Dad Dancing

Scattering is six months old this week. Whether you have been here from the start, have just arrived, or are looking back in the archives from the future, thank you for reading. Writing and sharing these stories is a joy to me, and I hope they bring some joy to you too.

This week I had the pleasure of reading a few of my daily stories at Speak Easy, a really lovely spoken word open mic night here in Manchester. If you're in the area I highly recommend it: it's joyful and eclectic and welcoming and warm.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

I dreamed I was a clownfish, tucked up safe in my anemone. I woke tasting brine, the night sweats running over my lips, but I was safe. I wondered what unfelt poison was protecting me.

Tuesday

Behind my eye the migraine sits, angry that it cannot push the ball out if its socket and escape to purer air. It has such colour and such shape to it, it seems a pity it should be locked up inside my drab old skull. I put a hand to my face to comfort it, and whisper to it in the dark, knowing it will not outlive the day. Darling migraine, you will miss all the beauty of this world except your own: jagged, iridescent, painful.

Wednesday

We lived in sliding frames, like kept bees. When they needed something from us they pulled us out and scraped us open. The little that was left they gave back for us to rebuild. A bee in smoke is too busy escaping the fire to use her stinger. The arrangement is for the good of everyone, the keeper says from behind his mask.

Thursday

Caring for the frogs in the garden kept me afloat, for a while. I sloped the edge of the pond for them, dropped logs in the water as resting places, and felt I was building up somewhere I could breathe. When they moved into the house it got harder: puddles on the carpet, tadpoles in the bath. I didn’t want pondweed in my bed and those strange eyes watching me. I didn’t want to wake choking on frogspawn. I didn’t know what I was choosing.

Friday

Danny wouldn’t let us paint or put up wallpaper. “It makes the room smaller,” he said. “We’ve little enough room as it is.” He took the walls back to brick and ripped up the carpets and stood there in all his space. But he left those heavy curtains that blocked off the whole bay window, and the bracken growing over the front door.

Saturday

The fairies sealed her son inside an acorn, and so she sat and watched all through the autumn, trying to see which one was him. She gathered them in sacks, and threw sharp stones at squirrels. Her palms itched through the winter as the acorns cooled under the soil. In twenty years there will be a forest where there had been nothing, and she will sit under the branches and remember him.

Sunday

I got a little dab of ink on my finger, which spread to my page and my sleeve and my face. I got mustard on my shirt and ketchup at the corner of my mouth. I slipped walking through the park, grass on one knee, mud on the other. I was a disaster, more colourful than I have ever been.

I have been reading...

• Bee by Claire Preston. I developed a long fascination with bees while at university, where I was taught by Claire Preston. Shortly after the bee-fever took me I found myself wandering downstairs in a local bookshop, to a section I rarely visited, where the first thing I saw was this book. Of course I bought it immediately, but for some reason I never got around to reading it until now. It's a delightful tour of the many places bees nest in our culture.
• 'The Crossing' by David Frankel, the latest Little Uncertainty from Uncertain Stories. These stories are available free in bookshops across the UK, or as a bonus when you buy an anthology. 'The Crossing' is a taut little story which uses a hint of horror to show the inhumanity of borders.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: Dad Dancing

The dancing began at seven pm with a reticent first shuffle, before the beckoning bride, a steady set of floor-fillers, and the arrival of pre-drunk evening-only guests set the party mood simmering. Ecstatic uni friends and indifferent cousins jostled for space with ballroom enthusiasts trying a little too hard. And dotted here and there, loosening their ties and keeping close to their pints, there were dads, each dancing his own dad dance for his own dad reasons.

🕺

Martin never saw the point of dancing. He loved music, and prided himself on listening widely and without snobbery. He felt a good beat in his bones, but never the urge to shake them. He might tap a foot, or a finger; he might, now and then, in a moment of wild abandon, air-drum. But to dance was a distraction. Dancing wasn’t listening, and listening was the point.

When Kitty started dancing, two months after walking, Martin was thrilled. Not about the dancing, sweet as it was, but because it was the first flicker of interest she had shown in any music not directly produced by her mum. She had chewed on crayons to Charles Mingus, rolled a Duplo car back and forth to the Stones, and turned her back on CBeebies when the presenters started singing. The nearest she came to an emotional response was filling her nappy. But when ‘Blame It on the Boogie’ came on, it was like it had come with a software update. She stood completely still for a minute or so, then exploded into a cacophony of limbs and didn’t stop for half an hour except to shout ‘Again!’. Whether it was the song, the stage her ever-growing brain had reached, or the weird orange powder on her melty straws, something had changed her.

After that, Kitty could pick out the rhythm of a car radio carried on the wind from a mile away. She danced to ice-cream van chimes and the ten-second loop of her toy mobile phone and the rain on the roof of the conservatory. She sought out music like a bee seeks a flower. She rarely had far to search: from that first frenzy of movement, Martin had saturated her in it, playing all the grooves he wanted to cut into her brain, trying to cram in all he could before she decided she preferred jumping or climbing or hiding handfuls of dirt between the sofa cushions.

Before long, she wasn’t content to dance alone: daddy had to dance too. And Martin wasn’t going to risk her losing interest, so he complied, dancing as best he could. His mind was never on dancing: it was on Kitty, and the joy of all that music pouring into her. Until he realised that the joy and the music and the love were pouring back out again with every movement. There was no Jackson 5 moment when lightning struck him and innervated his hips. But there was a moment when he noticed the change: noticed he was enjoying himself, noticed himself dancing when Kitty wasn’t there. He waved his hands like he was swatting flies, grinned his biggest, stupidest grin, and queued up The Contours’ ‘Do You Love Me’.

A few weeks later, Kitty discovered how much fun it was to bash her toy pans together when there was a cymbal crash, or tinkle her tuneless glockenspiel along with a piano part, or shake her tambourine to literally anything. Martin never had the patience to learn an instrument, but for her, he had perhaps too much. When Kitty gave insisted on performing for visitors, Martin insisted on dancing; when she climbed out of bed at three in the morning to play her recorder, Martin climbed out of bed and danced; when she played her first proper gig at the pub on the corner, Martin was there dancing while everyone who knew him pretended that they didn’t. Everyone but Kitty.

Martin still couldn’t dance (though Kitty loved him anyway). Whether he mashed potato or did the twist, his head was still nodding quietly between the earcups of his good headphones. He danced like a man at a silent disco tuned to a different channel. But there at the reception, as Kitty’s band filled the air with love, it didn’t matter. Nobody could quite see what Martin was trying to do with his flapping arms and stiff legs, but they could see it was joyful, and generous, and true.

🕺

Jan is dancing to the rhythm of his internal monologue. If it bears any resemblance to the music being played, it is a second-order effect as he worries along to the beat. But dancing is celebration without words, without thought, without justification or explanation. Dancing is celebration without question or doubt or an unguarded word; an unmediated expression of the joy that is supposed to be in your heart. So Jan dances.

Milena is with her grandparents for the night, the first time since she was born. That means wine and dancing and stopping out, rest and calm and early nights. It means not attending to her every need, and thinking of her every moment. It means uninterrupted adult conversations, and having nothing to talk about but the baby. It means quality time together (outside, in a private corner, while Emily cries guilty tears into Jan’s jacket). It means a strange alienation from a life Jan thought he desperately missed, which he must either acknowledge or ignore. So Jan dances.

Jan realises that he is still dancing to the last song, or possibly the song before that. He hasn’t been listening. A few feet away, Emily is dancing too, much more capably than him. Emily has always been an effortless, elegant dancer. It is as though the music moves and she just relaxes into the currents of it. You have to look into her eyes to see she knows what she is doing, for she dances there, too. But there is no dancing in her eyes tonight. When her eyes are like this, Jan knows he would have to call her name three or four times before she heard him, even without the music. And Jan knows he isn’t going to do it. So Jan dances.

It’s dance or talk.

Yes, she’s a treasure.

Ha, I remember sleep, I used to get that sometimes!

Such a beautiful wedding.

Yes, she’s OK, it’s hard but she’s tough.

I’m always saying going to work feels like a day off now! But I’d rather be at home with them.

I’d better not, got to be sensible these days.

You’ve got three, why didn’t you tell me how hard it is?!

Dance or talk, and the talking is all the same. So Jan dances.

🕺

Amol was always too self-conscious to dance in public. Not that he cared if people thought he was a bad dancer, or even if they made fun of him. The standard of his dancing was of no importance to him, and he knew that even the worst dancer looks less strange on the dance floor than being the only one still sat down. But he couldn’t shake his awareness of eyes on him: other people’s attention, layered between him and the world like patterned glass. When he danced in the shower, the music went straight from his ears to his feet, but on a dance floor every move went through his mind first, adding a fraction of a second’s delay like he was on the end of a video call, throwing him off the beat. He didn’t mind that it made him dance badly. He danced badly anyway. But dancing out of time just wasn’t fun. It felt like his attempts at learning to juggle, with the added frustration that he knew how it felt to do it properly.

‘Wild horses couldn’t drag me up there,’ he would say, and he meant it. He had no interest in doing something he didn’t enjoy just because it was supposed to be fun. But wild horses were nothing compared to Ajay, grabbing a handful of jacket in his tiny fist and pulling Amol insistently towards the dance floor. Ajay could drag him anywhere, and though he hadn’t yet learned to say ‘dance’ and struggled even with ‘baba’, it couldn’t have been clearer what he wanted.

So Amol danced, like the two of them did at home, but still aware of the other guests watching (‘So cute!’), still thinking about every step and clap, still always a little behind the beat. And Ajay danced, barely even knowing that other people could watch, but not yet in full control of his little body, still feeling it out, the music still cutting channels from ears to feet, leaving him, too, just a fraction late. And as the lights pulsed and the bass thumped, the two of them danced together, out of time with the whole room, and perfectly in sync with each other.