Dance Lessons: A Novel

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115 Terrence rests his elbow on the ledge of the open car window. He taps on the steering wheel as they wait for a group of tourists to cross at the traffic light, all dawdley and slow, the leader guy glancing up from his London A-Z street map, pointing up the street. Japanese, all of them, with their backpacks and cameras and tight jeans. They’re looking for Willington Market. Tourists always are. From the passenger’s seat, Cat Cawley sneaks a look at Terrence, who is her mother Carmel’s latest boyfriend. They’ve moved into his flat, her and Mum, and now Cat Cawley has her own bedroom in the basement that smells a little bit. But still, it’s a nice big room with lots of drawers and a full built-in wardrobe for her stuff. Terrence always wears the same thing—these stupid dress shirts with the wide collars, white or pink or bright blue, and those really awful jeans, and a pinkie ring. He looks like he’s going off to play piano in an old people’s pub or a nursing home. The traffic light turns green, and Terrence puts the car in gear again. But now an old woman in a green coat toddles across, pulling her wheelie plaid shopping bag behind her. Usually Cat takes the tube. But this morning when she got up, there was Terrence sitting at the kitchen table smoking a fag and reading his Daily Mail and offering to drive Cat to her weekly dance lesson at Miss Jarkowski’s Dance Studio in Kentish Town. Of course, when Terrence is being nice to his girlfriend’s sixteen-year-old daughter, that only means one thing. It means they’ve had another fight last night, him and Mum, another fight as they staggered up the hill from the Rose and Crown. And 116 * Áine Greaney now, Saturday morning, and Terrence is giving her a lift to dance class ’cos he’s sucking up. They’re driving again—past the shops with silver security shutters locked over the front windows, past an Internet café, a pub, an Indian takeaway, a bus stop, a corner shop with bright pink signs for special offers on Bacardi. There are spindly trees in a small town park, a children’s playground outside a row of council flats. In the car, Terrence always plays a really bad radio station, and sometimes he even sings along—stupid songs that nobody’s ever heard of except him. When he changes gears he brushes her leg. Always. Always does that. Pervey sod. He turns and smiles at her. “All right then, Catherine?” he asks. Cat. Stupid wanker. She’s told him ten million times that’s what she wants to be called. “Yeah. Fine.” She starts picking some black nail varnish off the nails on her left hand. Just what’s Mum see in him anyway? Not her type, Terrence, and he’s totally not like her other boyfriends, who actually were kind of fun. Like that bloke—what was his name?—Fawad or Fur—something? Cat quite liked him, actually. Except that Fawad didn’t have a nice big flat where they could live for free, her and Mum, and this huge big car that still smells all new inside. They turn down a side street, then another, a shortcut that Terrence always takes to avoid the Saturday market crowds—the vendors with their vans and shopping trolleys, the tourists just walking and gawking. In her basement bedroom, Cat always goes to sleep with her earphones on, falls asleep to one of her new CDs, ’cos anything’s better than listening to him and Mum through the ceiling above her bed, usually screeching at each other like two cats. Or sometimes, she listens to them shagging, and their bed going creak-creak-creak. Once, a long time ago, back when she was just a kid, she used to play this mind game. Like, Cat used to imagine that one of the boyfriends would actually turn out to be her real dad. It used to go like this: They’d be in their flat, her and Mum, or in one of the boyfriend’s flats, and suddenly, Mum would call up to the living room or the kitchen to where Cat was watching the telly and Mum would say, “Catherine, babes, can you come in here a sec? We’ve got something to tell you.” [18.117...