“Funny time for an audition.”
“Glad you’re so pleased for me, Mum.”
“I am, Son.” She was trying now, he had to admit, to put some enthusiasm into her voice. “It’s just that...”
“I know, Mum. You were hoping I’d got a real job.”
“I really am pleased for you, Son. It’s just that I should be getting back to bed. I’ve had my tablets.” A pause, then she repeated, “I really am pleased for you, Son. And perhaps getting the job will encourage you to lay off the—”
“Perhaps it will, Mum.” That’s the least of your worries about me, old girl, he mouthed silently. He lit another Marlboro and puffed smoke into the receiver as he hung up. “Sleep tight, Mum.”
As he ran the night’s performance through his mind, he shuddered with the conflicting tensions he always felt after he’d fooled people, shoved himself right into the middle of things, especially in a place he’d never been to before. His mind bounced brutally between clarity and confusion: decisive one moment, muddled as all hell the next.
He took the knife from the toolbox in which he had carried it to the theatre and put it under his pillow. He was not sure why he did this — and before he lay down he returned the knife to the box. The way things had gone tonight, it was unlikely he’d need it, although it was a worry about Danny Harkness. He hadn’t known Danny was in the ACDE, and though he’d picked him straight off — those bandy legs were a dead giveaway — he was pretty sure Danny hadn’t recognized him. So it should be all right, especially as Danny didn’t know his real name or where he came from.
That thought made him wonder where Danny lived. He consulted the phone book on the bedside table. There was a Harkness, Daniel Tomas listed at a place in the suburb of Glenelg. He remembered how Danny used to make a performance of having an ordinary middle name spelt an extraordinary way (“Well, it’s extraordinary if you’re not Hungarian, and I’m not”). He might call Danny later. Maybe, maybe not. He always woke up a couple of times during the night — his overactive brain, he supposed.
His imagination was going full blast. He climbed out of bed and put the knife back under the pillow. You can’t count on things not coming unstuck just because they couldn’t look better... It felt like insurance having the knife near him, ready for use. As he closed his eyes, he imagined a redness sliding along the blade. The image was so vivid he almost turned the pillow over to see if it was stained with blood.
When they had showered and were back in their street clothes, Bronwyn gathered the dancers around her.
“Sorry about blowing my top before,” she said. “You all coped marvelously.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s take this slowly. See if we can make some sort of sense of what happened. Did anyone recognize him?”
Danny Harkness opened his mouth, then shut it. He coughed and said, “He was wearing a mask, just like ours.”
Bronwyn had the impression he had been about to. say something else. “I was hoping one of you might have known him, spotted something about his physique or style that rang a bell.”
When the dancers shook their heads, she said quietly, as if afraid of eavesdroppers, “Please, not a word about this to anyone. God only knows what Mike Gillmore would do if he heard.”
“Surely he’d be pleased?” Bridget James said. “It seemed exactly what Mike Gillmore would have done if he’d used thirteen dancers.”
“The point is,” Bronwyn irritably reminded her, “Mike choreographed it for twelve, because that’s the way he...”
The sentence trailed off as she realized that, having begun to recover from the brain-freezing effect of the night’s performance, she knew who the thirteenth dancer was, although she did not know his name or where he came from or where she might find him.
The acclaim the ACDE received when it danced Six of One — the last item of a triple bill — on the opening night of the Adelaide Festival had enhanced the sense of amazed gratitude Bronwyn Baker felt at acquiring the work so easily.
When she had gone to Munich a year ago, she had hardly dared to hope that she would return to Adelaide with Mike Gillmore’s permission for the ACDE to dance his internationally acclaimed masterpiece, the first work he had devised when he became artistic director of the Munich Dance Theatre. He allowed her to have Six of One because it would be the centerpiece of the ACDE’s program at the Adelaide Festival. Leading ensembles and soloists representing all the performing arts from around the world would be at the festival, along with an international clutch of influential critics; and, for all the fame he had achieved, Mike Gillmore was always happy to garner a new clutch of reviews for his scrapbook.
“I’ve always liked Australian dancers,” he told Bronwyn in Munich. “They stretch themselves right past what you think they’re capable of. We get them through here regularly, though they don’t stay all that long...”
“They probably get extra homesick, being so much further from home than everyone else,” Bronwyn said. “It’s easy to mistake that for unreliability.”
“Not much for me to complain about on that score,” Gillmore said. “Though we did have one Aussie oddball through only a few months back. I could never decide whether he was a card-carrying crazy or just a weirdo.”
“That’s not much of a choice,” Bronwyn said lightly. She was concerned that Gillmore’s recollection of how one of her countrymen had behaved could be a problem in her negotiations for Six of One.
“I haven’t the vaguest what his real name was.” Gillmore frowned and smiled at the memory. “He was a great dancer, no denying that. But he had this trouble sticking to the choreography, though he was always saying how much he admired my stuff. After a few performances he’d start changing pieces as he went along. Probably had quite a choreographic gift, something to be encouraged. But not when he’s dancing in my work!”
Still worried that whatever this crazy Australian had done might dissuade Gillmore from giving her Six of One, Bronwyn asked, “Did he cause any other trouble?”
“Hard to put a finger on it. Something about him — a hint of barely repressed violence, perhaps — upset the other dancers. They couldn’t praise his dancing enough, but he was an unsettling influence.”
Gillmore’s tone suggested that he did not want to continue criticizing one Australian to another. “Anyway, he left us after a few months. I heard he — or some other Aussie like him — turned up in Frankfurt and Stuttgart and got himself into companies, and into some sort of trouble. There were some stories on the grapevine from Switzerland as well.”
A few hours after the thirteenth dancer’s unscheduled debut with the ACDE, Bridget James said to Danny Harkness as they lay in bed, “You were thinking about something else, weren’t you?”
“Sorry.”
She slid her fingers gently along his sweat-filmed chest. “Nothing to apologize for. Not great, but it’ll do to be going on with.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“I wasn’t complaining, Danny; just making a comment. You didn’t have your mind on the job.”
“The job! Pardon me if—”
“Stop dodging what’s really on your mind.” When Danny said nothing she added, “You know who he is, don’t you?”
There was a long pause before Danny said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s crazy.”
“We all are, to be in this business. A life of pain and five minutes of fame, if we’re lucky. But he’s a great dancer.”
“Better than us, and we’re bloody good.”
“So why not talk about him?”
Danny put an arm around Bridget’s shoulders, and for a few moments she thought he was not going to say anything more. Then he gave a nervous laugh, an embarrassed giggle. “To tell the truth, even thinking about him makes me nervous.” Danny was silent again, but Bridget sensed he would say more if she let him take his time.