by Liz Byrski
Liz Byrski was born and brought up in England and has lived in Western Australia since 1981. She is the author of a number of non-fiction books, and has worked as a staff and freelance journalist, a broadcaster with ABC Radio and an adviser to a minister in the WA Government. Liz now lectures in professional writing at Curtin University. She is also the author of Gang of Four and Food, Sex & Money.
www.lizbyrski.com.au
Also by Liz Byrski
Gang of Four
Food, Sex & Money
BELLY
DANCING
FOR
BEGINNERS
Liz Byrski
First published 2006 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney
Copyright © Liz Byrski 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Byrski, Liz.
Belly dancing for beginners.
ISBN-13: 978 14050 3746 4.
ISBN-10: 1 4050 3746 6.
1. Belly dance -Fiction. I. Title.
A823.4
The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Typeset in 11 / 14pt Palatino by Post Pre-press Group
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
Author photograph: Jacinta Innes
These electronic editions published in 2007 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
Belly Dancing for Beginners
Liz Byrski
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Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE
Sonya was feeling very Monday morning-ish, possibly because she hadn’t yet had her first cup of coffee but more likely, she thought, due to yesterday evening’s encounter in a coffee shop. Gazing out of her office window she reflected on whether it was similarity or difference that brought people together and hoped, not for the first time, that it was the latter. Her ability to attract losers was worrying enough without that added dimension of cause and effect. And her latest foray into the world of Internet dating had been a reminder that nothing much had changed. The previous evening she had been about ten minutes into her first face-to-face meeting with a pleasant looking man who had described himself as an entrepreneur with an active interest in the arts. They had met in an elegant but overpriced café, lined with stainless steel and stark black and white tiles, where the noise of the grinders constantly shattered conversation and left the customers blinking in shock.
‘I just want to let you know,’ the man had said in one of the oases of stunned silence, ‘that my wife and I don’t sleep together . . . so it’s, well . . . you know . . . it’s all right for you and me.’
Sonya, who had not even known he was married, put down her cup and stared at him.
‘I think you may have mistaken me for someone who fancies you,’ she said, picking up her handbag. ‘And if all the men who used that as some sort of excuse to screw around were laid end to end, more than half the men in the world would be flat on their backs.’
He opened his mouth and shut it again.
‘And that might not be a bad thing,’ Sonya added. ‘Less violence, fewer wars, less sport on weekend television,’ and with that she walked out of the café and left him staring into the remains of his macchiato.
Sonya wasn’t usually quite so cynical about the opposite sex; indeed, she had once succumbed to this particular line of seduction herself, but only after weeks of agonising self-restraint. Certainly not ten minutes into her first latte. Once home she put a blocker on his email address and user name; it helped but it didn’t fully erase her anger, nor soothe the sore spot in her psyche that occasionally dragged her to the brink of tedious victimhood. Why should he assume she’d want to sleep with him anyway? She’d never set eyes on him until tonight.
‘Men,’ Sonya said aloud, ‘I don’t know why I bother.’
In fact, these days she rarely did bother. She wasn’t much concerned about being fifty-six and single. She had a job she loved, plenty of friends, a busy social life and her own home. After two disastrous marriages and various other relationships, there was enormous satisfaction in going home at night to domestic peace instead of the emotional minefield of someone else’s emotions and expectations. She was good at doing things alone – mostly she preferred it – and if she needed company she had her friends. So what was she doing on an Internet dating site anyhow? Well, the world is designed for couples, especially if one is in one’s fifties, and even the single woman’s closest friends who so often secretly envy her freedom, are prone to suggest, in the most unsubtle ways, that being alone is a lesser state than being partnered.
‘Don’t you ever get lonely?’ Sonya’s friends, particularly the younger ones, would ask, small furrows of concern forming between their eyebrows. And Sonya would honestly reply that she never did.
‘Well, what about sex . . . don’t you miss it?’ they’d persist, implying that maybe her hormones were out of sync. Sonya had had a lot of sex in the past, much of it good, much of it embarrassingly bad. There had been a period in her late forties when, newly divorced, she had enjoyed a sexual roller coaster ride, which had made up for her comparatively chaste youth. But in the last couple of years it had seemed rather a waste of time and energy, and she had grown comfortable with the sense of congruence that came with long periods of cel
ibacy.
‘Hardly ever think about it these days,’ she’d reply, remembering a time when she had been able to think of little else. ‘One wants different things at different times of one’s life. I used to surf and go to rock concerts but I’ve lost interest in those things too.’ On occasions she might also mention that had she put as much effort in to building an investment strategy as she had put in to searching for a relationship and/or sex, she would by now have been a very rich woman.
But the Internet dating site? Sonya suspected that within everyone there burns the flame of hope that somewhere there is a soul mate; someone with whom we will connect so intimately and intensely that we can become our best selves. These days her flame flickered only occasionally, and could usually be subdued by a surf through the depressing line-up of fifty-plus caring gents, down-to-earth blokes, silver foxes and young-at-heart romantic guys, all with a good sense of humour, who dominated the website profiles. After the coffee shop encounter, six months at least was now likely to pass before she once again decided to check out the possibilities.
So here she was the following morning, staring out of the window of the huge East Perth building that housed the Department of Education, imagining she could see through the tree tops and past the sharp angles of the new ABC studios to the prestigious East Perth development along the river inlet. She was contemplating property investment and increased borrowing. Increasing the home loan was not a huge problem – it was currently comparatively small, her income good, her job secure and she had another ten years before she retired, probably more if Peter Costello had his way with her. But the prospect of sixty being the new forty filled her with frustration: surely by sixty-five she would have served her life sentence as a wage slave. Maybe she should scrap the moving idea and take early retirement instead.
‘East Perth is cool,’ Angie said, sticking her head around the half-open door. ‘Especially if you can buy on the waterfront. Tony and I had a look at a place there but we couldn’t afford it.’
‘And you think I can?’ Sonya asked, without turning round.
Angie joined her at the window. ‘Probably. And it’s very elegant.’
‘Mmm. But I’m not sure I’ve got the wardrobe to do it justice.’
‘Course you have. Anyway, I just came to invite you to my hens’ night. It’s the Wednesday before the wedding. You will come, won’t you?’
Sonya hesitated. ‘Isn’t this for your girlfriends? Wouldn’t I be in the way – a bit over the age limit?’
‘Of course not,’ Angie said. ‘My mum and her best friend will be there, and Tony’s mum.’
Sonya was cornered. Angie had been assigned to her section six months earlier and Sonya generally preferred to keep her social life separate from her work. But Angie, by virtue of her engaging personality, had managed to draw her into the sort of working relationship in which some social dimension was possible. Sonya had already accepted an invitation to the wedding, although the prospect of going to a wedding where she knew only the bride was not appealing. Now she was being invited to cluck with the hens.
‘Okay,’ she said, cautiously. ‘If you’re sure, then of course I’d love to.’ It was, after all, rather a privilege to be invited to something as personal as a hens’ night, and she supposed she’d survive it; perhaps she could just pop along for an hour and then duck away.
‘Great,’ Angie said. ‘I really want you to meet Mum. I’ve told her all about you,’ and she wrote the date and the address on the pad on Sonya’s desk and, with a smile with which it was impossible to argue, retreated to her own office.
Sonya tried to concentrate on feeling flattered, and to remember what it was like to look forward to marriage without the hangover of previous experience, without cynicism and residual disappointment. There had been a time like that, as indeed there had been a time when hope triumphed over experience for a second chance. These days she had to struggle to comprehend why any young woman would contemplate giving up not just her independence, but her head space, to someone who would inevitably overwrite it with his own needs, desires and expectations. Cynicism was, she realised, becoming a permanent and not very attractive feature of her personality. It would do her good to be surrounded by innocence and hope. She would try to enjoy it in the right sort of spirit.
That same morning Marissa, who was long accustomed to waking alone at dawn, wandered barefoot around her garden, wearing a cotton kimono and clutching a cup of green tea. A few days earlier she had done some intensive spring gardening: pruning, planting, mulching. Now everything was sparkling from a light, pre-dawn shower, the mulch was rich and dark and the small stretch of lawn glistened in the sunlight. Marissa breathed in the fresh damp air and curled her toes in pleasure on the wet grass. But as she stopped to admire some new buds on the Iceberg rose, she noticed that alongside it there were several large footprints that began in the soft earth close to the fence and led across the lawn. And as she traced them to the opposite bed she saw, to her dismay, that not only had several of her tomato plants been crushed, but the three marijuana plants which they concealed had been ripped out.
Marissa stared down at the earthy dark holes in shock, and then noticed that the door to the disused dunny that doubled as a garden shed was half open. When she peered inside, her heart beating uncomfortably fast, she saw that the bunch of drying leaves and seeds from the plant she had harvested a few weeks earlier was also gone.
‘Kids,’ her neighbour, Alberto, grumbled later that morning. ‘Kids, they come through the garden last night, pick all the olives, break my new vine. Teenagers, you know? What they want olives for? They no bottle them, for sure. They take anything from you?’
‘Just a couple of tomato plants,’ Marissa lied, ‘nothing much.’
‘Huh!’ Alberto said, tapping his walking stick on the path. ‘Kids! No good. What the parents think they doing? When I am children in Italy, we steal from the neighbours, we in big trouble.’ He shook his finger at Marissa. ‘My papa very strict, don’t do me no harm, I can tell you. What the world comings to I don’t know. I call the police but they don’t never do nothing!’
Marissa nodded in agreement; she certainly hoped the police would do nothing. The last thing she needed was for the kids to be caught with her stash and then own up to where they had found it. Marissa was not, of course, a dealer. Keeping a couple of plants for personal use was not a criminal offence, but this year she had grown extra for an acquaintance for whom a few marijuana cookies and a regular joint provided some relief from the pain of cancer.
She thought the culprits might be a couple of rangy boys who lived at the far end of the street in a house where ancient bikes and two decaying lounge chairs filled the front verandah, and the lawn was a mass of neglected brown patches. They were often seen hanging around at weekends and after school, baseball caps worn back to front, scuffed trainers, baggy shorts, kicking a ball or taking turns on a skateboard covered in stickers. She didn’t think they were bad kids, just kids doing things kids do, and she hoped they had hidden her grass somewhere safe.
Marissa didn’t subscribe to the popular view of teenagers as the new urban terrorists. Only the other day she’d heard some supposedly left-wing commentator whining about how much better things were when he was a kid in the fifties; how he and his brother raided gardens pinching strawberries and watermelons. Strawberries and watermelons – was there any difference between this rose-tinted nostalgia and the theft of olives and marijuana plants? It was just a sign of the times. She too had been a child in the fifties and could remember nicking raspberries and gooseberries from the neighbours as the light faded on long English summer evenings.
In this, as in other ways, Marissa differed from the majority of her neighbours. In the twenty years she had lived in Fremantle both the street and city had changed. In the early days her neighbours had largely been postwar European migrants, the men working on the wharf, the fishing boats or the railway, and the women at the biscuit factory. But in the wave
of gentrification that followed Australia’s winning of the America’s Cup in 1983, the cottages had been renovated out of recognition by trendy politicians, minor media personalities and professional couples with a nose for real estate values. Alberto and Maria next door were the only originals from the days when Marissa had bought this small weatherboard cottage.
The scruffy house at the end of the street was a deceased estate, let to a shifting procession of tenants who were able to ignore the fact that it was falling apart. That house and Marissa’s own were a source of irritation and offence to many of the new inhabitants of Violet Street. In Marissa’s case the garden was too wild and unkempt, the big clumps of sunflowers leaned out over the pavement, the ancient lemon tree dropped its fruit and the sprawling clumps of white daisies that grew thicker and faster every year poked out through the slatted front fence. Everything thrived in Marissa’s garden, front and back, including the marijuana. Only not now, of course.
The neighbours, with their neatly trimmed lavender, and kitsch paved paths, their trellised clematis and dwarf orange trees in expensive glazed pots sniffed at Marissa’s house. And on certain days, usually at weekends when there was a lot of DIY and potting going on, Marissa could sense waves of disapproval snaking up her overgrown front path; the flash of new gardening gloves, shiny secateurs and cans of weedkiller seemed like pointed personal rebukes.
