Free Dancing Backwards by Salley Vickers

happy to offer poems which had been turned down by more established magazines. An ad in the university newspaper produced further efforts from aspiring student poets, not all of them bad. Ralph, the sculptor who owned the house and worked in the basement, where he was engaged on a long-term project of casting the Seven Deadly Sins in bronze, supplied some line drawings, and with these and the poetry submissions they got together almost twenty pages.
    ‘We need one, maybe two more poems,’ Edwin decided one evening.
    They were eating risotto. The peppers and mushrooms were from the market, where fruit and vegetables were sold on weekdays and at weekends varieties of tatty junk were passed off on the tourists as antiques. At the end of the day’s trading any produce past its saleable life was sold off at rock bottom prices. Vi and Edwin were well-established ‘rock bottom’ customers.
    One bottle of wine had already been polished off and Edwin had opened a second.
    ‘This is a Persian debate. Anything promising left in the slush pile?’
    Vi went to her room and came back with some sheets of paper.
    ‘There are these. I’m not sure what to make of them.’
    ‘Let’s have a look.’
    Edwin read the papers on which were typed two poems of several short stanzas. ‘These are rather good,’ he said. ‘Here, give me some more of the Valpol. Emily Dickinson-ish but distinctively their own voice. Who are they from?’
    Vi began to clear away the plates. The tiny freezing kitchen ran off the room, which acted as their sitting and dining room and also held a sofa bed for guests. Rinsing the plates under the tap, she called out, ‘Would you like some fruit? I got a job lot of tangerines at the market.’
    She came back into the room with a blue glazed pottery dish piled with the orange fruit. The dish had been her gift to her mother, part of a matching set bought on the holiday in Brittany, where Vi had learned to swim in the biting cold green sea. She could still feel her mother’s hand in the water under her stomach, and the feeling it evoked, half comfort, half apprehension, as her mother promised not to let her go until Vi gave the word.
    The jug and the plate were almost the only relics of her mother—her father, either through grief, incomprehension or plain meanness, she had never quite decided which, had given almost everything else away. Only these and a small, worn, garnet cross, which she believed her mother had been given at her christening, survived.
    Edwin was re-reading the poems. He put down the paper. ‘Violet St John, tell me the truth, did you write these?’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘There’s a smudge on the “m” like on your typewriter. But anyway, I can hear you.’
    ‘I didn’t think about the “m”. They’re probably no good.’
    He was quiet for a moment. Far off she heard the tuneless sound of a night bird. Then Edwin spoke.
    ‘They’re marvellous.’ She looked into his odd eyes and saw that he was serious. ‘Here,’ he said, and he was smiling as only Edwin could smile. ‘Have another drink, Miss St John. You’re a poet, and you don’t know it.’
    Vi, out on the balcony, opened the notebook but the breeze coming in off the sea blew the pages so it was impossible to read and she went inside. Back in the cabin, she read again the poems which, her heart in her mouth, she had shown to Edwin long ago that November evening.
    ‘Will you stay on and help with the magazine after you graduate?’ Edwin asked.
    Vi had sat her finals for which Edwin had drilled her. ‘Forget any nonsense about developing ideas. That’s balls. Summarise as many ideas as you can in advance. It’s like doing a jigsaw. You need to put all the pieces of sky together in advance and on no account waste time attempting to form new thoughts. Forget thought. This is about being organised.’
    It was always easiest with Edwin, perhaps the least organised person she would ever meet, to do as he said. He was far more thrilled