I accepted a cup of tea and sat in an armchair. The family worker led Emily to a low-down table, poured water into a plastic cup and offered her cut-up apple and banana and satsuma segments. She wouldn’t stay at the table and instead took her plate to me and stood at my knee. ‘She’ll become more independent when she gets used to us,’ the family worker said as Emily ate her fruit. She was a good fruit eater. That’s luck, I know, because she doesn’t like vegetables.

  There was nothing formal about the meeting. In fact it was so informal I wondered if the social worker and the nursery head knew that this was all that went on: the kids got fed and the parents got a seat. I thought perhaps I could throw out a question or two about the shouting and the hitting: did anybody else’s kids still do it at four nearly five? Or I could make a casual remark about my rage and see if anyone else felt it. No, I would keep my rage to myself.

  I looked around me and spotted Caroline, the woman from the library with the swinging hair and the many children. She held her teacup in one hand and waved with the other. She must have clocked my surprise. Maybe she was as surprised to see me, but she can’t have been. Surely I was perfect for this kind of group.

  ‘I didn’t know your wee one went to the nursery. What’s her name?’ She held her baby now instead of her tea and was opening her maternity top as she sat down next to me. ‘I’m trying to wean him off but he’s refusing.’ The baby’s face was reddening and his mouth formed a cry. She put him to her breast and took a deep breath.

  ‘Her name’s Emily.’

  ‘Hello Emily.’ Emily said nothing. ‘That’s Carmel over there. You met her in the library.’

  Emily looked but didn’t speak.

  ‘I had to rush off. At the library.’

  Caroline scratched her cheek and pushed her hair from her face. ‘It’s hot in here. Don’t worry. Sometimes you just have to go.’

  I expected we would be called together to listen to a lesson or demonstration, to share experiences publicly, but the clock on the wall showed the minutes passing and nothing formal was said. The family worker spent time with some of the women but she didn’t approach me. Perhaps I was more like Emily than I thought and she was giving me space. The only thing she offered me apart from the cup of tea was the leftover fruit. ‘Eat it up,’ she said to us.

  ‘I haven’t had any lunch,’ Caroline said.

  ‘Me neither.’

  We ate the leftover fruit piece after piece. The family worker passed us crackers and we ate them too. I think it was on purpose, feeding the parents in case there was nothing to eat at home. We were close to that. Not quite, but close.

  ‘I was surprised to see you here,’ I said to Caroline. ‘You seem so together.’

  ‘You must be joking.’

  I wondered if she was on antidepressants too. Now that I was coming off mine I looked at other people and couldn’t believe that their serenity came from anything other than medication.

  ‘Carmel’s speech is slow,’ Caroline said. Her daughter was helping the family worker stack cups. ‘And they thought she would benefit from this.’

  I nodded. Caroline seemed happy with the intervention. She sat her baby on her lap and leaned back into her chair.

  ‘What about you? Can I ask?’

  I told Emily to give her cup to the family worker. Then I said, ‘She’s not settling in very well at nursery. We’re new here, I think I told you that.’ Then, ‘I’m the one that left her in the car.’

  Caroline sat up and turned to face me. Her baby smiled. I looked from face to face and thought how similar they were. ‘Oh my God, that was you?’ Caroline said. ‘You poor thing.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Are you…? Are they going to…?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But social services are keeping an eye.’

  ‘Ugh. And I brought it up with you. I’m so embarrassed.’ Caroline lifted her baby so he was high above her head. ‘Fuck them,’ she said to her baby as the family worker came round to remind us that the session was on again next week. We got our children in their coats and left.

  Robbie liked to watch me dance in the same way I liked to watch him run. It was rare that he wasn’t needed in the gym, but if he could, he stood in the technician’s box, kept out of the way of the sound and lighting engineer, and watched me, telling me afterwards how the audience reacted to this or that routine. He liked my strong thighs. I liked them too. He said I had flair. I knew I did. I’d never felt more proud of my body and what it could do. I was supple, I was fit, I was strong. I was a thing of beauty and grace. That, I appreciated. The sunrises and sunsets, I rarely saw them, so I appreciated them too. The ample wages I appreciated. The calm seas I appreciated when we caught the tail end of a hurricane and the ship rocked and water slapped out of the deck pool and we had to grab the handrails wherever we walked. The excursions when we docked at ports, I appreciated. The four-wheel drives, the beaches and sand and scuba dives, I appreciated. The meals cooked and presented to me, I didn’t appreciate. The cut-price drinks in the bar, I didn’t appreciate. The time out from life’s realities, not that either. We stood aside while drugs dogs sniffed our cabins, knowing we were untouchable because that wasn’t our life; nothing to do with us. Being with Robbie on a cruise ship on the pitch black ocean, under silver constellations, while whole continents got on with the business of trade and politics and war, I cared for nothing of that. Hedonistic me.

  Then my dad deteriorated and I heard over long-distance phone calls that he was becoming quite frail which was a surprise because we’d been told only six months earlier that the medication had stabilised him.

  ‘Do you want to fly home?’ Robbie said.

  ‘Am I allowed to just leave?’ We had one day off a week. I had solos and positions in dances that no one else could fill.

  We sat together in the crew bar, quiet with our drinks and my dilemma.

  ‘What would you do?’ I asked Robbie.

  ‘I would go home,’ Robbie said. I knew he would say that.

  He held me close that night. He couldn’t avoid it, the bunks were so small, but I felt calmed and was glad of him.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ my mum said when I told her of my plans. ‘The man’s not dead, he’s got leukaemia and it’s stabilising. You stay out there until you’re on a longer break. Send me some photos and I’ll show them to him. Go and have a nice time and I’ll see you in a couple of months.’

  I did what my mum said and stayed on the ship with Robbie.

  We used to leave our cabin doors open which is how Robbie got into trouble. All the staff cabins were on the same stretch of corridor and it was understood that if you wanted company you would leave your door open or go into someone else’s room. So I was never lonely, even before I met Robbie. If I wanted solitude I could simply close my door. It seems astonishing to me now that I could muster up the hours of casual conversations I had on the ship and that I could sit comfortably among people who took chat for granted.

  Robbie was berthed with the beauty therapists and the life guards. I was berthed with the dancers and singers and musicians, but our cabins weren’t far from each other’s. We slept, generally, in my room. Robbie’s roommate had a girlfriend who slept in their shared cabin most of the time and my roommate was seeing a musician so she spent her nights in his cabin. But even if she wasn’t sleeping with him at night, Robbie slept with us. We all did it. There was an intimate acceptance.

  Robbie went back to his cabin one day, the one his roommate slept in with his girlfriend, and took a change of clothes, a book and two paracetamols from his drawer. He didn’t take any money from his roommate’s girlfriend’s bag but that is what she accused him of.

  ‘My money’s missing,’ she said as she tore into my cabin. He had to go back to the gym in ten minutes.

  ‘Where did you leave it?’ we asked.

  ‘In my bag. In your cabin,’ she said to Robbie.

  ‘Are you sure it’s gone?’ I said. ‘Did you spend it?’

  ‘I didn’t spend sixty dollars.’

  She stood in my doorway with her hands on her hips. ‘Robbie, you and I get along all right but you’re the only one who’s been in the cabin all morning.’

  ‘Are you joking?’

  ‘Can you just return it and we’ll go back to normal?’

  They never went back to normal. I never doubted him. He was honest. More honest than me. And we didn’t need money. We had more money than we’d ever had in our lives. But something like fear came over him. It was the only time I’d seen him angry. He was loud. Perhaps it was stress his heart didn’t like. With minutes before he was due to start in the gym we followed him to his cabin and watched him lift pillows, shake duvets, tilt mattresses and tumble the contents of drawers in his hands. The space was tiny. There was no money. He left us to go back to the gym. I called in to see him an hour later and he was talking patiently to a woman who wanted a go on the rowing machine. Compared with their age – so many on the ship were of an age we could only aspire to, not comprehend ever being – he looked like a boy, wearing the shorts he’d returned to the cabin to get.

  The girl told her supervisor and Robbie was taken into his office for questioning. I waited for him and he came out looking grim.

  ‘He wants to search your cabin,’ Robbie said to me.

  The supervisor found nothing of course but threatened to bring police on board at the next port. He said he would withhold Robbie’s passport, all our passports, until the money was found. We’d just left Miami. We stood on the deck and there was nothing around us but sea and the first stars in the deepening sky.

  ‘I want to get off,’ Robbie said. ‘I have to get off.’

  ‘But you didn’t do it.’

  ‘No. They think I did, they think I did. Again and again.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘It’s not all right.’

  Two passengers came close to us and because he was a professional and because he was able to do it, I watched him change his posture and loosen his shoulders and shake the tension from his body.

  ‘Good evening,’ the male passenger said.

  ‘Good evening.’ We raised our heads and I saw the last of the purple in the black.

  ‘Don’t ever leave me,’ Robbie said.

  ‘Never.’

  The next day Robbie’s roommate told him she’d found her money. It wasn’t in her handbag; it was in a zipped pocket in her backpack. She never apologised to Robbie and he never spoke to her again.

  My dad timed his death for a break in our contracts. We flew home for his funeral and I introduced Robbie to my mum who was frayed with grief and tiredness.

  After the funeral, seeped in sherry, her face hot, she put an arm round me and held me close. ‘Oh, Liz, what am I going to do?’

  ‘Don’t do anything yet. You’ll be okay, Mum.’

  Her breath smelled sweet. Her fringe was wet. ‘You should have come home,’ she whispered, her lips touching my cheek.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘I was wrong. You should have come home.’

  She was right.

  We stayed for three weeks, me at my mum’s house and Robbie on the floor of his old flatmate’s house. He spent some nights with us and some nights away. By the time we were ready to fly back to Tampa for nine months we wanted nothing more than each other.

  ‘Next time we leave the ship, we stay together, we don’t separate,’ he said to me and I said, ‘That suits me.’

  My mum met Alan soon after my dad died, which I found strange but it made me feel less guilty about leaving her, because essentially I had failed her twice: once by not coming back and a second time by not staying.

  12.

  John stood outside the sheltered housing, a cigarette dying in his fingers. ‘You again,’ he said, ‘I’ll get my tap shoes and cane,’ and I touched him on the arm as I passed. He stubbed out his cigarette and rubbed his hands together as he followed me in. I presumed they would all be pleased to see me. But nobody appeared willing to start the class. Charlie stood by his frame, dressing gown snug around his body, hair combed back from his forehead, his jaw moving, as if chewing on something. June stood next to him holding a pint glass, Eve and Alice sat side by side not speaking and Senga and Agnes picked coins from a purse. Rita, the cleaner, was in the far corner of the room and the vacuum cleaner cord rippled along the floor as she worked. The radio played.

  ‘We’ll wait for the hoovering to finish,’ I said and sat on the floor to take off my trainers and put on my ballet shoes. They watched me in silence. It made me feel like a child.

  ‘Have you warmed up?’ I raised my head to look at them. Nobody spoke. Perhaps they couldn’t hear me over the noise of the vacuum cleaner. I stood and stretched my arms above my head, then I let my body fall forwards and I hung, head first, legs wide apart and stretched the backs of my legs and my back too. They were still watching me when I straightened up. So I did a single pirouette, landing neatly in fifth. Nothing.

  Senga spoke, finally. She told me that she and her mother had a taxi booked five minutes after the class finished and would need to leave promptly. ‘It’s her eyes this time,’ she said. ‘Look, she can barely see through those cataracts.’ Agnes smiled. Her irises were pearls. The skin on her nose and cheekbones was patched with age.

  ‘Come on,’ I said once Rita was turning the handle of the vacuum cleaner and winding in the cord. I grabbed chairs and lined them up, plugged in my speaker and phone. Nobody moved. Eve dabbed at her eyes with the sides of her fingers and Senga gave her a folded napkin from her handbag.

  John came into the room, smelling of smoke. He put down his paper. ‘That’s Ellen away, I’m presuming,’ he said.

  They all nodded.

  ‘You should have said goodbye,’ June said.

  ‘Of course I said goodbye. I went to see her last night.’ John put his hand in his pocket and put a five-pound note and a pound coin into June’s pint glass. June glanced at me, as if to say there you go, he can afford it.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Who’s away?’

  ‘Ellen.’

  ‘Who’s Ellen?’

  ‘She lived next door to Eve,’ June said.

  Eve folded her napkin and put it up her sleeve. Her fingers shook a little.

  Rita stopped by us and said, ‘Where is it she’s gone?’

  ‘Barrhead,’ June said.

  ‘Not Barrhead,’ Eve said.

  ‘Bellahouston?’

  ‘Bellahouston’s where the Pope came. I was there. Twice,’ June said. ‘Wherever she’s gone, it’s two minutes away from her daughter. They wanted her close by.’

  Ellen, their friend, had fallen, weeks ago, and fractured a bone in her hip. The family had decided on a care home.

  ‘Premature,’ John said. ‘That woman had a lot of life in her. They’ll realise they made a mistake when they have to pay her fees week on week.’

  ‘Bellshill,’ Charlie said.

  ‘That’s it, Bellshill,’ said June. ‘I knew it was a B. I was thinking Barrhead, Bridgeton, Bellahouston. Bellshill.’

  ‘She’ll not come out of there. She thinks it’s temporary. But she won’t leave,’ Eve said.

  ‘Eve was very good friends with her,’ Charlie said.

  ‘So was I,’ said John.

  Rita pulled her vacuum cleaner out of the lounge and said she would be back to make a cup of tea. Two men looked through the doorway and feigned fear when I waved them in.

  ‘They won’t come,’ June said. ‘They go to the bookies.’

  So I turned off the radio and stood in the centre of the room. I did another pirouette, a double this time, which was met with applause – I enjoyed the praise – and I said, ‘Right, it’s dance class time. Ladies, gents, get to the barre.’ It seemed all I could do. I wasn’t a therapist, I wasn’t a care worker, I was a dancer, and they were there to dance.

  We began with pliés and port de bras as before. I walked between them and lifted elbows so arms curved gracefully and I shaped fingers and wrists. I watched them tilt tender chins to the ceiling as they raised arms heavenwards, stretching their necks.

  ‘Keep your mouths soft and your necks long,’ I said. ‘Drop your shoulders. Pull in. You look beautiful.’ They were.

  They were better than the previous week at their pliés and relevés, their forward and back bends, their rond de Johns, and they coped with the battements tendus and glissés. We danced to ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’. Perhaps the music was sad but I think it helped them achieve a delicacy to their movements. It pierces you, that music, and you might as well use pain if it’s there. Watched by the faces in the photographs on the walls, they were a careful graceful troupe.

  Next I taught them how to slide the toe up the calf to the knee and hold it there, balanced. It was then I saw how difficult this was for them. Charlie wobbled. So did Alice and Agnes. I thought they would fall.

  ‘Stop,’ I said, my urgency in contrast with the peace we’d created. ‘Don’t lift your toe to your knees. Just point your toe to your ankle. Keep the tip of your toe on the floor.’

  This felt safer. ‘Raise your eyes now. Look up and over my head. Fly. Soar. Look at that photo on the wall behind me. Who’s that? Who is she?’

  ‘That’s Ellen,’ Alice said and I was pleased to hear her voice so loud and confident.

  ‘What’s the medal for?’

  ‘Nursing. She was a matron. She won a prize.’

  I was sad to make them turn away from her and work on their other sides.

  Afterwards, we took a demi-plié in third position and slid our legs along the floor to demi-plié in second, transferring our weight, and finishing with a strong standing leg and a pointed toe and closing into third. Chassé. To slide. Side to side. Then we chasséd to the front – en avant – keeping our back legs stretched. Here we scooped an arm from bras bas to first, elongating at the wrist and stretching to the front, our back arm following the line of the back leg or holding on to the barre. Arabesque. My beautiful dancers. Stretch. Hold that position. Balance. Stretch some more – allonger – to stretch out, to make longer. But to not fall.