Clacton Collaboration (1)

GOSH, LILLEY, THEY’RE PLAYING OUR TUNE

by Clacton Writers' Group (July 2008)

 
“Gosh, Lilley, they’re playing our tune.”

The dance hall had been empty until late evening, but now a few people struggled through the door having just left the pub down the road.  The echoey spaces towards the inner-roof were only half-revealed by the slow onset of a giant ball’s twirling glitters.  The walls’ shoddy decor was barely visible, too ... the hall’s internal dimness serving two purposes: cosmetic disguise and electric thrift.

The first piece from the makeshift loudspeakers had elicited an old man’s recognition of various harmonies morphing into a tune.  He moved towards the centre of the deserted floor, like a clumsy sailor on board a storm-tossed ship, Lilley in his wake, tugging her hand as she, perhaps reluctantly, submitted herself to the music.  Alone together in the dance.

Other couples remained shrunk back into the dimness that still hugged the walls. A ghostly audience for Lilley and the man, who had by now miraculously transformed into the spinning vision of youth and romantic memory.  The dancing couple had truly become earlier versions of themselves or they were simply a mirage of youth that the others saw from the side-lines of the hall – stimulated by a drunken nostalgia for old dreams.

But someone must have clicked a light-switch by clumsily leaning against it.  The whole hall sprung into bright light, revealing all the blemishes and insecurities of reality.  Lilley and her man were seen to be exactly what they were: old people on their last legs.

Then the door from the outside suddenly opened.  More dancers?  But, no, there appeared a complete stranger.  The main light had been quickly switched off again, so it was difficult to make out the shape of the stranger between the sharp speckles showering down from the shuttling kaleidoscope that the glitter-ball cut loose.

Lilley, looking over her partner’s shoulder, gave a sharp gasp.  A full stop seemed to have entered the room.  Her tune had stalled along with the dancing.

“Remember me?” a gravelly voice was heard.  All the couples had their heads turned towards him as if an audience watching a play.

“Well I don’t know you but Lilley obviously does.  How dare you ruin our tune!” Lilley’s man was furious.  His creased face had suddenly taken on a pink hue.  His nostalgic dream finished.

The figure drew closer and the other couples stayed in the shadows.  The man – who was not the complete stranger they had first thought he was – stood directly under the glitter-ball now. It flickered over his shiny head as he reached out some gnarled fingers towards Lilley’s soft face.  She was still frozen in shock and didn’t wince when he stroked her cheek.

“You must remember me.  The tune that was playing when I walked in, I recognised it Lilley.”

A tear slid down and dropped onto her pastel green dress, leaving a little blotch.

“Who is he, Lilley? Tell me!” said the man who had led her on to the floor.

“I can’t,” she replied softly, sending more droplets downward upon her dress.

“How does he know our tune? Answer me!”  Her man was obviously furious.

“It’s not your tune at all,” the so-called stranger smiled triumphantly.  He had on a long coat and it made him look very tall, like if you looked beneath he might be on stilts.

“Why come here and spoil everything?” Lilley’s blue eyes grew wide, her long grey hair vibrating with the quivering head.

“What was there to spoil?”  The smile had slipped. 

“I’ve had enough of this, one of you must tell me what’s going on.” Her dancing partner looked in total despair and confusion at the turn of events.

Lilley and her new partner remained silent; indeed the whole hall remained silent, with the tableaux of three frozen under the glitter-ball.

Someone behind the scenes looked up from their newspaper, took another sip of hot, dark-brown tea, and restarted the music.

“Gosh, Lilley,” both male protagonists chorused, “they’re playing our tune.”

In the reflected, glittering light, the dust motes danced and danced, more furiously with each movement of the dancers.  Lilley, unable to choose, stepped toward, then away, from each prospective partner as though dancing a solo hokey-cokey,  With each movement the dust motes gathered, until they coalesced into another human form – an old man, short and fat, with a jacket too short for him and trousers that preferred not to go anywhere near his shoes.

“Gosh, Lilley, they’re tuning our play,” he squeaked.

Lilley’s hand shot to cover her mouth.

“Oh, my God!  Not you!  Surely not you?”

“Lost, Gilly, they’re mooning our day,” said a one-armed figure appearing from behind the original man.

“Wash, Milly, where neighing our dune.”

“Dosh, Filly, dare weighing flower loon.”

“Cosh, Willey, flare saying dour coon.”

Figures appeared, and kept appearing amid a babble of voices.  Lilley kept looking around, occasionally saying things like “Jack!” or “Bill,” or “No, not Neville.”

Soon the shadows at the outer reaches of the hall were themselves pushed into ever deeper and deeper shadows, as Lilley’s erstwhile partners took their places.

“Hey, what’s going on here?”  The man who had accompanied Lilley to the dance in the first place wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” Lilley wailed.  “I don’t.  Sodding.  Know.”  Her eyes were wide as breakfast plates, fear and confusion evident in them.  Incomplete dust-mote figures swirled round her and she ticked off their names as she spotted them.  Bill, with one arm; Neville – he was missing an eye; Jack, with six fingers on one hand and none on the other; Samuel – half his right leg was missing; Derek, minus his right ear; Herbert, who looked complete but was probably missing a vital bit of his anatomy somewhere, and Joe, the original one-armed man.  Oh, and Uncle Thomas.  Lilley barely remembered him; he was a shadowy figure from her childhood, kept alive by photographs that had been placed prominently in every house she had lived in when she was young.

They were all men that Lilley had known.  All, in fact, men that Lilley had danced with, and not only danced with, but danced to the very tune that had been playing when they appeared – Glenn Miller’s In The Mood. 

Sadly, apart from Lilley’s original partner of the evening, there were all also men who had been killed; Uncle Thomas, who Lilley couldn’t actually remember dancing with, had probably twirled her around in his arms at some point before going off to war and being shot down over the ocean.  His body had never been recovered.  Bill had been a family friend, considerably older than her, who had taken her to her first dance when she was 14.  He’d died in Korea.  Neville, Sam and Derek had been mates.  She’d been passed round each of them in turn one hot summer’s night on the beach.  Later they’d wound up the gramophone and she’d danced with each of them to the only record they possessed – In the Mood.  They were all drunk by the time they dropped her off at the end of the street where she lived.  The boys had never made it home. Their car had wrapped itself round a lamp-post and Sam and Derek had been pronounced dead at the scene.  Neville was still alive when they took him to hospital but, despite copious amounts of blood being pumped into his body, he was dead before morning.  Jack and Joe had both left Lilley a widow.  Jack had been killed while serving in Northern Ireland, and Joe had died of cancer couple of years ago.

Lilley looked from one set of eyes to the next and the next and the next.  For her, each pair held a memory that she had cherished for so long that it made her want to call out with joy....  

...until she remembered the other memories that she associated with each of these men.  Memories that she had spent most of her adult life trying, and, until now, succeeding to repress.  She looked into the eyes of each of her dancing partners and wondered of which of their shared memories they had come to remind her. 

Blue, brown, hazel, green – between them they had every conceivable eye colour.  Yet not one pair of these eyes had been the colour of true love. 

“Lilley,” her partner of the night said softly as he reached out and touched her arm, “shall we …?”  He left the sentence unsaid.  He didn’t want to complete it in case he got it wrong.  She may want to go home.  In that case he would drive her.  And should she wish to stay and dance, then he’d make sure that he alone would partner her.  

Frozen in time Lilley wondered what to do.  Somehow she knew that she would have to dance with all her partners; real and ghostly.  Why else would they have turned up here?  She also knew, with a certainty that scared her that she would have to dance with them to this tune.  She couldn’t.  No she wouldn’t ask the band to play it nine times.  And she wouldn’t ask any of them to make such an unreasonable request on her behalf.  Or was it on their behalf?  She really didn’t know any more.

“Why are you here?” she asked, afraid of the answer yet determined to stall for time.

The nine spectral figures circled around her. “You know why we are here Lilley,” they all said in unison. Yes, she knew. They were all here for retribution. They were all here to dance the dance of death with her, and to escort her into that other world into which she had sent them with her curses when they had been alive.

Lilley paled. The hell of her own making loomed. Bill was first. He danced her round the room.

“Hey baby it’s a quarter to three.”

She was handed over to Herbert.

“Baby wont you swing it with me?” He swung her around faster. Then on to Jack.

“Darlin’, may I intrude?” Faster and faster he twirled her. She was feeling giddy. One by one they took her round the hall, moving quicker and quicker until she felt herself collapsing on the floor to the final strain of “Don’t keep us waiting whilst we’re in the mood!”

In the silence that followed, Lilley felt herself drifting towards the ceiling. The glitter-ball beckoned her ... she clung to it like death. Below, she could make out her other self lying on the floor, face down. The men as one stared up at her. Their beautiful eyes glowed in the darkness. She sang, “So who’s the lovely daddy with the beautiful eyes?”

The glitter-ball started to twirl her round in another mad dance. The figures below became hazy. “In the mood,” they shouted. “In the mood, in the mood, win the dude, bin the lewd, spin the brood, fin the snood, tin the food.”

Their voices became fainter as Lilley was swivelled away to the hell of eternity where none of her curses could save her.

Gosh Lilley that was some tune!