things from side to side, rotating our ankles and stretching our lower leg muscles.
I’m going to do it, I thought to myself as I glued my eyes to Miss Mimi’s feet and attempted to replicate everything she did. It was humiliating to be the only person getting everything wrong. I was standing out like a sore thumb. This time, I’m going to get one step right, even if it kills me.
I was fine in the early parts of the class, where we built up small step combinations, because we’d go through everything slowly first. I could just about keep up then, as long as I made sure my brain was whirring furiously, but once Miss Mimi put the music on and we did it double time, all I could do was at least try to travel in the right direction and match the rhythm of the others’ steps, and once we started travelling from the corner I got hopelessly lost. I just tried to hang at the back as much as possible, wishing fervently that I really did have the power to make myself invisible. The whole exercise would have been a whole lot less embarrassing if I could.
‘Don’t sweat it,’ Donna said in a low voice from beside me after yet another failed attempt at some shuffle-hop thing. ‘It’ll come if you let it. The key is to not think too hard about it.’
I nodded, even though I had no idea what Donna meant. How could I stop thinking? If I didn’t even try I’d make an even bigger idiot of myself than I already was.
We moved to the corner again to do riffs. Miss Mimi let me do the easiest kind, with only four beats, but even then I was always half a breath behind.
Why was this so hard? Dancing had once been so easy for me. It had given me a joy and sense of self that nothing else had. I drifted off, even as I was trying to do the steps—it didn’t matter, really, because I was going to get them wrong no matter how hard I tried—and remembered what it had once felt like to just lose myself in the movement, to be so consumed with it I’d entered a different place, lived entirely in the moment.
And then something really weird happened. Suddenly I was doing it—heel-toe, toe-heel—rhythmic and easy as that, for a few seconds anyway, and then as I tried to work out how I’d managed it, I lost it again.
I didn’t care. I done five riffs. Five! I jogged over to where Donna was waiting in line, feeling as if I was flying. Stupid, I know. It was only a tap step, and a pretty easy one at that, but my hope had swelled in that instant, like an inflatable dinghy whose cord had been pulled. This was the first thing that had gone right for me on a personal level in a long time, and if New Pippa could actually learn to tap dance, there might be no limits to what she could do.
Donna grinned back at me when I reached the other side and held her hand up for a high five. I looked at it for a couple of seconds then gave it a gentle tap with my fingers.
‘Told you,’ she said, smiling. ‘Don’t you worry. We’ll make a Ginger Rogers of you yet.’
It took two whole months to get the office straight. By mid-March the piles of paper were gone, sorted into files, shredded or archived, the office had been dusted and hoovered and I’d taken the ancient computer to the tip and had transferred all the dance school files on to my laptop.
‘Oh, it’s wonderful!’ Miss Mimi said, when I finally showed her the fully sorted office. She’d looked so overjoyed that I thought she might burst into a song-and-dance routine. She didn’t, but it made me wonder what it would be like to be that sort of person, to have those all-consuming emotions that took you to the dizzy heights of the rollercoaster but also down into its depths. It was an artistic thing, maybe. Ed had been like that too, his dark moods black and impenetrable, his excitement heady and infectious. In comparison, I’d always wondered if my emotions were too small. Stunted.
I’d continued to go along to the Friday night tap class, and I definitely wasn’t as hopeless as when I’d first started. I was picking up the steps bit by bit, even managing some of the longer combinations and routines. I was pleased with my progress, but disappointed too. I got enjoyment from it, but more the kind of pleasure you get from solving a challenging puzzle than that wonderful sense of freedom I’d had when I was younger. It seemed I’d forgotten how to enjoy that too.
The only time I got anywhere close to experiencing something dramatic on an emotional level was on the days Lucy had her lessons and I knew I might see Tom, then my pulse would skip into overdrive and I’d start feeling all restless. It was pathetic how often I discovered something urgent to put on the noticeboard just as her classes finished. She was terribly scatty, so at least twice a week Tom had to march her back inside because she’d forgotten a cardigan or her school bag, or because she’d arrived at the car with only one ballet shoe. We’d nod our greeting at each other, then I’d return to my desk, face flushed, and try to concentrate on Miss Mimi’s accounts.
It was stupid, I knew. A total waste of time. If Tom hadn’t found the younger, prettier, thinner version of me appealing, there was very little hope of him being interested in the present-day Pippa. Besides, we were both on the tail end of a divorce. Even if something did happen, it would probably only be a rebound fling, and that would be even worse. I’d rather not have him at all than be the mistake he’d rather forget.
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