by Penny Dixon
‘Call me.’
‘Sure.’
‘When?’
‘When I’ve decided where to go.’
I smile at him, feel his eyes on our backs as we leave.
Celia and I giggle like teenagers, bumping each other on the shoulder. We’re used to the pick up lines, used to the games; comes from looking younger than our age.
‘How was yours?’
‘Wondering why this vision of loveliness is out on her own. If I was his he wouldn’t let me out on my own. Ready for some food?’
‘Yes, need something to soak up that rum.’
We go to George; although he has a queue, we’re prepared to wait. We place our order, include another rum and coke and sit down to wait for our food. I have the marlin steak dinner and Celia the snapper. We make light work of the breadfruit, roast potato, plantain, coleslaw and salad, helped down by the rum and coke. I’m not sure of the measures but this one tastes even stronger than the last. I’m in a happy alcoholic haze, that state where I decide to leave my responsibilities in a tightly zipped bag and step away from it. I know they’re there to be opened up and attended to again, but for now they’re safely locked away. It feels like a lifetime ago since I was this free. Apart from Celia, no one here tonight knows me; lost in the anonymity of this pulsating crowd I can be anyone I want to be.
We make our way back to the gentle dancers and watch for a while before we’re approached by two elderly gentlemen. They could be twins. Both wear black pointed toe shoes polished to a shine and dark trousers tightly belted over white short sleeved shirts opened at the neck. Both have shaved heads with clean sharp features, as though time had chiselled their features rather than worn them down. They both walk briskly, purposefully toward us, their bright eyes hold ours as they hold their hands out to us. At about five foot, nine one’s the same height as Celia, the other slightly taller than me. The only other difference is that one’s nearly twice the width of the other.
I wonder how they made the decision who’d approach who, because the slim one – who can’t be more than nine stone – holds his hand out to Celia and the eighteen stone one asks for mine. His smile pushes his cheeks up towards the corner of his eyes and displays teeth so even I guess they must be dentures.
‘Can I have this dance please?’ His voice is like pebbles sliding across each other as the tide goes out, a kind of swishy whisper.
I take his hand but lean forward to tell him I’m not a ballroom dancer.
‘That doesn’t matter dear, just follow me. I’ll take care of you.’
Holding one of my hands out in front of me, he places my other on his shoulder and lightly rests his other in the small of my back. ‘Just follow me,’ he says softly as he steps off. I’m focusing hard to follow him, foot forward when he goes back, trying to keep in time when he moves forward and I have to move back.
‘Relax dear,’ he advises and squeezes my hand. ‘It’s OK to make a mistake.’
‘Sorry.’ I feel embarrassed. I should have said no to the dance. He must be laughing at me.
‘You visiting?’
‘Yes.’
‘From England?’
‘Yes.’ Hard to focus and talk at the same time.
‘I was there last year,’ he says
‘Oh really,’ I’m surprised, ‘where?’
‘Spent some time in London with my sister.’
‘Where abouts in London?’
‘A place called Notting Hill. Do you know it?’
‘Yes, it’s very famous. Have you heard of the film Notting Hill?’
‘I think my sister mentioned it but I didn’t see it.’
‘Did you enjoy your time in London?’
‘Yes, I like it very much.’
‘What time of the year did you go?’
Before he can answer, the song finishes. I’m pleased with myself, I haven’t stumbled, I’ve moved smoothly across the floor with his guidance.
‘Thank you dear.’ He holds my hand, takes a slight bow. ‘And remember, just relax and let your man lead.’ He’s gone. To ask a woman in a heavily printed dress to dance. I feel dismissed.
I wait till the next dance finishes and Celia returns. I watch the woman in the printed dress glide across the floor, despite her bulk, in the arms of an expert. Could I learn to let go and let a man lead me? I thought there was at least the possibility of sharing leadership with Richard but… Leave the bag where it is Josi. Not tonight.
‘Fancy the other place?’ Celia says, walking toward me. I nod.
They’re playing Michael Jackson’s “Bad”. The crowd in front of the stage is tightly packed, turning, spinning, weaving, arms going one way, hips the other, heads bobbing. The energy’s intense. I want to be part of it, to lose myself in the fervour, the thumping pulsating music. Want to stop the pounding in my head, to lighten my leaden legs. That man walking away pricked a large hole in my fragile blissful haze; pricked my balloon. I’m deflating fast. The hole’s letting in thoughts and feelings I’m trying to keep out, at least for tonight. I need to build myself up again, re-establish my miasma. I feel tears jab the back of my eyes, like impatient children kept too long inside and straining to run wild in the sunshine. Feel them kick the door with their heels, rattle the door knob. Not here, not now. I’m out tonight to have fun, to forget.
The DJ plays “Hot, Hot, Hot” and I find myself stepping up onto the stage, glancing over my shoulder to see if Celia’s following. She isn’t. I carry on anyway. I move my feet to the beat, small rhythmic movements. Scanning the bobbing crowd, I wonder what I’m doing up here. Then something gives, the giant elastic band that had been holding me together suddenly snaps.
My hands make big circles, my body undulates, my legs are fast and furious, my hips find new life. Everything I do is big. I watch myself from a distance and marvel at this bold and daring woman. A man in a white tracksuit manoeuvres himself in front of me and mimics my moves. He smiles. The light catches his single gold incisor but hides his eyes winking behind the large white sunglasses with blue lens. His white headband’s wet with sweat. Looking down at his white trainers, he does a Michael Jackson spin. I copy him. He holds out his hand. I take it. We turn and spin and slide across the floor, from one side of the stage to the other. I’m the only woman on the stage and I wasn’t invited on by a man. All eyes are on me and my man in white. I’m light as air, can do anything. Moves appear out of nowhere. I’m hot and breathless. The song ends.
Before the next song begins, another man positions himself in front of me, seizing the opportunity when the man in white goes to get a towel from a small rucksack at the back of the stage. He isn’t as flamboyant as Mr White. His checked trousers and beige polo shirt make him look more like Rupert Bear than Bobby Brown.
What he lacks in garb, he makes up for in style. We do salsa moves, cross body, side step, Suzie Q, lay back, v-step. He stands back to let me shine. Steps I haven’t thought about in years reappear fresh and new, like an old coat from the dry cleaner’s given a new lease of life. He never takes his eyes off me. I see his unclothed desire but it’s not what I’m looking for so I decline when he asks for the next dance.
I’m about to step down from the stage when I feel an arm on my elbow. Not an urgent insistent arm, a touch that simply says, ‘May I?’ I turn and am encircled in the arms of a man just over six feet. He’s the antithesis of Mr White, dressed from head to toe in black. Black trousers with front and back seams, shiny black long sleeved shirt worn over his trousers, black trainers and black shades. He carries his black towel in his back pocket which he takes out to wipe his brow.
The DJ’s changed mood and plays one of my favourite reggae songs, “She’s Royal”. As Tarrus Riley’s deep molasses voice oozes though the speakers, Mr Black puts one arm round my shoulder and the other in the small of my back. Not this again! Not another humiliation. I should leave now. But as he begins to sway his hips, I realise we are in for a different
kind of dance. One I feel more at home with. I allow my body to move in time with his. There’s something in his touch that calms my frenzy, something tranquil in his moves; something in the lyrics that stills my mind. When the song finishes, I thank him and leave the stage.
Celia’s waiting for me.
‘Can we go?’ I shout above the opening words of Sean Paul’s “Get Busy”.
She nods. We walk away in silence. As the music fades in the background and the aroma leaves our nostrils, she puts her arm round my shoulder and says quietly, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
Josi
‘Six weeks after the wedding, I was in the loft looking for some old photos to put into a beautiful antique frame we were given as a wedding gift. I knew Richard kept them in a box in the far corner. I never went in there cause you know I don’t like spiders, but I wanted to surprise him. So I braved it.’ Ice from the rum and coke Celia has made me is making my hands numb. The cold water dripping on my bare legs should be refreshing but it isn’t.
‘And?’ Celia promps softly.
‘You know, it still felt like his house. I didn’t really know where everything was. I felt like the new girl who started after everyone else and always had to ask where this was, where that was. You know how…’
‘The loft Josi. You’re in the loft. Don’t digress.’
‘Oh yes. I found the box and had a rummage through, had just about given up finding anything suitable when I found a thick brown envelope right at the bottom.’
‘Yeah?’ Celia sounds patient, like she’s encouraging a small child to be brave.
‘Inside the envelope were two smaller ones.’ I take a large gulp of the rum and coke, look down into the dark liquid and wish I could dissolve into the blackness like the ice cubes.
‘The first envelope had a picture,’ I take another gulp, ‘of a small boy, I’d say about ten.’
‘Go on.’
‘Giving a man a blow job,’ I whisper.
‘What!’ Celia unfolds her legs from under her and sits upright. ‘What!’ she looks at me wide-eyed.
I take another swig.
‘Josi, what are you saying to me?’ There’s concern in her voice, a few notches down from the panic I felt that day.
‘The head of the man was out of shot, but… but… I’ve known his body for eleven years Celia. It was Richard.’ I take another swig but the glass is empty. Celia takes it. Fills it up again.
‘Are you sure Josi, are you absolutely sure?’ she asks as she backs away to the get the drink.
‘I know the marks on his body.’
I feel a wave of heat rise from my feet and move swiftly to my head. My hands are freezing, not just from the ice; like my body can’t make its mind up what to do. I feel the same nausea rising from the pit of my stomach, like it did that day in the loft. It had threatened to explode all over the photos. I’d closed my eyes tight and swallowed hard. Then forced my eyes open and made myself look at the other photos. It’s like I was hoping they would be something innocent, seaside pictures or something else, something ordinary. I’d ripped open the other envelope; same boy, different angle.
I’d dropped the photos. Just made it to the toilet where everything undigested in my stomach came out. Retching and heaving and shivering and crying and praying for strength to get up and get through the day. I wondered, with my head down the toilet bowl, why it’s the stomach that lets go of its contents when it’s the head that needs clearing. What good is getting rid of my muesli and fruit when it’s the hard drive in my head that needs to be wiped clean? No amount of spewing could erase what I’d just seen. I could blot it out, selective amnesia; pretend I hadn’t seen my husband’s erect penis in the mouth of a small boy. I retched again but there was no more muesli.
Nothing was real that day. How could I go shopping, cook a meal, call friends, make appointments? How could I pretend everything was normal when nothing would be normal again? This must be what it’s like when a police officer knocks on your door and tells you your beloved’s been killed in a car crash. That would have been better. However careless the other driver had been, however over the limit, however unroadworthy his car, I could find a way to forgive him. I would live with the happy memory of my beloved husband and grieve the time that was snatched from us. Any kind of death would have been better than this. Crossfire in a bank robbery, blown up by a terrorist bomb. Innocent people die every day. Death of an innocent I could live with. But this?
There were words I didn’t want to use, thoughts I didn’t want to think. People I didn’t want to think about; my kids, my friends, my clients. I opened a bottle of wine. No matter it was only midday.
When Richard came home he went to scoop me up in his arms as usual, but his arms dropped to his side, as though he sensed the force field around me.
‘Everything all right darling?’ he’d asked nervously.
‘I found some pictures in the blue box in the loft today.’ I was surprised I could look him in the eye, but he felt the ice in my voice.
‘Wha… wha… what pictures?’ he stuttered.
I knew instantly that he knew what I meant. I’ve never heard him stutter. Never seen him look so scared. More scared than when we thought his mom had cancer, or when…
‘The ones in the big envelope at the bottom of the box,’ I said slowly, keeping contact with his eyes. ‘The double wrapped hidden ones.’
He’d stared at me. Fixed to the spot by a strong magnetic force.
‘Well!’ I screamed. The sound I’d wanted to let go of all day, an emptying of the lungs.
‘It was a long time ago, I was at a party, I was drunk,’ he gushed. ‘I think I’d been smoking as well. It was just the once. I’ve never done it again. You’ve got to believe me.’ He moved forward to hold my shoulders, to pull me to him, the way our quarrels often ended.
‘Don’t you touch me, you pervert,’ I whispered.
He stepped back, blown back by the force of my words.
‘I swear it was just the once,’ he pleaded.
‘Then why do you still have the pictures? Do you wank over them? How could you Dick – he’s a kid.’ Un-summoned tears rolled down my face, hot frustrated tears, stinging tears.
‘It was a long time ago, he’s not a kid now.’
‘He’s a kid; he’ll always be a kid.’
‘Please Josi, you’ve got to understand.’
‘Get out!’ I screamed, ‘Get out! And take those filthy photos with you!’
‘Please Josi…’ he began, saw the look of pure hate in my eyes and backed out of the room.
He returned a few minutes later to find me in the same spot, rigid with anger. Holding out the envelope to me he said. ‘I’ve ripped them up. I should have done it years ago. I’m sorry Josi…I’m so sorry.’
‘Get out,’ I said slowly, quietly.
He picked up his car keys. I heard the door close. I sank into the settee and wept. For the boy, for stolen innocence, for his lost future, for being such a fool.
Celia’s arm is around my shoulder. My glass is empty. My head throbs like a convention of a thousand drummers is taking place between my eyebrows. I’m swaying from side to side like Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. Maybe there is no difference between where they found the source of their creativity and where I find the source of my pain.
After what seems like a long time Celia says, ‘It’s the first time you’ve spoken about this?’ It isn’t really a question, more a recognition that the first time we revisit the source of the pain, the first time we find the courage to peel back the scab and look at the festering pus, to have its stench fill our nostrils, travel deep within our lungs and slowly putrefy our oxygen, every cell in our body feels suffocated and is ready to die rather than live in the cess pit. The first time this happens it’s good to have a friend with you; someone to tell you the oxygen can be cleansed, that in time you will breathe clean air again, that the wound can heal and the cells c
an skip and dance and laugh again. Someone who will not judge you, who will not say, ‘How could you be so blind, so stupid, surely you must have had some idea, he must have given you some sign.’ Someone who will hold you till the tsunami of that first telling passes. As a therapist, this is my function. I know how to do this for clients but I couldn’t do it for me, couldn’t do it for Richard.
For six months we went through the motions of a marriage. I existed as a wife whose husband has disappeared. Such a wife is suspended in limbo, cannot plan for the future, cannot grieve because at any time she may get news of her husband’s return. Such a wife finds small distractions or creates big dramas to keep her mind from focusing on his absence. If she has children she may focus on them so intently that they feel suffocated, try to pull away and leave her feeling even more abandoned.
Only in my case, the missing husband came home every night. After that day when I told him to get out, he stayed at a hotel. He’d had the foresight to take an overnight bag with spare shirts and underwear and went to work the next day as usual. As a senior partner in the accountancy practice he could have taken time off, come back home the following morning and tried to help me make sense of it. But I knew he’d wait for me to calm down, wait for me to ask him to come back home. We’d had rows before, nothing big; maybe I should say disagreements rather than rows. There were never raised voices or if there were it was usually mine. In eleven years he’d never raised his voice at me. After Curtis, my first husband and father of my children, it was good to be with someone who wasn’t always ready to pick a fight, ready to ram his opinions and beliefs down my throat. Someone who was rational, logical, reasonable, didn’t always feel that every disagreement was a threat to his masculinity, a scalpel to his manhood. Life with Curtis had been a roller coaster ride. He’d taken me high, shown me the world through a musician’s eyes. Colours, sounds, textures were heightened. He could play me like he played his saxophone. When he kissed me, he filled me with his breath. He had a way of blowing into my mouth and calling me his Grafton. I was happy to be his instrument.
