MEN DANCING

by Cherry Radford

  ‘Did you bring your accounts?’

  He flapped a battered folder in my face. ‘What d’you think this is? Shit... that bloody form... did you fill it in?’

  ‘No, last time we did it here didn’t we? Seem to remember being quizzed about my gynae problems when we had to redo the life insurance stuff.’

  ‘Have you got our credit card bills?’

  ‘Have you lost your mind?’ More laughter.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Firth?’ A pale young man the width of a pencil offered a sticky hand to each of us. ‘Michael Smith. Sorry to keep you waiting.’ He led us through to a slice of a room that would have pre-empted the success of any obese mortgage applications. Paper cups of grainy coffee were brought. We then went through the computer’s doggedly detailed questionnaire. What kind of a person can give an anywhere-near accurate figure for their monthly outgoings, I wondered. I started to yawn uncontrollably, and had to bite my lip hard as Jez pointed a finger at me and then mimicked me with dinosaur-worthy yawns behind his hand. I returned a lap-level V sign and watched him bend over to get a biro he’d knocked off the table, his shoulders shaking. He was superb at silent laughter; I was prone to snorts.

  Eventually Michael was examining Jez’s folder. ‘Your income Mr Firth... it seems to be falling.’

  Jez sat up and attempted some composure, explained he was about to start an extra job.

  ‘And the salary for that?’

  ‘Er... hasn’t been finalised.’

  ‘Can you give us some idea...?’ He couldn’t.

  ‘Ah. And Mrs Firth – sorry, Dr Buchanan – your salary.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It seems to have... gaps.’

  ‘Well I was transferring from one grant to another, it’s difficult to –’

  ‘And last month?’

  ‘Oh. I didn’t get my invoice in on time.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Michael scratched his acned cheek. He looked about twenty-one – was that old enough to decide about people’s massive mortgages? But then presumably it was just a case of inserting figures into the computer’s formula. He was asking about credit cards.

  ‘About five thousand,’ said Jez, with a commendable lack of hesitation. I found myself nodding with relief and approval, until I saw that the mouth behind the hand was grotesquely contorted with grin-suppression.

  ‘And yours?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Um... about the same,’ I said. Jez looked over with a stupidly give-away quizzical smile, making me wonder what the bank did about lying customers.

  There then followed a discussion of interest rates, payments and multiples of salaries that was way beyond us by that point. Or at any point, really; as Kenny would say, it was just too too boredy. Anyway, Michael’s conclusion was that all he could do was hand us over to so-how-are-you-two-today Kaylee – a girl who didn’t look a day older than Seb – for an explanation of how twenty thousand was ours if we signed up to pay a monstrous amount for it. We thanked them and left, glad to get out into the sunshine, release a pent up bout of mimicry from Jez.

  ‘Oh well. May as well drown our sorrows at the old Italian place,’ I said.

  ‘Or this Thai. Can’t believe how many restaurants Teddington’s sprouted since we were last here.’ His face clouded for a moment. ‘On the other hand perhaps we shouldn’t.’

  ‘Yes we should. Come on.’ I dragged him in and sat down at a blue-and-gold table.

  He leaned forward and played with my hand. ‘Look, if it gets really difficult I’ll ask Dad if he can help us out. He’s offered enough times. Just a loan until the business gets going.’

  ‘No, you don’t want to do that. Don’t worry, we’ll muddle through. Always do.’

  ‘I mean it, I know the garden just takes me over... but I am going to make this work. And Elizabeth’s got such faith in me, I couldn’t let her down.’

  ‘And... Sarah?’

  ‘Sarah?’

  ‘What’s her role in the business?’ And my marriage.

  He shook his head, twiddled the freesia in its vase. ‘She’s got a full time job... she just goes to Crete with Elizabeth sometimes. I told you – she’s not really part of it.’ He tapped the menu. ‘So what are you having?’

  Doubts about you, I wanted to say. I flicked through the pages, but even the English felt like a foreign language. ‘She’s not at all like her parents, is she?’

  ‘I don’t know. Who cares? So... spring rolls and...’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  He hesitated a moment; I tried to read his expression but he was examining the bamboo picture on his place mat. ‘She’s okay... Need the loo.’

  I watched him stride off. I obviously wasn’t going to learn anything without asking him directly, but somehow I wasn’t quite ready for that. The likelihood was that it was just a flirtation; it would pass. And it might pass more quickly if we had a special, precious day alone together, rather than a row. Besides, I didn’t deserve to know the truth. I’d agreed to meet Ricardo the next day for a couple of hours, and although I was planning to tell him that we needed to go back to being just friends I wasn’t at all sure of my resolve.

  ‘So... have you decided?’ he asked, making me jump.

  ‘Oh. Er... spring rolls and... egg fried rice.’

  ‘Is that all? You can help me with my panang. And then...’ He held my wrist to look at my watch. ‘Yes, there’ll be time before we pick up Kenny... We’ll have a bit of loving when we get back. Whatever you like – I’ll write you a menu.’ He put his hand on my thigh under the table.

  I smiled but... oh God – a bit of loving – the very same words. It was my turn to take myself off to the loo, and quickly, before the smarting in my eyes turned to tears. This was how it was going to be, this was my punishment: a dripping water-torture of similarities and contrasts that wouldn’t let me forget. I wanted to go back in time. Failing that, I needed to go forward, to when the wound would heal, leaving a fading scar. Just like Jez’s had all those years ago. Because sooner or later, inevitably, I would tell him. Try to explain, if I could. But first I needed to put it firmly in the past.

  17.

  I felt like I was stalking again, standing there in the same jacket. And the heavens had opened, venting their disapproval on this stupid woman who seemed to be making a habit of standing around waiting for other ladies’ Latin men. Fuck this, what am I doing, I thought. I don’t even like wine bars.

  Quarter past. We weren’t going to have much time as it was: for some reason he had to be back by eight. To hug Gabriel goodnight? Have the dinner that Ana was preparing? To cuddle up on the sofa and watch a drama series they’d been following? He hadn’t said.

  Couldn’t he call? I decided I’d give him until twenty five past and then I’d walk back to the hospital. Ring Ali and Jessie and tell them I could be with them earlier after all.

  This has to stop, I thought, I’ll tell him after the first glass of wine. We’ll go back to being friends; it’ll always be a bit awkward, but we’ll cope. After all, I can’t be in love with him if I’m still daydreaming about Ali and bowled over by his slightest compliment.

  Then a taxi screeched to a halt beside me, the passenger door flinging open.

  ‘Come in! Come in!’

  I banged my head on the door frame as I got in, let him make a fuss over my little bump.

  ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t get away. I’ll make it up to you, you’ll see,’ he said.

  How exactly, I wondered. By adding on an extra twenty minutes to my booked time? As if objecting to this idea, there was a text from Ana asking him to pick up some milk on the way home. He put his phone away and pulled me back over to him, a big smile on his face. God I’m horrible, I thought, and tears started welling up.

  ‘Rosie? What’s the matter?’

  ‘I don’t know, I seem to be in a strop... sorry,’ I said, leaning against him. ‘You might find you want to avoid me the first few days of the month.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, putting a war
m hand on my tummy. ‘So no baby for us?’

  ‘No.’ It wasn’t funny. But he was pressing his fingers into my tummy, dispersing the cramps. ‘Ooh, keep doing that, it’s helping...’ I started to relax, snuggled into him, tried not to groan with the ecstasy of pain-release.

  ‘As good as sex?’ he whispered.

  ‘Not far off. You sure you shouldn’t have been a gynaecologist instead?’

  ‘I did consider it actually. Ana wasn’t keen. I suppose if I’d wanted it enough...’

  The Cellar, it was called, but it was more like a stable, the small tables and padded benches separated by high wooden partitions.

  ‘Why don’t they put a little door on each while they’re at it?’ I said, as he found us a little free box in the corner. And for the first time I wondered if I was not his first affair. Who else had he brought here? When I thought about it, our uniqueness had only ever been implied, which almost certainly meant that there had been others.

  ‘Now what’s the matter.’

  ‘Nothing. Just a bit tired that’s all,’ I said.

  He squeezed me, and then I watched him go to the bar to order, the barmaid beaming a welcome as he approached. In his own country he probably turned a few heads, but here, compared to the pallid and graceless Britons, he was a dark and charming beauty that nobody could miss. And he probably knew it.

  ‘You’re looking very sad, Rosie. I think I preferred the strop. Come on, let’s hear it,’ he said, putting two glasses of wine on the table then sitting close and peering into my face.

  ‘I’m fine, really,’ I said, trying to smile, leaning into him.

  ‘It won’t always be like this you know,’ he said, his warm breath on my ear. I was going to ask what he meant, but a cheery girl was laying out plates of various cheeses, salads and bread. I wondered how Ricardo was going to manage Ana’s meal. ‘You wait ‘til you try their sticky toffee pudding,’ he said as she sorted out the table. ‘Came here once with some friends before a show. I remembered the privacy and desserts and thought you’d like it.’

  I smiled; he was being very sweet. But I’d have to finish my wine and tell him. Already 6.15.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he said, putting his hand over my watch. ‘Let me be the time keeper. We’ve got an hour and then a cuddle in a dark taxi. And if I’m late they’ll understand – I can call tomorrow as well.’ He explained that he’d arranged to call his mother while his brother’s family were visiting her, so that he could speak to everyone, even his small niece. He had to leave at about eight to get home to make the call at the agreed time. I’d got it all wrong.

  I pulled out my buzzing phone. ‘8.30 OK. I see you then. Ali.’

  ‘Who’s Al?’ he asked, reading upside down.

  ‘My piano pupil, the husband.’ Luckily he hadn’t added a kiss this time. ‘I’ve put back their lesson to half eight.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just cancel them?’

  ‘Well we’ve already rearranged it once this week – he’s often away on business.’

  It was cosy, sitting there cuddled up in the candlelight. He asked me about Seb and told me he’d also once refused to revise for end-of-year exams; we talked about how his mother was doing and how he missed her; he told me he’d dug out his clarinet and wanted me to accompany him. He was still checking out hotels; it had to be right, he said. At which point I should have told him that we wouldn’t need one.

  ‘What did you tell Ana, just that you’d be working late?’

  ‘No, I told her the truth – going for a drink with you. Said you were feeling a bit low about Seb and needed to talk.’

  ‘Oh. Was that a good idea?’

  ‘Yes. She likes you. It’s good for her to know we’re friends,’ he said, finishing his wine glass. ‘It’ll help when the time comes.’

  ‘You mean, when she finds out? Oh God, surely if we’re –’

  ‘I mean when I tell her. I told you Rosie, we won’t always have to hide away like this.’

  And then I really should have said something, but the wine was making me susceptible to his affection, to the gentleness of the hands that were beginning to stray all over me. I told myself it was wrong, tried to think of Ana and Jez, but it was no good; the thoughts instantly evaporated in the intense heat surrounding us.

  ***

  ‘Twenty past nine. I am thinking that you not come,’ he said, opening the door barely wide enough for me to get in.

  ‘I’m sorry. The meeting went on and on.’ Saying goodbye certainly had, much to the embarrassment of the taxi driver.

  We went through to the living room and I put my bag down by the piano, but he sat on the sofa, leaning against its arm. I asked him how he was getting on. But the bouncing puppy-pupil had vanished; I was dealing with the moody-man-at-the-barre, the one you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night.

  ‘First you say seven. Eight thirty is too late... then nine. Is very late now, is stupid.’

  ‘I know, I’m really sorry, but I thought you could still have half—’

  ‘I am Cuban, but I can be on time you know. Is professional. I like this in all that I do.’

  I wanted to remind him that he’d been okay about eight thirty, but didn’t want to find out what a hair-splitting contradiction might do to his already pitch-black mood.

  ‘Look, I know. I’m sorry, but this was a very unusual situation.’

  He grunted some disgusting Spanish about me and then winced and started to dig his fingers into his inner thigh. A wounded tiger.

  ‘You’re right, it’s late. I think it’s best if we leave it this week. We can’t have a lesson, communicate, discover music, with you...’ He was volcanic, waiting to blow, challenging me to say it and bring it on. ‘With you in a strop.’

  ‘What is strop? What are you saying to me?’ he asked, getting to his feet and stamping towards me.

  ‘You know bloody well what strop is. And believe me, so do I. So let’s forget all this and I’ll come back on Monday.’

  ‘But I need help with boat piece. It has new rhythm. You have to show me.’

  ‘Well you should have thought of that before you pissed me off,’ I said, picking up my bag, but he looked so startled, putting his head on one side as if it might help him read my face better, that I had to put my hand to my mouth and try not to laugh.

  ‘You are not pissing off.’

  ‘I said I’m pissed off. You don’t seem to know how to accept an apology. But yes, I’m also pissing off.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, please,’ he said, his hand gently on my shoulder. Aha, the magic word: something no mother can resist. I breathed out heavily. And then it occurred to me.

  ‘Where’s Jessie?’

  ‘At Spanish class.’

  ‘Ah.’ Very committed of her. I waited for the usual misery-irritation wave, but it didn’t come.

  ‘I’m sorry Rosi. Bad day for me, rehearsal was shit. Last night I missed a lift. Is hard to continue, to forget.’

  ‘Oh. That must be...’ But I couldn’t continue. He’d pulled me into his arms, squeezing me too tightly. Then after a while he held me at arm’s length to look at me. To see my reaction perhaps.

  ‘Coffee?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, turning towards the kitchen, but suddenly he was back holding me. ‘First I need more of this,’ he said, his hot breath in my hair. I won’t lie: even after a few hours with Ricardo my body responded to his hug and to the quick kiss pressed upon my lips. But I also saw a resemblance to the way he kissed his ballerina in Romeo and Juliet, and understood that these gestures must be an everyday vocabulary for him.

  ‘If you want me to explain dotted crotchets at this hour you’ll have to make me a coffee,’ I said firmly, pulling away.

  ‘Okay, I don’t want that you are pissed.’

  He fixed me an over-strong coffee while I educated him about the separate meanings of pissed, pissed off and pissing off.

  ‘Oh, almost yo
u make me forget,’ he said, picking up a bowl of Maltesers, and we took them back to the piano and unlocked the mystery of the dotted crotchet.

  I noticed it was ten fifteen. For some reason I wanted Jessie to come back before I left. And then I heard footsteps in the shared hallway.

  ‘What is problem?’

  ‘Nothing. Just thought that might be Jessie.’

  ‘No. The class is near her parents. Sometimes she stay night.’

  ‘Oh.’ I absorbed this for a few seconds; a few weeks earlier I’d fantasised about this very situation. ‘Tell her I’m sorry I missed her lesson, won’t you.’

  He kept on playing. And then he stopped and looked at me through narrowed eyes. ‘Your husband is content that you come here so late?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he be?’ I took advantage of his distraction to stand up and put away my pencil, signalling the end of the lesson.

  He laughed sheepishly, scratched his forehead, looked down at his thighs as if they provided the answer. As indeed they might. ‘He doesn’t ask about me? Or you don’t say who I am.’

  What an ego. Although he had a point. ‘That’s right, I don’t.’ He nodded, smiling knowingly. Perhaps slightly irritated by that, I added that there were quite a few things I didn’t tell him.

  ‘Oh?’ he said, waiting for me to go on. ‘You are naughty girl, Rosi?’ He looked up at me with a smile playing around his lips.

  ‘No! Well, it depends how you look at it,’ I said, wondering how on earth we’d got onto this.

  ‘It depends on... what?’ he asked, getting up and coming towards me.

  I smiled and shook my head, hoping I was dismissing the conversation, put on my cardigan. ‘Can I just use your...?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I sat on the loo and looked at the candles round the bath, the pair of toothbrushes looking at each other in the cup. Still no waves of misery and irritation. Not even a ripple. I’d made excellent progress; you could say I was almost cured. But I still had to actually leave.

  He was putting down the phone. ‘Taxi comes in five, ten minutes.’

  ‘Oh, you didn’t have to do that – the bus stop’s just round the corner.’