Dancing Backwards Read Online Free Page B

One of the tyres had burst, near a trattoria run by the driver’s cousin. While the driver had been hard at it changing the burst tyre, the party had enjoyed a long lunch. They were having their fortunes told in the coffee grounds by the driver’s cousin’s wife, when young Trisha Claybourne took a glass of wine out to the toiling driver who had just completed his task. He had expressed gratitude for the wine in the discreet interior of his coach.
    Trisha, who was slightly built, had not recognised the consequence of this encounter, and for a while had assumed that she was annoyingly putting on weight. By the time the penny dropped, there was no remedying the situation. Nor was it possible to track down the coach driver. Trisha didn’t even know his name. When pressed she thought it might have been Dino but she wasn’t sure.
    Des grew up calling his mother ‘Aunty’, her brother ‘Uncle Steve’, and his grandparents ‘Mum and Dad’. His grandmother loved him with a passion. Her first child, Melanie, had committed suicide. It was not something she ever discussed with her husband, and for Trisha and Steve, who came later, her anxiety was so great that it paralysed the full expression of her feeling for her own offspring. It was she who, noticing that her little ‘son’ had a natural sense of rhythm and an ear for music, decided that he should learn to dance.
    Children have a way of feeling the reality of any situation and long before the truth of his parentage was made known to him Des felt out of place among the Claybournes. Only at Miss Butler’s school did he not seem to feel a fish out of water. He began to win medals at competitions and passed all his dance exams as expertly as he failed his school ones.
    He was seventeen when he decided to leave home and, perhaps because she was the person he was least close to, it was to his Aunty Trish that he confided his plan. ‘I’m going to work in a night club in Rome—don’t tell Mum yet!
    Trisha had given a yelp of laughter and said, ‘That’s all right. Anyway, I’m your mum. What you think’s your “Mum” is your grandma. Did you never guess?’
    He hadn’t guessed. And now there was no one to whom he could confess that the news made him cry.
    Aunty Trish, who had so confusingly turned out to be Des’smother, went on to tell him about his father. Des had taken this as a chance to change his name. On the basis of his mother’s, now even hazier, recollection of the coach driver, Des became ‘Dino’ and with the change of name went, as is often the way, a change in character.
    He picked up Italian easily and became quite extroverted, even a bit of a flirt. In Rome, he found a dance partner, Sam, a determined brunette from Bradford, and for a while they performed a dance double act round the clubs. But Sam nursed ambitions to settle down. She finally ran off with a Roman priest who had left the Church over the loss of the Latin Mass.
    Without Sam’s purposeful character to drive him, Des drifted, making a living with seasonal hotel work, where his manner made him popular. One slack evening, chatting to a customer, he learned about crewing on the ships.
    ‘It’s a great deal,’ his confidante told him, ‘everything found, food, accommodation, the lot. And the best thing is if you’re out of the country for a year you pay no tax. I’ve saved up the deposit for a flat.’
    Des wrote to several shipping lines’ offices asking about bar work. His handwriting was neat and his bar references correct if not enthusiastic. In the end, it was his dancing accomplishments which landed him a job.
    ‘There are rules, mind.’ The well-groomed woman who interviewed him spoke with tired authority. ‘The passengers—we call them “guests”—will want you to sleep with them. If you do, and we find out, you are put off the ship at the next port.’
    ‘What age are the “guests” then mainly?’
    The woman looked at Des as if there were no depths of