Free The Candle Dancer / The Way That You Found Me by Patrick Holland Page B

the police.’
    I do not know why, but this sort of thing never really worried me. And I could usually persuade Jenny not to let it worry her either. For me, it was like having comic theatre performing permanently out the window, and I remember I had been smiling at the conversation while reading a piece on the Chinese gold standard when Jen had stood up.
    ‘It’s that note on your car, isn’t it?’
    ‘It’s those bloody harlots across the road, Peter. God, can’t you hear it?’
    ‘I– ’
    ‘Call the police, will you?’
    ‘Don’t you think– ’
    Just then a bottle flung from the house smashed on the bitumen.
    ‘I’m not asking.’
    The police arrived in twenty minutes. Drugs were found in the house. Only marijuana, but still… We heard through a neighbour that the girls’ school was contacted. Victor even had to go into the station with them and make some kind of statement and promise to keep a more careful watch over the girls: this of a man whose one hope and dream in life seemed to be that one Saturday he would come home and the aftermath of the previous night’s party would include a pregnancy, or perhaps three pregnancies, and he would be freed. It was easy to imagine the only thing keeping him alive were those odd weekends away where he and his wife could forget they even had children. And now what nature had not cleaved together was bound by law.
    Now on party nights he could not leave as he had before and he sat in his downstairs office with the volume of those fantastical adventure movies he liked nearly reaching that of the party. He no longer simply cut me when I waved to him that Sunday night. He scowled. His eyes were venomous.
----
    I sat up through the night—through many nights that month—with a bottle of scotch, watching, waiting. But neither dancer nor candle came to the window. I was researching.
    There was a thousand-year-old dance from northern Thailand called the
Fon Tien
, literally ‘candle dance’. A slow, meditative dance to be performed in the open air at night, typically on festive occasions and before dignitaries. There was a royally-sanctioned candle dance performed by villagers in Cambodia to re-sanctify their temples and bring blessings. I looked both up on YouTube. Lovely smiling girls with tapers in each hand made those graceful, elastic movements typical of Indochinese dances. The dancing did not seem to have much—anything—in common with what I had seen Victor doing. But I sincerely hoped the accountant had been performing one or other of them, as the only other examples of candle dancing I could find were pagan. Black arts.
----
    That weekend we had what might loosely have been called a cocktail party. A few friends from the bank, a couple of Jenny’s old school friends, and a young crime novelist she had picked up from somewhere. The girls drank cocktails and the men beer. I served my own—what turned out to be a really top shelf little pilsner. I remembered I had promised Victor a couple of bottles, and then I remembered that we had deliberately, accidentally, forgotten to invite him. Jenny circulated with trays of Spanish tapas she had made through the afternoon, and I caught her looking across the road every time she went back to the fridge. I followed her and looked too. Victor and his wife were on their front veranda, staring back at us like that old American Gothic picture by Grant Wood, where nothing is ostensibly amiss, but there is menace coming out of it like cold out of a deep freeze.
    ‘Go back and try to enjoy yourself,’ I said to Jenny.
    ‘Yes,’ she shivered.
----
    The next day she found a note in our mailbox. Just one half-sheet of paper on which was written ‘Bitch!’
    ‘Do you think it’s the mother or the daughters?’
    ‘I don’t know, Jen. I suppose we did get them in trouble with the police. Perhaps we should let it lie.’
    ‘Let it lie! That candle-dancing twit and his malevolent women have pushed me over the