The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘I know,’ he says, ‘but honestly, I don’t want you to act it. I just need to hear it.’

  ‘OK,’ Ailsa says. Act three, scene five is short – or at least Romeo’s part in it is – but Juliet has more lines than her hero, and so Ailsa hears her voice quaver and stumble, while Seb’s gains confidence. They do it again, again, again. On the fourth time, or maybe the fifth, Ailsa puts down her pencil, stops making the marks where a correction needs to be made, and finds that Seb takes her hand. His memory stutters again and again over ‘vaulty heaven’, so when finally he gets it – ‘   “Nor that is not the lark whose notes do beat./The vaulty heaven so high above our heads:/I have more care to stay than will to go”   ’ – they look at each other, delighted, and then Seb is kneeling up and his arms are around her, bear-hugging. He sits back on his heels.

  ‘We did it,’ he says. ‘I think I get a tick.’

  ‘You do. But you need to run over it again, tomorrow. Just to make sure.’ Ailsa’s hand is warm where he has been holding it for so long. She can’t believe she’s even noticing. Seb jokes about the women who stop him in the street, squeal and squeak and take photos. Inside, she’s squeaking. She hopes he can’t tell.

  Seb laughs. ‘I’ll go with you to the station and we can do it in the cab,’ he says. And then, ‘I thought a lot of the speeches would come back. From when I did Wherefore Art Thou?. But they’ve gone.’

  Ailsa nods. She’d downloaded the final of the show the night before she left, and watched it on the train on the way to London. Seb was skinnier then – not that he’s fat now, but he’s muscled, broader. His hair was longer, too, his face more open, so that every feeling of tension and fear, panic and hope, passed across it like the shadows of clouds on a hillside. At the moment when the winner was announced, the camera moved quickly from the air-punching, whooping victor to Seb, disconsolate, tears on his face.

  She stands, stretches, moving her weight cautiously from foot to foot, dispelling the beginning of pins and needles in her calves because she has sat unmoving for too long. It’s almost five thirty, and outside the window the purr and chatter of the rush hour is beginning.

  Seb stretches too, shakes out his shoulders, fingers, feet. He looks like an actor, a dancer, at these moments. He’s completely in command of his body, in a way that Ailsa will never be in charge of hers. Another deep breath, and then he opens his eyes, looks at her, before he puts his sunglasses on.

  ‘Do you fancy going dancing?’ he asks. ‘I know a place you might like. There’s a live band. A milonga. It’s fun. And it’s dark. I can actually take my sunglasses off.’ Even in the flat, with the light low, he still can’t tolerate more than an hour before his eyes start to ache, and he tries to rub at his lids, usually stopping himself just in time.

  Oh, she does. Tango has danced its way into her blood; alone in Yusef’s kitchen she’s been practising her ochos, hands either side of the door frame as she steps her feet across each other, hips twisting, opposite an imaginary partner.

  But a club, with Seb, who can really dance – that’s something else. ‘You know I haven’t had much practice,’ Ailsa says. She thinks of his fluidity, his confidence. ‘I don’t know if I’m good enough. And I don’t have my shoes.’

  Seb pushes the coffee table to one side, holds out his arms. ‘Let’s have a go,’ he says.

  It’s as though Apple propels her. She steps forward, puts her left hand on his shoulder, near his collarbone, lets her forearm touch, but not rest along, his upper arm, as Guy has shown her. He takes her right hand in his left, breathes in and out, slowly, and then starts to rock her from side to side, gently.

  ‘I’m just getting the sense of where your weight is . . .’

  And then his leg comes forward so that hers can only go back, and all they are doing is walking, but still, somehow it’s more than that.

  Seb comes to a stop. ‘OK.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ailsa says. And oh, she is.

  ‘Right.’ Seb tilts his upper body back a little, looks at her, comes close again. ‘Let’s see what I can remember. We were practising the tango the week my eye went to hell, so I didn’t get that far with it. Roz is sorting lessons for the cast but they won’t start until rehearsals. Ready to go again?’

  ‘It’s tango. I’ll just do as I’m told,’ Ailsa says. Although she’s not looking at him she can feel that he’s grinning; it’s as though the muscles in his jaw have twitched the air. She wonders if he can feel her smile.

  Unexpectedly, he starts to sing, just below his breath-line, a soft bom-bom-bom that he then moves in time to. Before she knows it, her feet are in position five – her left foot in front of her right, her weight all in her right leg, a deliberate effort of keeping her body strong, hips straight, stomach taut, muscles working to keep her in balance. And then Seb steps back, bom-bom-bom, and twists his trunk, and she’s pivoting, as best she can barefoot, moving towards him as he walks away. Step-pivot-close, step-pivot-close. There’s something about the way Seb is moving, pressing on her hand to give her something to work against, that makes this easier than it’s ever been.

  He stops, laughs, drops his hands.

  ‘What?’ Ailsa’s mind bounces an image of Seb and Fenella forward: everything about their movements sharp and precise. (She watched a bit of StarDance on the train, too.) Fenella’s ochos would make her attempts look like a cow in wellies.

  ‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘just – it feels good to be dancing. Doesn’t it?’ He touches her hand.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. And, cow-wellies notwithstanding, it’s true.

  ‘What size are your feet?’

  ‘Five and a half.’

  ‘Right.’ Seb goes into his bedroom and returns a moment later, holding a pair of shoes by the straps. ‘I. Am. The. King. Guess what size these are.’

  ‘Five and a half?’ Ailsa says.

  ‘No, five, but you’re supposed to go down half a size in dance shoes. Here you go.’ The shoes are black and gold, higher than anything Ailsa has ever tried to dance, or even walk, in – although that’s not saying much – and there’s the imprint of the ball of a foot inside them. Something about dead men’s shoes pops into her mind, makes her quell her impulse to reach out and take them from Seb’s hand.

  ‘I can’t wear someone else’s shoes.’

  ‘Fenella won’t mind.’ Nothing that Seb has told her about Fenella makes Ailsa believe this. ‘And anyway, they’ve been here for six months. It’s not like she needs them. She’ll have forgotten she ever had them.’ He thrusts the shoes at her. ‘At least try them on. They’re your size! What are the chances of that?’

  There’s an excitement in him that makes her sit down and worry her toes into the pointed black patent leather. They are beautiful shoes, sharp and clean-lined, the way a tango ought to be danced. She fiddles with the fastening, which is set for a slimmer ankle, but once she has them on, they feel just right.

  ‘Well?’ Seb says, and he reaches out a hand. He’s grinning; she sees the TV star in him shining through, the man with all his feelings on the outside, touchable, reachable. And also, to her, further away.

  She takes his hands and stands, wobbles, finds her balance. When he takes her into hold she’s tall enough to be looking at his ear, rather than his shoulder.

  ‘Are you sure she won’t mind?’

  ‘She won’t know,’ Seb says, and then they are dancing again, Ailsa half pushed, half guided from move to move. Her balance is in a different place, and now she’s standing she realises that the shoes don’t fit quite as well as they seemed to when she was sitting down. Her big toes are pinching already.

  But they are dancing, even in this small space, with their steps small to match it. Seb’s arms are taut and she can see the muscles moving in his chest underneath his T-shirt. She remembers what Eliza says (‘Are we using our bottoms to their full potential?’) and extends her legs fully backwards, from the hip, feeling her own muscles move under her skin. When Seb turns her she
overbalances, leans into him, and he holds her for a moment before letting go. Then he tips his sunglasses up to the top of his head, looks at her, green meeting blue.

  ‘Up for it?’ he asks, and Ailsa can do nothing but nod. ‘OK. I need to change first. There’s a restaurant upstairs: we can eat there. Steak and salad, as I remember.’

  ‘Caveman staples,’ Ailsa says.

  Seb laughs. ‘Do you want to change? We can go via yours if you do.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ailsa says, ‘I brought a dress.’

  ‘Two minutes.’ Seb pulls off his T-shirt and walks, bare-torsoed, through the kitchen, dropping his T-shirt on the floor next to the washing machine as he passes it. Ailsa thinks of how easy it must be, to be so unmarked. Since leaving hospital, she has loved her physical privacy. She no longer needs to spend days knowing that any passing medic might stop and assess the scar that they would pronounce to be, depending on personality, ‘beautiful’ or ‘healing nicely’ or ‘tip top’.

  Seb’s bedroom door closes behind him, Ailsa stands at the window, watching the North London street get on with its early evening: a father ushers three children on scooters across the road; a young woman picks up after a fat, furry dog; a BMW with its windows down parallel-parks in a space between a bright red Fiat 500 and a white van with a loft-conversion logo on the side.

  Ailsa inhales the petrol-fumes-and-bougainvillea air, exhales as fully as she can, now that she’s sure the stitches won’t burst and her heart abscond. She wonders whether it had ever occurred to anyone in hospital that she might be self-conscious about exposing herself. Presumably part of medical training is about not looking at the nipples, or maybe to her doctors her body was nothing more than the cage for a transplanted heart, the thing that must not become infected, or be allowed to do anything to jeopardise all that time and work and careful stitching, and – not least – waste the possibility of life not just for her but for the next faulty heart on the transplant list.

  She still examines her scar in the mirror every morning. She can see (partly thanks to Shona, who fitted her bra) that it’s neat, especially now it’s lost the furious scarlet puckering that marked its first weeks. She imagines pulling off her top, in front of – well, let’s say Seb, for argument’s sake – and having a moment where his face falls and rearranges, or, worse (better?), remains studiously still, as though every naked woman he’s ever seen has an unmissable scar. Either that or having to have a grim, unromantic chat beforehand: ‘When you see me naked you’ll notice something unusual . . .’ Maybe she could roll it in with the contraception conversation. Hypothetically. With whichever man it might be.

  ‘Right,’ Seb says, and Ailsa turns around and sees him, and – ‘What?’

  Ailsa shakes her head, ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I might still be half blind but I’m not stupid,’ Seb says. ‘What is it? Have I spilled something on myself?’ He’s looking down at his shirt front, examining his sleeves.

  Ailsa sighs, because there’s no way out of this now except to show how ridiculous she’s being. ‘I don’t like red. It makes me anxious.’

  There’s a beat, Seb looking at her, turning to look at himself in the mirror over the fireplace, turning back. A smile, but gentle.

  ‘Yeah, I can see why you wouldn’t like this shirt, then.’ It’s a tango shirt, for sure, the red of a seducing smile, bright and bold, with a sheen to the fabric that makes the colour glow.

  ‘It’s a lovely shirt,’ Ailsa says, ‘it’s just that – well – there was a time when every time I heard bad news, I was wearing red. Both times I missed out on a transplant I had red striped pyjamas on when they told me, and the same ones when – something else horrible happened. Whenever I had bad test results I seemed to be wearing red. Plus – all the blood. All the time. All the tests, you’re always looking at someone taking blood into a phial. Red makes me nervous. I know it’s stupid.’ She’s looking at her toes, the nails painted a bright coral pink, peeping out from the black-and-gold shoes.

  She waits for what’s coming. She’s had this conversation before. How many pairs of pyjamas did she have? Two? Then there was a fifty-fifty chance of getting bad news when she was wearing them. Plus, if she had red pyjamas, that suggested that she likes red, so there was a good chance that a lot of what she owned was red. She is an intelligent person. She knows that there’s no logic to this. She knows, too, that she looks for things to confirm her bias. The fact that nothing of hers is red isn’t what’s making her life go well. Having a new heart is what is making her well. Correlation is not causation.

  ‘I’ve got a black one,’ Seb says, then, ‘I’m wearing red pants though. Is that OK?’

  She looks at him to see if he’s teasing. Sunglasses: impossible to tell, even now they are better acquainted. ‘Are you teasing me?’

  Then, the most unexpected thing. He steps towards her, takes her hands; then steps back as she flinches away, not at the touch but at the unexpectedness of it, but there’s no way to understand, to articulate that in time.

  ‘Sorry. No, I wasn’t teasing. I was serious. I wore the same pair of socks for every broadcast of Wherefore Art Thou?. Thought they were my lucky charm until I lost. I’ll go and change. I won’t be a minute.’

  *

  Seb, skin pale, blond hair blonder against his black shirt, waits while she changes. The dress is looser around her torso than when she bought it. He was right about the weight loss around her middle. She puts on black tights, navy patent pumps, and takes the papers and notebook out of her satchel – she hadn’t thought to bring a different bag for evenings.

  She walks into the room where he’s waiting. ‘Do I look OK? For the place we’re going?’

  Seb takes off his sunglasses, gives her a long look, and smiles – or at least his mouth does. His eyes are serious and calm. It’s a Lennox look. She hardly dares inhale, for fear of Driftwood in the air.

  ‘You look as though you’ve dropped out of vaulty heaven.’ He opens the door.

  On the street outside, she stumbles on the step, and so it seems natural to take his arm. When he helps her from the cab, he keeps hold of her hand as they walk the hundred yards or so to the restaurant. They take a booth in a corner. Seb takes off his glasses, and suddenly the ground shifts and they can see – Ailsa can see, anyway, or admit – that they are bound now by more than understanding the oddness of having a bit of a dead person’s body stitched into your own.

  These London days have been a bit like making friends in the day room of a hospital, knowledge making intimacy until – well, that’s where it deviated. In a hospital, when you got close enough to someone, you became part of their circle, someone to be updated, someone to share the everyday grimness with. With Seb, knowledge has made intimacy until the obvious thing is to sit in a dark restaurant, drinking deep plummy wine, feeling eye contact go on for just a little longer than it ought to.

  And then something happens to remind Ailsa that it isn’t a date. The waitress, whose eyes were drawn to Seb from the minute they walked in, who lingered when she took their order and brought their food, brings a phone to the table with their bill and asks, ‘Could I get a picture with you? My friends will never believe how much more handsome you are in real life.’

  Seb says, ‘Sure,’ and the waitress hands Ailsa her phone, as though Ailsa’s entire purpose in being there is to take this photograph, and tucks herself in next to Seb, her head tilted towards him, their smiles white and bright. ‘Thank you,’ she says to him afterwards, and she kisses his cheek, right at the corner of his mouth. She takes the phone from Ailsa without looking at her.

  Seb waits until she’s gone, says, ‘Sorry about that,’ and then goes back to his story of Fenella and the cat she never remembered to feed, as though such interruptions are usual. Because, of course, they are, to him.

  ‘Were you and Fenella a couple?’

  Seb hesitates, wineglass halfway to his mouth, and says, ‘Why do you ask?’

  Ailsa shrugs. ‘Just making
conversation.’

  ‘Not really. We had a thing, for a bit, but you pretty much have to, on StarDance, if you’re both single. If you’re not, it’s optional. It’s hard to spend that much time wrapped around someone else’s body without at least’ – he pauses – ‘giving it a thought.’

  Ailsa nods. It’s the same in a hospital room. Even if you are both wrecks, physical proximity makes you think of what’s possible, that there are better uses for hands and tongues than taking temperatures and swallowing medication. ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘I haven’t ever had a proper relationship. Long-term. It’s never – appealed. I like change,’ Seb adds, and then he puts down his glass, gets to his feet, and says, ‘Let’s have some fun, shall we, Juliet?’

  He takes her hand and leads her downstairs to a candlelit room, where a band is playing a warm, melodic rhythm. She hesitates, and he stops, steps back towards her.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘it’s just – this is the first time I’ve heard live tango music.’ It’s more sensual than she would have expected, spilling from the instruments and sliding through the air, making her skin pay attention to the feel of her dress, the touch of Seb’s hand holding hers.

  A few couples are making their way around a dance floor that’s smaller than the one upstairs at the Dragon’s Nest. They find a table, put down their bags and jackets, and Ailsa changes her flat shoes for the spiky dancing heels.

  Seb put his mouth to her ear and says, ‘You know that in tango, you don’t ask people to dance in words. You have to look at them?’

  She nods. And he looks her a look to which her wordless answer is: Yes. Anything. Anywhere.

  Their steps soon match each other; the closeness of Seb’s body becomes both natural and exciting, as Ailsa’s learns how to move against him.

  ‘Lean on me,’ he says in her ear, and when she lets herself tilt forward a little, it becomes even easier to read what he wants her to do next in the pressure of his hands, the twist of his chest. She feels him smile. His mouth, at her ear, in a break between dances: ‘I love that in the tango; your heart always wants to be next to your partner’s heart.’ Apple, shiveringly, agrees, and Ailsa nods. The place is filling around them. More couples on the floor means that they are even closer, and there are times when it feels that all they do is sway against each other. The music weaves around them, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but always, somehow, in time with the beat of her blood.