Everywhere I Look (33 page)

Heathcote is forty, old for a dancer. He is world famous and garlanded with honours, but there is nothing outlandish about his body, only a fine uprightness and strength. His demeanour is that of a bloke you might be standing next to in a supermarket queue: he has a friendly, ordinary manner, very short hair and a grin full of big white teeth.

Eastoe, at twenty-six, is approaching what I'm told are a dancer's peak years. She's a small woman, barely 5'2" at a guess, but, like Heathcote, not at all extreme in shape. Her build, light but strong, reminds me subliminally of someone from my distant past. She calls up in me a strange affection, a desire to choose her as my favourite to watch. Over the five days I spend in the studios, I rack my brains for the source of this recognition, and one morning, when I see her yank her leotard down over her bottom like a kid at the pool, I grasp it: she reminds me of myself and my sisters, when we were thin, muscly legged schoolgirls in the 1950s. This isn't vanity. It's just a measure of how unexaggerated her build is, how close to the everyday; yet she has brought this standard-issue healthy Australian body to a pitch of shapeliness and power by years of concentrated labour that the ordinary teenage girl could barely conceive of, let alone aspire to.

The ballet mistress, in tight black with a ponytail and the soft voice that seems to go with the job, is guiding the dancers through the steps, sharpening and correcting and focusing. Heathcote and Eastoe grin as they work. Their manner suggests that on some level they find their efforts comic, even ludicrous. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Is this the right grip? Would it be better if I did it that way? They seem to have even the backs of their necks under conscious control. Then Heathcote steps up behind Eastoe, seizes her waist, and before I can see what he's doing, she's soaring high above his head, giggling as she flies. He places her lightly back on her feet.

Rain patters on the roof. Again and again they tackle the difficult passage. Heathcote watches himself and Eastoe in the mirror with a fierce concentration. There is a great politeness in the room and he seems to be the source of it. Every time they stop dancing to discuss the steps, the pianist seizes his cryptic crossword and bows his head over it.

Eastoe, her wavy hair escaping in tendrils around her forehead, constantly effaces herself before the more experienced Heathcote. In spite of his genial patience, she is always apologising, as if all the mistakes they make were hers: ‘Sorry! Sorry! It's my leg, not the step! It should feel beautiful, but there's something wrong with my arms—I feel retarded!'

He lifts her once more and up she flies—but high in the air on his two hands she loses it and starts to laugh helplessly. He lets her drop, vertical, to his chest and squeezes her tight, like a father playing with a child. Everyone in the room is laughing.

‘I have to not get
excited
,' says Eastoe, taking the blame. ‘I love that jump. I'll let
you
jump me!'

And this time they get it right. He doesn't ‘jump' her, he tosses her, as it were round the corner of himself, and catches her deftly in both arms, cradling her in an intricate folded posture, right across the front of his body. The trust! This whole thing is trust in action.

‘Right?' says the ballet mistress. ‘Thank you!' The piano strikes up.

And suddenly, with the music, the room changes key. What's happening? ‘This,' whispers the young publicist beside me, ‘is where she suspects he's having an affair.'

Something has happened to Eastoe's brow: it's low and dark, charged with pain. Heathcote, too, loses his genial smile. His face chills and hardens into defensive anger. They are dancing together, but he is withdrawing from her. His hand, which by all instinctive rules of dance and of love should now be curved round her face, is loitering stiffly by her waist. She seizes it, drags it upwards against his resistance, presses his reluctant palm against her cheek.

The emotional freight of that movement is unbearable. A wave of memory hits me. I want to hide my face; but when I glance at the publicist I see that she too, who has seen this ballet several times, has tears in her eyes.

Through the open door comes a faint rhythmic squeaking. I glance up from this scene of primal suffering and see a male dancer out in the hall, prancing up and down on a tiny, round trampoline and vaguely looking on.

Meanwhile a third dancer, a pretty woman with a broad, gentle brow, quietly enters the studio and goes to the barre along the mirrored back wall. She pulls on a long tulle skirt over her pink tights and glossy new pointe shoes, and begins unobtrusively, while Eastoe and Heathcote are still deep in their anguished pas de deux, to do preparatory stretches.

The publicist whispers to me, ‘That's Lisa Bolte. She left to have a baby. She's come back to do a guest role in
La Sylphide
.'

Bolte's arms, as she practises on her own, have a dainty lightness. They flow through the air, like thin water-jets snaking outwards from her shoulder joints. Every move she makes radiates sweetness, lifts the heart. Her facial expressions are introverted and eloquent, like those of someone engaged in a pleasant conversation on a hands-free mobile.

Heathcote and Eastoe turn back into ordinary people, pick up their gear and stroll flat-footed out into the hallway. Bolte's partner, Robert Curran, enters: a pale, long-cheeked, hairy-chested sex bomb who in this role will wear a kilt. The two dancers start work. Within minutes they are both panting and sweating. Bolte goes fleeting across the floor on pointe, her ankles whirring like mad under her delicate skirt. As she dashes past me I can hear her harsh, rhythmic breathing.

They pause to rest. I look at her with curiosity: yes, though she is still, by the standards of the world, a beautifully slender and strong young creature, her torso no longer shows the flat belly of girlhood. She has transcended the flowery innocence of the ballerina, and entered a deeper womanhood. This moves me, somehow. I respect her in a more complex way.

I glance down and notice that a very young dancer has spread out a dark red crocheted shawl on the floor beside me, and is lying on it, doing a series of slow but demanding abdominal exercises. There is no fat on her belly at all.
None
. I gaze at this in slightly disapproving awe.

In the wardrobe department, women—and the odd man—work in silence at big tables, subduing stiff swathes of translucent fabric. Deep in the room stand posts to which are hooked frothy clumps of those crazy-looking notions, tutus. Each one bursts upward in widening layers from its lacy little knickers. Their frills remind me of the tender feathers that Snugglepot and Cuddlepie glued to their bottoms when they disguised themselves as birds to escape the horrid Banksia Men.

A member of the corps de ballet is about to be fitted for her costume. Here she comes, a tall, fine-boned, brown-skinned lass with her hair screwed into a knob on top of her head. These necks they have! The essence of ballet resides in the neck. You can't mistake it. The length, the grace, the exaggerated distance between earlobe and shoulder tip—oh, it's gorgeous.

With the unconcern of one who knows her body is perfect, the girl strips off her baggy cotton garments and stands there in what looks like a black bathing suit. The seamstress pins round her waist a calf-length skirt in many layers, tinted the palest, most watery green. It gushes out from under the hard, narrow little bodice which is being fixed so firmly to her torso that I get anxious: ‘Can you
breathe
in that?' The girl grins and shrugs: ‘A little.' ‘Enough,' says the seamstress. The milliner reaches for a tiny coronet of georgette petals and plops it on top of the dancer's head. She examines herself in the long mirror: ‘I feel like a fairy already!'

Half an hour later I walk out of the building into hot sun, in the wake of three dancers. The middle one is the girl from the fitting room. On either side of her strolls a boy from the corps. I follow them, admiring their slender hips and loose, free, maritime gait. They're dressed in the street clothes you'd see on any slummock their age, but they walk like physical aristocrats, striding easily and with a flow. I speed up to pass them. They're talking about food. ‘Chips,' says one. ‘Crisps,' replies another. ‘Camembert.' At the end of three graceful arms burn three cigarettes.

My last moment of glory this week is to watch two versions of another scene from Graeme Murphy's
Swan Lake
: the Prince's pas de deux with a certain Baroness, the older woman who draws him away from Odette, his innocent young wife. The first pair is Heathcote with fellow principal Lynette Wills. Wills appears in the studio in perfect makeup, a stiffened fringe and a bun. She is everyman's fantasy of the ballerina—ethereal, otherworldly, evolved differently from the rest of us. She is tall, and thin, thin, thin, with tiny breasts and endless limbs and elongated fingers, feet that curve outrageously, immense eyes, pale flawless skin, and a large mouth—features so generous that they threaten to overburden her fragile face. At thirty-three Wills is thought of as a mature dancer. She has not performed for six months since hip surgery, but the flexibility of her joints is terrifying. One admiring critic has described her legs as ‘weapons of mass destruction'.

Once the piano starts, the fantasy dissolves and the real woman emerges. She and Stephen Heathcote know each other on a deep professional level: they are two masterly artists in full flower. Their dance, a daring and very sexy sort of tango, is full of adult darkness, a flirtation you know can only end by tearing somebody's heart out.

But then the second pair takes a turn: Matthew Lawrence and Lucinda Dunn. It's astonishing to see how differently they dance the exact same steps. Younger, cheekier, juicier, they bring to the scene a less tragic mood. This Prince and this Baroness are still robust enough to survive whatever they will do to each other. They sizzle, while Heathcote and Wills smoulder. Dunn is more rounded than Wills, even bosomy, but Wills's dancing has a devastating, deep, mature sexiness that you would not imagine residing in such an attenuated body.

This is when I realise that these last five days have made me a convert. I rush straight home and book a flight to Brisbane. I have to see this ballet on stage. I can't bear not to.

That night a violent storm batters Melbourne, uprooting huge elms and wrecking buildings. At 3 a.m. the wind wakes me to thoughts of death and destruction. I can't get back to sleep. It's shaping up to be a night of horror. The only thing that calms me is to think of the dancers, to try to find meaning in them and what they do.

I like to remember how eager and fearless the young ones are, while those in their thirties, already past their peak (though not their prime) and having learnt the painful lessons of injury, seem to radiate reason and patience—yet something in them, too, is still burning, a tough spirit under rigorous self-command.

And it heartens me to recall how, at the end of each morning's class, the dancers split into bunches of four or five and rush in diagonal leaping surges across the studio. Group after group they come, without pause or hesitation, driven by the music in an endless stream of energy. They manifest the tremendous onwardrushingness of life, which has only one destination and yet constantly renews itself, full of a joy that transcends words.

2005

With the exception of ‘Whisper and Hum', ‘Before Whatever Else Happens' and ‘Suburbia', the stories in this collection have previously appeared in the following publications:

‘Some Furniture',
Kitchen Table Memoirs
, ABC Books/Harper Collins, 2013

‘White Paint and Calico',
Monthly
, 2005

‘Dear Mrs Dunkley',
Sincerely
, Women of Letters, Penguin, 2011

‘Eight Views of Tim Winton',
Tim Winton: A Celebration
, National Library of Australia, 1999

‘Notes from a Brief Friendship',
Singing for All He's Worth: Essays in Honour of Jacob Rosenberg
, Picador, 2011

‘From Frogmore, Victoria',
Monthly
, 2007

‘My Dear Lift-Rat',
Age
, 2005

‘While Not Writing a Book',
Monthly
, 2011

‘Red Dog: A Mutiny',
Monthly
, 2012

‘Funk Paradise',
Age
, 2011

‘Dreams of Her Real Self',
My Mother, My Father
, Allen and Unwin, 2013

‘Punishing Karen',
Monthly
, 2005

‘The Singular Rosie',
Monthly
, 2014

‘The City at Night',
Monthly
, 2012

‘The Man in the Dock',
Monthly
, 2012

‘On Darkness', (address to Sydney Writers' Festival),
Monthly,
2015

‘The Journey of the Stamp Animals',
Lost Classics,
Vintage Canada, 2002

‘Worse Things than Writers Can Invent',
Independent Monthly
, 1995

‘How to Marry Your Daughters',
Age
, 2013

‘X-ray of a Pianist at Work',
Independent Monthly
, 1994

‘Gall and Barefaced Daring', Introduction to
Bush Studies
, Text Publishing, 2012

‘The Rules of Engagement',
Monthly
, 2006

‘The Rapture of Firsthand Encounters', Introduction to
Forty-One False Starts
, Text Publishing, 2013

‘Hit Me',
Monthly
, 2005

‘My First Baby',
Elle
, 2000

‘Big Brass Bed',
Big Issue
, 2007

‘Dawn Service',
Sydney Morning Herald
, 2006

‘A Party',
Age
, 2004

‘The Insults of Age',
Monthly
, 2015

‘In the Wings',
Age
, 2005