Cat Step, page 9
‘Are you still with me?’ I called to them. ‘Raise your back leg if you can. If you can’t, keep your toe on the floor and your arm stretched in front. It’s still an arabesque. Good. And relax your shoulders. Relax your mouths. Who can give me a smile? Ya dancer!’ That’s what Robbie said when he was pleased with something. Ya dancer. I always thought it apt.
They smiled, all of them, Eve under duress, but I saw the sides of her mouth nip up briefly. June winked. She was good. The best. I think she knew it.
Near the end of our session, I said, ‘Did the lady who’s gone, your friend, did she have a favourite song?’ and thank God I had Elvis and Ella Fitzgerald, and they were happy to stand in the middle of the room and clap and sway. John took Eve’s hands and they shuffled a jive on the carpet tiles and I told them if I’d known they could dance like that I’d have pushed them harder in class.
‘Let’s see if Rita has left some water in the kettle,’ June said at the end of the song and I thought, yes, that’s enough dancing for today.
We drank tea. John took a cup. He sat at a separate table turning the pages of his paper, but closer to us, this time. Agnes and Senga bustled away to their taxi and Alice took her cardigan from the back of a chair and waved goodbye, but Eve, June and Charlie stayed.
‘I’ll collect your money for you each week,’ June said, tapping the nails of one hand against the pint glass, full of coins and a couple of notes. ‘I know who squirrels their money away and can afford to pay a bit more.’
‘That’s kind of you.’
‘It’s nothing to do with kindness.’
Her tone was stroppy. I liked it.
‘Well, thank you then, but go easy please. I’m not up for fleecing old people.’
She told me to get my purse. I held it open like before and she poured in the coins and handed me the notes. It seemed to me that the departure of Ellen had thrown them into all kinds of anxiety. Eve was sad that her friend and neighbour had gone but more sad that her daughter in Toronto and son in Adelaide had made no such offer to take her away too. She said it must be a reflection on their relationship; why else would they live on different continents, and if that was all there was, what had been the point? I didn’t know how to comfort her and nobody else tried.
‘I’m happy as I am,’ John said, and folded his newspaper.
Charlie said he had five sons and fifteen grandchildren. They shared him out for Christmas. He knew he was, what’s the word, cumbersome.
‘June?’ I asked.
June shook her head. ‘My son writes every now and again and says he wants to move me closer. I think my daughter-in-law puts him up to it. But it would be the end of me.’
She said she would miss her view. She didn’t scramble up the sides of those fells as a child to leave them behind when the only thing that kept her going of a day was to see them from her window, or to take a bus, occasionally, and stand on them, looking out at all the gold and grass. She stood up and gathered the teacups.
Eve took a photo album from the sideboard and showed it to me. ‘Ellen started this off,’ she said. ‘When somebody died she put their picture in here so they wouldn’t be forgotten. The Book of Names she called it. That’s Agnes’s husband. They lived together. After he died, Senga moved in.’ Eve had oval fingernails and a gold wedding ring. She pointed to her friend’s slanted handwriting next to pictures of people with wrinkled faces, shining eyes and good dentures.
‘Have you got a nice picture of Ellen to go in the book?’ I asked.
‘She’s not dead yet.’
‘Sorry.’ I glanced at June, returning from the kitchenette, who shook her head at me, but in a mocking way, as if I was daft not mean.
‘I’m away to the laundry to do those sheets,’ June said.
Eve showed me photographs of parties and dinners and groups of residents wearing Christmas hats, an occasional child sitting on a knee. I saw Ruth the manager in some pictures, and Rita the cleaner. ‘We used to look after each other here. We were enough for each other. Now there’s too many single men who keep themselves to themselves and nobody gets together.’
‘Present company excepted,’ John said.
‘Ruth can only do so much.’
‘Does she check on you if she doesn’t see you for a while?’
‘She chaps the door.’
‘Do many people die here?’ I asked, and regretted it. They were quite silent.
‘Sometimes,’ Charlie said, ‘but we tend to go before we get too sick. To hospital. Or if we’ve had a stroke or if we can’t look after ourselves we get moved to care homes. There aren’t too many surprises here.’
Eve put the photo album back onto the shelf.
I told them about Audrey, Robbie’s gran. Hearing them talk had made me wonder if Audrey had been lonely. ‘I’m in her house just now with my daughter and it’s never quiet, it’s a riot, because children, you know, and I hate the quiet, I hate to think of her hearing her clock tick and having no one to talk to.’ You could be lonely with a child, I knew that too.
‘Get rid of ticking clocks,’ John said. ‘And put the talking radio on.’
‘Endeavour to leave the house each day,’ Charlie said. ‘Have a full head of hair and a beard. I let the lassies at the hairdresser’s practise on me.’
‘Is that why Alice comes here and rarely speaks?’ I asked. ‘For the company.’
‘Alice knows her memory’s going so she’s afraid to speak,’ Eve said. ‘Some days she’s awful confused.’
I stood up. It was nearly time to get Emily. I would call into Lidl on the way to the nursery to buy fruit. Eve took a book from her bag and said she was going to read by the natural light at the window. John and Charlie left. June met me in the corridor.
‘Can I borrow you for a second?’ she said.
She asked me to help her pull her neighbour’s wet sheets from the washing machine and put them in the dryer. Her arthritis was bad and there was little she could do on days like this. I didn’t know she had arthritis. I wondered if the ballet helped her joints or whether she was in pain for the whole class.
‘I’ve been duped. Harry next to me took sick so I helped with his washing while he was recovering. I washed his dirty sheets and put clean ones on his bed. Now he’s better and I’m still doing his sheets. Just put them straight in the dryer,’ she said.
The wet sheets were heavy. I bent to shove them into the dryer.
‘Just switch it on, hen, put it to forty-five.’
I started the machine and the room filled with noise and heat.
‘What if you can’t do your washing? What if you can’t get out to do your shopping?’
‘There are girls from the council who come. Charlie has one. Harry has one too. You manage. Most of us have family. Some poor souls don’t.’
‘What about you?’
‘My son’s in Essex. He doesn’t visit.’
‘You’re not a poor soul.’
‘Thank you. At last someone sees me for who I am.’
She shut the door on the laundry and as if it had just occurred to her she said, ‘Come and I’ll show you my view.’
I checked my watch and that small gesture of mine seemed to make her self-conscious.
‘You’ve got to get on.’
‘No, no, I’ve just got time. Come on, let’s go.’ If she felt she was being humoured, she didn’t show it.
She walked alongside me down the carpeted corridor, looking up to speak to me because I was so much taller. She kept her back straight and her feet turned out as she walked. We climbed a set of stairs slowly. We passed many doors.
‘There,’ she said as she pushed open the door to her flat. ‘Come through.’
She had a bedroom and a bathroom and an open plan living room with a kitchen at one end and a window at the other. There was a chair by the window and on it a blanket and a book of crosswords.
But oh, her view. The morning sun was on the Campsies. Every tree, hedge and boulder was yellow lit. The fir trees at the Campsies’ base smouldered in their deep green.
‘June, this is stunning.’
‘I feel like a bit of a show off now. But I wanted someone to see what I see. I’ve had no one in here since I moved in.’
‘No one’s been in to see it? I wouldn’t want to move from this view if it was mine.’
‘I can sit for hours. I watch the weather. It’s always changing. This view is worth being old for isn’t it?’
She seemed defiant.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I appreciate it, don’t you worry. When we lived in Campsie, my son used to run away into those hills and when he wasn’t home by evening I’d be forced to go and look for him.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘He’d find a hut to hide in or he’d sit in trees for hours. I was searching for him once, walking along, calling his name. I must have had a second sense he was there, a mother’s instinct, because suddenly sticks rained down on me from one of the trees. He was a good aim.’
‘Is that him?’
On the sideboard there was a photograph in a frame of June sitting on a sofa, next to a man much bigger than her, but with the same chin and the same coloured hair – June’s hair was grey, but in the picture it was sandy blonde and the man’s was sandy blonde too. Healthy strong heads of hair.
‘That’s him,’ she said.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Michael.’
I looked around her spacious flat and thought of my dad’s room in the hospice. My mum had told me it was adequate.
‘Shall I put the kettle on? You’ve not got time, have you?’
‘Sorry June.’
‘Take the pity out of your voice.’
I laughed.
‘I don’t have biscuits anyway.’
I looked out of the window and had a sudden vision of myself in a life I hadn’t planned. No Robbie, Emily grown up and gone, my mum long gone. Would I cling to a view like this? Probably. Would Emily visit me or would she go away like I had? What would become of us?
June was looking at me when I turned to face her. She pursed her lips and gave my arm a pat but said nothing other than ‘goodbye’ and I did the same.
Back in the corridor I heard the rumble of the tumble dryer and stood aside to let men carrying a chest of drawers pass. Outside a woman with two black bags stood near a hire van, its back doors open to the sun. I presumed they were Ellen’s black bags and would go with her to the care home. The woman threw them in the van with force.
13.
Paul brought a bottle of wine when he came one night to check his work and I had to tell him I didn’t drink. He left the wine by the front door and I watched in silence as he ran his palms across his newly painted walls and rubbed a thumb over a tiny bubble of paint he’d spotted by the floor.
Divertissement as they say in ballet. An enjoyable diversion. I said to him – a whispered confession, just as he bowed his head to my chest and his hands were on my waist and then my hips, as if in preparation for a lift – that it had been years since anyone: I’d never wanted to, had no desire to. Yet I was surprised to feel so flush so quickly and it was a strong pleasure to wrap a leg round his leg and feel the slick muscles in his back. We fitted.
Robbie became more alive after sex, more boyish, more talkative, full of energy, jokes, caresses, stories. Paul was more as I’d remembered men. He wanted to sleep where we lay on Audrey’s sofa. ‘It’s best if you don’t stay,’ I said when we had dozed and woken. ‘Mornings. Emily.’
He understood. ‘Can I come back though? I’m at my mum’s now and I can’t invite you over there.’
‘And I can’t leave her here, so yes, come back.’
He put on his trousers and searched around for his T-shirt, jacket, keys.
‘Thank you,’ he said to me.
‘It was good, wasn’t it?’
‘Aye, it was.’
He took his wine with him when he left.
I climbed into bed. Emily was there, lying as she did when she was a baby, on her back with her arms half-raised and her fists clenched into a cheer. I curled into one of her fists and it took me no time to sleep, no time at all. In the night I woke with a fear that I’d betrayed Robbie. Is that why I’d come to Lennoxtown, I thought, to sleep with someone from Robbie’s home if I could no longer have him? I did betray Robbie, there is no doubt. I also used Paul’s body as if it was Robbie’s, there is no doubt about that. But I liked it. I liked Paul. Even Robbie would have said it was a good thing for me. Divertissement.
14.
Could we tire of the waves and the ports and the crew bar and the nights squeezed into my single cabin bed? Yes, it seemed. A dancer I knew messaged me to say she was performing at the Lido in Paris and they were holding auditions. ‘You would get in with your figure,’ she said, ‘and your dancing. You get to live in Paris. They treat you like royalty.’
I told Robbie about it. He said I should audition. He was ready to go to university in London and take up his place on the physiotherapy degree he’d deferred year after year. London was close enough to Paris.
He had a feel for what would make us happy. Don’t do it, Lizzie, he would say about something I felt compelled or pressured to do. Not that there was much in those days. He helped me with my mum. He pointed out her good points, of which there were many, and told me to banish the memory of her leaning into me at my dad’s funeral telling me with her sherry breath that I should have come home, she’d borne too much on her own.
He was ambitious and so was I. We were a good match.
‘We’ll live in London, if I get my place, won’t we?’ he asked. ‘Or, if you get Paris, I could shoot over on the Eurostar at weekends. You’ll keep auditioning, won’t you? We’ll stay together.’
‘Without a doubt,’ I said.
That’s a lie. There were a few doubts but they were shared doubts like where we would live and how we would afford it but I dismissed them because we had a few thousand pounds saved each and that seemed like a lot of money then, seems even more now. So at the end of our contracts we kept our new ones unsigned, disembarked at Tampa and flew home.
The audition routines were tap and jazz and the kind of show dancing that I’d done on the ship. I had the height. Even before we danced they sent some girls home because they weren’t tall enough. I was the right size for once and was pleased that I’d run on the treadmill with Robbie and was fit. He’d kept on with his 10K nights with other crew and staff. He did them once a week and each week they tried to beat their previous times. I’ve heard it said that your body has only so many heartbeats. It’s preordained. Your heart ticks until it’s done. I wish Robbie hadn’t run so much.
They let more girls go before lunch but they kept me on. In the afternoon, they pulled me out of the line and told the other girls to come to the side. They made me do the routine on my own and told the girls to watch me. That’s what they wanted to see, that level of performance. I felt the envy but I took it, just pretended I was Robbie with his big mouth and big head and didn’t let myself be intimidated. A few minutes later they pulled another girl out and we had to watch her too.
At the end of the afternoon they let more girls go and there were only four of us left. I thought that was it. I thought I was in. Then they told us we’d made it to the finals and we would be called back the following week when we would do it all again with the other finalists.
In my tap shoes I practised wing after wing after double wing into double break that whole week, on the same laminate floor I’d practised on as a teenager. We were staying with my mum in London. The tubes were down on the morning of the finals and I eventually gave up at Kings Cross, running through Bloomsbury and Oxford Street to Soho, my tap shoes and jazz shoes and water bottle crashing around my dance bag. I barely had time to warm up, but I got there, pinned my number to my leotard and gave them what they wanted.
I got it. Paris. A Lido girl. Robbie bought Cava. He’d regained his place at university. He would start in September. We drank the whole bottle and he raced to the corner shop to buy more. My mum said all those dancing lessons she’d paid for had paid off. We had a celebration in her living room.
I sank so much booze that night I do wonder if Emily was affected. She’d been there the whole time, burrowed into my womb, stuck in while I barrel-turned and jetéd and wing-changed, and made herself known when my period didn’t come, after I’d signed the Lido contract, after Robbie had accepted his university place and we’d both told the cruise we weren’t coming back and we’d decided that on my salary he could come over on the Eurostar on weekends and on holidays but let’s get things started for us, shall we, let’s get living.
He didn’t persuade me to keep her although it was me who considered an abortion. He viewed my pregnancy through the eyes of a man who sees his future and is happy with what he finds. He was in love with me and a baby made sense. I capitulated, I guess, in the way that women do. Certainly if he’d questioned the timing of my pregnancy I might have spent longer toying with thoughts of abortion. Maybe I’d have decided entirely by myself that Emily was ours to keep. I don’t know now. I’ll never know. I miss Robbie’s lack of ambivalence because ambivalence runs through everything I do. I wasn’t ambivalent about losing Paris and the Lido though: I was gutted, heartbroken, my ambition stopped.
