Let's Dance by Frances Fyfield Page B

one by one, counting under her breath.
    â€˜One, two three … I wanted five thingies, Issy. Only I don’t know what they are.’
    â€˜You wrote them down, darling.’
    Serena looked puzzled, then definite, shook her head. ‘No, I didn’t.’
    â€˜Yes, you did. In your pocket?’
    â€˜No, I didn’t. I don’t do that.’
    Was that what all that fury was about? A forgotten list in her cramped script? Was that all?
    Isabel cooed like a pigeon. ‘Don’t worry, I can remember what it was you wanted.’
    Serena looked at her with the same pity she had herself received from the stallholder, the glance given to a lunatic.
    â€˜Of course you don’t know what I want. You can’t possibly have any idea. I want to go home, is what I want. I want George. Now.’
    The voice had risen a pitch. Serena rubbed her eyes,smeared the blackened eyebrows, making her look like a clown.
    So they set off towards the multi-storey car park, Serena giggling and pointing again, forgetting the imperative of haste. A ludicrous progress, akin to a pair of drunks, Serena clutching then pulling away, as the mood struck, Isabel embarrassed to restrain her. At one point Serena darted away to stroke the blond hair of a teenage boy: he reacted as if she had slapped him. Isabel hated him, too. Then Serena homed in on a posse of women, engaged them in earnest conversation until they fled in various directions. Then she sabotaged a group of children: she stood by the exit of Tesco, pulling faces, crossing her eyes, putting her fingers in her ears. The youngest child did not object, the eldest giggled with shifty embarrassment. By the time they were back at the car, Isabel had learned to keep a firm hold on her mother’s arm and maintain an adamant, insincere flow of loud chat. Serena refused to get into the car, claiming it was not hers, hers was bigger. Persuaded, finally, she slumped into a sulk in the passenger seat until Isabel remembered the music. Pausing to pay at the booth, Isabel aware, for the fiftieth time, of the now familiar glance of pity from the attendant.
    â€˜When are we going to have this party?’ Serena asked, suddenly sane again.
    â€˜Never. Not ever.’
    There was a pain throbbing at Isabel’s temples: she wanted either to weep or to sleep. It was wrong to feelthus, the opposite of virtuous or forgiving. Wrong to feel this dreadful shame.
    T hey were turning into the homeward stretch at the beginning of the fields by the church, Mother twitching and humming and finally unearthing from her pocket the shopping list which she greeted with a crow of pleasure. She wanted to go back, she announced.
    â€˜Back where?’
    â€˜Shops.’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Shops. Yes! I know what I want. I want to go back.’
    â€˜No. Absolutely not.’ No cooing in the voice, merely desperation.
    â€˜I want to drive the car!’
    Serena had refused the seat-belt and Isabel had failed to insist. She had no preparation for the lunge towards the steering wheel, Serena’s ringed hand catching her face, the temporary blindness of her hat in front of her eyes, the screams emerging from her own mouth as the car rocked, bucked, slewed from side to side on the track, romped off the road and into the field. They stalled to a juddering halt. Serena’s head hit the windscreen with a gentle crack. In the breathy, sobbing silence that followed, Isabel could feel the soft flesh of her chest pinioning her mother’s hard knuckle to the wheel. Beneath her left breast, the fingers began to move like tentacles.
    Serena began to whimper.
    T hey were out. They were out and Andrew was pleased; there was an enormous release from his own sense of not quite looking forward to this. There was an old car outside by the stable yard, back door unlocked, but no one in. Good. Andrew was tentative, but unashamed, of trespassing. The house remained as he remembered it, the outside