Free There Should Be More Dancing by Rosalie Ham Page B

drove off, scraping the side of Mr Ahmed’s parked taxi. Kevin’s light went on and a little while later a police car cruised by.

Margery woke early Sunday morning to that particular stillness streets have after a busy Saturday night, and more palings from her front fence were missing. ‘Wretched so-and-sos,’ she snarled. Tyson and his flatmates used her fence to light fires. They also tore branches from the trees in the park to cook sausages on sticks or to burn.
    She moved her legs to the edge of her bed, sat while her blood oriented itself to her upright position and, when she felt stable, she stood. Again, she paused while her feet adjusted to the weight of her body, and her tarsals and phalanges clicked into position. She rotated her shoulders, loosening her vertebrae, and then rolled her head as much as she could to free her neck. Blood had found its way to her feet; her fingers started to tingle and her heart seemed to be coping so she moved off, best foot first – in this case, her left foot, because her right foot supported a particularly sensitive bunion – sliding her feet into her slippers.
    She gathered her dressing gown about her and made her way cautiously out to the lav with her commode pot, and that’s whenshe found Pat. The noise, a snort, drew her to the shed. It went through her mind to phone the police, or go to Mrs Parsons’, but Mrs Parsons’ blind wasn’t up. She told herself it must be a sick pussycat or a possum and went to investigate, arming herself with the copper stick from the laundry. She shuffled to the shed door and opened it – ‘Here, kitty-kitty-kitty’ – but then she noticed that the travelling rug was not folded on the back dash of Morris’s car, and the passenger door was slightly open, the small yellow ceiling light burning. Someone was in the car. Margery tightened the belt of her dressing gown, secured her feet in her old slippers and approached the car, squint-eyed and determined. The snoring person was under the travelling rug on the back seat, a hand poking out, and gathered across the knotty, speckled fingers were dress rings, familiar dress rings – a fake black pearl on a silver-coloured band, a plastic cameo, an apex of glass diamonds. And the fingernails – Pat’s signature burnt-orange – lit by a shaft of morning light from the gap between the iron roof and the wall. It was definitely her. Margery gasped, her hands went to her cheeks and she said gleefully, ‘She’s dead!’
    For sixty-one years Margery had watched her neighbour skipping off to Saturday-night ballroom dancing in her stiff, twinkling skirts of many petticoats, and several times a week Pat passed on her way to the pub to have the time of her life with all her hilarious good-fun friends, over-dressed and over-happy. Often Pat would just pose in her front garden in her nylon slacks and matching colour-coded blouses, pressing her nose to her precious ruddy Baronne Prévost rose. Year after year Margery had endured Pat’s backhanded compliments about her knitting and sewing, her love of polishing and her colourful cross-stitching; ‘I suppose it’s nice . . . if you like that sort of thing.’
    Once, back in the 1960s, Pat had said to her, ‘You’d learn a lot if you ever bothered to get off your bed and participate rather thanwatching the world pass by your front window, Margery Blandon.’ But Margery had gathered in her irritation and replied, ‘You’ve never been much further than the pub yourself! You think life’s just one big party, that you’re here just to make a spectacle of yourself.’
    â€˜Life’s too short to go unnoticed,’ Pat retorted, lifting her apron and shaking it like a cancan dancer in the street. ‘I know exactly what you need, Margery. I bet you’ve never had an orgasm.’
    Margery was indignant. ‘Certainly not,’ she said,