Dance | Janey L Foster

1.1
Well, she thought, here we go again. Yet another year, they tell me. Everything compartmentalised, broken down into fraction and number and though I understand the truth that number is written into our place, I do question it. I question where it started, who made all the divisions? I question these days, these hours, the minutes that we watch. So they say it’s another year, I don’t worry because it’s just number doing its thing. It had a 5, now it’s a 6 and it’s all so arbitrary. I have to make sense of how I will spend it and spend it is all I can do. What skills am I employing, what messages to our son? And I can move. Remember that, I can still move and while I’m in this machine they call time, I must use it. And use it well.

I have a friend, a good friend who though I’ve never met her, I sense that I know. And I mean I know her from a different place, a different world, long ago or out of time, I can’t be sure. She resonates somehow to my wavelengths, I pulse in time to her dance and the friend turns her ignition key just about now, she has her eyes fixed on the horizon and her small dog curled up to her side. As she eases out of her gateway, bristling with choices and verve, I think of her, of the energy to change, of the irresistible law of movement. And as she forges outwards making new tracks, I remind myself to push up from the bed, to leave this warm bundle of familiar fabric and taking my cold feet to the bathroom floor I will find me there waiting, hand outstretched, urging me to spend my moments well, while we’re here, while we breathe.

This concept, this notion of time still around us and I must take our son’s hand for the dance.
It’s January they tell us, it’s the first yet again, as I write. We are here and we have choices. It’s all there waiting for us, in the turning of hands, in the beating of moments.
Wild, possible, untethered – It’s a only a matter of time.

11.1
More numbers and they keep coming. There’s little I can do but allow their process.

Mother bought me an abacas when I was young, I would sit near their old green settee and push the wooden beads back and forth, enjoying the slam and the click. I made patterns with my small fingers and I learned to count. Everyone learning to count, to add another year, another day, another moment, always looking to the next second, the time ahead, then they will have what they need, then it will all be in place and they will allow themselves to smile and be happy. And I can count backwards too, I remember the bear birthday cake. Mother spent ages on it, icing an upended Swiss roll, making small sponge arms and legs, the thick green icing swirled around its paws in scallops of butter cream sweetness.

I can do backwards. I can do then but all it seems to do is underline now.
Now, and my friend in this moment. Her little dog’s paws scuttering over new lanes, firing up dried out leaves as she runs. Something interests her, she stops, sniffs the ground, turns a circle chasing dust and then she’s off, my friend in striding steps behind her.

They tell me it’s another year, my numbers change but it’s arbitrary.
I am here. I am now. I am this moment.

I want to chase flecks of dust.

She had a sense of how it would be, how the waiter would have the most beautiful face, soft but still angular and his good nature would spill out over their corner table by the fire, by the old horse brass. And the fire would be warm but not crackling and when the food came it would steam hot, just enough. The beer batter would be popping from the fish, its crumbling whiteness flaking off her fork and they would laugh. The wine would bite the back of her throat leaving plum notes and swirls of dark chocolate in her mouth. She would notice the grain of the table, how the knots in the wood looked like stains of old food and she would scrub at them with her napkin.

But the stains were permanent, the shapes and patterns of age, formed into the its weft and she would look up. The waiter’s face, stubbled and young, said enough but was unable to smile and she tried and she joked but she couldn’t get through and then the food arrived.

Plates that weren’t piping placed down without care, as though they were the final two dishes to leave kitchen, the last two olden fish before the mop down and wash up and she held the cutlery like a man at the gallows and she scooped and she hacked and she fed. The batter fell in flour thick gloops back onto itself, opening up the greyed out carcass of baked flesh. The vegetables, bright colours offering up a promise that they couldn’t keep, burst to nothing in her mouth and she tried to swallow the resitance of undercooked chips, the fattened fingers of someone else’s failure hung around the sides of her teeth like a creature in the dark, hiding behind dustbins, dislodging food that had gone before and she sat. The wine swirled around the glass, clipping the muck of neglect, leaving its residue on the unclean streaks of a hurried kitchen and she drank.

The smoothness bit the sides, coated her throat in acid and as the heartburn to come rose up from her gut, the potential for pain never far, she looked towards the fireplace, to the embers. A photographic miss match, flicking up, the replica of flames approaching dance, swirling round like she used to, when her skirts were long and thin, her hair thicker against the storms and she would spin and twirl as though she wore no manacles. On sawdust floors under olden lights, cars flashing by in the dark, familiar streets that didn’t scare her and smiling faces. In the days when she could move, when she was lifted in the presence of strangers and the beer batter was golden crisp and melted in her small red mouth.