After the Last Dance

by Sarra Manning

  ‘There’s no need to be scared, darling,’ Jane said and Leo didn’t know if she was talking to him or Rose who was so still, only her lips moving as she took in little sips of air.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Leo asked.

  Rose didn’t answer at first. Then her fingers, resting over the heart of the charred dress, lifted. ‘I’ve had such a lovely time,’ she said, and she closed her eyes. ‘It’s been wonderful, it really has, but I have to get back to my friends now.’

  It was simple, in the end. He lay down so he was facing Rose, but looking at Jane, who looked back at him, steady and sure. Then Leo slid the syringe into the cannula. Rose took two more laboured breaths, breathed in again and then no more.

  Leo wished he could say that in that moment he felt Rose’s soul leave her body, but he didn’t. His hand rested on top of Rose and Jane’s hand rested on top of his.

  After a while, though Leo couldn’t say exactly how long, there was a tap at the door. ‘Can I come in?’ asked Agnieska.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Jane called out as Leo curled his fingers round Rose’s wrist, her skin cooling, but not cold. Flesh pliable, but also resistant.

  ‘She’s gone,’ he said. Rose looked like a blurred copy of herself. She was without animation; that magnificent, restless spirit. Without life. Lifeless. He didn’t want this to be the way he remembered her and he pulled his hand free and got off the bed. Walked to the door. Opened it. ‘She’s gone,’ he said again. ‘Can you go and wake Lydia, then call the doctor?’

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ Agnieska didn’t even peer in through the open door but hurriedly walked away.

  Leo couldn’t look at Jane or at the bed. He went into the bathroom and splashed his face and hands with cold water and by the time he was done, Lydia was there in a lilac dressing gown, face creased, crying.

  ‘Oh, my dear. My Rose,’ Lydia sobbed, her arms tight around her midriff.

  Leo wondered if Jane had died too because she was so still but as Agnieska approached the bed, she rolled away from the body and stood up. Lydia walked into her arms and Jane rocked her, shushed her, but refused to look at Leo.

  Suddenly Agnieska’s mobile rang and when Leo heard the opening bars of Carmina Burana blast out, he laughed. He was sure that Rose would have laughed too, though she’d have pretended to be very cross. If there was an afterlife, then it was just the right kind of portentous fanfare to announce Rose’s arrival at the Pearly Gates.

  Agnieska looked affronted. ‘Dr Howard’s on the doorstep and there’s no one to let him in,’ she said huffily.

  Everything went very smoothly after that. Leo waited outside while Agnieska and the doctor did whatever they had to do. Then the door opened and Leo was ready.

  ‘Can I have a word?’ he said and he took Dr Howard into the bathroom and picked up the empty phials. ‘I have to tell you something. I —’

  Dr Howard, three-piece-suited and booted though it was barely six in the morning, held up a hand to stop Leo. ‘I’ve already signed the death certificate. There shouldn’t be any need for a post-mortem. Not when I saw her yesterday and, well, this was expected.’

  ‘But I —’

  ‘Just be thankful that you were with Rose at the end. I’m sure that was an immense comfort to her.’ The doctor shifted his case to the other hand. ‘I’ve left you a form to hand in when you register the death. The undertakers will be able to assist you with everything else.’ He sounded as if he was reciting lines. ‘Please call me if you need to, but as far as I’m concerned it’s all in order, Leo.’

  It felt as if his world was teetering on the very edge of chaos. ‘But… Don’t… Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely sure. I’ll see myself out.’ Leo watched Dr Howard walk through the other room, past the body, then paused in the doorway. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss. Rose… Ms Beaumont, she really was an incredible woman. I will miss her more than I can say.’

  Agnieska came in to pack up the medical equipment and Leo went downstairs to the kitchen where Lydia, still in her dressing gown, still sniffling, was sitting at the breakfast bar. Frank hovered anxiously. ‘I’ve called the undertakers,’ he said. ‘What else can I do?’

  There was nothing else to do but drink tea, smoke all of Lydia’s cigarettes, though she was still maintaining that she only smoked socially as she had ever since Leo had known her, and then, with heavy sighs and heavy feet, she and Leo went back upstairs.

  Neither of them looked at the bed. Lydia marched straight into the dressing room and he followed her blindly.

  ‘Rose left specific instructions. Didn’t want an open casket. There’s a dress she wanted to be…’ Lydia couldn’t get the next word out. Leo rested his hands on her quaking shoulders. ‘No, I’m all right. Do you think I should change her now?’

  ‘No,’ Leo said, because Lydia couldn’t manage by herself and he couldn’t help her. Rose wouldn’t have wanted that. ‘We’ll give the dress to the undertakers.’

  ‘But her hair… she’d hate not to have her hair done.’ Lydia turned round and buried her face in Leo’s chest and as he closed his arms around her, she shook with the force of her sobs.

  ‘We’ll ask her hairdresser if they can send someone to the funeral parlour. It will be fine, Liddy,’ Leo said. Somehow he knew the right things to say without having to think about it.

  The undertakers arrived. They parked their black private ambulance outside the front door, because he wasn’t having Rose sneaked out round the back. Lydia, Frank and Leo watched the body (covered by a white sheet because he wasn’t having Rose zipped into a black body bag either) wheeled out, then driven around the square that she’d loved so much.

  It was seven-thirty now. How could it only be seven-thirty? ‘I need to go and register the death,’ he said, but it would be another two hours before he could do that, so he wandered back to the kitchen with Frank and Lydia, the three of them in a state of limbo. Not shock but an uncertainty because Rose had gone and she’d dictated the rhythms of their day and without her, they weren’t sure what to do.

  Lydia put the kettle on but Frank said, ‘No more bloody tea. Let’s have a proper drink.’

  Leo waited for Jane to say, ‘Champagne, darling. It’s what Rose would have wanted,’ and it was then he realised Jane wasn’t there.

  ‘Where’s Jane?’ he asked.

  ‘Jane? She’s around, isn’t she?’ As Lydia was staring at the tea bags and milk as if she had no earthly clue what to do with them, Leo wasn’t surprised that she had no recollection of when she’d last seen Jane.

  ‘Probably gone back to bed,’ Frank said. ‘When my mum passed on, my dad slept for the best part of a week.’

  Jane wasn’t in any of the downstairs rooms. He didn’t go back into Rose’s room but stood in the doorway and that was enough to see that Jane wasn’t there.

  He walked into his room – no, their room. It was empty. There was a towel draped over the back of a chair. Her phone and handbag was dumped on the bed, so she couldn’t have gone far. But Leo couldn’t say exactly where she had gone to until he heard her crying.

  He’d never heard crying like it. As if the sobs were being torn out of her against her will. As if she was locked in a battle with her own grief.

  ‘Jane? Where are you?’

  There was a moment of silence and then came another one of those pitiful cries, more dreadful than anything he’d heard from Rose, from under the bed.

  He crouched down. She was curled into a ball, hair in her face, hands clutched in her hair.

  ‘What are you doing under there? Come out.’

  Jane didn’t say anything and Leo thought about pushing the bed back, but he didn’t want to disturb the little cocoon that she’d made so instead he stretched out full length on the floor.

  ‘I know it’s awful about Rose,’ he said. ‘I can’t even deal with how awful it is, but she was in terrible pain and now she’s not. You made the right call.’

  ‘Shut up,�
�� she said thickly. ‘Shut up. Don’t be nice to me. I don’t deserve it. I’m disgusting. I’m a monster. The absolute worst.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Leo said, because she wasn’t. She was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a bad person. He knew bad people and Jane didn’t even come close.

  ‘Oh, Leo, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘You’ve got to nothing to be sorry about.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it.’ Her voice was raw from crying for so long in the dark. ‘I was meant to do it. It’s why Rose wanted me there at the end. She knew me. She’d been around, she knew everything.’

  ‘Not everything. Just because she was old didn’t make her some great all-seeing, omnipotent being. Alice Neel was her favourite artist. That’s not someone who knows everything.’

  ‘She knew what I was really like without me having to say a single word.’

  Leo still hadn’t shifted the bed, dragged her out and exposed her to the light. He was just lying there, looking at her with concern instead of condemnation. That was about to change.

  ‘What are you really like?’ he asked and God, she couldn’t tamp it down any longer. It was leaking out; knocking down the walls she’d so carefully constructed.

  ‘You’ve always had a life, Leo. Even if you pretend that you don’t care about your parents, your brother, you have a family; you have roots. You have history. You’re part of something.

  ‘But before I came to London, I didn’t have a life. Hardly even had a name. I barely existed. I crept round the edges. I was nothing. Less than nothing. And I still feel like… a ghost. There’s nothing anchoring me down. I feel like I could blow away.’

  Back then, she wasn’t aware of things like day and night or what the seasons were. The days had no rhythm.

  Sometimes, earlier on, she’d gone to school but only when Nana Jo was alive, and after she’d died she didn’t even have the haven of school for a few hours.

  She learned quickly that it was better to be ignored, to keep out of sight, even if it meant going hungry. Her brothers and sisters fought for approval, attention, though approval never came and attention rarely led to anything good. How quickly they’d even turn on each other, because there was no honour among thieves, so she’d hidden herself away from them too.

  Jane had heard all about the ‘deserving poor’. She’d been at dinner parties with politicians, intellectuals, do-gooders with a rosy view of the decent working classes bettering themselves through education and honest toil, but she’d come from the undeserving poor. An underclass despised and feared by the other families on the estate.

  Their part of the estate was where the council had shoved the great unwashed and unwanted. ASBO Alley, they called it, the one desolate road where no one, not even the police, would visit after dark. Sometimes, to get away, she’d walk across the estate to the library. Not to read – it wouldn’t have occurred to her that there was anything for her in the tiny black letters that crawled across the pages – but the library was warm and next door was a shop where her family hadn’t been banned and she knew the blind spot where she could stuff a sausage roll down her tracksuit top and the lady on the till wouldn’t see.

  There were lots of bad times. Each time her mother brought home a new man, each one worse than the last. Meaner. Harder. More demanding. Dreadful times when she found herself cornered by one of them but there were worse times even than that. Like just before benefits day when there was nothing to eat, nothing to put on account, no booze, no pills, no puff, no powder and that was when tempers got ugly. There’d be screaming. Things and bones would get broken. One time her mother had taken a swing at one of her sisters, who’d ducked so her mother had ended up putting her fist right through the wall.

  Staying tucked away in one of the damp bedrooms was a good way to not get noticed but crawling under the bed was better – scooched right up against the mildewed wall so she couldn’t be yanked out unless the bed was lifted up. It had been lifted up that day when her mother had dragged herself upstairs on ulcerated legs.

  ‘You! Shift your arse to Fat Alan. Get me something on tick.’

  The only kindness her mother ever showed her was not sending her off to Fat Alan to get something on tick, unless she’d exhausted every other possibility.

  She’d walked the ten minutes to Fat Alan’s house on the nicer bit of the estate. It hadn’t occurred to her to say no. Saying no was as unimaginable as being invited into one of the nice houses she passed with their cladding and their satellite dishes; some of the really fancy ones even had hanging baskets and flowerbeds.

  Fat Alan’s house didn’t have flowerbeds. Just two cars and a white van parked on the drive and that wasn’t good news. Sometimes Fat Alan would force her down onto her knees as soon as he shut the door behind her. Ram himself down her throat so hard that she’d choke and her nose would be pressed against the stinking raw folds of his pendulous gut, but when Fat Alan had other men there… it was the worst of all the worse times. She’d blank out, pretend she was under the bed, until it was over, until they were done with her and she could leave with a wrap of something worth no more than twenty quid.

  ‘Who the fuck is it?’ Fat Alan shouted when she knocked on the door.

  ‘Sally sent me,’ she said and she heard him laugh before she saw the big unformed mass of him through the frosted panel.

  He opened the door. She walked in. Kept her head down, stared at his trainers, felt his pudgy hand clutching the back of her neck and she let him push her down, saw his other hand delving into his tracksuit bottoms and then there was a sharp knock on the door. Two sharp knocks. Pause. Two sharp knocks. Pause.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Fat Alan had shouted at the unseen caller. ‘Give me a minute.’

  He frogmarched her down the hall. For one heart-stopping moment, they passed the lounge where the sound of music, heavy beats, thudded through the door, but he kept going until they came to the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t fucking move,’ he said and shut the door.

  The dog was in there. It was a huge Alsatian called Killer. Fat Alan treated the dog like he treated everything else, but the dog didn’t take it quietly. It snarled and snapped, growled and barked. Once it had bitten her when Fat Alan had made her put her hand in its mouth.

  Now the dog sat there, ears alert, staring at her. She looked everywhere but at the dog. At the empty bottles, cans and takeaway containers. Then she looked at the table. There were bags and bags of pills and powders because Fat Alan knew that she was the only person he could leave in there with strict instructions not to fucking move and she wouldn’t fucking move.

  Then she saw the money. A huge roll of notes secured with a rubber band. That much money didn’t even look real, not when she’d hardly seen a twenty-pound note before, not hundreds upon hundreds of them, and perhaps that was why she picked it up; just to see if it was real.

  She hadn’t imagined that money would actually weigh something. That there’d be so much of it that she could hardly close her hand around it.

  The dog just sat there and watched her, like he couldn’t quite believe it either.

  She didn’t know how long she stood there, holding the money. Not even thinking about what it could buy because that was too much to process. Then Fat Alan was in the doorway.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ He didn’t shout. Didn’t need to. ‘Taking my fucking money, like a thieving bitch? Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t slit you from ear to ear?’

  There were no good reasons. Not one. He walked over. She watched him get closer. She wasn’t scared. Not really. More resigned, accepting that this was what was coming to her. Then she saw the knife. It was just an ordinary knife. In an ordinary home, ordinary people would use it to chop up vegetables. She picked it up and he laughed, like it was funny. He said something to her, she didn’t hear what, because she shoved the knife at him, into him. It wasn’t easy. It didn’t just slide in like all his blubber was butter. She had to drive the
knife in. Really smash it into him.

  Then she took her hand away. The knife stayed where it was. Inches deep.

  ‘What the fuck did you do that for?’ He didn’t sound angry, but curious.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Do you know what I’m going to do to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m gonna take the knife and I’m gonna shove it in your cunt and up your arse and then I’m going to make some more holes in you and then I’m going to get my friends to fuck each one. We’ll fuck you to death,’ he’d said, like that was a nice way to spend the afternoon. ‘That’s what I’m going to fucking do.’

  She’d pulled the knife out then. There wasn’t any blood until she did that and then there was, so much of it, and he gave one surprised bellow and that was when the fear grabbed hold of her so she slammed the knife in and it was much easier this time to stab it through all that fat, all those rotten layers. Push. Pull. Push. Pull. Push. And he must have fought back, but she couldn’t remember that, though later she discovered that she was covered in bruises and, to this day, she still didn’t have any sensation in the little finger and ring finger on her left hand. But back then, he slipped on the blood and landed with a dull thud and a roar and she heard a someone coming down the hall and she left the knife stuck in him and the back door was unlocked and she launched herself through it.