DANCING TOO FAST TO DEAN MARTIN

It had left her with a heart murmur, that single room with no heating or hot water in a damp, crumbling tenement they’d forgotten to demolish, but she made herself look respectable before venturing out with her carrier bag of old Dean Martin LPs to the spot where she knew the traffic ground to a halt. The Dean Martin albums were the last she had left and the last she wanted to sell, as his was the music that had kept them both alive all those years ago when her and Robin had deliberately danced too fast to both sides of each entire album. It made them both warm, and it made them laugh until they were gasping for breath, and it made them forget their hunger, and it made them love each other more than two people ever had – she knew that for certain, even more now she was on her own. She watched the courtship ritual of the two windscreen wipers as they followed each other devotedly across the glass, from side to side, from side to side. She’d got one of the albums out of the bag and held it up but the driver wouldn’t even talk to her, just turned a fixed stare straight ahead at the road. She moved her bags into her other hand leaving her right hand free to reach around to grab one of the wipers and wrench it off. “Now you can see what it’s like,” she shouted at the driver, before walking proudly back to her building, and up all those stairs to her room, where once again, despite her broken heart, or perhaps because of it, she would dance too fast to Dean Martin, until she couldn’t dance any more.