Cat Step, page 3
‘Are we doing it now?’ the woman asked. ‘I’ve got a taxi waiting. I can’t do it now.’
‘What kind of dancing?’ a man said. They were so sceptical, so buttoned-up.
I put my handbag on the floor and stepped away from them. I lifted my right leg and grabbed hold of my foot. Then I stretched my leg so that I was doing the standing splits and raised my left hand for balance. ‘Ta-da!’ I said.
That rattled them. That made them laugh. ‘Bravo,’ a man said. The woman who was waiting for a taxi said, ‘You’ll have us all at Stobhill.’
‘What’s Stobhill?’
‘Infirmary.’
‘You’re not from here, are you?’ June asked.
‘No.’ I bent to pick up my handbag. ‘Right, a fiver a class. You’d lose that on a lottery ticket. Try it once and see if you like it.’
‘I’m not a gambler,’ one of the men said.
‘What day?’ June asked.
Ruth told them she would speak to me then put up a sign.
‘As long as it’s not too hard, I’ll come along,’ June said, looking at me. ‘Although I’ve never been one for dancing.’
The others said they might come.
‘Wear comfortable clothes. Tie your hair back. Don’t wear your pearls. Bring water.’
That was it. We left the lounge with its photographs and sideboards, and the radio still playing, and I went with Ruth to her office to choose a day. I told her I could finish no later than quarter to twelve because I had to be back in Lennoxtown to pick up Emily. When I left I saw between a gap in the buildings the Campsie Fells. The view went straight through and in the sunlit sky between me and the hills seagulls darted about. I could have leaped into that space and flown I felt so good. Joy returned like a downpour of fresh rain, clearing the shooting stars from my head. Dancing was my rightful thing. I should never have stopped.
5.
I will tell Emily this: never look down on a dancer, classically trained, who doesn’t make the corps de ballet. Never criticise a girl who tries but fails to get the West End chorus jobs she’s recalled for, who dances on the Palladium stage but looks out at empty seats until she’s told to pack up and go home. Never sneer at the cruise ship girls doing the West End routines in ships’ carpeted theatres. Dancing is dancing. It is strength and passion and energy. It’s a corporeal freedom that nothing except sex will match. It’s a sense of belonging. A total release. You’re born to it and you’re lucky to do it.
At the start of my training they told me I’d never be a ballerina. No, before I even began my training they told me to come back a year later when I’d lost weight and improved my technique. When I finally started college, they told me I’d never dance classically. It’s hard to hear something that disappointing, even when you’re expecting it. I worked hard in the ballet classes all the same, believing that a pin-head pirouette or a seamless développé would be helpful whatever style of dance I performed. I was right.
In my other classes – my tap and jazz classes – it was different. They said: You’re a performer. You make us watch you. Girls, come to the side and look at Liz. This is the drive we want to see. This is the energy. See her commitment to every step? This is what we want.
So, although they told me many times to lose weight, to sharpen up, to work on my core, they also praised some inner spark in me, my flair I suppose, and I came through college confident. I knew what I wanted. West End shows. Number One tours. The Lido. The Moulin Rouge. And if that eluded me: cruise ships bigger than hotels, can-cans, grand finales, sunny ports, money, glamour, stories to tell my grandchildren and to make my parents proud.
I nearly walked out of the audition that started everything. Some momentary collapse of confidence after a run of rejections. I saw all the girls in their make-up, packed into a hot waiting room, warming up or texting or discussing past jobs, and thought I could never do it, I could never stand out.
They taught us a dance combination – something from Chicago, I think – step tap shoulder roll, step tap shoulder roll – and we danced in lines in the studio. They stopped us and divided us into two groups and we danced again. They told certain girls to go and certain girls to stay. I stayed. Then they told all of us to go away and return at two o’clock. I sat in Soho Square and phoned my mum who was working in her open-plan office a tube ride away. ‘I’m so close. I can’t bear it,’ I said.
‘Bear it,’ she said. ‘You can do this.’ I hear now the sorrow in her voice, knowing she might lose me as well as my dad, but at the time I only heard my own happiness reflected back.
The afternoon audition was as tough as the morning. Tougher. I stayed in the room until there were only four lines of girls left, then only two lines. Then there were just eight of us. They wanted six. We danced as a group, we danced in pairs, we stood alone in front of the panel and sang. When I walked out of the studio and the pigeons flew up from the pavement I knew I couldn’t have tried any harder.
They telephoned the next day and offered me the job. A nine-month tour leaving out of Tampa, Florida. A month of rehearsals on ship throughout the night, midnight to seven. I cried. And accepted, of course. No ties, no partner to leave behind, no rent, no bills, no commitment. I danced on the cruise ships for nearly five years. I literally travelled the world. That’s where I met Robbie, on the ocean, somewhere between Miami and San Juan, under the glare of the ship’s fluorescent lights, five floors below sea level.
6.
We tried one of those sing-a-longs in the library. We sat on coloured cushions next to parents or grandparents whose toddlers pulled books from shelves and clutched crayons. Emily sat on my lap, turned her body into mine and refused to sing. My voice was the loudest so I sang more quietly. Come on you people, I thought. ‘Come on, Emily,’ I said. She pulled at my ear lobes. Afterwards, she wanted to sit on the cushions and read books and that was fine by me. I felt relaxed enough. A woman smiled at me and I grabbed at her smile in a fierce way. We shared the ages of our children and she told me Emily seemed small for four but hers were giants because her husband was six foot three so perhaps she was just used to giants. A baby boy slept in a sling against her chest. Her daughter climbed into her lap. The woman’s hair swung at her chin as she told me she was waiting in the library because she had another one to collect at three and it would be pointless to go home for only ten minutes. Undressing them then dressing them again, sticking their arms in coat holes, putting their gloves back on.
‘I thought work was hard, but children…’ She widened her eyes.
I liked her.
‘Have you lived in Campsie long?’ she said.
‘Where?’
‘Here. Campsie.’
‘Lennoxtown?’
‘You clearly haven’t. We call it Campsie.’
Emily used her thumb to turn a page of her book. I stroked her head and twirled a piece of hair around my finger. ‘Can you read it, Mummy?’ she said, and I should have read the book but the woman spoke again.
‘Do you know anyone here?’
‘You’re my first…’ I was going to say friend.
‘I’ll give you my number. I’m Caroline.’
I didn’t expect tears to spring.
‘Where do you go? What do you do?’ I gestured at our children. Emily tugged my arm and asked me again to read the book.
‘There’s a playgroup in one of the church halls. That’s about all. Or I come here. It’s warm. There’s a toilet. You get a good view of the street.’
We looked out of the windows at the main road with the garage and the Co-op opposite. Something must have resonated because she asked me, ‘Did you hear about the woman who left her baby in the car?’
‘No,’ I said, and my cheeks must have flushed, they must have.
She told me a story about a woman whose car got broken into while she was in the Co-op buying wine and fish fingers. She’d left her daughter in the car crying her eyes out and the police were after her. She was in awful trouble. I listened to this story and when Caroline said, looking at me with her tired eyes and her hair swinging at her chin, ‘I feel a bit sorry for her actually. I think she was a bit unlucky. What are you supposed to do?’ I almost whispered, ‘It was me, it was me,’ but I didn’t.
Emily pressed her heel into her bum.
‘You can’t take any chances though,’ Caroline said and checked her phone.
‘You need a wee,’ I said to Emily.
‘I don’t. I want to read the book.’
‘Yes, you do, I can tell. I have to make her go. She won’t go unless I make her.’
‘Oh yes, we’ve been there,’ Caroline said.
I took Emily’s wrist and pulled her up. Away we went. Soubresaut: a sudden leap.
After she’d peed, a great swift gush, we left the library. I waved through the glass at Caroline sitting with her phone and her children. I wish I’d gone back to her but shame shut that down. In the car I asked Emily to give me five minutes’ peace while I made a phone call. I left a message for the social worker. I’ve been busy which is why there’s been a delay, I said. My phone stopped working, it cut people off as soon as they rang. The social worker will have been familiar with excuses like that from people like me.
A man stood on Audrey’s doorstep. He took his hands from his pockets and walked down the path towards us. I thought he might have been a policeman. It’s true that fear can make your stomach flip.
‘You told me half two,’ he said as I unplugged Emily from her car seat.
‘What?’
‘I’m here for the clock.’
Gumtree! I’d forgotten. So many texts from so many people saying they’d come at this time or that time, and some came and some didn’t. Emily got out of the car and I moved her away from a bottle she wanted to kick.
‘I was just about to leave,’ he said.
‘Sorry.’ I took my keys from my bag.
‘I want honey on my toast,’ Emily said to me.
‘Honey it is.’ We walked up the path. Emily stood with her hands and nose pressed against the front door. I asked her to step back so I could get my key in.
‘I’ve got a vase to view at three fifteen in Stirling and I’m late now,’ the man said.
I ignored him.
‘Some scenery you’ve got here. The shadows on those hills. Looks menacing.’ He wouldn’t be ignored.
But neither could the fells be ignored. The clouds were full and high and between them there was blue. Pushed by some barely felt wind their shadows covered the ground in slow-moving patches. The man rubbed his hands and blew on them.
‘It changes every minute,’ I said and I showed him inside, to Robbie’s gran’s things.
The clock had a picture of a bird at every hour and at every hour a bird’s call chimed. I’d put a battery in to make sure it worked and the first time it chimed Emily and I had looked at each other, startled, then listened after that for other bird calls. We liked to mimic them.
‘I’m a little disappointed in the quality,’ he said.
Fuck the quality, I wanted to make my daughter her toast. I accepted his four pounds, bartered down from the five I’d suggested and had to search for coins to make up his change. I flicked on the heating. The flat was cold.
He asked if I was having a clear-out and I showed him other things I’d put aside: some ornaments and lamps and books. It seemed a betrayal, laying out a life like that for a stranger to pick over. He took two lamps with matching shades and gave me a tenner to go with the four pounds.
As he walked through the hall carrying Audrey’s things Emily shrieked and grabbed hold of my jumper pulling on it so hard she nearly toppled me.
‘I don’t want him to take the clock,’ she said.
‘He’s bought the clock.’
‘I want the clock. I like the clock. I want to keep the clock.’
‘You can’t keep it. We’ve sold it to the man.’
She pulled at me harder and I tried to prise her hands off my jumper. ‘Just go,’ I said to the man and followed him down Audrey’s stairs. When I closed the door Emily threw herself onto the floor, put her forehead to the carpet and cried. She turned on her side and kicked the wall.
‘Stop crying! Stop kicking!’ I said but she wouldn’t stop.
‘I want the clock, I want to keep the clock. I like the birdies.’ She kicked the wall again.
I knew she was hungry. ‘I’ll make your toast.’
‘No!’ Her cries were desperate.
When I knelt to comfort her she kicked me. I hated it when she kicked me. It was wrong and it hurt and it made me sad. There was so much rage between us and I didn’t understand how it had happened. I’d only had her in the door for five minutes.
I noticed the brown envelope on the doormat and because distraction had worked before I said, ‘The postman’s been. We have a letter.’
That made no difference. She continued to kick so I caught one of her legs and held it as she kicked. Sometimes she would laugh at me trapping her this way but she didn’t that day.
‘Look! Exciting! A letter in a brown envelope. Who is it for Emily? Is it for me? Is it for you?’
She stopped kicking and lay still. I noticed the lines on her leg from the elastic hem of her sock and I wanted to kiss her calf but was afraid she’d kick my face.
‘Will you open my letter for me?’ I squeezed her ankle.
She pushed herself onto her hands and reached for the brown letter. Anger gone, face calm, lips wet. I leaned against Audrey’s door and was glad of the cold at my back. I don’t know you. That’s what I was thinking. I don’t understand you. I don’t even know how to be your mum.
But I tried. ‘Open it. Who’s it to?’
She liked that. She sat down and struggled with the envelope. I knew better than to offer to help. She picked out the pink piece of paper with delicate fingers.
‘Is it for you, Mummy?’ She handed it to me.
It was.
‘What does it say?’
I laughed.
‘Why are you laughing?’
And then I sighed.
‘What’s wrong, Mummy?’
We have made several attempts to contact you…As a matter of urgency, please call the social work office…the welfare of your child…we will be forced to involve the police.
‘I just called her.’
‘What does it say, Mummy?’
‘I just called her.’
‘Is it for you, Mummy?’
I inhaled as if preparing for a double pirouette. ‘To Emily and her mummy. This is a ticket for the playground near to Emily’s nursery. You must use it on a sunny day. Bring a Fruit Shoot and a Freddo.’
She took the letter from me and read it upside down. I turned it round and pointed out her name, Emily, typed on the page. She blinked and I saw from her eyes when she looked at me that I’d deceived her completely.
‘Can we go, Mummy?’
‘Of course we can.’
I just wanted her to be happy, I really did.
And then the doorbell rang and we stood up, dishevelled, Emily with the blotches on her cheeks that came out when she cried, standing with the letter in her hand. I thought it might have been the man who bought the clock, back to complain about the shit bird calls. What time was it? Three o’clock. He would have heard the wood pigeon. I shouldn’t have sold it to him. Emily liked it and I did too.
But it wasn’t the man who bought the clock.
‘Sara from social services,’ the woman said. A motorbike’s roar kept me from hearing what she said next. She leaned in. ‘We sent a letter. You can ignore it now.’
The noise of the motorbike faded. ‘I just called you,’ I said.
‘I know. I jumped in the car when I got your voicemail. Ignore the letter. It’s form. We have to do it if we can’t get through to someone.’ She held out her hand. I didn’t know if she wanted me to shake it. ‘You can leave it with me.’ Her face looked mild but she stood as straight as me, I’ll give her that. ‘Or throw it away. The letter. We’re here now.’
I took the letter from Emily and gave it to the social worker but Emily screamed as if she was dying and shouted, ‘No!’
I realised. ‘We need the letter back. It’s our ticket to the playground.’ I winked and held out my hand. The social worker stared at me. I thought they were supposed to read signals, social workers, be perceptive, be good with people. She didn’t read any signals until Emily screamed again and lay on the floor.
‘Please give her the letter,’ I said.
She bent down and handed Emily the letter. ‘You must be Emily.’ I noticed the red streaks in Sara’s hair and looked over the top of her head to the street outside, saw my car and considered grabbing Emily and fleeing all the way back to London.
‘Can I come in?’ She looked up at me.
I let her in. I wondered what she would think of the way we lived.
‘Where do you want to inspect first?’ I said. It was difficult to climb the stairs because Emily was tight at my legs tilting me off-balance.
‘Let’s just sit.’
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘I’ve never known a health visitor or midwife to accept a cup of tea. You must think we keep dirty houses.’
I lifted Emily up and carried her on my hip like I did when she was small. The social worker said nothing. I took her through the flat, passing the rooms either side of the hallway, to the living room at the back. She removed her coat and pulled a folder from her bag. I put Emily down, opened the curtains and sat on the armchair, waiting for it to start. Emily’s pyjamas, her dressing gown, some books, dolls and a mug lay on the floor. We both watched Emily for a few seconds until Emily became self conscious and threw a plastic cup at the TV.
