What?’ Stella wore an expression comprised of equal parts of indulgence and embarrassment, and I felt as if it was me who was the silly younger sister, out of her depths in this big grown-up conversation.
‘ Um – you know, I suppose it started with the breakdancers in, what, ’83, ’84, didn’t it? They literally used to spin on their heads, and then it came to be like an expression for what kids did in discos – ‘
Cringing, I heard the words ‘kids’ and ‘discos’ jarring discordantly around the table. I felt about eighty-five years old. I looked at Charlie, the other ‘older’ person present, for support, but he appeared to be intently counting the bubbles in his pint of poncey European lager.
‘ No,’ said Stella. ‘Nobody spins on their heads anymore.’
‘ I think I’ll just go to the loo,’ I said, standing up and cracking my knee against the edge of the coffee table. ‘Excuse me.’
More than anything, when I was fifteen, I wanted to be able to breakdance. I used to beg Mum to let me rip up the lino in the kitchen so I could carry it around with me in an unwieldy roll, ready to lay down on any sort of surface and do my stuff. I could do a passable back spin, but the first time I tried a swan-dive, where you dived on your front and then slid back up as if nothing had happened – it had been a disaster. The lino I was practising on was still attached to the kitchen floor, so there had not been a lot of available space. I’d banged my head so hard on the side of the fridge that I nearly knocked myself out.
So my breakdancing skills were never honed enough for public display – and I’d have been far too shy to perform, anyway - but it was around that time I began to teach Stella some of the disco moves we later evolved into our own dance routines. I realised that I missed going dancing with Stella.
When I emerged reluctantly from the Ladies’ again, I saw from across the bar that Stella was holding court, talking animatedly, more than half-drunk, waving her slender hands with their heavy silver rings in the air and then momentarily stilling them while she pulled out a cigarette from the pack on the table in front of her. Her hair looked incredible loose around her shoulders, its artfully snaky blonde waves like a sculpted Pre-Raphaelite.
Suddenly, everyone round the table, except Stella, who was still occupied with her smoke, raised their heads and watched me come towards them. Through some strange and unpropitious coincidence all the conversations at the other tables around them abruptly dropped in volume, allowing me to hear Stella's words quite clearly, despite the cigarette flapping between her lips as she held a lit match to it:
'.......well, she’s not my real sister, she's adopted. Oh, and guess what, she plays the recorder! And when she was a kid, her best friend was a gorilla called Betsey!'
It seemed to me, approaching as if in slow motion, my cheeks flaming, that the whole bar turned to see who this strange, adopted, monkey-loving recorder-playing weirdo was. The lack of reciprocal laughter from her friends alerted Stella to the fact that she'd been rumbled, and she leaped up awkwardly as I got back to the table.
'I was just telling them about Betsey, Em. It's such a cool story.'
Through her sugary-liquor flush, Stella's face turned peaky and anxious as she watched me gather up my coat and bag from the depths of the leather sofa.
'Nice to meet you all,' I said, putting one arm into the sleeve of my coat, 'but I've got to go now.' Stella rushed to help me with the other arm, but I violently shrugged her off. I turned to leave, then turned back to the sheepish-looking group of students. 'Oh, and by the way, Betsey wasn't a gorilla. She was an orang-utan.'
I didn’t know why Stella had said Betsey was a gorilla. Our mother had been a zoologist who spent years working on a PhD on the behavioural patterns of orang-utans - not gorillas, or chimps, or baboons;
‘ Um – you know, I suppose it started with the breakdancers in, what, ’83, ’84, didn’t it? They literally used to spin on their heads, and then it came to be like an expression for what kids did in discos – ‘
Cringing, I heard the words ‘kids’ and ‘discos’ jarring discordantly around the table. I felt about eighty-five years old. I looked at Charlie, the other ‘older’ person present, for support, but he appeared to be intently counting the bubbles in his pint of poncey European lager.
‘ No,’ said Stella. ‘Nobody spins on their heads anymore.’
‘ I think I’ll just go to the loo,’ I said, standing up and cracking my knee against the edge of the coffee table. ‘Excuse me.’
More than anything, when I was fifteen, I wanted to be able to breakdance. I used to beg Mum to let me rip up the lino in the kitchen so I could carry it around with me in an unwieldy roll, ready to lay down on any sort of surface and do my stuff. I could do a passable back spin, but the first time I tried a swan-dive, where you dived on your front and then slid back up as if nothing had happened – it had been a disaster. The lino I was practising on was still attached to the kitchen floor, so there had not been a lot of available space. I’d banged my head so hard on the side of the fridge that I nearly knocked myself out.
So my breakdancing skills were never honed enough for public display – and I’d have been far too shy to perform, anyway - but it was around that time I began to teach Stella some of the disco moves we later evolved into our own dance routines. I realised that I missed going dancing with Stella.
When I emerged reluctantly from the Ladies’ again, I saw from across the bar that Stella was holding court, talking animatedly, more than half-drunk, waving her slender hands with their heavy silver rings in the air and then momentarily stilling them while she pulled out a cigarette from the pack on the table in front of her. Her hair looked incredible loose around her shoulders, its artfully snaky blonde waves like a sculpted Pre-Raphaelite.
Suddenly, everyone round the table, except Stella, who was still occupied with her smoke, raised their heads and watched me come towards them. Through some strange and unpropitious coincidence all the conversations at the other tables around them abruptly dropped in volume, allowing me to hear Stella's words quite clearly, despite the cigarette flapping between her lips as she held a lit match to it:
'.......well, she’s not my real sister, she's adopted. Oh, and guess what, she plays the recorder! And when she was a kid, her best friend was a gorilla called Betsey!'
It seemed to me, approaching as if in slow motion, my cheeks flaming, that the whole bar turned to see who this strange, adopted, monkey-loving recorder-playing weirdo was. The lack of reciprocal laughter from her friends alerted Stella to the fact that she'd been rumbled, and she leaped up awkwardly as I got back to the table.
'I was just telling them about Betsey, Em. It's such a cool story.'
Through her sugary-liquor flush, Stella's face turned peaky and anxious as she watched me gather up my coat and bag from the depths of the leather sofa.
'Nice to meet you all,' I said, putting one arm into the sleeve of my coat, 'but I've got to go now.' Stella rushed to help me with the other arm, but I violently shrugged her off. I turned to leave, then turned back to the sheepish-looking group of students. 'Oh, and by the way, Betsey wasn't a gorilla. She was an orang-utan.'
I didn’t know why Stella had said Betsey was a gorilla. Our mother had been a zoologist who spent years working on a PhD on the behavioural patterns of orang-utans - not gorillas, or chimps, or baboons;
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