Dancing in the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page A

yellow Polo. I was rubbing it off with my handkerchief when Trudy came out with the children. She ushered them into the back of the family’s old Sierra and came over to me. ‘Thank the Lord that’s over for another month.’
    “You can say that again!”
    “I can’t get me head round this kindly old grandfather shit.” Absent-mindedly she rubbed the scar over her left eyebrow.
    “I suppose we should be thankful for small mercies.”
    Trudy regarded me keenly. “You okay, Sis? You look a bit pale.”
    “Mum said that. I’m fine, been working hard, that’s all.” I eyed the car. I’d got most of it off and what was left wasn’t legible. “Look, Sis, I’m sorry about Alison,” I said in a rush, “but I really have got work to do.”
    Trudy pressed my arm. She glanced at the house where we’d grown up. “I feel as if I’d like to drive away and never have to see another member of me family again, but we’re trapped, aren’t we? I don’t know if I could bear it without Colin.”
    As I started the car, I noticed that the house opposite had been boarded up, although children had broken down the door and were playing in the hallway. There was a rusty car without wheels in the front garden. As I drove away, the sun seemed to darken, although there wasn’t a cloud to be seen. Unexpectedly, I felt overwhelmed by a sense of alienation. Where do I belong? I wondered, frightened. Not here, please not here! Yet I’d been born in a tower block less than a mile from this spot, where nowadays Gran lived like a prisoner: Martha Colquitt rarely left home since she’d been mugged for her pension five years ago. My own flat in Blundellsands was a pretence, more like a stage set than a proper home, and I was a fake. I couldn’t understand what James saw in me, or why George Masterton was my friend. I was putting on an act, I wasn’t real.
    And what would James think if he met my slovenly mother and chain-smoking father, and if I told him about my brutal childhood? What would he say if he knew I had a sister with severe learning difficulties who’d been in a home since she was three, safely out of my father’s way?
    A scene flashed through my mind, of my father slapping Alison, knocking her pretty little face first one way then the other, trying to make her stop saying that same word over and over again. “Slippers,” Alison would mutter, in her dull monotone. “Slippers, slippers, slippers.” She said it still, when agitated, although she was seventeen now.
    Even if I were in love with James, we could never marry, not with all the family baggage I had in tow. I reminded myself that I didn’t want to get married again, that I wasn’t capable of falling in love. I belonged nowhere and to nobody.
    Nevertheless, I had an urgent desire to see James. He was calling for me at seven. I looked forward to losing myself in empty talk, good food, wine. He would bring me home and we would make love and all that business with my family would be forgotten, until the time came for me to go again. Except, that is, for the dreams, from which I would never escape.
    It wasn’t until Thursday that I managed to get to Toxteth. James had tickets for a jazz concert at the Philharmonic Hall on Monday night, which I had forgotten about. Tuesday, I’d promised to go to dinner with Diana Riddick, a colleague from the office whom I’d never particularly got on with, but then few people did.
    Diana was thirty-five, single, and lived with her elderly father, who was a “pain”, she claimed, particularly now that his health was failing. She was a small, slight woman, permanently discontented, with a garishly painted face, a degree in land and property management, and an eye on the position of manager of the Woolton office. She didn’t realise that I nursed the same ambition and when we were alone together she openly discussed it. I’d suspected she had an ulterior motive in inviting me that evening and it turned out she wanted to pump