The Twisted Heart

by Rebecca Gowers

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Postscript

  Also by Rebecca Gowers

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  There was an hour of learning steps, then an hour of social dancing. Kit learned the steps but she didn’t stay for the dancing.

  The hall, property of St Christopher’s, was more cramped and more decrepit than she had pictured it. Just to get in you had to edge round stacks of unmatched plastic chairs. The street-side windows were filled with wire glass. The walls were littered with Sellotape, tin tacks, the dog-ends of near-illegible notes: do not DO NOT boiling wa—Thursdays Every Time BUT. The plasterwork, too, was a mess. In another part of the world half the plaster damage might have been taken for bullet holes. Or perhaps this was another part of the world? Even the air carried the dead-alive smell of split sewerage cut with bleach products. Kit felt near illegible herself as she paced the beautiful, old, battered, softly sprung floor.

  She had wavered, up in her little attic bedroom in the late summer gloom, thinking, Friday evening, should she go out and dance, or flick on the lights and settle down to some work? She had failed to imagine at all accurately what she’d be in for, the dirty wire glass, wrecked plaster, eau-de-Nil paint, a maladjusted sound system, not that any of this really mattered. The moment the class had begun she’d ceased to register these things, and had instead succumbed to the rote enthusiasm of the endlessly yelling instructor, ‘That’s it, people, passion!—one two, three four; come on, come on; let’s see, you move—hips!, TWO, three four. Excellent, nice—two, three four; and left, and—WHAP! Nice there, better—whap whap, whap whap; like this, like THIS! Girls?—cooee, you all right, mate?—three FOUR; keep up, keep up; and next and LEFT and hips!, and LEFT and—’

  *

  Kit, once she’d chosen to go dancing, had discovered as she walked along to the bus stop that it was warmer outside than in. She had got herself to the hall, all the way across town, but that had only been the start of things because, having shown up for the Beginners try-out session, she had found that it was full. Full? It hadn’t even occurred to her this was possible.

  The instructor had shouted, at Kit and others, the surplus gaggle of them, that they could either try again, ‘Okay, next week Thursday’, or could wait an hour, come back and try Intermediate.

  Once more, Kit had found herself wavering. Intermediate? How hard was that likely to be? Would she be able to hack it, more or less? Would it be worth the wait of an hour? And if she waited, tried, and found it too difficult, then what?

  She teetered on the verge of abandoning her project. She could have caught a bus back into town never to return, and she’d considered this. But, stepping out of the hall onto the pavement, she had spotted a café opposite through a break in the traffic, had, seizing the moment, run through the traffic without especially thinking about it, over the road and into the café, Pams Cafe, had bought herself a sandwich and a cup of tea and—there she had found herself with an hour and nothing much to do.

  That was what had happened, not planned or anything.

  Of course, her dash through the break in the traffic, had she misjudged it just a little, whap whap, whap whap, she could have been killed. And that would have been it.

  Kit had picked this particular dance club mostly on account of its being run out of a hall up the nearest hill in East Oxford; not a hill, more a slope really—St Christopher’s Social Dance Club, an easy stroll from the estates lying on the inner outskirts, as she conceived it, of the roughest edge of town. What she’d fancied to herself, when she had happened upon a flyer advertising the class, had been beginner dancers dancing up the hill, twirling like deranged weathervanes on a level with the tops of the city’s ghoulish spires. This much she had pictured, set within a church hall that had not, in her imagination, appeared war-damaged.

  Instead of any of which, here she was at a table in a comfortless East Oxford café with a cheese-pickle sandwich and a large cup of tea. The only work-related material she had with her was the notebook that she kept in her bag. She got it out and flipped through the pages: brief comments on a seminar from the end of the previous term, ‘Electricity and the Imagination’, heard it all before. Notes from The Times on the Bermondsey cholera outbreak, 1849, ‘N.B. several witnesses in the Manning murder case died of cholera before they could give evidence’—amusing at a distance, she reflected; though, amusing? Notes in rough for the first lesson she’d given Orson:

  O. TWIST Plot—Dickens begins it in instalments starting Feb. 1837. Almost certainly initially intended as just a few episodes, ‘The Parish Boy’s Progress’, social satire—only then? does Dickens decide to upgrade it to a full-blown criminal-romance serial novel. N.B. includes a brutal prostitute-murder, Nancy bludgeoned to death in her bedroom by her pimp, Sikes and—

  Kit was bored. She flicked backwards through the pages, stopping randomly at a list she’d scribbled months earlier, names of various criminal suspects mentioned in the memoirs of John Wilson Murray, a late nineteenth-century Ontario detective: ‘Hunker Chisholm, Knotty O’Brian, Senator Voorhees, Young Billy Nay, Nettie Slack, Napper Nichols, Poke Soles, counterfeiter, or “shover of the queer”. Polly Ripple, Meta Cherry, Baldy Drinkwater, Ebenezer Ward’—was ‘Meta’ a real name? Yes, certainly it was.

  After half an hour Kit bought a second cup of tea. Intermediate-level dancing—perhaps, come to think of it, it was preferable to fail where there was no hope of succeeding, i.e., perhaps Intermediate would be less embarrassing than Beginners, not more so. Well, so what? The principal point was to avoid meeting anyone she knew, because all Kit was really after was to lose herself in some steps, a form of loss for which, in her view, anonymity was a prerequisite. She glanced over the road and thought, bloody hell, and wondered, what am I doing here in this shabby little café?

  Answer: she was reading, or trying to.

  Kit tried to read. On the page facing the name list she had recorded the outlines of a couple of Detective Murray’s cases. In one he had posed as a comatose dosser under a bench, simulating unconsciousness in order to eavesdrop on a gang of firemen who were suspected of setting fires for profit. The firemen, in turn, had seized this opportunity to urinate all over him. Pissing arsonists, Kit thought. She found she had also copied out—mainly, she deduced, because the line was in metre—Murray’s description, p. 73, of the effect on a farmer’s wife of being forced to confess to murder: ‘Her eyes were like those of an ox in whose throat the butcher’s knife has been buried.’ And then, God, below this, yes, here were notes, sentences Kit had patiently transcribed one after another, concerning the case of Jessie Keith, a young girl—a real young girl, these were real cases—Jessie Keith, who had gone missing near Listowel, Ontario, on October 19th, 1894:

  The party hunting beyond the Keith home came upon the pieces of a body lying in the woods. Newly turned earth showed them where the parts had been buried. Other portions were spread out while others had been tossed into the brush. Tightly wrapped around the neck was a white petticoat, soaked crimson. The head was uncovered and the pretty face of Jessie Keith was revealed. The girl had been disembowelled and carved into pieces.

  Kit bent closer to the page. In almost hieroglyphic scrawl her notes indicated that the hunting party had been able to find, and had roughly reassembled, some two-thirds only of Jessie Keith’s body. Detective Murray had been called in, and had tracked down a locally escaped lunatic called Almeda Chattelle; and no doubt it was the warped lucidity of this madman’s explana
tions that had led to his being found fully responsible for the crime. To Kit, though, rereading Chatelle’s remarks, he seemed about as insane as it was possible for a single human being to be. He had spoken with ostensible distress about the moment at which he had taken the pretty girl, of how it had come over him ‘like a flash’:

  ‘I grabbed her around the waist and carried her to the woods. She screamed and dug her heels into the ground, so I tied the white skirt around her neck. She still struggled, so I took out my knife and I cut her across this way and then down this way, and I threw away the parts of her I did not wish, and the parts I liked I treated considerately, and later I buried them under a tree. I was not unkind to the parts I liked.’

  The parts I liked I treated considerately, and later—later? The parts I liked I—I was not unkind to the parts I—

  Kit, repelled, allowed her gaze to leap up from the page and was confronted by the sight of people spilling elatedly from the hall. Beginners try-out was over. Her pulse started to race, she snapped her notebook shut, rose like an automaton to her feet.

  There was an hour of learning steps, then an hour of social dancing. And the learning part was fine. It was great. In sum, it engaged Kit completely without being so hard she couldn’t do it.

  The instructor started off with a flurry of points. ‘Bit of a crowd in, extras from Beginners, please, chaps, ladies, this side, that side. I know, I know. We’ll learn the steps in groups. Ghost partners for now, call it a refresher lesson; sorry, folks. Next week—Beginners will be Thursdays from next week, not Fridays, do not forget—it’s in at the deep end for you new people, it’s—aren’t we popular!’

  But the shouting, where it actually mattered, was a case simply of, ‘Right, girls this side, blokes that side’. The term ‘ghost partners’, meanwhile, was as much as to say that they would all be dancing alone.

  Kit observed at once, immediately, that she was the tallest person there, and so was relieved about the pairing business. Being paired off, or worse still, failing to be paired off, was what she had most dreaded about the entire exercise. If only she had known this wasn’t going to happen, or not straight away—phantom partners, ‘ghost position’, arms circling no one—how much better she might have endured her slow and fretful hour of waiting. You goof, she said to herself repeatedly, as she paced the sprung floorboards and waited to begin.

  Even the dancing wasn’t at all what she had expected. The instant they started Kit found herself exhilaratedly stamping in formation with the other girls. The boys, men, danced in a block to the side of them, a different dance, the complement, obviously, to their own; Polly Ripple one side, Senator Voorhees the other—‘whap whap, whap whap; like this, like THIS. Girls?—cooee, you all right, mate?—three FOUR; keep up, keep up; and next and LEFT and hips!, and LEFT and—’ And the fact that a number of people found it difficult led to incidental chaos, but this exhilarated Kit too. It lifted her spirits. It was—‘whap whap, whap whap’—exhilarating simply to be exhilarated; not at all what she had been picturing when she’d sat motionless on her bed. She had imagined a much more floaty experience. The mob aspect felt—‘yes yes’—like preparation for a war. It was therefore no doubt somewhat debasing, she thought vacantly; though if so, it was definitely debasing in an uplifting-feeling way—if that wasn’t, oh brilliant!—what being debased meant.

  After a while, Kit consciously began to take stock, noticed the glimpses of shimmer on her side of the hall, these girls dressier than the Beginner crowd had been, more serious, the ones who could do it, pearl-spangled skirts, sequins, gloss, their more pronounced movements leading to after-tremors of glint—‘and left, and back, and three, and turn’—their hair though, in the main, impeccably unmoving. Kit wasn’t dressed right, but she hadn’t expected she would be, not even for Beginners; this distinction she had swallowed in advance—‘yes yes. That’s it, people, passion!—one two, three four; come on, come on; let’s see, you move—hips!,TWO, three four. Excellent, nice—TWO, three four; and left, and—WHAP! Nice there; good you!—better—’

  Kit tried to stop thinking. And for a while, it was everything she had wished it to be, and she lost herself in the steps. Yet as minute succeeded minute, she came slowly back to herself, realising that if she was happy to be implicit in a gang, this pleasure by no means fully offset the awkwardness of managing such steps alone. With her body she felt keenly the lack of a partner. She hankered for his missing balance—force?—lilt? It was disordering to be unsupported. Especially her top half felt adrift. With her feet, the steps, the formation stamping, the experience was fun. But her top half keened to be held.

  She grasped that the first hour was done only when the instructor shouted, ‘Ten minutes,’ before adding with a saucy wink that after this they’d be able to pair themselves off or not as they pleased, as it fell out.

  Kit walked over and propped herself up against the pockmarked wall, closing her eyes as small defence against a sudden but not surprising fit of light-headedness. Most people had shuffled towards the back to drink water they’d brought with them. The noise of those who knew each other or were just friendly covered the silence of those who didn’t or weren’t—a mash of sound that receded crazily fast as Kit bent, crouched, slid floorwards, head tipped between her knees, afraid she might be pitching into a faint.

  When she had sufficiently recovered—it was only a few seconds, and she was used to the brief descent of this somehow razorish fog—she hauled herself back up onto her feet and passed amongst the others, shaken still, but aware of their ironical comments, their complaints, their readjusting of garments and fanning of faces. Kit went to her bag, picked it up, looked inside it for no accountable reason, and then quietly, downheartedly, slipped away.

  It hadn’t been like any dance club she had ever heard about or seen represented on screen, or, indeed, dreamed of. On the contrary, the place had felt borderline hostile, not to mention its being so badly organised. There were all sorts of reasons to leave, yet the one most acceptable to her, irritatingly enough, was the fact that she had been the tallest person there; not by much, but even so.

  She had noticed it at once, and had had the duration of the first hour to get over it. Easy to say that it couldn’t have mattered less. In some part of her mind she had said this to herself, for an hour.

  Then she’d left.

  Outside on the hall steps, Kit shivered. It was cooler now and her own heat was largely expended. She decided to salvage the evening by fitting in a short stint at the library. Pams Cafe, where in virtual solitude she had sat out the previous hour of her life for the price of a sandwich and two cups of tea, had transformed itself into the strip-lit refuge of four, five, six huddled figures.

  Kit walked up the street, drooped against the bus stop and stared back at them, and it came to her abruptly that of everyone on the Ontario-criminals name list, it was Jessie Keith, a child one day cut into pieces and then in some appalling fashion raped, who had best exemplified the name, Meta Cherry. In the act of forming this thought—too late, that is—Kit wished her mind would leave words alone where words didn’t serve.

  The scene through the café window, plus the window itself, scattered over with special offers handwritten on dayglo stars, looked like a black-and-white photograph, ‘Useless People at Twilight’, that happened to have come out in colour. Who were they all, Kit wondered, these wasters? She stared at them, annoyed, until two of them started to laugh, at which she was pierced by a sense of her own loneliness. Oh yes, she thought, more annoyed still, and isn’t this just exactly the kind of moment where you’re supposed to ask, ‘What is life for?’

  While she was busy replying to herself that this was a question she was unqualified to address, she was startled by a hand on her arm, ‘You off then?’ She—a man had taken hold of her, nondescript, tough, thin, Kit only peripherally looked at him—crop-haired, a not-quite-youngish man.

  He let go.

  Kit said, ‘I’m just catching the bus,’ and l
ooked back at the café, at the laughing people inside it, at the sun-bleached, illustrated menu, green and orange dayglo stars. She looked around at the street, at the world, at the rest of the world, at a cyclist, a graffitied dustbin, a kid opposite who—

  ‘You’re okay, are you?’

  —a kid opposite who was walking along with odd, stiff, jolly, deliberate steps.

  The man hesitated then tried again. ‘Were you thinking of coming back next week?’

  Not now, I’m not, thought Kit, though she hadn’t been planning to anyway.

  ‘I was hoping I might get a chance to dance with you,’ he said. ‘You were—you didn’t want to try out with a partner?’

  Kit felt got at. She was a definite pip taller than him. She drew herself up. She muttered, ‘I don’t know, I have to be off.’ As she had just left the hall, wasn’t that pretty obvious?

  ‘Might you make it next time, do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘If I can,’ she said, gracelessly.

  ‘Joe,’ he said, and held out the hand with which he had notionally detained her.

  She shook hands—how could she not?—and seemed to remember hearing that blind people judged the beauty of strangers by the feel of their hands. What did his hand feel like? He was nondescript, tough. His hand was nondescript, tough. It meant nothing to her. What might her hand feel like, come to think of it, to him? Nothing, also?

  ‘Kit,’ she replied.

  ‘Kit?’

  ‘Kit,’ she said, more distinctly. Perhaps he wasn’t nondescript after all. Tough though, yes. There was about him a certain—what? He caught her eye, smiled and turned away, and walked away back towards the hall.