Ice Dancing Episode 8

Mum was right. Most of the people in my class – well the handful who were going on to university – were taking up places at Glasgow or Strathclyde or Paisley. But I had my sights firmly set on the capital and I wasn’t about to change my mind. I can remember those feelings of intense expectation and nervousness, all mixed up together.

I can remember mum and dad driving me over to Edinburgh for Freshers’ Week, with all my stuff heaped into their old car in suitcases and boxes. I can remember my first sight of the castle, and the sphinx-like shape of Arthur’s Seat, giants eyeing each other across the city.

Sense of anticipation

I had a place in a hall of residence. My room was small and warm with a view of Salisbury Crags. My parents hugged me and mum looked as if she might be going to cry. I was trying hard to keep my tears inside but after much prevarication they left, and I made for the kitchen, feeling a bit desolate.

We made coffee and then later, somebody opened a bottle of wine. The air was alive with our shared sense of anticipation. And I remember thinking: “This is it. This is where it all starts for me.” Anything seemed possible.

It was in the autumn term of my second year, not long before my nineteenth birthday, that the phone call came. Dad was in hospital.

He had had a massive stroke, dropping down suddenly and without warning in the middle of the shop. I caught the next train home and went straight to the hospital, but he never fully regained consciousness.

Mum and I sat beside his bed and I held his hand. After a while, he squeezed it, just one little squeeze, and I never knew whether it meant sorry or I love you or just goodbye or all of those things wrapped into one. And then he died.

I wondered why his eyes wouldn’t close properly. I didn’t realise he was dead until the nurses came. For a long time I felt as though somebody had kicked me, a hard blow right in the middle of my body, a punch that sent me reeling, gasping for air. But alongside my own grief came the realisation that mum couldn’t manage.

She had never lived alone. She had married young, and dad had seldom travelled anywhere without her, so her own company alarmed her, threw her into a panic.

After Christmas, that first dreadful Christmas without dad, I knew I should be thinking about going back to university. My friends kept phoning me up to tell me so, and so did my Director of Studies.

Eventually, I travelled to Edinburgh to see him, and when he suggested that I take a year out, I agreed. We both thought it would be best. Mum would adjust and I could make a fresh start the following autumn. So I packed my bags again, and somebody else’s dad gave me a lift home. I helped out in the shop of course. “That’s nice for your mum,” said the people in the village. “She needs you at a time like this. How is she doing?”

They would always ask that. Never, “How are you doing?”

Even if they had asked me, I would probably have told them I was fine. But I wasn’t really. I was struggling.

Sometimes they would tell me, “You’re doing a great job there, Helen,” when I handed them their morning papers or weighed out their cheese.

“Are you going back?” they would ask, and I would always say, “Oh yes. That’s the plan.”

I could see that some of them wondered why I needed a university degree in a useless subject like history when here I was, nicely established in what I’m sure they called “that little goldmine of a business”.

Bored and sad

After all, they were thinking, what good was history when it came to finding a job? A job was the main thing in the village. Money. Security. Settling down. Especially for women.

This was twenty years ago, of course, and it’s different now. Although sometimes when I look at the young mums in the pub after line dancing, I wonder how different it really is.

I read a lot. I read all my set texts and did a lot of work on my own. I meant to go back to Edinburgh and finish my degree. Except that during my year off and while my mother and I were missing my dad, I also started going out with Sandy Breckenridge. I was bored and sad and he was interested in me. It seemed exciting.

He was seen as a bit of a catch within the very small world that was the village. He would have been twenty six then, a big, attractive lad and still unmarried.

“Time Sandy Breckenridge found himself wife.”

That’s what the old ones were saying, the ones who stayed in the shop for half an hour at a time, talking to my mother, commiserating with her, widows themselves.

In February, I went to the bowling club dance in the village hall and the music was very loud, to make up for the fact that the band couldn’t play or sing all that well.

Sandy was good looking in a thickset, sexy and old fashioned way, like a forties film star. He came over and asked me to dance and he kept treading on my toes but I didn’t mind because I couldn’t dance very well either. I could do the waltz and the Scottish dances we had learned at school: the Gay Gordons, Strip the Willow and the Drops of Brandy. Sandy seemed very grown up, mature and confident.

But then I was only nineteen. What did I know? Of course he was confident. This was his time and place.

He asked me to the cinema a couple of times, and then we started going out regularly. I was bored out of my skull with working in the shop but I was also in mourning for my father and, now that I think about it, for my time in Edinburgh.

Sandy made up for it somehow, gave me something else to think about, a space in my mind that could be filled with thoughts of this man who made me laugh. We went to the cinema in town and we used to go to a Chinese restaurant afterwards, but Sandy would only ever have steak and chips.

He said he didn’t like foreign food, but he’s never tried it yet, so far as I know.

I was bored and sad and he was interested in me. It seemed exciting. He was a bit of a catch within the very small world...

Ice Dancing by Catherine Czerkawska, Dyrock Publishing, £9.99 and Kindle E-reader from £2.99. For more of her books, including The Posy Ring and A Proper Person To Be Detained, see www. saraband.net.