Let's Dance Read Online Free PDF Page A

imagination.
    â€˜No bollocks!’ she yelled.
    Bums, cunts and bums. Fucking bums.
    Back to the writing-paper then, restless.
    There was another thing to do with the knife. She would stick it right up her private bits, turn it round and round and round, dig it in. Killing herself this way might be no worse than a big bleed and certainly better than having a baby. That was tomorrow’s plan, then: she would get ice from downstairs; something to put on top and dull thepain while she bled away slowly from below. Three hours at least before anyone would find her, six if she said she was tired, and by then half her vital fluids would be in the mattress.
    Tomorrow, promise?
    First she wanted to tell them, so that when they found her she could point to the paper. The sounds she made these days were so ugly. Dawn edged prettily round the window with the promise of a fine October day. She wrote busily.
    Fucking bloody arseholes, fucking cunts. Bums, bums, bums. It’s all on that paper, there; her whole life history on the paper which she put under the pillow for transferring to the desk.
    She even told them how dawn had looked before another day of horror.
    Grey, colour, shot with light, streaked with excrement.
    Curious.

C HAPTER T WO
    I sabel Burley began most conversations by saying she was sorry. It was not always clear why, but she was usually in a state of apology about something. She was thirty-three years old and honed into fitness and a slenderness she wore well without anyone remarking how extreme it was. The joints were too big for the body: experts would notice a closet anorexia; the rest were either bewitched or bewildered by the long legs, ballerina features and gauche lack of grace, as if life had frozen her adolescent years into the stance of either a frightened gazelle or a clumsy foal. She had a nervous laugh and was widely perceived as reliable, if stupid. If she turned up for an appointment damp, breathless and late, she still turned up without fail. Poor little semi-rich girl, sometime aerobics teacher, sometime cosmetics saleswoman, sometime student, victim to her own good looks, her own incessant concern about them and a constant anxiety to please. There was more than an element of the dizzy blonde,except she was dark. Whenever she passed a mirror, she checked her long hair.
    The riches, such as they were, consisted of Aunt Mab’s inheritance, received with bewildered gratitude over a decade before, to the fury of Mab’s nephew Robert, who received nothing. Aunt Mab had been a schoolteacher who knew very well how to invest her stipend, so the fruits of her prudence and her pretty cottage had been enough for Isabel to buy a London flat and thus avoid the need to earn more than a modest living. Isabel always served her notice, but she preferred jobs she could leave. What others spent on mortgages, she spent on clothes. Her brother Robert said it was amazing she had never tried drugs, since she was extravagant and they were not fattening. The riches were not of the endless sort, but they were sufficient to set her apart from striving contemporaries. What was left of her inheritance, Robert said, was all for pissing downwind, like the fool she was. This was not entirely true: Isabel had invested carefully, and although she knew where the bottom of the barrel was, she was never going to scrape it.
    Men loved Isabel, who had been brought up never to be a nuisance and rarely was. Despite the feeling of inadequacy that made her twist her mouth in front of a mirror in the morning, telling herself over and over, ‘I am not silly, I am not silly,’ a practice learned from a self-help manual and rendering at least one lover paralysed with laughter, she could never quite encompass the truth of her own denials. Isabel Burley was not,after all, a fool, but she had two inhibiting agents to that hidden, mental chemistry which was not brilliance, but certainly intelligence. Firstly, education had