Summer Flings and Dancing Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page A

apartment she stood gazing around. Mum had insisted on living at Wisteria Lodge because it once featured in ‘Country Life,’ but it was expensive and my pay alone couldn’t cover the fees. So Mum and I had talked about it, and our old family home was about to go on the market. Fortunately Mum didn’t seem to miss it as much as I’d thought she would and had seemed to move on as soon as she had stepped into her room at Wisteria Lodge with its pink Laura Ashley sofa and antique coffee table.
    How wonderful it would be to just turn your back on everything that made you unhappy or sad, to cast it off like an old rucksack and move on. As a single mum I’d had to make my own life. Okay, so it may not be everyone’s idea of a big successful life, but I’d managed to keep the wheels on. I had a demanding mother, a young daughter, a full-time job and no partner - so I didn’t have a lot of choice.
    I suppose deep down I’d hoped something would change along the way. I’d seen it happen for other people – why not me? And for years I waited for that special someone to come into my life and make everything whole. But it never happened. I couldn’t just blame fate – I didn’t go out, I had no intention of online dating and had such a busy time juggling everything I’d have been too exhausted to notice if Mr Right was standing next to me.
    And now, in what my daughter had referred to as my ‘little’ life I had suddenly become more conscious of my future, and the prospect of another twenty odd years behind the checkout. I also had the task of selling Mum’s house and was completely daunted by the prospect of clearing thirty odd years of clutter from it first. Mum had left the house as she’d lived there – with her life in overflowing cupboards stuffed with several hundred years’ worth of glossy magazines and unworn designer clothes.
    I looked at Mum now perfectly made-up, well-groomed with manicured nails and blow-dried hair, all available at OAP rates at Wisteria Lodge. She was settled on her pink sofa, leafing through Hello and confusing soap stars with their characters.
    ‘I thought she was dead,’ she said, holding up a picture of someone from Coronation Street.
    ‘Well, she’s not dead. She’s the actress – she didn’t die in real life, she just left the programme.’
    ‘I know... she died of cancer,’ she said very sombrely.
    ‘Only in the programme, Mum.’
    ‘But how did they get those pictures?’
    She held the magazine up close to her face to read more about this apparently resurrected actress and marvel at how ‘amazing it is what they can do with computers these days.’ I wasn’t sure if she was referring to the photo-shopped face or the human resurrection.
    I smiled to myself, ‘I’m glad you’re happy, Mum, I haven’t seen you this happy for a long, long time.’ I said loudly.
    ‘Yes I am,’ she smiled, looking around. ‘I like this room, it reminds me of the ship’s cabin your father and I stayed in when we went dancing...’ She had a far away look in her eye and told me about a time before I was born when she and my father had taken work as dance teachers on a cruise ship. ‘Your Dad charmed all the ladies with his Viennese Waltz,’ she said. This was the first time she’d ever really spoken to me about the past, and I was surprised, but pleased –and I asked her what else they’d danced and how long the trip lasted. I thought the spell had finally been broken, that she was finally able to talk about the past, but then she changed the subject, so as always the past stayed hidden.
    Through the veil of thick make-up, the layers of life and lipstick, I had seen a glimmer of the Mum that used to be many years ago, before that terrible night when we lost everything. The move away from the family home had taken her away from the heartache and the memories of past sadness. And I glimpsed the woman who had once danced in the kitchen, twirled around the living room and who was