During the Dance

Dad stopped drinking the day my sister was born. He called her his angel, and the booze didn't take him back until she died. He came drunk to the funeral, crying and roaring, loud enough for two parents, loud enough to make up for Mam's silence. At the end, the men had to hold him back, or he'd have thrown himself in the grave. And foolish enough he'd have looked, a grown man in that narrow hole. I saw it in my mind's eye, him stuck in the grave-slot, his legs waving in the air, and a laugh ripped out of me, so fierce it hurt my throat.

"Shush, boy." Uncle Jim took my shoulder. "Quiet, Sammy."

"Shut him up." That was Aunt Grace. Fat, brutal, and red.

I couldn't stop of course. The hysteria had me, and the laughter howled through me.

Dad, and Mam, and me. We made a trio, there in our borrowed black, him cursing God for the taking of a baby, me with the laughing gas and the tears rolling down my cheeks, and Mam twisting so slow on an invisible wrack, every muscle at war with every other, and no sound escaping past her teeth.

Me-me came into the world five years after me, to the day. She arrived on the same rug, in the same room. We lived the same life, but somehow she lived it deeper and sweeter. Mam called her Martha, after Nana Robbins, and the priest at St Luke's down by Bethnal Green poured the holy water on her so that God would know her name too. I thought that was strange, because God knows everything, and because no-one called her Martha after that.

Mam called her a blessing, and her heart. Dad called her his angel. He would rock her in his arms, hour after hour, when the coals burned low in the hearth that first winter. He'd lick his finger and curl her hair into black spirals on her forehead, and she'd chuckle and reach for his hands. Somewhere along the way she named herself, in those first gurgles. Me-me.

I came back to that room after we'd buried her. The room where we slept four to the bed, and now three. I sat on the rug, gray, with a memory of some diamond pattern in the fluff above the worn hessian. We'd both arrived there, me squalling at the world, telling it off good and proper, Mam said. Me-me limp and silent so's to set Dad shouting up the stairs, is it dead? Oh Jesus! But she'd coughed, and rolled open the bluest eye.

I picked at the fluff and tried to imagine the pattern that'd been there once, a lifetime ago, woven in, bought and sold, sold again, beaten for dust in the alleys. Beaten out. Would Me-me be beaten out? She was just a pattern now. A pattern in my head. A small marker in the corner where they put the little ones. A white coffin Dad couldn't afford. She'll be cold there, under that London clay. I thought of her, alone now, in that dark box, and the tears came.

Me-me walked young, and she talked young. She brought the sun with her, into the narrow alleyways of the East End. As a child in poverty you never know that you're poor, the slums are the slums. They're home. They're what is. So I'd never felt poor. But Me-me made us feel rich. She carried smiles with her.

An older brother is supposed to be the one to delight the younger children with tales, but in our house it was Me-me who told the stories. From the moment she could talk she narrated a world I couldn't see. We'd sit on the steps out front, and watch the children barefoot in the street, and the coal-man coming with his sacks to fill the cellars of those who could pay. We'd watch the birds above, in that bright line of sky between the rooftops, we'd watch the washing on the lines, but most of all, Me-me would watch the dancers, and I would listen.

She saw them everywhere. She saw them dancing on fence-tops, along old gutters, between the pegs on the washing line. She called them the 'dancers', but then 'angels' because Mam said that was proper if she couldn't stop talking about them. Mostly she saw them out on their own, dancing one at a time. She saw a lady in white, dance on Mrs Jenning's doorstep. She said the lady had hair like glass, and a dress that sparkled like sugar. She danced there for an hour before the light failed, jumping from step to step, even though they were taller than her. And we watched, or rather Me-me, watched and clapped her hands, and I listened to her, and tried so hard to see that sometimes I imagined a sparkle from the angel's dress when she spun.