Dance Till You Drop

Prologue

My mother's funeral was awful. I was stuck in a room full of people who kept sending me consoling glances. I didn't want their sympathy. I wanted my mother back. They tell me that she can still see me, that she's looking after me. I'm not sure. If she's up there, she's not here, is she? She isn't there to do my hair for my dance shows, or to go through the bits of my routine that I don't understand. She hadn't always had a lot of time, and I could do my own hair, but she never failed to make me smile. She didn't miss a single one of my shows either, and I'd been doing them since I was five years old.

I still have all the pictures of me, concentrating really hard with a little frown on my pale face. Sweet costumes - a ladybug one term, an angel the next. As I get older, ladybugs become schoolgirls, angels become pirates. My last show. My solo. Up on point shoes in a pale blue dress. The customary picture before I left; without the stage makeup, you can see the nerves etched in every little worry line on my face.

My mother had been a professional. She had toured the States with various groups, soloed in London, Paris and Berlin. School got in the way of me going to most of her shows, but to see her dance was my favourite thing to do. When I was a toddler, I would get in the way of her feet until she picked me up and spun me round and round. In all the photos, I'm the happiest child in the world. Once I started dancing, I would clumsily copy her moves, and she would laugh, and show me what I was doing wrong. When I was old enough, she would teach me some of her dances, and we would do a duet, just for us.

I was never more than average, though. I could do all the dances, but I couldn't choreograph to save my life. I passed my exams, but I never got top of the class. I loved dancing, but I wasn't quite as good as everyone thought I ought to be. The great Charlotte Isaacson's daughter, they reasoned, must be just as good as her mother.

I got solos so that they could write on the programme that Rebecca Isaacson would star, but there were others whose solos' were enjoyed more.

And no matter how much I loved to dance, now that my mother was gone, it would always hurt to know that she wasn't in the audience cheering for me. My father was never going to take her place.

At 17, I was going to have to learn to love dancing again.