Read Online Dancing in the Dark by Susan Moody - Free Book Online Page A

banners, thick as paint impasto’ed on to the page. His limbs hung loosely from his body, his hair shone, he grew two, four, six feet in the short time he was there.
    The days rolled into each other. After breakfast, he and Charlie would swim, or take a boat out to rock on the motionless water and look down at the ribbed sea-sand below. They climbed the rocky iris-scattered hills behind the house, carrying olives and figs, coarse bread, bunches of yellow grapes. Sheep bells plunked among the rocks. Eagles soared above the crags, while the sunshine soaked through the top of his skull and trickled down into the hollows and interstices of his bones. As dusk fell, sea and sky merged and became a single velvety black.
    Occasionally he’d left the others and gone in to light a candle, remembrance of things long past, thank God, sniff the familiar smells of incense and damp, kneel for a moment and let himself be transported into anonymity. When Charlie left to meet up with Carolyn in St Jean de Luz, Fergus stayed on. The heat grew. Albania shimmered on the horizon; at night they could see firelight on the hills across the water. Max Cartwright, Charlie’s father, took him out in a boat one night and they fished by the light of an oil lamp, watched the octopuses squeezing themselves through the translucent water, like beating hearts, or drifted through the night-black ocean, trailing green fire from their fingertips. Iris and asphodel springing from the bare earth, the crippled mandolinist under a tree with a voice like a bird and everywhere, the sharp smell of salt and sage.
    By now, thinks Fergus, the island has probably turned into some Blackpooled nightmare of beer bellies and chips, heavy metal thumping from café doorways, karaoke bars and fake Oirish pubs, hideous apartment buildings backing up the hillsides, Corfu concretized.
    The doorbell rings. He hears the high, excited voices of people prepared to enjoy themselves. Anticipation sparks through his blood. Maybe, this time, Caro and Charlie will be right and this Theo Cairns will have transmuted into the woman he desires in his dreams. What he would never have admitted to either of them is the extent of the isolation he feels, the increasing difficulty he has in pretending to both himself and to others that he enjoys the solitary life. His simple lack of happiness.
    If he could only recapture the effortless creativity he’d known back then in Corfu. Perhaps the possibility of going back was worth looking into. If nothing else, it would get him out of London, away from the bastards of the press, the sniggers. Wherever he went, he’d carry the ghost of Brendan with him, of course, but maybe he’d finally be able to bury him there, by the citron sea. And he might find that he could write again with the same passion and intensity he’d written that summer.
    â€˜Yes,’ he says now, aloud, under the walnut tree as the doorbell rings again, drawing in a breath, preparing to be sociable, to meet the knowing glances and whispered asides of those who read the tabloids. ‘I should go back.’

FIVE
    â€˜Y ou don’t remember me, do you?’
    He’s right. In fact, I’ve never seen him before in my life. Or have I? Now I look more closely, he is definitely familiar in a distanced kind of way. More than familiar. Is he someone famous? Was he on – God no, surely I’d remember! – one of those TV gardening programmes with me? ‘Uh . . . of course I do.’
    â€˜Caro told me you would be here,’ he continues.
    I suddenly realize what this is: a clumsy Cartwright attempt to get me off with some totally unsuitable no-hoper. Though, to be fair, as no-hopers go, this one isn’t bad looking. ‘Ah,’ I say, still trawling my memory.
    â€˜I’ve been looking forward to seeing you again.’
    Again? Where did we meet before? I register an Irish accent, one eyebrow slightly higher than the