Blind Date at a Funeral by Trevor Romain Page B

earlier. ‘Obviously I’m not in the picture but …’
    â€˜Well,’ he interrupted, shrugging his shoulders in typical French fashion, ‘then how can you be in zee picture?’

My Lonely Dancer
    (Soundtrack: ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba)
    I saw her the day I moved into the little flat.
    In fact, I saw her within the first thirty seconds of being there. My new little home, above the Spar grocery shop, was the first place I lived after leaving the wonderful nest I shared with my parents for twenty-five years.
    It was quite by chance really. I was looking out the bathroom window and I spotted her in another block of flats down the road. It was a little too far away to see her face, but I could tell she was pretty.
    It was the movement of her white dress that caught my eye when I first spotted her. She was dancing. Right there in her lounge.
    And that girl could dance. She was so uninhibited. I mean she didn’t know I was watching, but still.
    I think she danced for PACT Ballet or something, because her movement was very fluid and she was obviously a professional.
    I looked out of the window a number of times during the afternoon like a real pervert. I kept on looking, mainly because I am a typical male, but also because I have a thing for ballet dancers. And apparently, from what I can gather after a bit of self-diagnosis, I have certain voyeuristic tendencies to boot.
    At that stage in my life, I hadn’t figured out that I needed glasses for seeing at a distance and I thought everybody saw the world through a sheer silk cloth like I did. So I couldn’t quite make out if she was as attractive as I thought she was.
    I went to my parents’ place for dinner later that afternoon. (Yes, I still went home for dinner with my folks, even though I lived in my own place. You did too, right?) While I was at my folks’ house, I looked through some of my old stuff and found exactly what I was looking for. My grandpa’s antique Boer War telescope. It was a small device wrapped in leather and it extended out to about a foot long.
    It would do the trick.
    I drove back to my flat, accompanied by a typical Transvaal storm, which was hammering Johannesburg with thunder and lightning.
    I got home and – yes, you guessed it – I went straight to the window with the telescope to check out my lonely dancer.
    She must have been inspired by the thunder and lightning because she was dancing across that floor, back and forth, like a woman possessed. Actually, she danced with such passion, it looked like she might rip herself apart.
    I put the telescope to my eye.
    I held my breath.
    I closed one eye and tried to focus on her. All I saw was a blur of white. The telescope was so old it was almost impossible to focus.
    I could hear a symphony in my head and everything was happening in slow motion as she slowly came into focus.
    Now I saw her clearly. I looked up from the telescope, shaking my head in disbelief.
    I could not believe my eyes.
    Then I bent down and looked at her again.
    The girl was not a dancer, although her moves were so incredibly balletlike. She was a white lace curtain, dancing in the Transvaal breeze.

Never My Idea
    (Soundtrack: ‘The Dambusters March’ by Jethro Tull)
    How come, when I was young, it always seemed like someone else’s idea that got me into trouble?
    And how come, when I was a kid, the word ‘consequences’ had no meaning just before some extremely dangerous, dumb, downright stupid fun was about to be had?
    And how come we were scared of getting into trouble with our parents for doing something wrong, but we still did it anyway? Just for the hell of it.
    Things like playing tok-tokkie, making bombs out of HTH and chlorine, putting firecrackers in the fishpond, jamming potatoes in the next-door neighbour’s exhaust pipe, creating home-made foefie slides and exploring caves created by erosion on mine dumps, even though mine dumps were