Angelique

You have to pay to get in now.

Five dollars.

I’m not sure if I mind or not. I try to imagine what the cashier would say if I told her why I was here. Just an awkward, sympathetic smile – but that’ll be five dollars please.

Do you pay to walk into a graveyard?

This isn’t quite the same, ma’am.

A conversation we don’t have. Cos I’m not that cheap. And this: you can’t say it’s not beautiful. I walk down the stairs into the belly of the thing, and the atmosphere is heavy, sumptuous, saturated. You feel as if you’re walking into something sacred. The right feeling.

This was a functioning theatre back in the day. It was regularly alive with music and drama, with sounds that carried throughout this great space, that bounced off the walls, that seemed to flow from all sides. They say the stage still gets used sometimes, a special performance or the like gets put on. Everything lights up.

And in the meantime, this murky, soupy, gold-touched light. And the walls still crawling with decoration. All the way up, elaborate curls and clusters; creamy plaster against pink/beige walls, a pearlescent lustre; great big carved beams, coloured glass. A mural on the ceiling that seems to be mostly a tangled garden; but there are tiny fairies in there, pulling back the thorns, wearing rose petals like hats, their finely rendered hands reaching out towards an audience sat far below. Thick, patterned carpet. Velvety chairs. It’s pure old-world luxury. It’s the past reaching out towards the present and offering a hand to hold.

Well, I’m here for a different past. For the stage, when it was in full swing. When Angelique was up there, dancing, in full ballerina dress, toes pointed, hair all braided and pulled back into an elegant bun.

Twenty years ago, today.

“Peter and the Wolf, wasn’t it?”

I don’t see her until she’s already seen me, and she’s had time to come walking up beside me and speak to me.

And then: “Sonya?”

Angelique’s sister.

“Frances Coburn. Yes?”

“Yes. Franny, I was back in those days.”

“I know. Yes. You were so…”

“Plump?”

“I was going to say cute.”

“You were only three years older.”

“I’ve been looking at some old photos. Thinking… you know. About Angelique. And this was the day. Her performance. This was… it was the moment in her life.”

“I thought I’d be the only one who remembered. That part of it.”

Sonya smiled. “Oh no. She was non-stop about it. Prattling on like any twelve-year-old girl. I thought it was annoying because I was fifteen at the time, and that’s what you think about a twelve-year-old sister. And I didn’t know. Nobody knew. She was so beautiful up there; she was her perfect self. She was, wasn’t she?”

I have a single rose in my hand. “She’d never been happier.”

Sonya has a bunch of daisies. “No. It was… it was like seeing a whole other side of her. Like I’d never seen her before. Even through all the cynical fog of being a teenager, I could see how much it meant to her. Gosh, she must have already been sick, even then.”

My eyes are just flashing with images, with memories of how perfect she was. How she filled the stage, even though she was just one dancer amongst many. Twirling, jumping, swaying low with outstretched hands. Running away backstage. Back out again in costume as a woodland animal. She’d been a fox…hadn’t she? In one scene. A hedgehog in another.

The first and only time she wore make-up.

I said, “You couldn’t tell. She really did dance up there on air.”

All the while, we know now, her bones were already bending beneath the tumours, her body was thick with them. So well hidden inside her. That’s what let them spread so far and wide.

Weeks. A twelve-year old girl trying to get her head around that. Her best friend: in weeks, there’d be no more of her. Just gone. I had to hear it twice, three times, before I could connect with it, believe it, properly understand. Rejecting my mother’s proffered embrace and just rushing out into the street, running down to the park, kicking the shock out into the air as I worked the swing. There’s no pubescent playbook for something like that..

Sonya says, “Hey, do you remember Danny Yorke?”

I nod.

“I saw him just a week ago. He was on a street corner, begging for change. I wasn’t sure at first that it was him. But I’ve heard rumours, you know, about the drugs and all that. That he went right downhill, right to the bottom.”

“Did you give him any? Change?”

Sonya colours, shakes her head, “No, I couldn’t.”

“Good,” I say. And that makes me sound like a bitch. But Danny, he was the bully who haunted Angelique’s little life. He was the one who started calling her “Leaky” and the one who’d taunt her with the name after class, him and his friends, following her home, chanting it in sequence. He’d shove her, he’d flick her forehead, he’d throw bits of food at her or squirt her with his drink. And I know, I know, that he was thirteen years old. But Angelique didn’t have much, she didn’t have time for much, she didn’t have the years for it, and so he left a bigger, dirtier mark on her life than anyone could have known.

Sonya says, “I should have given him money.”

“Screw that.”

“He’s a middle-aged man, he’s probably sorry now, in hindsight.”

“Yeah well. Did you see him at the funeral?”

“He was a kid.”

“I’m glad he’s a homeless junkie. Sorry, but I am.”

There’s a smile on her face, in response to my vitriol. She says, “You really bear a grudge. And I mean, you sound so fierce, so protective of her after all these years. It’s… nice to hear it.”

“We were friends.”

“I know. I know you were. And thank you. For being that friend. For always being there for her… and liking her. I wasn’t as good a sister as you were a friend. Not by a long shot. I’ve got as much to feel bad about as Danny bloody Yorke.” And there are tears welling up in her eyes.

“Well, you remembered this day. And how much it meant to her. And sisters… that’s what sisters are like. All over the world.”

Her. Here. Just like me. Just the two of us.

“She was incredible.  She was…”

“I know.” And I wrap my arm around her. Enfold each other in an embrace. So weird to feel the warmth of another person’s body, to take comfort in it. We have these shared memories, this common cause. Though actually, we don’t even know each other that well. But to pull back now and ask, ‘how are you these days?’ ‘are you married?’ ‘kids?’ ‘what are you doing for a job these days?’ – that’d just cheapen this moment. And what brings us here, that’s profound, that’s something sacred and special. It only belongs to those few of us who get it, who remember it, and who really understand.

People must wonder at us right now. And when the janitor comes at the end of the day, coming up to the stage and seeing one rose, and a small bouquet of daisies, beside an adolescent girl’s photograph, he must wonder: now what’s that all about?

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work