Prima Donna (58 page)

‘Pavel,’ she said, unable to look away from her brother. ‘Tell Mr Silk to leave, please. I’m busy.’

Sophie overpaid the driver – though why, she didn’t know, she’d have been faster hopping – and ran into the theatre. She caught a glimpse as she sped
through. Bums were already on seats and the water glasses on the judges’ table were being freshly filled.

Without bothering to dump her bags, she ran along the backstage corridors, bumping into ballerinas and stepping on those precious toes. Adam was leaning against a wall, chatting intensely to
Ingrid, losing his flow as she streamed past.

‘Hey, Soph!’ he called after her.

Sophie stopped and turned. ‘Yes?’

Adam stared at her. He hadn’t expected her to stop.

‘Uh, I . . . I . . .’ he stammered, desperate for something to say to keep her here. ‘Have you . . . uh – have you heard about Ava?’

‘What about her?’ Sophie sighed.

‘She’s leaving the ChiCi. Going to Europe. Her manager announced it this afternoon.’

‘Where?’

Adam shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t confirm. Milan, I’d guess.’

Sophie’s eyes narrowed. She wouldn’t. She knew exactly where Ava was gunning for next. ‘Does Baudrand know?’

‘Apparently he’s known for months. All the suits have. It’s all just been embargoed from the press until today.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Sophie said slowly. It made sense of a lot of things. She remembered Baudrand’s agitated conversation with Alekseev after the dance-off – the manager must have
been telling him then. It also explained why the Varna committee had allowed Baudrand to serve as a judge. Ava wasn’t his employee any more. In effect, he was non-partisan about both her and
Pia.

But if that was the case, it also meant one more thing: if Ava wasn’t Baudrand’s pet any more, then it also meant he wasn’t the judge in her pocket.

But then, Sophie already knew that. She flew down the concrete steps three at a time, her Converse trainers squeaking madly, like a mouse being tortured, before coming to a bewildered, flailing
stop outside Pia’s door.

What was with the bouncer? Had things really got so bad with Ava?

‘Hi, can I, uh . . .’ she started, sidestepping around him like an inconvenient boulder.

Pavel stepped with her.

‘I’m just here to see Pia. I’m a friend of hers.’

Pavel shook his head and remained staring at a fixed point behind her, like one of the Queen’s guards.

‘No one’s allowed in, miss,’ he said automatically, like a robot.

‘Yes, but I’m her friend . . . her best friend. I’m not just anyone.’

Pavel shrugged. ‘Orders are orders.’

‘Well, can you tell her I’m here, then, please?’

He shook his head. ‘She says she’s not to be disturbed
at all
, under
any
circumstances.’ She could hear Pia’s intonation in his repetition.

Sophie narrowed her eyes. ‘I’ve got a really important message for her. You have
got
to let me through.’

Pavel widened his stance as though getting ready to wrestle with her. ‘Can’t do that,’ he replied, staring above her head again.

‘Then what do you suggest we do?’ she said, folding her arms like a stern headmistress. ‘Because I can tell you now that she’ll fire your arse when she finds out
you’ve barred me from getting in to see her.’

‘I’m only hired for the day,’ he shrugged.

Sophie heard the music from
La Bayadère
start upstairs. Shit! The first performance had begun. She had to get to her seat. She couldn’t stand out here waiting for Pia.

‘I can pass on a message for you, if you like,’ he said, clocking her genuine panic, and softening a little.

‘No, that’s no good,’ Sophie muttered. ‘It’s confidential.’

An idea struck her. She rummaged around in her bag and found a birthday card she’d been intending to send to her little sisters. Hurriedly she wrote in it in purple pencil.

‘Just make sure she gets that, will you?’ she said, sealing the envelope. The gum almost made her retch again.

‘Sure,’ Pavel said, holding it in his hands like she’d given him her shopping list. She walked back up the corridor, anxiety rising in her throat like bile.

‘You’ll be sure to see that she gets it?’ she called, turning around at the steps.

Pavel nodded.

‘Because I can’t get back here again . . . I have to go . . . But it’s important. She needs to read it.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Pavel said, shooing her away with his hands.

Sophie reluctantly climbed the stairs and made her way to the auditorium, crawling on all fours to get to her seat. She gave a heavy sigh and started to draw, but she couldn’t shake the
feeling that her help had come too late.

The music filled the air like steam, billowing and expansive, making the audience sit forward and gasp for breath as they watched the vision on stage. History was being made
– no, rewritten – as Pia’s variation of
Façade
infused Ashton’s debutante with a glamour and wit that even the great choreographer himself couldn’t
have imagined.

Her technical and lyrical brilliance had always been apparent, but now she was dancing with a transparent joy that transcended any mere physical ability. For the first time since her very first
audition – before her family had been taken from her – she hadn’t frozen up. Her lungs hadn’t compressed to the size of raisins; acid hadn’t drip-fed into her stomach.
She was free at last, and as she traced the ballet’s story with her sinuous limbs she proved categorically that for a discipline that is based on supreme physical mastery, it is the heart
that is the most powerful muscle of all. There was nuance and anima in every part of her. She could tell a story with her back, a poem with her arms. She seemed to be as light as the wind and just
as elusive to catch.

The audience watched, thunderstruck, as she attacked her
jetés
with abandon, her back curving sculpturally and seeming to almost rest on her back leg; they gasped as one during
her
assemblés
; and they forgot to exhale as she
pirouetted
across the stage like a flicked whip, her lean limbs slicing through the air. But when, at the end of a dazzling
and bravura
enchainement
of
piqué
and
chaîné
turns, she pulled off a virtuoso
double tour en l’air
– which had never been
attempted in
pointe
shoes in modern times – they rose to their feet before the music had even come to a stop.

Their cheers and roars rose into the sky like balloons, falling back down and sprinkling over the traffic and pedestrians outside, and Pia let the tears stream forth. Nothing she could have done
would have stopped them. In the wings she could see Tony clapping hardest of all, dumbstruck by his sister’s talent and the love that was washing over her from the crowd.

She ran off into his arms and they cried and laughed. And cried again. She’d done it! Ava stood silently in the opposite wing, watching. Pia met her eyes but she didn’t need to say
anything. They both knew that nothing Ava did could match that. It had been the performance of a lifetime.

‘That was incredible,’ Tony said, as they staggered backstage, hardly able to move for congratulations. ‘Is it always like this?’

‘No!’ Pia laughed, amused – and thrilled – by her fellow dancers’ admiration. She realized it was the first time in her life she’d ever felt popular.

There was an hour to go till the prize-giving and they fell into her dressing room to celebrate. Pavel – thinking he’d signed on to an easy job with this lonely ballerina –
suddenly found himself earning his pay as he struggled to contain the hordes of fans rushing backstage with champagne and flowers. Ava must have been dancing to an empty auditorium.

Tony opened a bottle of Dom as Pia unwound her ballet shoes and wiggled her toes. He gasped at the sight of the bloodstains.

‘Jesus! Could you not break them in first?’ he exclaimed.

Pia smiled. ‘It’s okay,’ she soothed. ‘It looks worse than it is . . . I’m used to it.’

Tony raised his eyebrows dubiously, and poured them each a glass. He held one up for a toast. ‘To us.’

Pia blinked hard. She’d never thought she’d be part of an ‘us’ again.

‘To us,’ she said, laughing happily and letting the tears plop into her flute. She drained it in one gulp and he poured her another.

‘I can’t believe what you did out there tonight,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘I did it for you,’ she said, clasping his hand. ‘Because of you. I always have. I’ve never once gone on that stage and not done it for you. It’s important you know
that.’

‘You thought I was dead,’ he said simply.

Pia nodded.

‘And I thought you were dead,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Dad told me you’d been killed in an accident.’

Pia’s face tightened at the mention of their father. She looked away. She didn’t want to ask, and yet the agony of not knowing . . .

‘Is he dead?’

Tony nodded. ‘Cancer, four years ago.’

‘Good.’ She looked into the distance and they were silent for a few minutes, lost in the memories of their ruptured childhood, thinking of what could have been, what
should
have been. ‘So what did he do . . . after . . .’

‘We slept rough for a few weeks after he came and found me; he pretended to try to get a job, but we went for days without food. Then one day he came back in tears, drunk, of course. He
told me that you’d been killed – hit by a motorbike outside the academy. He said that there was nothing left for us in Brazil and he asked my – sorry, our – grandfather to
bring us back to Ireland.’

Pia looked at him. She obviously hadn’t been the only one with survivor’s guilt. ‘That must have been hard. You were only eight.’

‘Aye. I couldn’t speak any English . . . I didn’t know what was going on,’ he said quietly. ‘I couldn’t get used to the cold. And it never bloody stopped
raining.’

‘But what about Mamma?’

His mouth set into a grim line at the mention of her. He was still digesting the new truth. Everything he’d thought about the villains and saviours of his childhood had been turned upside
down in the past few days. He felt a deep ache in his chest at the thought of the hatred and resentment he’d harboured against his mother all these years; a gnawing sickness at the love and
care he’d given his father, the man he had now learnt had tricked, cheated and stolen him.

‘She never came . . . well, so
he
said. He told me she was packing up the house and was going to join us in Rio, but the weeks went by and . . . nothing. He said he left a plane
ticket for her with a friend so that she could join us . . .’ His voice trailed off and he looked away. ‘He said she got involved with the cartels instead. That she chose drugs over
me.’ He shook his head. ‘But there never was a plane ticket. I know now that it was all lies.’

‘Who told you it was lies? Not Dad, surely? I can’t believe he’d confess to his crimes against his family, even on his deathbed.’

‘No. No, he didn’t.’

‘So – what happened then? How did you find out I was alive?’

‘It was by accident, really. I went over to England looking for my girlfriend, Sophie – Sophie O’Farrell.’

‘Sophie?’ Pia repeated, shocked. She’d never mentioned a boyfriend but . . . there’d been a distance in their friendship that Pia hadn’t been able to bridge. Pia
had put it down to lingering mistrust between them still, but a broken heart made a whole lot more sense.

‘Yes,’ he said, anxiously scanning her face, relieved that Pia so clearly knew her after all. ‘She ran away last week. I found out she’d worked for you, so I came looking
for you to see if you’d heard from her. I read that you were recovering from an injury in Dorset, so I went to track you down there.’

Pia went very still. The thought of Tony meeting Will made her feel sick.

‘Luckily, I went to the wrong house. I ended up at the farm by mistake and it was your friend Tanner who made the connection between us. He was the one who told me you were my
sister.’

Her friend Tanner
? How mild the words sounded, completely unlike the reaction his name elicited in her.

‘Tanner? But how did he know?’

‘He saw my birthmark,’ he shrugged.

‘He did?’ Pia shook her head in disbelief. She had mentioned it in passing. It had only been an off-the-cuff detail; but it was one that he had remembered, and it had changed her
life.

‘I couldn’t believe it at first. I’d heard of you of course, but shortening your name to Pia and using Mamma’s surname – it just never crossed my mind that you
could be my sister. Dad told me you had died and I just accepted it without question. Why would I have doubted him – especially about something like that?’ He looked at his drink.

‘I understand,’ Pia replied. ‘It certainly explains why I never had any leads in Brazil. I never . . . I never thought to look in Ireland.’

There was a heavy silence.

‘Look, about Sophie . . .’ Tony said. ‘I don’t want to draw our celebrations short at all, but it’s really important that I find her. I’m running out of time.
Have you heard from her? Do you know where she is?’

Pia snapped back into focus. ‘Sophie? God, yes! Of course I have.’

Tony’s face lit up. ‘Where is she? Has she gone back to America?’

‘No!’ she beamed excitedly. ‘She’s here!’

‘Here?’ He looked like he was going to fall over.

‘Right here. In Varna. Sitting in front of the stage. She’s the official artist for the competition. Between you and me, I asked them to secure her for the competition – it was
one of my demands for agreeing to appear. The advantages of being a prima donna!’ she laughed, mocking herself. ‘But quick! You must go to her,’ she said, jumping up and taking
his glass from him. ‘The performance after mine was the last one. It’ll be finishing any moment. Go to her. Go and get her.’

She opened the door and found Pavel arguing with the crowd of people who were trying to get through.

‘Pavel, do you think you could move everyone to the backstage door?’ she asked, smiling sweetly. ‘I think this door will cave in if there’s any more pushing against it
and I’d just hate for Ava to be unable to get into her dressing room.’