Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

The analogy made her smile. She kicked in her pipe drones as the fiddle and tenor banjo joined in on

“The Glen Allen.” It was halfway through that second tune that she became aware of the young woman dancing directly in front of Matt’s microphone.

She was small and slender, with hair that seemed to be made of spun gold and eyes such a deep blue that they glittered like sapphires in the light spilling from the stage. Her features reminded Amy of a fox—pointed and tight like a Rackham sprite, but no less attractive for all that.

The other dancers gave way like reeds before a wind, drawing back to allow her the room to swirl the skirt of her unbelted flowered dress, her tiny feet scissoring intricate steps in their black Chinese slippers. Her movements were at once sensual and inno—

cent. Amy’s first impression was that the young woman was a professional dancer, but as she watched more closely, she realized that the girl’s fluidity and grace were more an inherent talent than a studied skill.

The dancer’s gaze caught and held on Matt, no matter how her steps turned her about, her attention fixed and steady as though he had bewitched her, while Matt, to Amy’s surprise, seemed just as entranced. When they kicked into “Sheehan’s Reel,” the third and final tune of the set, she almost thought Matt was going to leave the stage to dance with the girl.

“Again!” Matt cried out as they neared the usual end of the tune.

Amy didn’t mind. She pumped the bellows of her pipes, long fingers dancing on the chanter, more than happy to play the piece all night if the dancer could keep up. But the tune unwound to its end, they ended with a flourish, and suddenly it was all over. The dance floor cleared, the girl was swallowed by the crowd.

When the applause died down, an odd sort of hush fell over the club. Amy unbuckled her pipes and looked over to see that Matt had already left the stage. She hadn’t even seen him go. She tugged her chanter mike up to mouth level.

“We’re, uh, going to take a short break, folks,” she said into the mike. Her voice seemed to boom in the quiet. “Then,” she added, “we’ll be right back with some more music, so don’t go away.”

The patter bookending the tunes and songs was Matt’s usual job. Since Amy didn’t feel she had his natural stage charm, she just kept it simple.

There was an another smatter of applause that she acknowledged with a smile. The house system came on, playing a Jackson Browne tune, and she turned to Nicky, who was putting his fiddle in its case.

“Where’d Matt go?” she asked.

He gave her a “who cares?” shrug. “Probably chasing that bird who was shaking her tush at him all through the last piece.”

“I don’t envy her,” Johnny added.

Amy knew exactly what he meant. Over the past few months they’d all seen the fallout of casualties who gathered like moths around the bright flame ofMatt’s stage presence only to have their wings burnt with his indifference. He’d charm them in a club, sometimes sleep with them, but in the end, the only lover he kept was the music.

Amy knew all too well. There was a time ...

She pushed the past away with a shake of her head. Putting a hand above her eyes to shade them from the lights, she scanned the crowd as the other two went to get themselves a beer but she couldn’t spot either Matt or the girl. Her gaze settled on a blackhaired Chinese woman sitting alone at at small table near the door and she smiled as the woman raised her hand in a wave. She’d forgotten that Lucia had arrived halfway through their first set—fashionably late, as always—and now that she thought about it, hadn’t she seen the dancer come in about the same time? They might even have come in together.

Lucia Han was a performance artist based in Upper Foxville and an old friend of Amy’s. When they’d first met, Amy had been told by too many people to be careful because Lucia was gay and would probably make a pass at her. Amy just ignored them. She had nothing against gays to begin with and she soon learned that the gossips’ reasoning for their false assumption was just that Lucia only liked to work with other women. But as Lucia had explained to Amy once, “There’s just not enough women involved in the arts and I want to support those who do make the plunge—at least if they’re any good.”

Amy understood perfectly. She often wished there were more women players in traditional music.

She was sick to death of going to a music session where she wasn’t known. All too often she’d be the only woman in a gathering of men and have to play rings around them on her pipes just to prove that she was as good as them. Irish men weren’t exactly noted for their liberated standards.

Which didn’t mean that either she or Lucia weren’t fond of the right sort of man. “Au contraire,” as Lucia would say in the phony Parisian accent she liked to affect, “I am liking them too much.”

Amy made her way to the bar, where she ordered a beer on her tab, then took the brimming draught glass through the crowd to Lucia’s table, trying to slosh as little of the foam as she could on her new jeans.

“Bet you thought I wouldn’t come,” Lucia said as Amy sat down with her stein relatively full. The only spillage had joined the stickiness of other people’s spills that lay underfoot.

Lucia was older than Amy by at least six or seven years, putting her in her midthirties. She had her hair in a wild spiky do tonight—to match the torn white Tshirt and leather jeans, no doubt. The punk movement had barely begun to trickle across the Atlantic as yet, but it was obvious that Lucia was already an eager proponent. A strand of safety pins dangled from one earlobe; others held the tears of her Tshirt closed in strategic places.

“I don’t even remember telling you about the gig,” Amy said.

Lucia waved a negligent hand towards the small poster on the wall behind her that advertised the band’s appearance at Feeney’s Kitchen this weekend.

“But you are famous now, ma cherie”, she said. “How could I not know?” She dropped the accent to add, “You guys sound great.”

“Thanks.”

Amy looked at the tabletop. She set her stein down beside a glass of white wine, Lucia’s cigarettes and matches and a halffilled ashtray. There was also an empty teacup with a small bright steel teapot on one side of it and a used tea bag on the lip of its saucer.

“Did you come alone?” she asked.

Lucia shook her head. “I brought a foundling—fresh from who really knows where. You probably noticed her and Matt making googoo eyes at each other all through the last piece you did.” She brought a hand to her lips as soon as she’d made the last comment. “Sorry. I forgot about the thing you used to have going with him.”

“Old history,” Amy said. “I’ve long since dealt with it. I don’t know that Matt ever even knew anything existed between us, but I’m cool now.”

“It’s for the ,better.”

“Definitely,” Amy agreed.

“I should probably warn my little friend about him,” Lucia said, “but you know what they’re like at that age—it’d just egg her on.”

“Who is your little friend? She moves like all she was born to do was dance.”

“She’s something, isn’t she? I met her on Wolf Island about a week ago, just before the last ferry—all wet and bedraggled like she’d fallen off a boat and been washed to shore. She wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing and I thought the worst, you know? Some asshole brought her out for a quick wham, barn, and then just dumped her.”

Lucia paused to light a cigarette.

“And?” Amy asked.

Lucia shrugged, blowing out a wreath of bluegrey smoke. “Seems she fell off a boat and took off her clothes so that they wouldn’t drag her down while she swam to shore. Course, I got that from her later.”