Dancing in the Dark by Maureen Lee

days most people had off.
    In the living room, she automatically kissed the feet of the porcelain figure of Christ on the crucifix over the mantelpiece, then skipped into the back kitchen where she washed her face and cleaned her teeth. She combed her silvery blonde hair before the mirror over the sink. As an experiment, she twisted it into two long plaits and pinned them together on top of her head with a slide.
    Irene Dunne had worn her hair like that in a picture she’d seen recently. Flo had been meaning to try it ever since.
    It looked dead elegant.
    She made a face at herself and was about to burst into song, when she remembered the superstition, “Sing before breakfast, cry before tea.” Anyroad, everyone upstairs was still asleep. She’d make a pot of tea and take them a cup when she heard them stir. Martha and Sally enjoyed sitting up in bed, pillows tucked behind them, gossiping, on days they didn’t have to get up for work.
    Unlike Flo, they both had horrible jobs: Martha was a bottle topper in Good lad’s Brewery, and Sally worked behind the counter of the butcher’s on the corner of Smithdown Road and Tunstall Street.
    Oh, but it was difficult not to sing on such a glorious day. The sun must be splitting the flags outside, and the whitewashed walls in the backyard dazzled so brightly it hurt her eyes to look. Flo filled the kettle, put it on the hob over the fire in the living room, releasing the flue so the embers from the night before began to sizzle and glow, and decided to dance instead. She took a deep breath and was twirling across the room like a ballerina, when she came to a sudden halt in the arms of their lodger.
    “Mr Colquitt! I thought you’d gone.” Flo felt as if she’d blushed right down to her toes. He was wearing his regulation navy blue uniform with red piping, and grinning from ear to ear.
    “I’m glad I hadn’t, else I’d have missed the sight of a fairy dancing towards me to wish me good morning.”
    “Good morning, Mr Colquitt,” Flo stammered, conscious of his arms still around her waist.
    “And the same to you, Flo. How many times have I told you to call me Albert?”
    “I can’t remember.” To her relief, he removed his hands, came into the room and sat in the easy chair that used to be Dad’s. Flo didn’t mind, because she liked Mr Colquitt—Albert—though couldn’t for the life of her understand why Martha was so keen on capturing for a husband a widower more than twice her age. Since her best friend, Elsa, had married Eugene Cameron, Martha was terrified of being left on the shelf. Like Flo, she took after Main’s side of the family, with her slim figure, pale blonde hair and unusual green eyes, but had unfortunately inherited Dad’s poor eyesight: she had worn glasses since she was nine and had never come to terms with it. She thought herself the unluckiest girl in the world, whose chances of finding a decent husband were doomed.
    Martha had been setting her cap at Albert ever since he arrived on the scene. He was a tall, ungainly man with a round pot belly like a football. Although he was not handsome, his face was pleasant and his grey eyes shone with good humour. His wispy hair grew in sideboards to way below his ears, which Flo thought looked a bit daft.
    The main thing wrong with Albert, though, was that he didn’t get his uniform cleaned often enough, so it ponged something dreadful, particularly in summer. It was ponging now, and she would have opened the window if it hadn’t meant climbing on his knee.
    “Would you like a bite to eat?” she enquired. Breakfast and an evening meal were supposed to be included in his rent, but he usually left too early for anyone to make breakfast, so compensated by eating a thundering great tea when he came home.
    “I wouldn’t say no to a couple of slices of toast, and is that water boiling for tea?”
    “It is so.” Flo cut two slices of bread and managed to get both on the toasting fork. She knelt in front