Fiona Harper - The Summer We Danced

‘It’s not just about the weight, though. I feel like crap because I’m eating crap. I want to be fit and healthy too, feel good about myself.’

‘You’ve still got that gym membership, haven’t you?’ Candy asked.

I nodded reluctantly. I’d transferred it to a branch of the same club in Swanham, the nearest big town, even though I couldn’t really afford it, knowing I had to do something , but the card had been gathering dust in my purse since the autumn.

‘I know I should use it, but every time I get dressed in a T-shirt and jogging bottoms, I take one look at myself in the mirror and then strip it all off again.’

Candy gave me the once-over. ‘You look fine,’ she said in the same tone of voice she used when trying to convince Noah that broccoli was nice. ‘Who hasn’t put on a little extra over Christmas?’

I searched her frame for even the hint of a bulge, but couldn’t detect one. I shook my head. ‘It’s the women at my gym,’ I confessed. ‘Half of them look like Barbie dolls, even the ones older than me! They’ve got tiny little grape-like bum cheeks inside their skin-tight yoga bottoms, and they all wear those strappy little crop tops that show off their taut abs … And then I waddle in wearing my size eighteen Marks and Sparks trackie bottoms and one of Ed’s old Pink Floyd T-shirts that I didn’t give back …’

It’s the biggest and baggiest thing I’ve been able to find. I hadn’t kept it because it smelt of him or anything. In reality it had been mine for years. I’d nicked it to sleep in when it had been like a tent on me, but now it was the only T-shirt I had that fit.

‘I know gyms are supposed to make you feel better about yourself,’ I said, reaching for a Quality Street. ‘But mine makes me want to slit my wrists.’

‘Time for a new gym, then,’ Candy said, ever practical.

I nodded, even though I was pretty sure the same cookie-cutter gym bunnies would populate the next one too.

Candy must have caught something in my expression, because then she added, ‘Or time for a new way to burn off the calories.’

‘I’m not going running like you do,’ I said with a chuckle. ‘With the size of my boobs bouncing around, I’d give myself a head injury …’

‘Oh, my goodness! Stop!’ Candy said, laughing. She jerked her head towards the screen, where Fred and Ginger were having a cross-purposed conversation on a balcony. ‘I mean that ! Dancing!’

I turned my head and looked at the couple on the screen. ‘They’re not dancing, they’re arguing.’

Candy gave me the kind of look only a big sister can give a little sister. ‘Don’t be awkward. You know what I mean.’

Of course I did. But I wasn’t going to let Candy know that. I studied Ginger Rogers, still wearing the iconic satin-and-ostrich-feather dress she’d designed herself for the scene. ‘I can’t do that. I’d look like a heifer in that dress, for a start. I mean, white , for goodness’ sake! Don’t you know that’s the most unflattering colour ever?’

Candy merely replied calmly, ‘I thought you told me once that dress was actually sky blue.’

I bumbled around for a good reply to that one. Which was difficult, seeing as Candy was right. ‘That’s beside the point.’

‘Well, the point is that I’m saying you should try dancing as a form of exercise. You know you’d enjoy it.’

I folded my arms and stared at the screen. ‘I’ve never done any ballroom.’

‘It doesn’t have to be ballroom. You were brilliant at dancing when we were younger! Me? I had two left feet.’

I really didn’t want to feel the warm glow that flared inside me at Candy’s compliment; I was too busy being irritated with her. Which was odd, because I realised I wasn’t sure why. She just seemed to have hit a nerve.

‘I was passable,’ I muttered.

I hadn’t thought about dancing for a long time. Not in years. But all of a sudden I remembered being back at dance school, loving the sense of joy that had filled me every time I’d stepped through the studio doors, how I’d lost myself in the movements, loving the feeling of not just learning them but mastering them.

I had been good. Candy had been right about that. For a while I’d even considered going to performing arts college and training as a professional dancer, but then, well, things hadn’t worked out that way, had they?

What would it be like to do it again? What would it be like to feel that wonderful sensation, as if I was flying, as if the steps themselves were living things, moving and breathing through me?

I glanced back at the television, then picked up the remote and scooted back to the bit where Fred and Ginger were tapping in a large white set that was supposed to be a bandstand in a London park and watched them, really watched them.

‘Learning to tap dance is on my bucket list,’ I confessed.

A large smile slowly grew across Candy’s face. ‘Well, there you are, then. You could even go back to Miss Mimi’s School of Dancing, see if she does adult classes …’

‘Oh, my word! She can’t still be going, can she? She must be eighty if she’s a day!’

Candy let out a grudging laugh. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she outlived us all. Do you remember that time, before I’d managed to convince Dad that dancing wasn’t my thing, that she made me do a whole class with one of my geography textbooks on my head, because she said I had “horrible” posture?’

I couldn’t help laughing. That book had slid off Candy’s glossy hair and hit various parts of her body on the way down more times than she could count. By the time we’d got home she’d looked as if she’d been doing boxing, not ballet.

‘I don’t know, Cand … Miss Mimi’s? Really? Surely there’s some funky young dance studio I could go to instead these days?’

‘Probably,’ Candy said, nodding. ‘Although I’d guess there’d be a startling amount of tiny bottoms and Lycra in one of those too.’

Ah. There was that. Back to square one.

I shook my head. ‘I can’t do that,’ I told her. ‘People will see me.’

‘Don’t be daft. People see you every day.’

No, they don’t, I thought. Not really. Only in the fringes of their vision, because in my world Ed had always been the one everyone wanted to watch, and now that Ed wasn’t part of my life any more, I was starting to wonder if I’d disappeared completely.

‘Tell me you’ll think about it?’ she urged.

‘Maybe,’ I said, but mainly just to shut her up so I could watch the rest of the film in peace.

Elmhurst was a pretty little place, full of red-brick cottages covered in local flint with high gables and leaded windows. It was a big enough village to have some life—a local pub, a main street with shops and a post office, a primary school and two churches—but still quaint enough that it had become a desirable location for well-to-do Londoners who wanted a bit of the country life without straying too far from a tube stop or a Starbucks.

In the centre of the village was a green with a wrought-iron town sign and a war memorial that always, always had a wreath of pristine poppies underneath it, and at the other end of the green was a duck pond where Candy and I had fished for minnows with plastic nets and jam jars when we were kids.

The oldest houses clustered around the main street, but the village had grown over the last century to include bungalows and a few oast-house conversions and two small estates of new-build houses in local stone.

If you ambled down the main street past The Two Doves and kept going, you’d reach the cricket pitch, complete with its vintage wooden scoreboard and pavilion, and past that, tucked away, out of sight down a side road, was a little church hall. It had once belonged to St Christopher’s C of E church, but the main building had been flattened by a stray doodlebug during World War II. In the early seventies the last of the rubble had been cleared and it had been paved over, turning the footprint of the church into a large car park for the hall.