Page 15 of Kiwi Gold
The fortuneteller herself, whose own eyes had seen too much—why did I think that in her regular life, she was either a nurse or a psychologist?—looked at me steadily.I’m willing to go on,those eyes said,if you want me to. Or if you think she can bear to hear it.
I stood up and said, “Cheers,” then dropped another twenty into her hand for good measure. She’d given value for money, I reckoned, if you counted that in chills up the spine and so forth, which you probably did. I told my masked mystery woman, “Cops are bound to be gone by now, and it must be close to midnight anyway. You’ve come to the ball, Cinderella, so let’s dance before it’s too late.”
“I don’t know how to dance,” she said. Looking rattled again, as if the very idea had shaken her. A runaway princess? A cult survivor? An abused wife? No. She was reserved, not scared.
“Fortunately,” I said, “I do. I’ll tell you why, if you like. Though it’s not exactly a romantic story.”
We’d headed out into the light and noise and crowd again. There was a thrum of excitement in the air, which meant it must be nearly midnight, and a kind of urgency grabbing me as if, unless I took my chance now, I’d lose her.
She said, “So tell me why.”
“Is this one of those hard questions I have to get right in order to be granted a dance with you?” I asked. “Why have I felt all night like we’re in a story?”
“Really?” she asked. “You feel that too? Because we’re costumed, probably.”
“Maybe.” I could’ve said it felt more like an enchantment. If I’d wanted to, again, have her think I was a prat. I grabbed a couple of glasses of champagne, handed one to her, and said, “If I tell you, you have to promise to tell me your name.” At the widening of her eyes, I added, “There’s always a bargain, in stories.”
“My first name,” she said. “If you like. I promise.” Looking at me squarely, as if it were a vow. “And you can tell me yours.”
Moving on. “Why do I know how to dance in the whirling-around way?” I said. “Four little sisters, is the answer, like it’s the answer to most questions in my life.”
She’d forgotten to be wary now. Her mouth was curving, and she had that golden glow in her eyes again. Itcouldn’tjust be the candlelight, and I wanted to see her without her mask. I also wanted to see the hair again. And to know her name. She said, “Tell me.”
“Picture my sister, Lark,” I said, “in her most overdramatic thirteen-year-old fashion, telling me, ‘Some divine man will ask us to waltz, and we’ll have to say, “Sorry, don’t know how,” and there the love of our life will go, buggering off.Forever.’And then my sister Lexi saying, ‘The love ofyourlife, you mean.I’mnot falling in love with some naff waltzing person. I’m not falling in love at all, unless he does something more exciting than dancing. Climbs impossible things, maybe, like Kegan Ashford.’ I remember the Kegan Ashford part particularly, because she had his photo in her school notebooks. That was before opinion shifted on the bloke, of course. She said, ‘If he’s a heroandhopelessly attractiveandgives me mad sex, thenmaybeI’ll marry him. But probably not. I’m going to join the Navy and become a rescue diver, I’ve decided. That way,Ican be a hero.’”
I told my mystery woman the rest of it, as well as I remembered it, like how I’d told Lexi, “I wonder if this fella’s still going to be keen when he learns you were plotting at thirteen about how he’d need to give you mad sex and be hopelessly attractive. Not sure what that says about your priorities. Not too high-minded, eh.”
Lexi said, “About as high-minded as yours, probably.” Which was true.
My sister Liana chimed in next. “But even then, Lexi, after you’re a rescue diver and all, what if it’s your wedding day, and you can’t dance? Wouldn’t you just be totally humiliated?”
“Excuse me,” Lexi said. “I’ll learn? Or maybe we’llbothbe divers. Maybe we’ll have our wedding ceremony under the sea!”
“You can’t,” my sister Larissa said, with the logic that maddened her sisters. “You couldn’t say the words underwater, and you have to have the words for it to be legal. Besides, people aren’t going to learn to scuba dive to go to a wedding. You’d get no pressies, and that’s the whole point of weddings. We should all learn to dance now, and then we’ll know. Lachlan can show each of us in turn, and we can practice with each other between turns.”
“That’d be all good,” I said, “if I knew how myself.” I was twenty-one and finishing Uni. In exploration geology. Ballroom dancers were thin on the ground in my social circle.
They stared at me. Four sets of eyes, all accusing. Lark said, “How will we learn,then? Mum’s not going to teach us, that’s certain. Doubt she knows how herself.”
“Because she’s busy,” Liana said. “Working. We can learn how. Somehow.” Her voice fading away.Doomed,that voice said.Doomed to social obscurity and awkwardness, because our brother doesn’t care.Liana’d been the smallest when she was born and was still the most fragile, and now, she looked stricken, as if I’d destroyed all her prospects of happiness.
“So,” I finished up with the mystery woman, “I sighed a bit, but I learned, and practiced with them, too. When you do everything four times over, you get better at it. It’s come in surprisingly useful, actually. Very popular in lonely, faraway places with expat populations, dancing. Especially if those places are Muslim, which they so often are, and the dancing feels exotic and even forbidden, maybe, the way it never does at home. Which meant the girls were right, eh. Itcanbe romantic. So let’s do it.”
* * *
Laila
He’d had me laughing with his imitations, and imagining him, the big brother with four stairstep sisters who knew they could depend on him, was nothing but sweet. Even the sound of my husband’s name, Lachlan’s sister’s childhood crush, couldn’t dampen my spirits. The “Muslim” bit may have given me a momentary pang of guilt, and of bewilderment—why had he been in faraway Muslim places?—but compared to drinking and wearing my nightdress to a party and palmistry, what was dancing? EvenI’ddanced before. Not the way people were doing it now, with steps and so forth, and only with my husband, but I’d done it from time to time, the sort of thing where you hold each other close and sway around the floor. Early on, that had been, when we’d been out with his mates and their partners, when I was part of the excitement and not the one dragging him into domesticity. In other words, not once the girls were born.
The cop may still have been standing there. I wasn’t looking. I was on my second glass of champagne this time around, and it had gone to my head faster, making me feel as if I were floating above my body and looking down, light as air, on the lights and the band and the glitter of it all. The music they were playing now had actual melodies, and nobody was shouting out the words in that angry tone, so that was quite nice.
The man drank down his own champagne, then said, “Shall we?”
I said, “Yes,” and then trembled as if I’d agreed to sex.
He didn’t answer, just guided me through the crowd, his hand barely touching my mid-back through two layers of fabric.
Black T-shirt. Arm muscles. Chest. Jeans. Boots.
