The Last Dance

by Carolyn McCrae

  Yes, she simply reversed the truth.

  How different all their lives would have been if she hadn’t.

  It would have been so easy for her not to lie. She hadn’t had to look anyone in the face, she was 200 miles away, she could have said “Of course she isn’t yours Arnold, of course Henry was her father.” After a bit of embarrassing explanation to Carl and Susannah she would be able to clear the air and explain that they could not be related. They would probably never speak to her again, but they could have been together.

  But Alicia did lie, and all those lives were changed.

  “Of course she’s your daughter Arnold. What on earth makes you think she isn’t?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Susannah had dashed out of the house without thinking where she was going or what she was going to do. She just had to walk, and walk, and the longer she walked the less she felt she could go back home.

  Her thoughts darted backwards and forwards between Carl, kind, generous, open-hearted, wonderful Carl, Carl – her brother – and her father. How could he? She hated him. How could he hurt her like this? How could she hurt him back?

  He’d never loved her or Charles, she knew that, he had never spent any time with them – he was always with Carl and ‘that woman’. How could he have uprooted them from their lovely house and taken them to live with her? How could he have married her? How could he have let her get so close to Carl? He’d known all along and never said anything! She hated them all, Aunty Kathleen, her father, Charles. But not Carl, no, she could never hate Carl. She would always love him.

  When this had all settled down they’d go away where no one knew them. They’d go to London, they’d get jobs there, get a flat, no one would need to know they were brother and sister.

  But he wouldn’t go with her would he? He was too honest and too caring to do that. He would come up with some horrible facts about what happens when parents are too closely related. She knew enough to know that the children of parents who were too closely related were ‘not right’.

  He wouldn’t go away with her like that. She pictured him so clearly, she just knew as if he were standing in front of her, speaking to her. He wouldn’t go away with her, he would say ‘No’ because she was his sister. There was no way she could be with him, even if she wanted to he wouldn’t, not now. Had he known? Had he guessed? Was that why he’d never gone all the way?

  She was on her own from this moment on.

  Walking around the wall of the boating lake, a narrow strip of concrete that separated the enclosed water of the lake from the river estuary, she looked down into the choppy water deciding whether she should throw herself in, but even in the state she was in she realised that it was, at most, 4 feet deep. She wondered for a while, almost academically, how she could make herself drown in 4 feet of water. That would serve them right. They would feel guilty then.

  But she didn’t only want to make them feel guilty. She wanted not to hurt so much. She would have to go through life without Carl, she loved Carl, she knew he was the only person she could ever love. They had been made for each other, that was what the others said – ‘Susannah and Carl’, ‘Carl and Susannah’. They were so much together. Now what was going to happen? If she were dead he would be free to find someone else, he would be happy in the end. He would always love her, but he would find someone else to marry, never loving that other woman as he did Susannah. She imagined him, in years to come, visiting her grave every Sunday afternoon, laying fresh flowers, never able to forget her.

  She knew this mixture of anger and pain was stopping her from thinking straight.

  She sat down on the concrete and cried until it hurt and she felt she had cried her heart out.

  But there is only so long you can cry and after an hour she began to think properly again.

  How had they found out about her and Carl? Who had told them? It had to be Charles and Monika. She had seen them last night.

  They were so different – her two brothers. She laughed out loud. Two brothers! Charles and Carl, the same name really, it could have been quite funny if it had been happening to anyone else. One she loved and one she hated.

  The bottles of wine had been left, opened and almost full, on the sea wall by people who had known no better. She picked them up, held them up to the light, put one to her lips and drank. The tart taste didn’t matter, she swigged it down. It made her feel better.

  She sat down on the concrete, her legs dangling over the edge, a bottle in each hand, her back to the yachts skimming across the lake in the stiff breeze. She stared across the empty sands at the hills of Wales. They seemed so close.

  Looking further and further through the haze to her right, she followed the line of the coast, past the Hilbre islands until she could just see the outline of Sandhey on the headland.

  Charles had been all right hadn’t he? He’d got out in time. He hadn’t gone to live in that stupid house in Dunedin Avenue. He hadn’t had to put up with Daddy and Aunty Kathleen playing happy families. He had run away to a lovely large house, far larger than Millcourt, overlooking the sea. He had charmed Uncle Max, he had a wonderful life. How had he managed that?

  Anger and fear was giving way to loneliness and jealousy. She took another swig, practically draining the first bottle. She wasn’t used to alcohol and it tasted horrid, but it was making her feel better.

  She thought about Charles, what hold did he have over the man who owned the place? She knew that older men liked little boys but she didn’t think Charles was like that. But he had always been a bit strange since before he had gone away from school, and especially since he had come back. The year he had been away she had been the darling of the nursery. Without Charles around Monika gave all her attention to her.

  She had been so stupid not to see it before; Charles was one of those boys who didn’t like girls. That’s what made it OK for them to live there, they hadn’t wanted her because they knew she’d find out and tell.

  She took a final swig at the bottle, emptied it and threw it into the lake. Charles had ruined her life. If he hadn’t seen her and Carl everything would be OK. They could have been together and it would have been too late to stop them. She’d go to see Charles and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing fucking up her life. If he didn’t tell her, she was going to ruin his.

  She started on the second bottle, spilling some of the sour red liquid on her blouse.

  She was going to go and tell them that if she couldn’t live there, with them, she’d tell everyone about Uncle Max and Charles. About Uncle Max and Nanny, Charles and Nanny. Something had to be wrong. All she had to do was tell someone and it’d all be out in the open.

  If Charles could live in that lovely house she would as well. She aimed for the house as she walked. Focussing was not easy, the wine was taking its toll. The house couldn’t be far, no more than a mile along the beach and across the sand dunes.

  She dropped the nearly empty second bottle and set off along the sand.

  She was ready for them when she reached the house. She had been going over and over in her mind what she was going to say. About how she knew what she knew, and they weren’t going to hide anything from her any more and he was a pervert and if they didn’t let her live with them she’d tell everyone. She knew exactly what she was going to say. All the words were there, ready.

  But they were out.

  The maid who answered the door did not know when Master Charles and the Major would be back. She believed they might have gone to Manchester. Miss could wait in the drawing room, or the garden if she preferred. Would she like some tea? A drink of orange?

  The anticlimax of it all was too much for Susannah. They weren’t there and all the words she had got in her head had gone. And the world wasn’t very straight any more and she wasn’t feeling very well. She couldn’t wait, possibly for hours.

  She turned from the door very deliberately, to avoid falling over, and walked away.

  She should have wa
ited, it would only have been a couple of minutes before Max and Charles drove up to the house.

  They would have realised why she was so upset and would have looked after her. They would have fed her coffee and listened to her, and allowed her to sober up before sending her home – no harm done.

  But she didn’t wait.

  Instead she decided to walk over to the islands.

  Hilbre Island was so beautiful. She had been there many times. She loved sitting out there on the islands looking back at the Wirral, viewed from the middle of the estuary the houses seemed like toys and life didn’t seem real.

  She had often walked across with the gang, and with Carl. It didn’t take long – they normally left from the top end of Marine Lake and walked across to the smallest island in the little group, Little Eye, then across to Little Hilbre, before reaching Hilbre Island proper. They always read the tide tables and set out at the best time of the tide to give them the longest time to laze around on the rocks, listening to their kind of music on the transistor radios that at least one of them would have with them. It usually took about an hour to get there, then they had four hours or more before having to leave to get back before the tide blocked the route back to the mainland. The absolute rule was to leave the island three hours before high tide to make sure they got back in safety.

  Those hours on the islands were the times she and Carl had hidden away and she had nearly, so nearly, made him make love to her. He always had an excuse, but she knew he would give in one day. One day they would make love. All the songs said so. He always held out until they had to go back. He must have guessed.

  Susannah did not think about the tide. She didn’t realise that it was far too late to be setting off across the sands. She couldn’t see that the tide had turned; she couldn’t see the gullies and channels through which the sea raced, creating a network of impenetrable, fast flowing torrents, invisible until the careless walker was practically on top of them.

  These channels were ever changing in depth and breadth, filled by the incoming tide, they trapped the unwary – just as they had trapped Henry three months earlier.

  This Sunday afternoon she just wanted to get to the sanctuary of the island. She would feel detached from all these people and all this pain if she could only get over there.

  The sands stretched out dry and bright in the sun in front of her as she set off.

  She had been walking for several minutes when she came to a channel, a steep dip in the sand perhaps as deep as she was tall. She was startled to see brown water frothing and surging up river, fast flowing towards her left. Some part of her realised the tide was a lot higher than was safe. Had she not been running away from Carl, from her father, from home, from disappointment, from fear and loneliness, had she not drunk the best part of two bottles of wine, she would have been thinking more clearly and would have turned back. She was normally a sensible girl who knew the tide was treacherous.

  But she was running away and she wasn’t thinking straight, and she was more than a little drunk.

  She looked across the water and the sands towards Hilbre, the island seemed enticingly close, so she stepped back a few paces to take a running jump over the channel. She cleared it easily, not really stumbling as she landed on the ridges of sand. But she increased her pace.

  In a couple of minutes she came across another ditch, this time the water was deeper and running from her left to her right – such was the intricacy and unpredictability of this network of channels. Again she took some steps back to take a running jump and she just got across – the sand she landed on crumbling under her feet and slipping downwards into the surging brown water.

  She stopped to catch her breath.

  She was beginning to think that she should feel scared.

  The island seemed so close, but it was not close enough. There would be other channels – wider and wider until she would eventually reach one she couldn’t jump over. Could she swim across them? She knew she would soon meet one that would stop her, but she couldn’t go back – the waters she had already crossed were going to be raging torrents by now.

  She looked around her to see if there was anyone else out on the sands. She saw no one.

  “Shit.”

  She stood where she was.

  There was no point in going forward or back.

  How long would it be, she thought with detachment, before the sands beneath her feet would grow sticky and suck her down, how long before the water spilled out of the channels and spread out around her, rising up her legs, her body, as she was held, unable to move, by the sticky, saturated sands.

  How long before she would drown.

  She looked down the coast to the outline of the Marine Lake and thought of how she had imagined drowning, just a couple of hours before, in such a detached way.

  She was now going to know what it felt like.

  She had nowhere to go. She could do nothing but wait. She wished she had that bottle still. The warmth of the wine had been comforting, it would be comforting now.

  She wondered why she felt no panic. She didn’t want to scream for help. It wouldn’t do any good. No one would hear her.

  She knew she was going to die and she wanted to see the beauty of what she was leaving behind. She watched the birds wheeling in the air currents above her.

  She waited. The water was only just covering her knees, but it was rising fast. She wiggled her feet, freed them from the sucking sand, but what good did it do her?

  The water was past her waist, she was almost floating now, drifting to left and right, her feet still on the sand.

  But now the water was nearly at her neck, she lost contact with the sand and was drifting gently, up and down, gently rising and falling with the swell, the torrents of the channels had merged and now become just sea, the surface deceptively quiet and still.

  She was a good swimmer, but she was too far from the island or the mainland, and no match for the currents.

  She waited, hypnotised by the rising and falling of the water.

  It was very beautiful really. The sky was so blue, with small clouds, white clouds. So beautiful, the white clouds against the blue sky. Birds’ heads and wings against the white clouds against the blue sky, free, flying, free of the water.

  So beautiful. So gentle – rocking backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards watching the birds against the white clouds against the blue sky.

  So this was what it was like, dying, saying goodbye to the world. Was this what it had been like for Henry. Poor Henry, he hadn’t been that bad really, had he known Carl wasn’t his son? Carl....

  Oh Carl.....

  “Hold on girl. Just hold on a few moments more. I’m nearly with you. Just hold on a little longer. Don’t go under now you stupid bint. Look at me! Here! Who’s Carl? I’ll be with you in a minute. I’ll get you home to Carl. Hold on. Don’t go under. I’m nearly there.”

  Joe kept shouting, saying anything, trying to keep her concentrating on him and the boat, which he was painstakingly manoeuvring against the tide, trying to get close enough to her to drag her out of the water. If she lost sight of him she would go under and he wasn’t going to dive in after her.

  He was very happy to try to save her from the safety of his boat, but he wasn’t going into the water. Like many fishermen he couldn’t swim. He worked on the principle that if he could it would only prolong the agony of drowning, if he couldn’t keep afloat death would be shorter and less painful. It was always very unlikely that being able to swim would save him in the waters he would be in. He’d either be far too far from land or caught up in unforgiving currents such as this girl was now.

  Pity, but there it was, there was only so far he was prepared to go to rescue this girl stupid enough to get caught in the tide.

  He reached out for her, risked everything by trying to get his hands under her arms to drag her into the skiff. It was really only big enough for one person but he didn’t have much choice.

  She hea
rd words but had no understanding of what was being said. She felt his arms, she yelped as he pinched the skin under her armpits, dragging her up the side of the boat, she felt the pain in her chest as he finally pulled her over the edge into the safety of the boat. Then she wasn’t sure whether the pain in her chest was more or less than the pain on her face as she felt the flat of his hand against her cheek.

  Slowly she realised that someone was shouting at her. Slapping her. She put up her arms to stop him, with her eyes tight shut against the stinging of the salt she flailed her arms like windmill sails in the air, practically knocking the man over the side. He managed to stop her hitting out at him by grabbing her wrists. “No you don’t! You’ll have us both in the water and then we’ll both be drowned.”

  It took a while, the two of them precariously balanced in the tiny dinghy, the man with one large hand gripping her two wrists together, protecting himself, whilst trying to control the small boat in the current with one oar in his other hand.

  Eventually she quietened down and stopped being a danger to them both.

  Although her eyes were still screwed quite shut her mind was beginning to recover from the place of safety it had retreated to when she knew she was about to die.

  In her mind’s eye she still saw the sky, the birds, the island – so near yet so far, the mainland. She felt the acceptance of death, she had not been fighting it.

  She knew she would have to open her eyes soon, and when she opened them she would be reborn.

  She would have a very different life. She would have to forget Carl, or if not forget him make a life without him. She would have to be with someone, anyone, else.

  She said some years later that, as she sat in the dinghy with her eyes tight shut against the stinging salt, she made a decision. She had accepted she was going to die that afternoon so she would accept whatever life was to throw at her afterwards in the same manner. She would be resigned and fatalistic. She would not fight life just as she hadn’t fought death. She would start again.