by Rachel Joyce
Maureen would never be like her mother. When the chance came, she would say ‘I think so’ to everything.
Out of the darkness, lights began to emerge. The girls passed close-together cottages with lit-up windows and Christmas trees. Esther Hughes said she wanted to stop and look; she’d never had a tree in her house ’cos her brothers would only knock it over and shred her mother’s nerves. The pinched hardness melted from Esther’s face as she took in the shining baubles, the silver tinsel, the Christmas angel perched at the top, until she looked like a child. Then the other girls crowded next to her, smiling and cooing ‘Ahhh!’ and Maureen could see the child in them too.
She thought of those people inside their houses, watching television if they had a set, or making sandwiches with leftover turkey. She imagined her father dozing at home in the armchair, her mother stabbing a cross-stitch tapestry with her needle, and she was glad she was out here, in the cold night. The wind had dropped again and the air smelt flinty. Roof tiles shone like blue fish scales.
‘Thass it, look!’ shouted Patty Driscoll.
Far ahead Maureen could make out the faint yellowy glow of the hall, and a dotting of smaller lights twining through the dark. She took a deep breath to steady herself. She fancied she could hear the faraway thump of music and it was like a part of her, like the beat of her heart.
She followed the girls.
‘You are not going to the Boxing Day Ball,’ her mother had said, ‘and that’s final.’ But Maureen had stood her ground. ‘I’m eighteen now,’ she’d said. ‘You can’t stop me.’ She could not look her mother in the eye. Had she asked her father’s permission? Of course not. He was a gentle man, softly spoken, always apologizing for not being well, always saying he was a burden until it got tiring to keep saying, ‘No, no, you’re not.’ ‘How do you think it is for me?’ her mother had asked. And Maureen had shrugged uncomfortably because the question seemed to come from a part of her mother she had not met before. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ said her mother, turning on her heels and leaving the room.
The dance was already underway. A queue spilled from the door and several boys loitered in stiff jackets that were either too big or too small, smoking cigarettes between pinched fingers. Patty Driscoll and Esther Hughes shifted impatiently, trying to get a better view of the young men who would later partner them, trying to get a first picture of the hall. A shadowy couple was already up against the wall. ‘That Judith Hoggs, Christ, she ain’t got no shame,’ said one of the girls. Another boy was on his stomach, half under the bushes.
Esther said, ‘Thass Peter Green. He ain’t having a good time unless he’s spewing up his insides.’
The girls stopped and cheered. ‘Go on, Peter. Spill it out, boy!’
It was no wonder Maureen’s mother had never been to a Boxing Day Ball.
The doorman was dressed as Father Christmas. He wore a red velour hat and a fake white beard along with a red jacket that didn’t quite button over the swell of his stomach. Holding each ticket up to the light, he examined it as if he suspected forgery, so that even though Maureen had paid for her ticket, she felt nervous. Once he was satisfied that the ticket was a real one, he took an ink stamp and made a blue mark on the back of Maureen’s hand. ‘Ho, ho, ho,’ he said to the girls, catching their fingers.
‘Have we been a good girl?’ he asked Patty Driscoll’s breasts.
‘Oh fuck off, Santa,’ she said, pushing past.
Inside the hall Patty shucked off her mackintosh and handed it to the woman in charge of the cloakroom. Maureen unbuttoned her red coat and did the same. The other girls wore mini skirts and short frocks and they tugged at their hems and shoulder straps. ‘You are not going dressed like that,’ her mother had said, entering the bedroom while Maureen got ready. Maureen had been confused; she always wore her white blouse and plaid skirt. Her mother left the room as quietly as she had entered and returned with a black satin dress. ‘Try this.’ The dress had a sweetheart neckline with a nipped waist and fitted skirt. Maureen had never seen it before, though she could tell from the neatness of the stitching that her mother had made it. She could tell, too, that it had never been worn. And all the time that Maureen’s mother had helped her into the dress and fastened the zip and led her to the mirror, she had said nothing. She had only worn that tightened look that made Maureen feel both a burden and desperate to be free. ‘Does this mean you are letting me go?’ Maureen had asked. In reply her mother had said, ‘I’ll wave from upstairs. No need to call out. No need to wake your father.’
The parish hall was a big building with a polished wooden floor. The bare light bulbs had been replaced with more festive red ones and they hung the length of the dance floor like giant red berries. There were homemade evergreen banners and coloured paper chains strung between the metal rafters. A ball of mistletoe had been hung at the centre and the young people avoided passing beneath it as if it were dangerous. Tables were arranged along the walls, covered with paper cloths and sprigs of ivy. At the far end there was a makeshift stage, also decorated with evergreens and a small decorated Christmas tree, where a DJ was playing records. Behind him the band were already unpacking their instruments. They did it slowly, tuning their guitars, setting up the drums, trying to look nonchalant. They wore suits and two-tone shirts and the singer had a necklace like a giant gold ball of sun.
The hall was already full, though only a few people stood up near the stage. Instead they hovered as if they hadn’t quite decided whether they were going to dance or just stand there, having a look. Most people were gathered in groups close to the walls – the farm boys in what looked like borrowed jackets, the young men in full dinner suits and bow ties. Groups of girls clustered around the tables. When they greeted one another or picked up their drinks, when they offered their laps as seats, and even when they laughed, they did it with exaggeration and a sideways glance to check who might be watching. Maureen recognized a boy with oiled hair from one of her mother’s friends’ parties. She thought the young man was called Howard. If he wasn’t, he ought to be. She looked away before he could spot her. The floor beneath the mistletoe ball lay empty and polished, like still water.
The caller took his place at the front of the stage. And now here came the girls, stepping into line on one side of the hall, giggling with their friends, offering embarrassed half-glances across the dance floor, making a fuss about swapping places. Here came the boys, slowly, checking their ties, some of them still holding their drinks, with a look of studied casualness as if it were quite by chance that they, too, were falling into line. Charleen stood opposite the boy Maureen recognized and she gave a wonky grimace. Patty didn’t seem to have a partner. Esther’s curled hair was already flat. Pauline and Paulette Gordon were hand in hand. The band started up. The couples stepped forward.
And away they went, hands crossed, galloping the length of the floor, up one way and back the other, down the middle and along the sides, joining hands as they met again, some of them slapping into the walls, the top couple gripping damp hands to form an arch, the others hurtling beneath. One dance after another with only brief intervals to buy drinks from the bar. Left arms linked to move in a circle, then back to back, then casting off to dance outside the set. Cross hands, counter clockwise, figure of eight, up a double and back. Maureen could feel the pounding of their feet through the floor and it was as though the hall itself was dancing.
‘Ain’t you got no partner, Maureen?’ shouted Patty Driscoll. After over an hour of dancing, her face was red as a cherry. She was so breathless she could barely get her words out.
Maureen shook her head. She had stood on the side for a while and she had joined in for a while, but now she was watching someone so hard she could not really see anyone else.
She had noticed him from the start. She couldn’t miss him. Whilst the other couples danced in groups and pairs, he jived by himself in the middle of the dance floor. Sometimes they bumped straight into him, sometimes they caught him
in a circle, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. Arms out, head shaking, legs kicking; the flaps of his coat flew like dog-tooth-check sails. It was as if he was dancing out something that was inside him. He looked wild. Half insane. But he looked free. She’d never seen anything like it.
‘Who’s that?’ Maureen asked.
‘We call him No-Mum,’ said Patty Driscoll.
‘Why do you call him No-Mum?’ During the conversation, she’d lost him again, the wild-dancing young man. She was afraid he’d already gone.
‘’Cos he’s got no mum.’
‘Where is his mum?’
‘She left. And his dad’s a right bastard.’ Patty closed her eyes and staggered a little, losing her balance. ‘I love the ball. I don’t ever want to go home.’ She galloped back to the dance floor and Maureen shifted to one side for a better view.
There he was, the boy, still dancing alone. He was like a stranger in the room, a person from a foreign place who did not understand how things were supposed to be done. She kept watching and she was aware of time passing and she smiled. So long as she could keep him in her eye line, that was enough.
Maybe he sensed her watching because he stopped suddenly and looked back at her. Then he danced some more, for another half-hour or so, and she continued watching, but it was different now because he surely knew she was watching. He did not stop and neither did she look away. It was the raw energy of him that moved her. The completeness of what he was. He stopped again. Caught her eye again. Then he threaded his way through the crowd and stopped so close she could feel the heat of his skin. He smelt sweet, like oranges.
He stooped with his mouth pointed towards her ear and lifted a small lock of her hair so that he could speak to her and be heard. The boldness of the gesture sent prickles of electricity shooting down the length of her neck. Maureen held her breath as if to stop time.
His voice touched her ear, surprisingly soft and close. It was as though he had actually slipped inside her head and was speaking to her from her bones. ‘You could always be my wife,’ he said.
Did he? Did he say that? He moved aside and gazed down at her, waiting for her reply, his face serious to show that whatever it was he had just said, he meant it. Or was it, ‘You could always give me a light’? Was that what he had said?
She studied his face, searching for clues, and all she could see was the deep blue of his eyes. He did not stop gazing down at her. Clearly he needed his answer. In her embarrassment she felt her skin stain with heat, and before she could do anything about it a cry of laughter shot from her mouth. It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t at all funny, but now that she had started, she really couldn’t stop. And all the time she laughed, he watched, a smile quirking the corners of his mouth, as though he were both intrigued and delighted that he had done this, that he had made her laugh so suddenly and uncontrollably. She had no idea if he had asked her to marry him or had asked for a light, and so she said the first thing that came into her head.
‘You’d better buy me a drink first.’
She had never said that to a boy before. It was the sort of thing Patty Driscoll and the other girls would say.
Now it was the boy’s turn to laugh, and as he did, little tucks and creases flew from his eyes towards his cheeks. Then he shrugged his shoulders and walked away.
She watched him waiting his turn at the bar. He didn’t look back and it gave her a proper opportunity to take in his height, his hair combed into a quiff, his coat that stopped short of his wrists and knees and was too small. Perhaps it wasn’t even his. She had never seen anyone so complete and so alone, and it made her laugh just to keep watching. Then the woman behind the bar must have asked what he wanted because she nodded and went to fetch his order. The woman laughed when she came back to him with two drinks. It seemed to be an effect he had.
He pushed his way towards Maureen, holding out two plastic cups. When he saw her waiting, she could tell he was moved, that he had believed she would go and was both relieved and touched that he was wrong. He smiled in a shy way, as if he couldn’t quite face her, and she smiled too to show him not to be afraid. They touched their plastic cups carefully. The drink was clear; she guessed it must be gin. She didn’t want gin but she wanted to accept his kindness so she took a gulp of breath and stopped her nose. She decided to empty the cup in one go and get it over and done with.
It was tap water.
Maureen smiled, more deeply this time, as if she knew the boy and he knew her. ‘Thank you,’ she said, projecting her voice clearly above the music so that he could be in no doubt.
‘That’s OK.’ He lifted his cup to his mouth and knocked it back. Afterwards he wiped his mouth with the side of his hand. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Maureen.’
‘Maureen.’ He said it again, ‘Maureen,’ as if he were trying to get the taste of the word. Maureen had a feeling that he wanted to stay and tell her something else and she wanted the same, and yet there was nothing else to say and so they looked at the dance floor.
In the far corner Maybe-Howard was approaching a girl in coral. He gave a little bow as he offered his hand and then he turned the colour of her dress while he waited for her to answer. She shook her head but the girls around her pushed her forward so that she landed against him, then he in turn pushed her away as if overwhelmed.
It was almost the end of the evening. Maureen had no idea how it had passed so quickly. The singer left the stage and the band began to play ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and once again the floor began to fill. Maybe-Howard and the coral-dress girl were shuffling in a stiff wooden circle, her hands perched like claws on his shoulders. Pauline and Paulette Gordon swayed in a threesome with Peter Green. Patty Driscoll was slow-dancing with Esther Hughes, her chin heavy on Esther’s bone-thin shoulder, the halo of her orange hair touching Esther’s lips, her large hands around Esther’s scrawny fingers. And there was the singer, his mouth open wide over Charleen’s, as if he were emptying every song he knew straight inside her.
Maureen watched them all. This was how it was, she thought. People would find one another, and sometimes it would last moments and sometimes it would last years. You could spend your life with a person and not understand them and then you could meet a boy across a dance floor and feel you knew him like a part of yourself. Maybe it was the same out there in the fields. Maybe the sheep were sitting two by two with the foxes and so were the rats and worms.
She thought of her mother, the way she had gazed out from the upstairs window as Maureen walked away, not waving or smiling, as if willing her daughter not to come back.
‘You look in a world of your own,’ said the boy.
She smiled. ‘I was.’
‘They were saying at the bar there’s snow.’
‘There can’t be.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Still. That’s what they’re saying. So you and I could stay here, wondering about it. Or we could go outside and look.’
Without another word he turned his back on her and moved towards the door. This time she followed. She did not think. He reached his hand backwards as if, even without looking, he knew she would be there. His fingers curled in a perfect fit around hers.
And if anyone had said to her that night as they made their way past the embracing couples, across the parish hall with the floor all sticky now, the evergreen garlands unhooked and hanging like limbs, the paper chains in torn-up fragments on the dancers’ shoulders, if anyone had said that this was the man she would soon marry, abandoning all thought of university, that they would share a child and one day lose him, that they would move into separate bedrooms and talk over breakfast about nothing because silence, or something close to it, would be easier than words, that they would forget the Boxing Day Ball and the things that had seemed so funny, she would have hung her head so that her long hair lapped her cheeks. ‘No, no,’ she would have said, and then perhaps, ‘I think—’
But this was all to come. For now, the boy helped her into her red coat an
d pulled open the door. The sting of the cold almost pushed her backwards.
‘Well, look at that.’ He laughed.
The moon was gone, the land an even paler blue. All around them swirled the Boxing Day snow, like melting stars. It seemed to be both lifting out of the ground and tipping from the sky. Her life was her own. It wasn’t her mother’s and it wasn’t Patty Driscoll’s or any of those other girls’. She thought of the boy dancing, the question he had posted into her ear. The answer was so simple, so clear, there was nothing to do but laugh, as if to laugh and feel happiness was the most serious thing in the world. Almost unbearable.
She said, ‘Yes.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes.’ She did not turn her head to face him. She did not need to. She would see him now, everywhere she looked. He would be a part of everything and she did not even know his name. It was no less than a small miracle.
She stood in silence and looked up at the falling snow.
A Snow Garden
The boys kept asking if there would be snow at the new flat. ‘Yes,’ he told them. It began as a joke but then it got serious. ‘Yes, Yes, YES!’ ‘I don’t know why you keep promising there will be snow,’ his sister said when she rang. ‘It only happens in films and that bloody advert.’ ‘Because it’s what everyone wants,’ Henry told her. ‘They want snow. It’s traditional. It makes Christmas – you know.’