by Tania Casselle

She stands on the table, spike heels digging into the white linen tablecloth. Someone turns the music up and she laughs, throws back her head, dark hair spiraling into the arch of her spine. Her hips coil and sink into the drumbeat, shiny emerald skirt snaking up tanned thighs as they edge wider. The table rocks beneath her feet. She wipes the sweat from her face with the back of her hand and turns like the tide to stare directly at Joe, eddies towards him, so close he can smell her flesh. One quick curving wave as she bends, bows before him. A flick of her hair, wet as seaweed, whips into his face. Hot brine on his lips.

She sways her attention elsewhere, fingers playing on the laces that tie her gold blouse, glittering on the surf of music. A swell of men’s voices urges her on. A few women join in the chorus of cheers and laughter. She shimmers back to Joe, flooding his gaze. All eyes are on her body except his. His gaze is chained to her lips, pursed towards him in a rain-slick kiss. He feels the breathlessness of water and kicks back the chair, diving through the calling crowd to the dry shore of the doorway. He inhales the clean air then looks back, past the dark twisting figure on the table.

Finally he spots the one he’s searching for. A slight blonde woman in a white dress. She sits silent at the edge of the circle, still as stone, hands squashed flat beneath her thighs. Her eyes are tightly closed, her face upturned and set, resigned to drowning.

* * *

Sam stepped out of the shower and stood blinking and dizzy from the fierce heat of the water. She wrapped a giant white towel around her, using one corner to wipe off the thick skin of steam coating the mirror, and stuck out her tongue to inspect it. Pale pink, paler than other people’s she was sure. Sam was pale all over. She didn’t try to keep out of the sun, it was just as if someone had turned a valve on her body, letting the color run out of her eyes and her eyelashes and her cheeks. Even her nipples were pale raspberry, her hair blonde but without gold.

She looked back at the spot where she’d stepped out of the shower, expecting to see a rainbow puddle on the floor, where all the colors drained from her body had gathered to drip to the corner of the linoleum where the floor sloped down. Beside Annie she felt like a paper cut-out, someone you could see right through. Annie had so much color to her you needed sunglasses. She shone tawny and tortoiseshell, green glints in her eyes, fire in her hair, her skin always tanned. Petals for toenails, hibiscus pink. Annie wore every color but white and you saw summer when you opened her underwear drawer, smelled the sea, oranges and lilies, the licorice of black net, all the spices of India. Sam’s underwear drawer smelled of fabric conditioner. She only wore white, and her drawer was winter. Clean frozen ponds.

Sam tried nude and flesh underwear once, trying to find a tone that matched her skin, but they still looked too dark, as if she’d painted her body with gravy. She’d left the department store changing room almost at a run, and was out of the door before the attendant had time to count the discarded bras to check they matched the number on Sam’s tag. She knew that she’d never be as bright as Annie, she’ll never be a Spanish fiesta, a carnival in Rio, but she’d settle for an English garden in spring.

Sam wiped her face with the back of her hand and tugged at the bathroom window, stiff and unwilling in its wooden casement. She leaned out of the window, sucking the wet London air into her lungs, noticing the thin moon, half set already at dusk. The garden tangled below the window, untended and overgrown behind the barred back door that hadn’t been opened in years.

Through the half-light Sam made out the crab apple tree, its bark tougher than an old woman’s hide and just as wrinkled, its fruit withered and rotten where it fell in high grass. A scrub of dirt in the darkest corner could be a foxhole ‘ a small paradise in the city, safe from humans. Sam had often watched for the fox, standing sentinel at the window after her shower, waiting for his shadow in the long grass, but she’d never seen him. Perhaps he’s left too, she pondered.

She remembered when they used to sit outside with summer drinks: Pimms and olives and thin cheese-tanged biscuits. Over the evening an informal party would fill the small square garden, turreted all around by houses, shaded by high roofs. Friends dropped round after work, bringing wine in green bottles, the glass still dewed from the chilled cabinet. The women sat on the neat lawn, brushing ants from their laps, rubbing their bare feet as the growing night chilled their skin, but they stayed till the wine was finished and the sound of traffic hushed. The men dragged wooden chairs from the kitchen, too tired or too dignified to sit on the grass in their office suits.

Now Sam leaned out further over the garden, trying to catch a movement of fox. Or an echo of old conversations, the smoky aroma of a barbecue, before everything changed. Annie had always been such a snob about barbecues, considering them the TV of outdoor entertaining, something other people did.

But Annie was engaged once for two months to an Australian who was really called Bruce. He was huge and muscled, ruddy from the sun, his fingers wide as spoons and rough raw, but his heart was romantic as a schoolgirl. He fell for Annie like a human sacrifice driven over the edge of a cliff, who suddenly decides if they are going to fall anyway they might as well give themselves willingly, and he stretched his arms crucifix-wide as he fell.

Annie liked Bruce’s height, his devotion, his quaint vernacular, and reminiscences of his father’s sheep farm. But she tired of him after the first barbecue. She winced when Bruce suggested it, but eventually she realized that barbecue was in his veins, and grudgingly gave him permission. At that first barbecue ‘ the only barbecue - Bruce had reigned over the little iron grill he’d bought, complaining about how small and tinny it was, how unsteady on its screw-on legs.With a short yellow apron wrapped around his substantial waist, shirt sleeves rolled up, hair damp and flat from sweat, standing with a sausage speared on the end of a long trident fork, Bruce had something of Britannia about him, something feminine despite his great bulk. Perhaps it was his eagerness to please.

‘Next time I’ll build a proper BBQ,’ he said. ‘Get some bricks and fix it up over there.’ He nodded towards a shaded corner, under a six-foot high wall covered in ivy.

But there wasn’t a next time. Bruce was expelled, like all the others before him ‘ like Joe would be soon, if Annie got her way ‘ and even the parties had stopped once Annie padlocked the back door for good. Sam had come home from work to find Annie nailing half a dozen wooden slats over the inside of the door. ‘It’s for your own good,’ was all Annie would say. She swore at the weight of the hammer as she drove the final nail to secure her web of slats to the doorframe. ‘It’s for your own good.’

Shivering slightly as the night breeze flicked the edge of her towel, Sam closed the window quietly, so Annie wouldn’t hear, and squeezed a creamy flower of moisturizer into her palm. She didn’t miss the parties so much anymore, she realized, smoothing the lotion into her legs. But she missed the cluster of rose bushes that flamed into color each year, a brief explosion of scent and raging red. She wished she could still smell them as she lay in bed, inhaling their sweetness to drive off nightmares, but Annie wouldn’t allow the bedroom windows to be opened even in hottest August, when nights were sticky despite fine cotton sheets. August was the worst time. It was the time they both remembered and tried to forget.