of course she is.’ Her mother had crossed her hands over her Chanel bag, the only designer item she owned, that she pulled out of its tissue paper at the bottom of the wardrobe to impress at moments like this.
‘Anna?’ Madame LaRoche had fixed her in her beautiful, beady gaze. ‘Are you in the top one percent? Do you have the hunger?’
And Anna had swallowed. She thought of the auditions, of the classes she had watched, of the girls who might be thinner, harder, cleverer, tougher than her. Girls who didn’t blink when they looked at her. Who danced through stress fractures, twisted ankles, who pushed themselves till they were sick on the floor, vomiting blood they’d worked so hard. Toes bound and crushed and bleeding; blistered, swollen feet frozen in ice. The constant, gruelling quest for perfection, the hours at the barre, the gnawing hunger. Knees strapped into place, tiredness that seeped into the bones like lead, weighing you down like an astronaut suit. Did she have the hunger?
In Nettleton, Anna was the top one percent. Here. Here she felt suddenly tiny, soft, fragile, breakable, scared, nervous, terrified. She could see her father watching them leave, cheeks wet, begging her mother to stay, that he was sorry. She could see the eyes in the street as they sped out of the town. She glanced momentarily at her mother, saw her rigid jaw, her defiance, her determination.
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