Dance Move – Wendy Erskine

Irish writer Wendy Erskine’s first collection of stories, Sweet Home, received widespread acclaim and featured on many prize lists. I haven’t read it yet, but decided to begin instead with her latest and newest collection first, the deliciously titled Dance Move, and what a superb piece of work it turned out to be.

Dance Move is a wonderful collection of short stories set mostly in Belfast; eleven tales of ordinary lives written with warmth, compassion and Erskine’s keen insight into human nature.

Typically, when we talk about short story collections, there are always some stories which really stand out, while some others fade away from the memory quickly. What’s great about Dance Move though is that there’s something memorable about each of the stories, although I do have my favourites and those are the ones I will focus on here.

In the first story “Mathematics”, we are introduced to Roberta, a cleaning woman employed and trained by an agency run by Mr Dalzell. Roberta is thoroughly efficient at her job, excellent at following instructions to the tee, and is hired by Mr Dalzell when he observes her cleaning the floors at a restaurant. Her daily routine is fairly simple. She has to liaison with Gary Jameson who drives her in his van to the houses or hotel rooms she has to clean. He gives her the requisite house keys, to be returned as soon she finishes her work. If she finds items left behind by the occupants, she is free to keep them (“The drawer beside Roberta’s bed contained remnants of other people’s fun”).

But one day, Roberta’s routine is upended. On her second job, while clearing up the remnants of a house party, she opens a bedroom door to notice a school girl of about eight or nine perched on the bed. She’s patiently waiting for her mother, instructed to stay quiet in the bedroom, while her mother partied the night before, but now it’s clear that the girl has been abandoned. Roberta has no idea who her mother is or how to go about finding her, but she manages to glean the name of the school the child attends daily. Meanwhile, she takes the girl with her to her own home, but keeps Mr Dalzell and Gary Jameson in the dark about these developments. As she begins to bond with the girl, snatches of Roberta’s childhood are revealed to us, the blurry details hinting at similarities in their fate. “Mathematics”, then, is a superbly penned tale of abandonment, unlikely bonds, and how our past can define the way we live the present.

One of my favourite stories, “Cell”, is a dark, devastating tale of control, imprisonment and neglect in communal settings fuelled by shaky political activism. The story opens in the present, where the protagonist Caro (short for Caroline) is living in a one-bedroom house in Belfast, slowly patching together the torn pieces of her life; twenty-five traumatic years wasted on a lost cause.

Bit by bit, we begin to get a colour of Caro’s past. Brought up in an indifferent household, Caro, in her student days, decides to break away from the smallness of the place she grew up in, and enrolls in a university in London to study linguistics. Soon, university life disillusions her, and at some moments Caro is even homesick, but her pride prevents her from going back. It’s at a student union talk that Caro’s life takes an unfortunate turn pretty much defining how the rest of her life shapes up. There she meets Bill, who introduces her to his set of friends, a bunch of people with vaguely defined ideas of fighting causes or making a difference.

Caro had started to visit that flat every week. There were speakers, demos, papers, house resolutions, discussions and debates and at times anger. But there was also a sense of optimism and imminence.

Soon, she becomes part of the nucleus which involves Bill, Maurice, the leaders and dominant personalities in the group, Bridget and Luis. Over the next many years, Caro finds herself enmeshed in their claustrophobic world where she is relegated to the unglamorous, thankless role of housekeeping, caregiving and cooking. Whatever attempts she makes at independent thinking are quickly squashed by Bridget. A clear case of abuse, Caro submits to the wand of control wielded by Bridget and Luis, until a slew of unfortunate occurrences give Caro the release that she deserves.

“Golem” is another excellent tale of mismatched relationships, of alternate lives that could have been lived. We are introduced to Marty and Rhonda who are invited to a posh birthday party hosted for Rhonda’s cool, detached sister Eloise. Eloise and her husband Edgar are wealthy and doing well in life in a way Rhonda and Marty are not, which causes Rhonda much heartache and envy. Rhonda also has a tetchy relationship with Marty and is often embarrassed by him although Marty could not be bothered. To make matters worse, Rhonda is aggrieved that their marriage has not yielded children, while Eloise has been blessed with a daughter. The birthday party – the present – forms the focal point or the core, from which the story often makes detours into the reveries and desires of Marty, Rhonda, Eloise and Edgar – their disillusionment with how their life has evolved, and their yearning for things not meant to be.

While the little overhead vent on the plane had been blowing air in her face, Rhonda had been lying on a beach somewhere with Edgar. He had just brought her a drink in a tall glass. He rearranged the beach umbrella, and the little breeze stopped. It was endlessly sunny with Edgar and sometimes they lived in a house she had seen in an interiors magazine that belonged to a professor at Stanford; a house in Palo Alto, all greenness and beautiful wood. So warm there too. There was always golden late afternoon light when they had sex.

“His Mother” is a poignant depiction of a mother dismantling the ‘missing’ posters of her now dead son, the emotions of those days flooding her mind; while the title story “Dance Move” takes a look at generation gap underlined by the disconnect between a pushy mother and her rebellious daughter.

“Mrs Dallesandro”, a tale of unexpressed unhappiness, focuses its lens on a housewife on the day of her twenty-third wedding anniversary, who while at a tanning salon reminisces about a sexual romance in her youth. “Nostalgie” is an account of misplaced reasoning and regret where a singer is called upon by a paramilitary outfit to perform a hit song from his long forgotten music album from the distant past.

In “Bildungsroman”, a cocky young man becomes an unlikely confidante of his landlady’s dark secret which will later come back to haunt him, while “Memento Mori” is a tale of illness, death, the suddenness of both and its life-changing impact on the people left behind.

There’s a wide range of themes covered in this collection – failed relationships, abandonment, the quest for a better life, missed chances, thwarted dreams, unlikely friendships, illness, and the sense that the past can never entirely leave us. Many of the characters struggle to carve out a meaningful existence for themselves, often confronted with unexpected situations that leave an indelible impression on their minds, sometimes even offering relief from the tedium of the everyday. Lost and adrift, they are mostly ordinary people whose lives are somehow altered for the better or worse by chance encounters or events that befall them out of the blue.  Then there are some who try to make peace with their imperfect circumstances under false pretenses. For instance, Mrs Dallesandro is aware that her prosperous husband has a roving eye, but deludes herself into thinking that they are not really affairs, while Caro becomes a victim of manipulation and deceit under the false guise of making a difference.  

Erskine’s storytelling is sublime, very down-to-earth, and each story is written with such tenderness and compassion. With her sensitive portrayal of fraught lives, she understands the psyche of her characters and is able to convey multitudes in a short space in her distinct expressive style (“What happened next, remembered so many times, is burnished and glittering and perfumed”).

In a nutshell, Dance Move is a great collection, one I would whole-heartedly recommend.