back of her head so the ends trailed from under her cloud of silvery grey hair. I reckoned if you squinted hard and imagined Mimi fifty years younger, she might just pass for Jean Harlow.
Everyone scooted into line, the confident ones—Amanda, Nancy, Dolly and Victoria—in the front, which left me, Ruth (who’d arrived so silently I hadn’t even heard her) and Donna in the back. If there was one thing I remembered about Miss Mimi’s classes, whatever the dance style, it was that she liked everyone present and correct when it was time to start.
‘Right, warm-up!’ she called and we started off using toes and heel to tap simple steps, doing little travelling 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.’
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