Tigers on the Beach by Doug MacLeod Page B

has been thinking about me a lot and that she has missed me. Instead she gives me the address of an elderly people’s home.
    When I ask Dad if I can take the afternoon off, he tells me that if the guests keep leaving, we can
all
take the afternoon off. Twenty silver-haired ladies and two bald men sit on plastic chairs, awaiting their afternoon’s concert. The Park Lake nursing home is about to be entertained by
Il Gattopardo Pazzo
. The five musicians sit at their music stands on a small stage. Sam waves to me, the only person in the audience who is under eighty. I give her a little wave back. Sam’s tights are blue. I think I like these even more than the red and black ones, and
definitely
more than the green ones. I’m certainly getting to know my tights. As the musicians tune their instruments, the little old lady seated next to me asks who I was waving at. I tell her it’s Sam. The lady asks me if Sam is a boy and if I am gay. She must see my look of surprise because she immediately tells me she has a gay grandson and she likes him the best of all her grandchildren. He comes to visit more than all the others. Mind you, all the others are in juvenile detention, so that figures. I tell the lady that I’m reasonably sure I’m not gay although I think my little brother is, and that Sam is actually short for Samantha, the beautiful red-haired girl on the stage. The lady tells me that Samantha is a beautiful name. She adds that her own name is Ethel. I tell her that’s a beautiful name too, and she chuckles, shaking her head.
    â€˜It’s bloody awful. It makes me sound like a chemical,’ she says. ‘Why do so many old ladies have such flipping horrible names? We sound like minerals or nasty organs of the human body.’
    I tell Ethel that my name is Adam. She asks if I’m named after the first man in the bible. I explain that I’m named after a cowboy on a TV show. Ethel thinks this is funny. She says that if
she
could be named after a character in a TV show she’d like to be called Flipper, after the famous dolphin. Ethel may be a bit crazy, but I like her.
    Their tuning done,
Il Gattopardo Pazzo
starts its first number, ‘The Entrance of the Queen of Sheba’. Ethel taps her foot and nods happily. Sam looks fantastic as she plays her shiny silver flute, even though it dribbles from time to time. The Queen of Sheba takes quite a long time to enter, and some ladies nod off. But they wake up when everyone claps. I ask Ethel how she knows the tune so well. She tells me that she was around when it was written, two hundred years ago. And she chuckles again.
    â€˜Turkey in the Straw’ is next. It goes over better than ‘The Queen of Sheba’. Rico the ensemble leader says the audience can get up and dance if they like. Ethel wants me to dance with her, to make all the other ladies jealous, especially Agnes, whom she hates. She forces me to my feet. There’s a thirty-centimetre height difference between us.
    â€˜Relax and follow me,’ she says.
    Ethel reaches up and places her left hand on my right shoulder. She places my right hand on her left shoulder. We then clasp together our other hands and hold them out, rocking to and fro.
    â€˜You’re doing very well,’ she says.
    â€˜I feel a bit embarrassed.’
    â€˜Don’t.’
    Other couples join in. There is laughter as a lady tries to get a male orderly to dance with her. The ladies encourage him and he finally gets to his feet. It’s as if the ladies have turned into children. They’re as happy as can be, dancing to ‘Turkey in the Straw’, even though crutches sometimes get in the way. The music finishes and we return to our seats. I see Sam smiling at me.
    The next tune is J. S. Bach’s ‘Air on the G String’
.
It makes me realise that J. S. Bach is a genius, even if he’s lousy at naming his tunes. It’s a sweet, sad melody. The mood in