Starting Over by Tony Parsons Page B

in cars together all the time, and sometimes they die together. So it wasn’t just Lara. Although for many years I think it felt as though it was just her. Still does, on her bad days. She once said to me, dry-eyed and thoughtful, I don’t know what would have happened to me without my nan. She took me in. She loved me. She helped me on my way. She stopped me falling through the cracks.
    Nan loved MGM musicals. Fred and Ginger putting on the Ritz. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds sparring. And when Lara went to live with her nan, it was the early eighties, the age of video rental. For the first time ever, you could watch Singin’ in the Rain or West Side Story or Oklahoma! whenever you felt like it.
    And Nan and little Lara felt like it most of the time.
    They loved Gene, Ginger, Fred, Debbie and the rest, butthey loved Cyd Charisse above all. They loved her dancing with Gene Kelly in the great Broadway dream sequence in Singin’ in the Rain – Kelly on his knees before Cyd the gangsters’ moll in her green dress – and they loved Cyd with Fred Astaire in Bandwagon , dancing in a seedy, smoky bar, doing the kind of dancing that starts fights.
    Although she had done her childish ballet and tap, that was where the dancing really began for her, those wet Sunday afternoons watching MGM musicals with Nan. Those other Sundays, long ago, where the colours seemed brighter than real life. Better than real life. And as I watched Lara and her nan watching their film, I wondered if anything had changed. It felt to me as if the dancing still measured out her dreams.
    ‘One day I will dance the tango in Buenos Aires,’ she said, sitting on the arm of Nan’s chair, one arm lightly draped across the old lady’s thin shoulders, neither of them taking their eyes from Gene Kelly. ‘You can take lessons when you get down there. To BA, I mean. They call it BA. I looked it up on the Internet.’ She laughed, and glanced over at me. ‘That’s the final frontier for an MGM musical nut,’ she said. ‘Dancing the tango with your husband in some little milonga dance hall in Argentina, with the music and the crowd and the sweat, and all the colours better than the real world.’
    Might be a bit tricky, I thought. I put on my dancing shoes during our courting days, but these days Lara had her work cut out getting me to dance at weddings.
    When Lara went to place the order for Nan’s dinner, the old lady gestured for me to come closer. I thought she was going to tell me something about George Gershwin or Gene Kelly. But instead she hissed a warning in my ear.
    ‘Don’t get old,’ she told me.
    My parents wore matching kit at their self-defence class. They were a couple of trim seventy-somethings in their Adidas tracksuits, red for her and black for him, their uniforms as shiny as an oil slick. Accompanied by around a dozen other pensioners, mostly women, they shuffled across the floor of the gym on the instructions of their trainer, their kindly faces frowning with feigned violence.
    ‘Dogs don’t know Kung Fu,’ the instructor told them. ‘Dogs don’t know Karate or Tae Kwon Do or boxing. Yet every dog can protect itself.’
    The class smiled benignly at him. Their footwear was as white as their hair. It looked box fresh. It looked as though it would never get old. The instructor clenched his fists and his teeth.
    ‘What did he say, dear?’ one old lady asked my mother.
    ‘He said, “Dogs don’t know Kung Fu”, dear,’ said my mum, and she gave me a delighted smile. She was happy to see me. I didn’t see them enough. I was always too busy.
    ‘Dealing with the frontal bear hug,’ the instructor said, motioning my father to step forward, ‘you are gripped around the arms and the waist.’ He proceeded to embrace my father in a way that I had never embraced him. Perhaps my mum had never embraced him like that either.
    ‘First – knee your opponent in the testicles,’ said the instructor.
    ‘What’s that?’ said the old