Belly Dancing for Beginners

by Liz Byrski

  Oliver patted croissant crumbs from his lips with a paper serviette.

  ‘What brother?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know about that either,’ Sonya said in amazement as Oliver shook his head. ‘Angie’s got a brother, couple of years older than her. His name’s Josh and he’s gay. Brian kicked him out. This was all just after the tobacco job stuff was happening. It was a huge family drama. Gayle threatened to leave, but of course she didn’t. Brian banished him, you know –’ she lowered her voice and put on a severe face – ‘no son of mine is a poof . . . All that sort of thing. Told Gayle she was to have nothing to do with him.

  ‘This was about ten years ago. I don’t know where he went at the time but he and his partner have some sort of business up in Broome now. Brian won’t have his name mentioned.’ She peered at Oliver, who looked as though he’d been kicked in the stomach. ‘Are you all right, Oliver? Have this glass of water, you look a bit odd. I can’t believe you didn’t know all this. I thought you and Gayle had been friends for years.’

  FIVE

  Marissa woke at five, restless but sluggish after an uncomfortably hot night. The dawn light was pearly and the smell of the sea inviting. She pulled on an old pair of bathers and a sarong and threw a towel over her shoulder. A swim was the best start to what promised to be a sweltering day.

  South Beach was deserted but that wouldn’t last long. The joggers, dog walkers and early swimmers would soon be trailing across the sand, ruffling the glassy water. She sat for a moment on a flat rock staring across at the distant outline of Garden Island, enjoying the stillness and the illusion that she was miles from anywhere, alone with just the sea, the sand and a few gulls strutting back and forth at the water’s edge.

  Eventually, she wandered to the water, plunged in, swam briskly to the rocks at the far end of the beach, and then more slowly back again, finally rolling over onto her back to float and then tread water as she watched the beach. There were people around now, a black Labrador chasing the seagulls and an elderly couple holding hands in the shallows. Marissa wandered back to her rock to sit in the sun, gazing out to the horizon. She didn’t notice anyone approaching until a shadow fell across her.

  ‘Morning,’ Frank Owen said. ‘I thought it was you. D’you mind if I join you?’

  She did mind, but she moved slightly so he could sit down. She hadn’t seen him since the night she’d found her fading marijuana plants on the back verandah. For a few weeks after that she’d had an uneasy feeling that he might just turn up at the door, but as time passed, and Christmas and New Year came and went, she thought he had probably moved on to more important things. The whole incident had shocked her. What was she supposed to do? Feel guilty? Expect a charge? Be grateful? She wasn’t sure how she felt about him returning the plants. Was it some sort of power game? In her uneasiness she had destroyed the plants and dumped the bag in a roadside skip one night when she was out on the bike. Seeing him again revived her unease. She shifted her position on the rock and pulled the sarong over her legs.

  ‘Haven’t see you here before,’ he said.

  Marissa shook her head. ‘I usually go further up, the other side of the groyne.’

  ‘I . . . er . . . I was wanting to talk to you,’ he said, looking awkwardly away from her and up the beach. ‘I thought of phoning . . .’

  Marissa’s stomach lurched uncomfortably. Presumably he wasn’t going to charge her right here on the beach, but even a friendly caution would have been embarrassing.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Wondered if you’d fancy a drink one evening?’

  ‘A drink?’

  ‘Yes. The Norfolk, perhaps? And then maybe get something to eat down the Terrace?’

  ‘Oh, well . . . I think –’

  ‘Only if you’d like to,’ he cut in.

  ‘Er . . . yes, okay,’ she said. Surprise was unnerving her.

  ‘Good, excellent – Friday okay?’

  ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘No, I mean yes, that’s all right.’

  ‘Seven suit you? Meet you at the Norfolk?’

  ‘Seven,’ she nodded. ‘Fine.’

  He got up. ‘See you Friday, then.’ And raising his hand in a half-wave, he walked off up the beach.

  Marissa stared after him, wondering how it had happened; how, in less than a minute, she had agreed to a date with a police inspector. It was years since she’d been asked out by a man, and police were not her natural companions – although she had never known one personally, she had a basic distrust of the species. A few years earlier she’d been part of a very vocal action group protesting about police methods employed to keep young people off the streets of Fremantle in the evenings. Besides, his knowledge of her illegal crop put them on an unequal footing, so it all felt a bit uncomfortable. She had agreed because she was scared of the consequences of saying no. She hated her instinctive fear of authority, the fact that she wasn’t the confident, strong-minded, no bullshit person everyone seemed to take her for. She picked up her sunglasses, wrapped the sarong around her waist and walked up to her usual part of the beach knowing that, when Friday evening came around, having a drink and a meal with Frank Owen would be the last thing she’d feel like doing.

  Marissa was still pondering the situation that evening when she went to open up the hall for the beginners’ class. January wasn’t usually a good month for dance classes; too many people were away on holiday and the evenings were too hot, but to her surprise several regulars were waiting at the door. And as they wandered into the hall, kicking off their shoes and complaining about the heat, the three women from the hens’ night arrived, pausing awkwardly in the doorway – the red-haired woman, the bride’s mother and the sporty looking friend.

  ‘Hi!’ Marissa said. ‘So you decided to give it a go.’

  Trisha smiled. ‘We said we would, but you know what it’s like, Christmas and everything. Time just got away from us.’

  ‘Gayle nearly got away from us too,’ Sonya said, taking Gayle’s arm. ‘We almost had to apply leg irons to get her here.’

  From the look on Gayle’s face, Marissa realised this wasn’t too much of an exaggeration. She looked even paler and more tense than she had done the last time she’d seen her. ‘How did the wedding go?’ she asked.

  ‘Good, thanks,’ Gayle said. ‘Lovely.’

  ‘It was fabulous,’ Trisha cut in. ‘Angie looked beautiful, fabulous food, heaps of champagne and we all cried our eyes out.’

  Marissa put a big calico bag of veils and hip scarves on a table. ‘Sounds lovely. You’ve never done this before?’

  They shook their heads. ‘We’re absolute virgins,’ Sonya said with a grin, ‘except for that one-night stand with you.’

  ‘And not much other dancing?’

  ‘Not since school,’ Trisha said.

  ‘No bad habits acquired, then. Well, you’ll learn a few basic steps tonight but don’t overdo it. Just try to relax and enjoy yourselves, get used to the music and the feel of your body in the dance. It’s more strenuous than it looks and if you feel stiff and sore tomorrow, you won’t come back.’ She looked at their feet. ‘You might be okay in those sandals but flatter ones will be better next time, that or dance pumps. You can dance barefoot if you want, but it’s dodgy: if you step on a bead or a sequin it can be quite uncomfortable.’

  She switched on the music. ‘Come along, everyone, in the middle of the floor, please. Let’s stretch a bit to warm up, some deep breaths to relax, listen to the music, to what it’s telling you. Good. So we’ll begin with something really simple – remember, Gayle, Sonya and . . . er . . .’

  ‘Trisha.’

  ‘Yes, sorry, Trisha – the first thing to remember is that Middle Eastern dancing is very grounded, but you still need to be light on your feet. Now, watch my feet for this basic movement . . . and try to keep in time.’

  Breathing deeply was always hard for Gayle. She noticed it when she was walking and swimming. She was reasonably fit bu
t quickly grew short of breath, as though her lungs would not hold enough air to carry her through the activity. A yoga teacher had once told her that she needed to learn to breathe again, to let the breath into the upper part of her body. ‘It’s anxiety,’ the woman had said. ‘You have a lot of tension in the upper thoracic region. If you stick with yoga and meditation, you can change it. It may be quite confronting dealing with the emotional causes – sadness, fear and so on – but it’ll be worth it.’

  Gayle never went back. She had enough to cope with without having to confront everything she’d managed to suppress for so long; shortness of breath seemed infinitely preferable by comparison. She breathed deeply now, feeling the old constriction and trying hard to expand her chest. Trisha and Sonya seemed totally absorbed in following Marissa’s instructions, expressions of rapt concentration on their faces. She sighed. She was here on sufferance, on the basis that if she gave it a try they might stop nagging her about it. They had met regularly since Angie’s wedding and it was purely her own reluctance that had stopped them from coming weeks earlier.

  Gayle’s response to Angie’s departure had been to immerse herself in her PhD, and she cursed her own decision to take some of her leave at a time when she most needed to be out of the house. She’d only been onto the campus a couple of times to pick up some books she’d ordered, and each time she’d thought about calling Oliver to see if he’d like to meet, but something had stopped her. Apart from a very short email thanking her and telling her how much he’d enjoyed the wedding, she hadn’t heard from him. Sonya had apparently seen him a few times and now he was on study leave, starting with a trip to Berlin. She was beginning to feel that letting him into her personal life had been as damaging as she’d feared.

  Gayle watched Marissa as she danced in front, her back to them so they could follow her moves exactly. She was wearing a sleeveless black leotard, a long gauzy skirt in deep bronze and a shiny gold-beaded scarf tied around her hips. When she danced she seemed to be an extension of the music. Her moves were fluid, sinuous, almost mesmerising, like the music on its unfamiliar Eastern scale.

  Trisha and Sonya were laughing now, stopping to get themselves together after their first disastrous attempts. Gayle smiled across at them. She hadn’t mentioned that she’d been quite a good dancer in her youth, but now she envied the other two their exuberance, the enthusiasm with which they both threw themselves into everything they did. Sometimes she felt as though some great ravenous creature had devoured her energy from within, leaving her bereft of spontaneity and the ability to enjoy even the simplest pleasures. It was becoming increasingly difficult for her to be with them because she felt like an outsider, like the dull, mousey girl in the playground hanging around behind the lively ringleaders.

  ‘Hey,’ Sonya cried, pointing towards her and nudging Trisha. ‘Look at Gayle – she’s got it, she can do it.’

  Trisha spun round in amazement, and as they looked at her Gayle realised that they were right, she was actually following the moves Marissa had shown them and she was in time with the music. She was even managing to hold her arms in the correct position. Raising her eyebrows in surprise she grinned and carried on.

  ‘You got the steps really well,’ Marissa told her later, ‘but you do need to loosen up. There’s an awful lot of tension in your body.’

  So at least she hadn’t totally disgraced herself and thankfully she hadn’t had to listen to Marissa talking about what it all meant. After tonight they couldn’t accuse her of not trying and being a boring old fart. She had tried it and could now say definitely it was not for her and she wouldn’t be going again.

  Frank, nursing his third beer at a table in the courtyard of the Norfolk Hotel, rested his foot on the strut of an adjacent chair and contemplated the error of his ways. Why was he doing this again? He’d been getting a grip on things, finding ways to cope with himself, his memories, his roller coaster moods, and to make it safely from one day to the next without falling through the cracks of his own life.

  As a young man, Frank’s idealism about love had died a terrible death. Forced into a shotgun wedding at eighteen, neither he nor Julie thought they should be married. A couple of years later, struggling with a baby and a low income, their efforts to make the best of it simply ran out of steam and they went their separate ways. ‘Never again,’ Frank had told himself time and again in the ensuing years. ‘Never, ever again.’ But invalided home from Vietnam, wounded in body and soul, he had fallen in love with his nurse. How many wounded soldiers and their nurses have discovered, to their cost, that long after the body is healed the soul must still wrestle with its wounds? It would be a good few years before, along with others, Vietnam veterans were clinically diagnosed with the post-traumatic stress disorder that would haunt them.

  Frank and Anna had lasted seven years and, on reflection, he was amazed that she had put up with him for so long. Eventually she decided to save her own sanity and took a job in New Zealand, probably, he thought, with the idea of putting some distance between them. Since then it had proved safer for him to be alone, peppering his life with a series of brief encounters that began with scorching eye contact across a crowded room and ended a few days or weeks later when the sex-fuelled illusion of intimacy had burned itself out. Then the old symptoms would start again, the nightmares, the anger followed by moody ambivalence, the sudden increase in his drinking and the bouts of depression. Sometimes it took months for him to get himself back together.

  Frank finished his beer and wondered if he could squeeze in another before Marissa arrived. What was it about her, anyway? Returning the plants could have been a bad move. He’d thought he was doing her a favour but she might see it as some sort of power game. It was clear she wasn’t interested in him. When he’d asked her out she’d looked as though she’d rather stick pins in her eyes than have a drink with him, so why had she agreed? ‘Women,’ he murmured to himself, ‘they always mean trouble,’ but even as he said it he knew that he was the cause of the trouble, simply as a result of what had happened to him and what he had become. And as he’d grown older he had found himself yearning for something else, tenderness perhaps, affection, someone to hold him, someone to give him purpose, someone to love. But, knowing his own weaknesses, why was he pursuing this woman? The last thing he needed in his life was a dope-smoking, Harley-riding, belly dancer.

  ‘You’re interrogating me,’ Marissa said later, putting down her fork and moving her empty pasta dish aside. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Because it’s interesting,’ Frank said, leaning back and pulling out his cigarettes. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

  ‘Do I mind if you smoke now, or do I mind smoking in general?’

  ‘Either . . . both?’

  They were sitting at a pavement table on South Terrace, which was noisy with Friday night diners and coffee drinkers. ‘I don’t mind if you smoke out here, but basically I object to smoking because it’s so bad for your health. Shit, that sounded really self-righteous.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling but looking away from her, ‘it did, and I assume your objection only extends to tobacco.’ She had the grace to blush and Frank lit his cigarette. ‘As I said, I’m not interrogating you, I’m just interested.’

  ‘It’s a job.’

  He leaned forward. ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘No, it’s more than that. I’ve seen you dance. There’s no way it’s just a job. How did you get from prim young wife and secretary in the Home Counties to belly dancing in Fremantle and riding a motorbike?’

  Marissa shrugged and stared past him, to the other side of the street where people were queuing for pizzas. ‘You sound like you’re taking a statement,’ she said. ‘Okay, well, I was brought up – moulded, really – for a certain kind of life: dutiful early sixties wife, destined to keep a perfect home and be a credit to a good but boring man with a future in insurance. I wasn’t Marissa in those days, I was Jean Smedley. Then one day I was shopping in Sainsbury’s and an Austral
ian backpacker bumped into me and I dropped my shopping. A couple of days later I dropped everything and did a runner.’

  ‘What, just left your husband and legged it with the Aussie?’

  She nodded, and reached for the wine bottle. ‘Yes, went backpacking and finally ended up here. It was an escape route and I took it.’

  ‘You stayed with that same guy?’

  ‘Yes . . . same group, really. You know what it was like in the sixties, everybody into everybody else.’

  Frank nodded and drew on his cigarette. ‘And the belly dancing?’

  ‘That came quite a bit later. It was a way of claiming myself, I suppose. You probably don’t know this but –’

  ‘It’s a women’s dance, danced for women, not for sleazy blokes on buck’s nights,’ he cut in.

  ‘Oh, you do know.’

  ‘I can read.’

  Marissa smiled. ‘Can and obviously do, so you know about it. I’ve been dancing for more than twenty years now, and slowly it became a way of earning a living. Not a great one but enough for my needs.’

  ‘And the bloke, whatever his name was?’

  ‘Blue? His name was Blue. That’s all I ever knew him as. We called him Blue Peter. You see, you are interrogating me.’

  ‘Just tying up loose ends.’

  ‘We split up after we arrived in Australia. Port Hedland,’ she said, her face darkening. And Frank, trained to read the signs, saw her grip on the glass tighten and noted how she drew her other arm across her chest.

  ‘And you never saw him again?’

  ‘Never. He was strange, controlling, very shut off. He was travelling alone and he’d met up with all these other people on the way. I’d never heard anyone called Blue before, then I realised it was quite common in Australia.’

  Frank nodded. ‘I knew a good few Blues in the army. And you never married again?’

  She laughed. ‘No way! I’m not the sort of person who fits well into other people’s lives.’ She paused and looked him straight in the eye. ‘I like to please myself. I don’t do relationships.’