Nina Ellis is a British-American writer and PhD student based between the UK and Pakistan. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, 3:AM, Ambit, The Mays anthology, and elsewhere. Her doctoral thesis at Cambridge is a biography of Lucia Berlin.
It’s eleven o’clock at night in Rome, which means it’s ten o’clock back home in London. I open my hotel room window and look across the rooftops, towards the station. Sounds rise from the street below: cars, motorcycles, music from the hotel restaurant on the ground floor, people chatting so far beneath me they could be speaking any language. Touring stopped being fun five years ago, when every city started to feel like every other city, even Rome. I wish I could talk to Angel about it, but she’s a Soloist now and doesn’t see where I’m coming from.
On our flight from Paris today, I decided to quit ballet and retrain as an osteopath. On the train into Rome from the airport, I changed my mind again: without ballet, who would I be? I go back and forth like this all the time, between quitting the British Ballet Company and staying for another season. It’s a tombé, pas-de-bourrée, glissade, assemblé to the right and a tombé, pas-de-bourrée, glissade, assemblé to the left. You end up back where you started.
I close the window and unroll onto my bed. The mattress presses into my vertebrae. Coccyx, sacrum, lumbar. Tho-ra-cic, cer-vi-cal. Anatomy class at ballet school was the last time I was the best at something. The British Ballet School is a boarding school in the middle of Richmond Park, but on Sundays we were allowed to walk into East Sheen to buy sweets from Woolworths and Deep Heat from Boots. Angel and the others would follow me through the park, repeating: coccyx, sacrum, lumbar, tarsals, metatarsals, phalanges. Past the deer and up to the gates. Radius, ulna, the radius crosses. Through the gates to the outside world.
I won the Academic Excellence trophy that year; but now, at twenty-six, I’m lying on top of the covers in this hotel room, feeling the seasons of Cygnets, Petals, and Snowflakes in my knees, and remembering what it was like to be the best and not just part of a bigger body. A corps de ballet. In La Bayadère, the show we’re touring this summer, I play a Shade in Act Three. I enter and exit and that’s pretty much it. A Shade is like a ghost—the ghost of a bayadère, a temple-dancer—except there are twenty-four of us and we’re not scary at all. We’re not even listed in the program.
The hotel room ceiling is beige, blank. No interesting stains or cracks. I stretch my hamstrings, pulling my shins down to touch my forehead, one leg at a time. If I were an osteopath I’d get my name carved onto a gold plaque and nail it above the buzzer to my studio.
Cosmo is in the room next to mine. He’s a Principal Dancer, and wherever we go, he gets the hotel concierge to put him in the room between me and Angel. This is bad because he takes his electronic keyboard on tour with him and insists on playing it without earphones, loud through the wall. ‘Für Elise,’ ‘Ode to Joy,’ ‘Clair de Lune.’ Beginners’ classics. Sometimes I wonder whether he’s playing to impress Angel or to annoy me.
I took piano lessons at ballet school, after Miss Dearborn told my mother that my port de bras was too tense. We paid extra for those lessons. We paid extra for everything. I was the only fee-paying student at the school—fee fodder, Angel once called me, before we made friends. Angel grew up on a council estate in Hammersmith and I grew up in a townhouse in Kensington, but we both really grew up at the British Ballet School. In class, in rehearsal, backstage, onstage.
Angel comes into my room without knocking. She’s as beautiful as she’s ever been. Her face has become more angular, lately, and her dark eyes glint above those high cheekbones. She could have been a film star if she hadn’t wanted to be a dancer, and maybe she still could, except she’d have to learn to do accents. Even in French lessons at school, she always sounded like herself.
She lies down next to me on the bed and tilts her head onto my pillow. I miss sharing beds with you, I want to say, but I keep quiet.
“Can you believe we’re in Rome again?” says Angel.
I can, but I shake my head and smile.
Angel smiles back. “We always have fun here.” She has this warmth to her voice that makes you feel like you can do anything as long as you’re with her.
I sit up, unrolling through cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacrum. “Want to go out?” I ask, and Angel nods. She follows me through the door and down the hallway to the lifts. I want to escape Cosmo, but as we pass his room his piano playing stops.
Cosmo joined the British Ballet Company in March, and he’s been haunting Angel ever since, getting closer and closer. She says that he’s just a friend, but she’s been telling people that I’m just a friend forever and we both know that’s not true.
I press the button for the lifts. It’s too late, though: Cosmo’s behind us.
“You wanted to leave without me?” he asks. Angel giggles.
On the street, we hail a cab. Cosmo takes the front seat and Angel and I climb into the back. We pass the Teatro, which has a poster advertising our show stretched across it: The British Ballet Company in La Bayadère. Cosmo’s on the poster, fifteen-feet-tall. He points it out to the taxi driver and they exchange sentences in Italian. I don’t understand. I think how nice it would be to speak Italian. To take taxis everywhere, speaking Italian.
The cab stops in a busy piazza. People with normal bodies and normal jobs fill the square with bodies and laughter. There’s a fountain on a plinth in their midst.
“Let’s get pizza,” I say, but Angel and Cosmo raise their eyebrows. I shrug. “Well, we can at least have a beer.”
We find a restaurant in a corner of the piazza and buy bottles of Peroni Leggera to take outside. I think how nice it would be to eat pizza every day and not have sesamoiditis or shin splints or blisters. Cosmo asks me to take a picture of him with Angel and then makes me wait while she fixes his hair. I look up and around us. This square is romantic. I think of the Nutcracker pas de deux I’ve always wanted to dance but never will, because I’ll never make Soloist, forget First Soloist or Principal Dancer.
Then someone steps on my foot and I yelp like a little kid. “Mi scusi,” says the foot-stepper. He’s in his early twenties, younger than me and shorter, too, but he looks me up and down anyway. He’s wearing khaki trousers and deck shoes with no socks. “You’re English,” he says.
I shake the pain out of my foot. I hate talking to strangers.
“I’m English, too,” this stranger continues. “I’m from London.”
“That’s nice.” I glance over my shoulder for Angel, but she’s gone. Cosmo has disappeared, too, like something out of that ballet Napoli. Trapdoor and dry ice.
“You are English,” says the guy, as if that’s the craziest thing in the world. He looks me up and down again so I look him up and down, too, which makes him fidget. He seems less creepy than he did at first, more like a kid pretending to be a man.
“Listen”—I gesture to the empty space behind me—“I’ve got to find my friends.”
“You lost them?”
I shake my head, but he takes this as a Yes and starts making suggestions. Maybe they’re buying drinks. Maybe they’ve gone into a bar to use the loo. I take out my phone and ring Angel and then Cosmo, but neither of them picks up.
“I know Rome,” the guy tells me proudly. “I can help you track them down.”
I’m too tired to disappoint him—it’s easier to answer his questions. He asks me about Angel and Cosmo and what it’s like being a dancer in the British Ballet Company. I see the usual thoughts cross his mind when I talk about ballet (flexible, huh). Then he leads me back to the place with the Peroni Leggera, but Angel and Cosmo aren’t there.
“That’s a shame,” he says. “I’m Doug, by the way.” He holds out his hand for me to shake, and his grip is as clammy as it looks.
“Minty.” My name is Araminta, actually, not that I tell people that. I look back down at my phone and send Angel a message. I ask where she is. I don’t mention Cosmo.
“So what will you do now, Minty?”
“They’re probably waiting for me at our hotel,” I say, though I know that’s not true. I look around one last time. Angel and Cosmo aren’t in the square—but across the street, cobblestones lead over a hill and out of sight. “See you later,” I say to Doug, and hurry up the hill in my trainers before he can stop me.
Once I bridge the lip of the hill, I slow to a walk. I’ve lost Doug, but Angel and Cosmo aren’t here either. The street is deserted. The skin on my arms prickles. When I look over my shoulder, though, there’s no one behind me.
I walk on and think: Ballet is a failure before you’ve even begun. In La Bayadère, which I danced in Paris twelve hours previously and am billed to dance here in Rome twelve hours in the future, and forever and ever until my body gives out, the Shades enter at the beginning of Act Three. During the interval, we’ve stood in the wings, stretching our Achilles tendons and pushing into our cou de pieds. Then the applause for the conductor breaks into a shower. We lock pinkie fingers for luck. The curtain rises.
Cosmo runs on stage from upstage left, and throws himself onto a low bed. We shift from foot to foot in the wings, rubbing rosin into our soles and watching Cosmo as we wait for our cue. Cosmo isn’t himself anymore: he’s a warrior smoking opium and mourning his lost love. And we, the Shades, are the ghost of this lost love, multiplied twenty-four times. We’re his ideal woman.
A harp scatters the air, and the first of us appears: Angel, at the top of the ramp, except now she’s not Angel. She’s not even a Shade, really, because she’s First Shade, with all the solos. She descends: step-step, penché, step, petit cambré. I follow: step-step, penché, step, petit cambré. My bottom leg is steady. Angel and I are aligned. Soon there are eight of us onstage, and then sixteen, and then twenty-four. Step-step, penché, step, petit cambré. Angel as First Shade followed by twenty-three of us as anonymous Shades. We weave back and forth across the stage, like lines on a page, except going both ways—left to right and then right to left again. Our white tutus shiver in the same wind. We are each other.
But no one can live up to that male fantasy, and who would want to? Our arabesques will never be perfectly parallel. Our pointe shoes will always make a sound as they touch the floor. So ballet is failure before we’ve even begun. We will never be the warrior’s ideal; we’re not even temple-dancers. We’re underpaid women in repurposed tutus from last year’s Swan Lake.
I trip over my trainers, stumble, and catch myself. At the British Ballet School, our blazer pockets were embroidered with the school’s motto, Strength and Grace. But I’ve never been graceful, except onstage. Not back at school and not here in Rome.
At the bottom of the hill, I turn right, through an archway. Another empty street—no Angel or Cosmo to be seen anywhere. I still have goosebumps on my arms, though, and the skin on the back of my neck is prickling now, too. I hear footsteps behind me. I turn and someone ducks into a doorway. “Doug?” I say. I know it’s him.
“I’m sorry,” says Doug, stepping into the light. “I was worried that you’d get lost.” His nose runs down his face, long and lopsided.
“Not cool, Doug,” I begin, and then I hesitate. The night is dark, and I can’t go to bed until I find Angel. Besides, Doug is harmless. I could take him in a fight. “Come on, then,” I say.
“With you?”
I nod and start walking again, as if I know where I’m going. Doug falls into step beside me—but the skin on my arms and neck is still prickling.
“Which ballet are you in at the moment?” asks Doug, and I’m grateful to him for filling the silence. I explain about La Bayadère, and that bayadères are temple-dancers, women who’ve given their lives to serving their gods.
Doug nods like I’m saying something very interesting, although I doubt that he’s taking any of it in. I examine his profile. Small mouth, long neck, skin the color of a new peach. I clear my throat. “I only date women,” I say, “just so you know.”
“Really?” Doug looks shocked, but I’m used to it. People always assume that I’m straight.
Then it happens. We walk into another piazza, and something catches my eye on the steps of the building in its center. My breath stops in my throat, but it’s not Angel—it can’t be. Angel was wearing her green dress when we left the hotel, and the woman on the steps ahead of us is a ballet dancer in full costume, dressed as a Shade. I watch her as she curves out of a cambré: cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacrum.
I know a Shade when I see one. There’s the white tutu, of course, and the crown of flowers in her hair. The pale tights and pointe shoes. The bodice of the tutu, embroidered to gleam. And the long, semi-transparent white scarf, which begins in the Shade’s chignon and loops along her arms. La Bayadère is set in the Royal India of the Past, according to the program. That’s what the looping scarf claims to allude to, though like most things in ballet, it gets it totally wrong.
Maybe this Shade was the presence I felt behind me in the darkness. Recognition blossoms in my chest: a warmth that feels like coming home, though that makes no sense. I move faster and faster until I’m running towards the Shade—“Hello!” I call. But she arches her long back and rises into a bourrée, which takes her gliding around the corner of the building. “Wait,” I say, breathless now. By the time I reach the steps, she’s gone.
I feel Doug’s hand grip my shoulder and I yelp again. “Are you okay, Minty?” he asks. “Why did you run away like that?”
“I thought I saw my friends.” I look at my trainers and sigh. Ballet is finally getting to me.
“Do you want me to leave?” Doug sounds annoyed. I look up and see that he’s sulking, which is silly given that I never asked him to follow me in the first place.
I’m too spooked to ask him to go, though, so I make a sound that doesn’t exactly mean No.
“Oh good,” says Doug. Then he turns back to the building in front of us. “I love the Pantheon. It’s my favorite building in Rome.”
“This is the Pantheon?” It looks like a theater, with its columns and height and breadth. I think of the church halls I performed in as a kid in Kensington (Dibley-Sewell Prize for Potential, 2001), the theater at the British Ballet School (fee fodder), and now the Opera House in London (corps de ballet)—and the opera houses of Paris and Vienna and Rome on our various summer tours. My ceilings have kept getting higher and my walls have kept getting wider, but I’ve stayed the same size within them and now I’m drowning in space.
“It was a temple at first,” says Doug, gesturing to the Pantheon as though he made it himself. Its columns are spaced as evenly as Shades along an orchestra pit. Step-step, penché, step, petit cambré—eleven hours until our next performance, and I’m so tired. I’ve always hated performing. I even hated the company scouts who came to watch us in our last year of ballet school. All clipboards and clicky heels on sprung studio floors. My practice had always been for something larger, something intangible, and the scouts tainted it with their gaze. But when they gave me a place in the corps de ballet, people told me I was lucky.
Doug puts his arm around me.
“For Christ’s sake, Doug,” I say and duck away from him.
“I thought you were cold.”
“It’s July.”
“You were shivering.”
“I’m just tired.” And it’s true. I’m tired of ballet. Tired of being a Shade. Tired of running after Angel, of tagging along with her and Cosmo. I’ve been tired of it for months, and suddenly I’m tired of being tired of it.
“Want to go to a party?” asks Doug.
“Whose party?”
“My dad’s. It’s a big one.”
I stop myself from laughing out loud. Then it occurs to me that I am actually curious about who Doug’s dad is and what his party will be like. “Okay,” I say.
Doug leads us down another street. I still feel like we’re being followed—but then he takes a clementine out of his pocket and its scent draws my mind back to the clementine I peeled for Angel in bed in Year Ten. It’s a leap, but clementines always make me think of her. That afternoon, she was faking a fever and I’d had two fillings so we were allowed to skip lessons. We lay together in my bed, feeding each other pieces of fruit. My mouth twisted away from the dental anaesthetic. The dormitory curved out of sight at both ends. I pressed my lips to Angel’s and ate up the warm smell of her mouth. My hand followed her neck to her breast and down: sternum, iliac wing, iliopubic eminence. Beautiful words. Beautiful folds inside of her.
When Doug offers me a piece of his clementine, I say no.
We cross a main street, into the sound of bass and clapping. “How big is this party?” I ask Doug, and then I interrupt myself. “Look,” I say, “there!”
The Shade is bending towards us around a corner. Her arms part the empty air. She’s closer to us now than she was at the Pantheon and I can see her clearly. White tutu, crown of flowers, looping scarf—and framed by her arms, her beautiful face.
I’d know that face anywhere.
“What are you pointing at?” I look at Doug and he looks confused.
When I turn back to the corner, Angel is gone. I blink and blink but I know what I saw and I see what I am: a woman walking around Rome with a man after midnight, hallucinating the ghost of her lost love. I’m not even a warrior. I’m a cliché.
I force a laugh and touch Doug’s arm. “Never mind.” Then I start walking again, down another alleyway, towards the music, the bass, and clapping.
Within minutes, we’re there. Doug’s dad must be important: His party is in another piazza, behind a metal barrier guarded by two men in suits. They don’t even ask for our names: They simply bow and step aside, taking the barrier with them, and we’re pulled into the beat as it repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and—
I close my eyes and let my body move inside the music. My shoulders roll. My hands weave. My feet pivot on the cobblestones. I open my eyes and the piazza is a kaleidoscope. Faces double and triple around me. Round mouths, round earrings, round breasts, rounded pupils, yellow silk, bunny ears, older men, and younger women. Across from me, Doug moves awkwardly in his t-shirt. The fountain behind him is lit up bright gold.
I feel a hand on my waist and spin towards it. A very tall woman in bunny ears is smiling down at me. I don’t recognize her. I keep spinning so that her face repeats and repeats and repeats with the beat. “Sei carinissima,” she says. Her giant earrings gleam like grapes.
“Minty doesn’t speak Italian,” Doug says. “Where’s my father?”
The woman nods and drops her hand from my waist. “This way, my Lord,” she says, and cuts a path towards the fountain. Doug follows her and I follow him. My Lord? I smile to myself. Strangers move past us, drinks slopping out of the glasses at the ends of their arms. A man tilts a bottle into my mouth. “Saluti,” he says, and I splutter. On a glowing platform to our left, a woman is dancing in a circle of men. She’s wearing a green dress. As she turns, my stomach twists.
It’s Angel, my own Angel, her wrists bending and melting like a Shade.
Then the circle of men closes around her, blocking my view.
“Excuse me,” I say, and I split away from Doug. Beyond and between the men on the platform, Angel’s dress flashes green in the heat. I take the stairs to the platform two at a time and break into the circle of men. They’re whistling, their fingers snapping. Angel’s long back unrolls: cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacrum.
“Angel,” I call, but she can’t hear me over the music. Her eyes are empty and so are her arms until Cosmo rushes to fill them. Jealousy fills my stomach and I picture myself dividing them, taking his place. But then I imagine the circle of men watching us, whistling and snapping. I can’t dance with Angel for them.
So Angel and Cosmo spin, the men around them whistle and snap, and I stand on the edge of the platform, caught between watching and dancing. Tombé, pas-de-bourrée, glissade, assemblé to the right and back to the left again. I think I finally know what I’m going to do. I’m going to leave the British Ballet Company, and I’m going to find out who I am without ballet. Without Angel.
I turn away from her and walk back down the stairs, into the crowd. Around me, couples spin together and spin out and spin together, men and women in pairs. I remember the Nutcracker pas de deux I’ve always wanted to dance but never will. Angel and I saw it on our first school trip to the Opera House. She sat beside me in a box high up in the Grand Tier. Everything around us was velvet. Our chairs were painted gold. Arpeggios swelled out of the orchestra pit, full and steady as a pop song. The prince and princess moved in unison, legs parallel, gazes aligned. The princess unwound into a pirouette, the prince caught her, and Angel caught my hand. The oboe rose, quick and strange, and the princess jumped and landed in her prince’s arms. I put my lips close to Angel’s ear. I’d give my life to this, I whispered. Her skin smelled like hairspray. Her earring sparkled.
