“What are you up to, rattling around in there?” his mother demanded from the kitchen.
“Just looking for some string,” he shouted back. The sideboard drawers were a repository for all sorts of odds and ends, from rubber bands and exhausted ballpoints to old postage stamps that his mother fancied might turn out to be valuable one day. “A strap on my backpack’s busted.” That was true, and he’d better fix it after he had checked on the knife.
The carving set, knife, fork, and sharpening steel, all bone-handled and marked Made in Sheffield, had been among the few wedding presents his parents had been given. Twenty-eight years later, it was the only one left. Everything else had worn out or been broken or lost. The carving set had not been used since his father had run out on him and his mother and sister fifteen years ago. The dinner service his mother had bought early in the marriage had also been kept out of service. It was turquoise, decorated with a border of red, orange, and blue flowers and a band of gold, as fake as the carving set’s “walnut” box. She insisted it had become an heirloom, to be treasured and passed on to him when he married and started a family.
Every three months or so, on one of her special cleaning days, his mother would check that the unused china had not in some mysterious way been chipped or cracked. She would also take out the carving-set box and give it a polish with her duster. “I like to keep some things for best,” she would say, replacing the box in the drawer. But best, whatever that was — having visitors and not eating in the kitchen, he supposed — never came.
He ran his thumb along the knife’s edge. Not all that sharp, but the point, when he removed the cork that his mother kept on it (“You can never be too careful when it comes to knives”), looked dangerous enough, and that was what counted.
He’d need the knife only if killing turned out to be unavoidable. He didn’t really believe things would come to that, although the stirring in his gut told him he was already hoping they would. So it would be just as well to have a good knife. It seemed to him the only weapon an amateur — well, semi-amateur — could safely use. He supposed he could buy a knife in Adelaide, but what if the shops were closed when he needed to get one in a hurry? To be on the safe side, he’d arm himself in advance. His mother had done one of her big cleanups the other day. It wasn’t likely she’d miss the knife.
He stuck the cork back on the point and shoved the knife into the bottom of his backpack, under the spare socks and underpants and the bodytights that he knew he had dyed exactly the right shades — midnight blue and what he thought of as dried blood. With some string he attempted a repair job on the broken strap, but soon gave it up as not worth the trouble.
He walked through the kitchen and out to the drive and tossed the pack onto the backseat of the 1972 Holden sedan. It was a real hoon’s car to look at, ready for the junkyard, most people would reckon; but the engine was in good enough nick, and he was allowing himself plenty of time to do the 1600-mile drive, halfway across the country, from Brisbane to Adelaide. He’d have been in a rush if he’d wanted to be there for opening night, but he’d decided against that. He couldn’t risk running into Mike Gillmore, who, he’d heard on a radio program about the festival, would be in Adelaide for a few days.
Back in the kitchen, he thought how old and tired his mother looked in her faded floral apron and scruffy pink “silk” slippers, with a hairnet imprisoning an unsuccessful do-it-yourself perm; sixty at least, if you were asked to make a guess, though she still had a couple of years to go before she was fifty.
He felt only a flicker of guilt about going away again so soon. He might have found it harder to leave if her grizzling didn’t get him down so much. Sometimes he wanted to punch the old girl, to shut her up. It wasn’t like he was leaving her on her own. His sister and Bruce, the guy she was living with, would call in fairly regularly to check she was okay, and that money she’d scored in her auntie’s will a few years back meant she was never short of a dollar.
He couldn’t wait to be out of the place. And it wasn’t just that he’d be glad to go; he had to go.
“If I look like being away more than a couple of weeks, Mum,” he said, making an effort to rustle up a grin, “I’ll give you a call.”
“Give me a call anyway.” She could never pick when he was kidding her.
“Okay, if I’m near a phone.”
“Make it your business to be near one,” she snapped. Then her face softened for a moment. She went into her bedroom and took fifty dollars from the purse she kept on a shelf in the wardrobe. She returned to the kitchen and pushed the money into the pocket of his denim shirt, next to the packet of Marlboros. She pursed her lips at this evidence that he hadn’t kicked the habit she was always on about.
“Thanks, Mum” He kissed her cheek. “Well, gotta be off.”
“I wish you’d try and get a job.”
“You know I’m trying for the only job I want.”
“Oh, that.”
“Yeah. Oh, that’s what this trip’s all about.”
“You’ve hardly been back two months, after wasting all that time gallivanting round Germany and those other places.”
“Don’t start, Mum.” He couldn’t keep the heat from his voice, though he tried to, out of gratitude for the unexpected fifty dollars. “Be seeing you.”
She looked as if she was thinking about saying something else, perhaps have another go about his smoking, but he wasn’t going to hang round while she made up her mind. He gave a quick wave and avoided looking at her again as he backed the rattling Holden down the drive.
They were all masked, but to Bronwyn Baker they would never be anonymous. She could recognize each of them by their bodies. They were not perfect bodies, just nearly perfect, and their individuality was vital to the harmony of contrasts she encouraged in their dancing.
Danny Harkness, for instance, had slightly bowed legs. He made no attempt to hide his “deformity,” and this refusal to be embarrassed by it gave his dancing a cheeky arrogance that was its most attractive quality.
Bridget James’s broad shoulders and boldly muscled thighs and calves meant that she could never be a classically ethereal ballerina. Those legs propelled her into jumps of a height to challenge a man’s. Yet there was nothing masculine about Bridget’s style. She had the confidence of a strong, beautiful woman who took pride in what her body could do, and when she and Danny danced together, her strength and his arrogance combined, sexually and aesthetically, in a way that always excited the audience.
They had such similar, distinctive good looks — wide foreheads, voluptuously defined mouths, slanting green eyes above high cheekbones, orientally black and glossy hair, his tied back in a ponytail, hers coiled at the nape of her neck — that they were often mistaken for twins.
Now, their resemblance diminished by the uniformity imposed on the group by the masks, Danny and Bridget were dancing together, as excitingly as ever, but that was not why Bronwyn was holding her breath as she glared at the stage.
Well, at least, she thought, trying to comfort herself, it’s not opening night; no critics here, none of those nitpickers who’d rather find fault with everything than enjoy the dancing. She turned cold with the thought of how Michael Gillmore, the choreographer of Six of One, would have reacted to what was happening onstage. Thank God he’d had to go back to Germany after only a few days in Adelaide.
She nudged Robert Elston, who was sitting beside her in the seventh row of the front stalls in the Festival Theatre. “There’s thirteen up there,” she whispered.