The Twisted Heart

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:

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: 

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 explanations 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':

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.