The Twisted Heart

by Rebecca Gowers

  She packed her work bag, took a bagel out of the fridge, filled it with butter, peanut butter, cheese and a suspect lettuce leaf, then made her way, eating, down the stairs, to the front door, out and down the front steps and over the gravel drive, where, abruptly—confused—she was forced to re-regulate her understanding, because there was no rain. Nor was the gravel wet. Nor was there even much smell of recent wet.

  She came to a halt, thought back. On waking from her nap, her vision had been swimey and blurred. Out of her little window she had glimpsed a thin falling in the air. Now she grasped that it must have been her own insufficient and troubled sleep, filtered through bleary eyes, that had conjured the illusion of rain. There was no rain. She was discomposed by this fact, set against her recent belief, knowledge, to the contrary.

  So much for knowledge, she thought. Kit started walking again. She had also known, believed, for a whole week, that she wouldn’t be returning to Intermediate. Yet, as the hour of the second dance class approached, she found herself thinking that it would be pitiful not to go.

  Volume 83, The Dickensian, Kit took it over to seat 103, happily vacant, and sat down to read, not expecting much. And to her disappointment—after all, she had been expecting something—she found the essay cursory and barely helpful. The crime case it examined most thoroughly concerned the unsolved 1838 murder of a prostitute, Eliza Grimwood, in a slum beside the Thames at Waterloo. A decade or so later, Dickens had been keen to get the inside story on a killing that was still notorious. Charles Field, who couldn’t pretend his work as principal police investigator had been anything other than a failure, had described for Dickens being challenged by complex false leads—complex but also imaginary, so the article stated. Kit was already fighting impatience as she reached the concluding sentences, in which the author made two points. First, that Dickens had had a particular interest in the victim, Eliza Grimwood, alluding to her more than once in his later writings. Second, that the details of her murder had been too sordid for him to be able to reproduce them in a family journal like Household Words.

  Too sordid, how—exactly? Kit felt annoyed. Wasn’t it the differences between the Household Words accounts and the true facts of the various cases that this article had promised to reveal? As she slumped back in her chair, in close proximity to thousands, millions of printed words, Kit thought about summoning up, out of all those many millions, some small number of hundreds that might make the question clearer.

  But was there really much excuse to take the thing further? Surely not. How exhaustive did a person’s thesis research need to be? And, more particularly, what did Kit need with the details of another case of brutal slaughter? Wasn’t Jessie Keith’s death horror enough for one hoppish mind? It was. Whatever had made Eliza Grimwood’s murder sordid, it was no business of Kit’s. She had masses of real work to do.

  In typical fashion, she snapped the journal shut, with what turned out to be an unfortunately loud bang, and, sensing that the day was on the wane, was up on her feet at once, packing her bag. She glanced at the clock, twenty-five minutes to go, took her reading material back to the issue desk, and recognised—that she was playing a shady game with herself; that although her mind might be hesitating, her feet weren’t.

  Kit ran down the stairs, out into the early evening, over to the High Street. Only when she was installed on a warm bus did she begin to breathe again properly, and it came to her straight away that Joe might also have been a novice, why not?—shunted, like her, as overspill into the previous week’s Intermediate class—in which case, perhaps he wouldn’t be there today, Friday, given that the regular Beginner class had been set for Thursdays. If he had shown up for this week’s Beginners, he would have missed her, a view of things that filled Kit with a tentative feeling of relief.

  And why was she going to Intermediate? she wondered. But she knew why. She had found she was good enough to cope with it, was the answer, so why do anything else? She had learned dance steps for years as a child, and was quick about new ones. Once on the bus, it was as though she had always planned to go back. St Christopher’s was probably the worst dance club in Oxford, but for her it now had one thing over all the others, namely that she knew what she was in for. She felt cross with herself for being in trousers. She should have put her skirt back on. Presumably this week they would be working in pairs from the start, but in trousers, when someone swirled her around, she would be graceful only in so far as her limbs were graceful, no rippling skirt. Never mind, she thought bravely. It doesn’t matter. Someone there will whirl me round regardless.

  *

  She got off the bus in haste, but decelerated to the trudge of the condemned when she saw, up ahead, Joe, bathed in the sodium glare of a street lamp, his arm draped over the railings at the entrance to the hall. She saw him and became immediately self-conscious about when to catch his eye, when to greet him.

  As soon as he saw her, though, he straightened up and began to walk her way. In turn, she politely smiled. He didn’t smile back. He was better looking than she had remembered, more present, and not as short as she’d been thinking: a sensible height. She got a grip on herself.

  ‘I have a request,’ he said, and rotated deftly on his heel to accompany her back towards the hall.

  Kit pulled a surprised face at him, for jumping the gun. ‘Hello,’ she said, and said it, she felt, with poise.

  ‘Hello,’ he replied, ‘Kit. You’re late.’

  He sounded as though he might have said more. ‘Sorry,’ she replied. She thought, fuck. Her spirits fell a little. ‘So, yes,’ she said, ‘you have a request?’

  They made their way round the jumbled stacks of chairs in the entrance. The instructor was at a table by the inner door. ‘I’ll pay,’ said Joe. Kit protested, but only for form’s sake, because she didn’t wish to negotiate with him, and he was already handing over a note as he said it. She had forgotten quite how bad the air smelled in the hall. It caught her in the throat.

  There was quite a crowd. She and Joe went to the back together to dump their coats and bags, then stayed there like guests marooned together at a party.

  ‘Arequest?’ Kit repeated, raising her voice above the hubbub.

  Joe got his mobile out of his pocket, switched it off and shoved it into his shoulder pack, then straightened up and looked right at her. In a voice that she registered as appealingly low and warm, he said, ‘You do the boy’s half.’

  Her thoughts seemed to drain. The hubbub receded. The lights appeared a shade brighter, the smell more difficult. She swallowed hard, disgusted. She didn’t doubt she had heard him correctly. She had heard, no point requesting him to say it again.

  As witnesses to accidents mouth, ‘No, no, no’, so Kit, eyes lowered, breathed her silent reply.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Joe leant closer.

  ‘I’m the boy?’ she whispered.

  ‘The boy. That’s what I’m asking you—yes. Only if you want. You have the nerve, right?’ He grinned. ‘I trust you. Be a man. What have you got to lose?’ He grinned, it looked to Kit, wolfishly.

  There was a blast of music from the scratchy sound system.

  ‘What, because—what?—because I’m tall?’ she asked, with much sarcasm. Not me, please, she begged, begging the fetid air. When I came all this way, she thought. I was happy, she thought. No, no, no, she thought.

  The instructor yelled, ‘Okay, people!’ The talk dwindled to nothing; the commands began as, felicitously, Joe murmured in Kit’s ear, ‘Because you’re outstanding’—and that was it: ‘Right!—ONE, and two, and HIPS, and four; and—’ Kit stood, stalled, upset, faltering, ‘—SMOOTH, and yes, and three, and four; and—’ somehow or other, Joe had her take him in her arms, ‘ONE, and two, and three, and four—’ got her holding him, they started, ‘—YES, and yes, and good, and turn—’ and the physical effort of leading him was so instantly extreme, required such concentration, that Kit was locked into the job of it at once, her anguish palpable to her, but s
econdary—‘two, and three, and TURN; and left, and back, and three, and TURN; and—’

  And it was exhausting, each minute a sort of torment. This will come to an end, Kit said to herself over and over, as though it incredibly might not. She fought to stay alert to everything, beat, space, pulse, fatigue, sweat—alarmingly, control of another person, ‘—GIRLS one, and two, and THREE, and yes; and—’

  To begin with, the instructor distinguished between ‘followers’ and ‘leaders’. After this, though, Kit was horribly aware that it was ‘girls’ for the followers, and any number of designations for the rest: ‘gents’, ‘gentlemen’, ‘fellas’, ‘guys’, ‘boys’, ‘lads’, ‘chaps’, ‘you lot’: ‘Come on, you lot, show her who’s boss, make her do what you want. And oops, and two, and three, and four; come on, come on—come on, lads!—come on; and—’ Kit was the boy. She was the boy. Bad in every way, though only after a while did it come to her that—‘two, and three, and four—’ that after a collective deep breath of the tainted air, the real girls dancing alongside and about her were evincing apathetic contempt.

  I am being anathematised, Kit thought. Her mind, already stricken, narrowed down further. ‘Yes yes, and yes, and yes, and yes—’ She—‘yes’—was being anathematised, ‘yes yes, and yes—’ if the boys, at least, for their own reasons, were less brutal. From one or other of them, as the minutes ground on, she received a flying nod, a smile, at points of maximum exertion, or if they bumped. And with these exchanges, Kit’s gratitude was close to being more than she could bear.

  Joe, meanwhile, gave her no obvious encouragement. Maybe this made things easier, after a fashion. All the same, the more he trusted himself to her, the more deeply she resented it. They were well matched for ability, but not for strength. ‘And go, and go, and go, and GO.’ This, too, will come to an end, she thought.

  There was one other irregular couple. Kit did eventually spot a pair of men. No girls paired up, though there was an excess of them in the class, a floating superfluity whose individual members the instructor switched in and out. When, from time to time, the call went up, ‘Change your partners’, Kit and Joe didn’t respond, and no one tried to make them. They were left to themselves, unswitchable.

  This switching business, there were occasional clipped flare-ups in the hall. And didn’t numbers of the girls look like Slavic sex workers? Yes, they did—Kit’s idea of a Slavic sex worker, anyway. Perhaps, if I weren’t a stranger here myself, she thought numbly—but there was no continuation to this line—‘go, and go, and go, and go—’

  At the same time as she learned the steps, she grew ever more knackered, not that Joe wasn’t restrained in how he depended on her. She would have depended on him far more. Even so, it required an act of immense surrender on her part to marshal the strength to make their pairing work—‘and two, and three, and TURN; and left, and back, and three, and TURN; and—’

  So they danced—it was dancing. They danced. The minutes crawled: they danced. The minutes crawled. Kit endured—everything. But only after a terrible long stretch of time did pride cause her to lift herself up, to put her entire will into their pairing, just as fatigue started to give her almost a high.

  This will come to an end, she said to herself, the words devoid, now, of meaning. From which point, slowly, slowly, their bodily understanding grew subtler, until Kit’s feelings of shame—her feelings—fell away.

  At the ten-minute break after the first hour, before the social dancing began, when the dancers gave in to forms of collapse, Kit was unsurprised that sickly blotches swirled across her vision. She closed her eyes tight, took rapid, shallow breaths and murmured, ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘You’re—’ Joe’s voice drifted from her. Her knees gave slightly. He grabbed her by the arm, she could smell him, moved her backwards a few paces gripping her tightly. He led.

  ‘Here,’ he said, close in by her, hand around her upper arm, she was whirling in the dark, ‘here, wait, wait—hang on—’ she felt something solid hit the back of her legs, ‘okay, sit. You’re okay, sit down. You’re okay.’ So she did, and slammed into a chair seat halfway on her journey to the floor. Involuntarily her eyes flew open but the room was spinning so fast that she at once shut them again. A bottle was pressed into her hands. She tempered her breathing, water. Blindly, she drank.

  *

  Same old shit: too much work, not enough sleep. After an indeterminate pause, Kit wiped her face with her left hand, shivered and opened her eyes again, room normal. A few more breaths and her equilibrium returned. She was light-headed though, and felt sick.

  Joe crouched down beside her. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured, ‘I am. But I don’t think I can carry on, you know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m okay, but I think I’m going to stop now. This happens to me, don’t worry. It’s okay. You stay,’ she said, and got up and put the bottle down behind her on the chair, and moved away from him along the wall to retrieve her things.

  Outside on the hall steps in the dirty fresh air, Kit, pausing to adjust to the drop in temperature, was interested, through a wave of desolation, was interested far inside herself, that Joe had asked so much of her. It was chilly now and threatening to rain; or at least, however cold it was, she hadn’t the strength to withstand it.

  She jumped when he materialised beside her, pulling on his jacket. ‘Sorry it ended like that, but thank you,’ he said. ‘You were great. I admit, you surprised me.’ He tried in vain to win a response from her. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t so bad, was it? You were excellent.’ His voice softened. ‘Do you need to sit down again? I was going to ask if I could buy you dinner.’

  Kit walked dumbly forwards, just straight forwards, until she found herself at the edge of the pavement. Joe came up on the bus-stop side of her. To catch a bus, she would have to pass round behind him. She stood on the kerb trying to marshal her thoughts. It was cold. She was shivering. It wasn’t perhaps freezing, but she was cold.

  ‘Anyway—’ she said, and left the word to loiter in the air between them.

  Anyway, she repeated to herself, flinching in shock as the massive side of a haulage lorry passed a few yards in front of her face, its slogan skidding across her view, the stink of its exhaust in her nostrils.

  ‘—to sit down,’ said Joe. He took her upper arm once more and led her through the traffic, over the road, into the fug of Pams Cafe, of course, guided her to a chair at one of the two window tables.

  ‘Do you drink tea?’ he asked. ‘You’re shaking. I think it might be a good idea.’

  She stared at him, then at the grubby white back-sides of the dayglo stars taped to the window glass beside her.

  ‘Hey.’ He took her bag off her shoulder for her. ‘One minute,’ he said.

  ‘I was in here yesterday,’ Joe pushed a cup of tea towards her and a plate with a paper napkin and a sandwich on it, ‘in case you turned up for Beginners, not that I thought—I sat in here for half an hour after the class began, in case.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ said Kit.

  ‘I’m glad you think so.’

  ‘No, no,’ she tried to pull herself together, felt totally sapped, ‘I’m saying I came in here myself, last week, when the try-out session was full,’ she took a deep breath, ‘had exactly this, cheese sandwich and a cup of tea, sat for a whole hour.’ Her remarks seemed to float out of her.

  ‘You were great,’ he said again. ‘Thank you.’

  Thank you? It wasn’t enough.

  Now that she was parked back in the warm with a cup of tea, it seemed to Kit as though she might never be able to stand up again.

  She felt so humiliated, so contemptible, and so defencelessly pleased at being tended to a little, even by the person who had humiliated her, that her eyes momentarily swam. She had believed she was going to the class ready for anything, but what had happened was sufficiently offensive to her that she was forced to acknowledge this hadn’t been true. For one t
hing, she had not envisaged needing to master, so completely, the steps, because she had imagined that some other person would be guiding her as she drifted mostly backwards. For another—

  ‘What made you decide to go to this particular club?’ she heard herself ask, retreating into dullness.

  Joe perceptibly paused, then replied, ‘Actually, the person I expected to meet last week proposed it. You?’

  ‘Chance.’

  ‘You live near here?’

  ‘No. You?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ His eyes flickered briefly as he seemed to consider this prospect. ‘Eat the sandwich,’ he said, and then said, ‘I’m surprised you didn’t pick a studenty dance class in town.’

  ‘Being I’m a student?’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, no,’ she bit off a dryish mouthful of bread and cheese, ‘that’s correct. Which is to say, I’m a graduate.’ She didn’t add, ‘You?’ First, she had no instinct as to what he might be. Second, she was still absorbing the information that he had approached her the previous week only after having been stood up by someone else.

  To her alarm, sandwich in hand, she began to cry.

  For a long time Kit couldn’t stop. Nor, for this reason, could she swallow the bite she’d taken out of the sandwich. Joe sat opposite her, calm.

  When at last she’d got a hold on herself, she wiped her eyes along the back of her sleeve, encountering as she did so the gaze of a man as he looked in through the café window.