The door swung open and Gabriele was standing there. I could tell immediately that something terrible had happened.
He took a step back, letting me in. I closed the door behind me, my eyes searching his face, which looked drawn and grey in a way it hadn’t out on stage. The same dead eyes, but now even more vacant than before, as thoughhe’d heard something that his brain wasn’t equipped to deal with.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked.
He tried to speak, but had to stop to clear his throat. Whatever it was, he was finding it difficult to say. I braced myself for the worst.
‘My father died an hour ago,’ he said.
Without thinking about it, I walked the few steps to him and wrapped my arms around him. At first he felt rigid beneath my hold, frozen almost, but slowly his muscles began to soften and he folded into me, resting his head in the gap between my cheek and my shoulder.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, my throat tight with my own tears. ‘I’m so sorry, Gabriele.’
It was the natural course of things, to lose a parent when you were a certain age. But Gabriele was too young; his father been taken too soon and so suddenly. How could life be so unfair?
In the absence of anything useful to say – because what was there? What could possibly help? – I stroked his back, letting him hold me, letting him know that I wasn’t going to let him go, not until he wanted me to.
When he eventually pulled away, I held his face in my hands. His eyes still had a slightly haunted look about them. It must have been such a shock for him, to come off stage and to have heard that.
‘Sit down,’ I said, ushering him into a chair, slightly worried that he might just crumple into a heap on the floor ifhe didn’t. He did as I suggested, leaning forwards, covering his face with his hands. ‘Can I get you something?’ I asked gently. ‘Some water? Something stronger?’
He shook his head. ‘I do not need anything.’
I crouched down next to him. ‘How’s your mum doing?’
He groaned. ‘As badly as you can imagine. My father was the love of her life. She has never so much as looked at another man. He was her everything and now he is gone, snuffed out like a flame. One minute she was watching him out in the vineyards, the next the doctors were telling her he was unresponsive, that there was no hope. She had not wanted to tell me how ill he was before I went out on stage, but in the time it took for us to perform our show, he slipped away.’
His voice broke and my heart went out to him. I clutched his hands in mine, feeling like sobbing myself, but desperately trying to hold it together. This wasn’t about me, it was about him and his family, and I was determined to do whatever I could to help him get through this. Where did one even start when something this huge happened?
In the back of my mind, I had a vague thought about the show. There was no way Gabriele could carry on now. But that would have to wait; it didn’t matter. We would cancel shows if we had to. What mattered was making sure he was okay, that he had everything he needed to get through this.
‘What do you want to do?’ I asked. ‘Shall we walk back to the hotel together? You can lie down. I’ll bring you something to eat.’
He shook his head. ‘I could not swallow a single thing.’
I stood up, looking around the room. Gabriele was neat and precise in all areas of his life, it seemed. Whereas the dressing room I shared with the other girls was chaotic, a mess of make-up and hairspray and costumes flung haphazardly on rails, Gabriele’s things were hung neatly with equal space between them. Only a handful of products were lined up on his dressing table. A book – its title in Italian – lay next to them.
‘Shall I pack up your stuff?’ I asked, searching for a bag to put them in.
‘Leave them,’ he said. ‘I will not need any of this for the moment.’
He stood up as though it was an extreme effort to even move, pulling his coat over the costume he wore for our final Argentine tango. This in itself showed he wasn’t thinking straight, because changing into something more comfortable was the first thing he did every night.
‘We can go,’ he said, abandoning his dressing room, leaving it as a stark reminder of how everything had been better before he walked out on stage that night, and that everything had taken a terrible turn for the worse by the time he got back.
I walked him back to his hotel room because I wasn’t sure what else to do and I didn’t want to leave him. I wanted desperately to hold his hand, but he was even harder to read than usual and I couldn’t even begin to imagine how I’d feel if it was me in his position, and thereforeI didn’t presume to know what was best. Perhaps I’d want to be alone, too.
At the door to his room, he fumbled for his key, patting down his jeans, checking all of his pockets.
‘I can’t remember where I…’ he said, eventually finding it in his back pocket.
He buzzed himself in.
I stood on the threshold, unsure whether to follow him inside.
‘Will you be all right?’ I asked from the safety of the doorway, watching as he slumped on the bed, as though every ounce of energy had been zapped out of him. He slipped off his shoes without using his hands and lay back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.
‘I will have to be,’ he said.
