Dancing in the Dark by Susan Moody

spring rolls.
    A big black guy, half-recognizing him, flashes a smile, teeth hanging like a line of laundry from the douche-red of his gums. ‘Hey, wossup, man?’ whirling past into the jumble of the crowded street. The Knight of the Dolorous Countenance, that’s me, he thinks. Tilting at windmills in search of something long since vanished. Isn’t it Sidney Smith who offers twenty-two recipes against melancholy? Sugar plums are in there, somewhere. Which reminds him. He stops at a newsagent to buy a box of chocolates – ‘
Sorry, dear, we’re right out of sugar plums
’ – for Caro’s boys.
    Turning into her hedge-lined white street, he thinks,
What’s gone wrong? Here I am, thirty-eight, closing on thirty-nine. I have everything I set out to gain and yet, for two pins, I could crumble into the gutter and caterwaul, howl, ululate.
    Is it the next book, stuck somewhere in his subconscious and refusing to show itself? Is it the solitariness catching up with him?
    Or is it Brendan, come back to haunt him after all these years, Brendan last seen with his blue-white skin lying flat on his bones, a pile of newspapers clotted and stained with human waste, his head resting, dear God, on a cushion that was putrid with snot and vomit, clammed with it, his hollow yellow face pressed into the stink of other men’s breath? Brendan gone at last to the Land of Promise, and Father Vincent at the funeral, scrawny neck emerging from stiff white collar, floggings furnace-hot at the back of his eyes,
Well, Fergus, we did all right by yez, I’m thinking
, lips pulled back over wolfish teeth, and himself, hate and rage rising in him like pus, lungeing for the man’s throat, screaming,
Bugger, sodomite, sadist, all fucking right?
    Ye’re at the Oxford University, aren’t yez, and wasn’t it us who got ye there?
Yes, Father, with your hands and your canes and your fleshy pricks – yes, you got me there with the Latin and the poetry, Synge and Yeats and the rest of the sodding Anglo-Irish fraternity, and the whimpers of little boys, the plump pillows of spread buttocks, the worm-shine of their tears. Yes, you got me there.
    Ah, Jesus . . .
    Adrenalin-pumped, he presses the bell beside the smartly painted navy-blue door. Will the anger ever leave him or has it scarred him for life, like someone who’s drunk Drano and painfully survived the corrosion of his entrails?
    â€˜I’m growing old,’ he says aloud as it opens to reveal Caro, long and elegant in designer jeans and a cropped white top.
    â€˜Rubbish.’ She reaches up to kiss his cheek.
    He smells her familiar scent. Sanity and
Miss Dior.
The same as it has always been, ever since she was the girl sharing the bedsit below his, years and years ago, a medical student intending to specialize in paediatrics. He’d loved her, back then, in a hopeless kind of way, knowing that she was already half engaged to Charlie Cartwright, and in any case the last thing he wanted was anything at all that suggested settling down, mortgages and careers, all the things Charlie had embraced with relish because it never occurred to him not to. So many evenings, the sea-taste of tears on his cheeks as he drooled out the squalor of his rearing, the death of his brother. She is the only one he has ever told. He’s gone on loving her, in an intensely fraternal way, standing as best man at their wedding and then as godfather to Ricky, their first child.
    â€˜Still as beautiful as ever,’ he says, stepping into the wide hall, handing over the bottle of champagne he’s brought with him for the party. What would he have done if she’d ever responded to his muted advances? Run a mile. Run a marathon. Run to the flat edges of the world and dropped over, clung there by the very tips of his fingers until she’d gone away. ‘What are you on, the elixir of youth? You never seem to change.’
    â€˜I wish