Dancing in the Dark

Norbert

Chapter 45

Dancing in the Dark

Nunky, with his tall debonair looks, has become a widow magnet at the afternoon tea dances at the Palais. One particular woman, Violet Sniffling-Onions, has boldly asked him to be her partner at the extremely popular fortnightly evening social dances, held every Saturday. (The logic behind this is simple. If dances are advertised as weekly, too many people attend. Advertising them as fortnightly, people only turn up on alternate Saturdays. So there are two manageable groups.)

The dance teachers, Mr and Mrs Doethe-Fandango, have become protective of Nunky and advised him to come as a foursome, as the dowager Mrs Sniffling-Onions is on her uppers and on the lookout for husband number four. (The previous three coincidentally drove their cars over the 300 foot sea cliff at Macarbrough Point, which is interestingly nearly a mile from the main road.) Nunky therefore asks me to find a dance partner and accompany him.

‘I’m hopeless,’ I answer, ‘but I am receiving lessons at work.’

Potty Dotty is therefore my partner. Just to make sure she understands, Vera and Mandy offer to dress her and drive her to the Palais.

Nunky and I are wearing proper suits, and his hair and my balding scalp are plastered with aromatic pomade. Even though it is raining hard, we get off the bus a stop early to call at the petrol station to buy flowers. Being a regular, Nunky gets them half-price. (Flowers were Randy Mandy’s suggestion. She said that in her day a lady was more likely to accompany you round the back of the Palais for a kneetrembler if you bought her some flowers. She said it always worked with her. Foultongue said that Mandy was no lady and spent more time behind the Palais than in it.) I personally see no point whatsoever in taking a lady behind the Palais and rolling my trouser legs up in the pouring rain until it gets so cold my knees tremble, but Mandy insisted that a kneetrembler would do both me and Dotty the world of good.

Dotty is waiting for us under the awning outside the entrance with two plastic ties in her hand.

I hand her my bunch of flowers. ‘Hello Dotty.’

She bites the head off a tulip, chews for second, spits it out and says: ‘Dance.’

‘This is my uncle.’

‘Call me Nunky,’ he says, offering his hand.

‘Pull my finger.’

We leave our overcoats with the cloakroom attendant (who is probably related to the Queen, because she is wearing a sequined dress and tiara).

‘You’re a dish, honey,’ she says to Nunky, ‘and if you play your cards right, I will happily accompany you round the back for a kneetrembler.’

‘Tickle,’ I say to Nunky. ‘We’ve come on the wrong night. It must be a whist drive.’

The woman in the tiara blows Nunky a kiss and warns him to stay away from the black widows.

We meet Violet inside. She, like the majority of the women, is also wearing a sequined dress. She lowers the bottle of Pimms she is necking, presses herself against Nunky and kisses him on both cheeks.

‘What happened to your hair?’ he enquires.

‘It’s a beehive. Do you like it?’

I am now totally confused. Which is it, the beekeepers’ annual ball, a whist drive, an illustrated talk on spiders, or a normal dance night? The woman in the tiara mentioned a dish of honey, but I can’t see any on the refreshments table, there is nothing buzzing round Violet’s head, no screen and projector and it is too dark to play cards.

‘I got you some flowers,’ says Nunky. ‘Your bees can pollinate them.’

She plants them in a half empty noggin of lager, much to the annoyance of the bloke holding it.

‘Shall I get a round of drinks?’ I ask.

‘Alcohol makes me uncontrollably randy,’ says Mrs Sniffling-Onions. ‘I’ll just have a triple vodka on the rocks, please.’

‘It’s a long walk to the beach. Wouldn’t you prefer to drink it in here?’

‘Mine’s a noggin,’ says Nunky.

‘I suppose you want me to pull your finger?’ I say to Dotty.

‘Pull me a noggin of industrial strength cider first.’

So she can talk.

We secure a table on the edge of the springy wooden dance floor. An aging disc jockey in a purple lamé suit, frilly-fronted yellow shirt, bow tie and orange cummerbund hobbles on to the stage. He straightens his teddy-boy wig and with shaking fingers places the stylus of a record player arm onto a disc. This must be plugged into an amplifier, because the hiss and crackle of static echoes round the hall. An orchestrated foxtrot begins to play. The dim lights immediately go out to be replaced by a circle of multi-coloured spotlights aimed at a revolving silver ball hanging from the ceiling above the centre of the dance floor. The many-faceted mirror produces hypnotic, ever-changing patterns of colours across the floor.

Lone women wearing black sequined dresses seem to appear from nowhere and approach lone men. They pair up and head for the dance floor. I am instantly entranced by the kaleidoscopic merry-go-round of lights twinkling off the sequins and the ever-changing patterns swirling over their bodies.

The sound system is playing a compilation of different dance tunes; the foxtrot is followed by a waltz, followed by something else. (These are the only two dances I know the names of.) Some couples stay together; others split up after one or two tunes and go in search of different partners. One lady in a black dress disengages from her partner and approaches Nunky.

‘Would you like this dance, handsome?’ she says.

‘Are you giving it to me?’

‘I’m offering it to you.’

‘On a plate,’ says Mrs Sniffling Onions, tossing the ice cubes in her empty glass in the woman’s face. ‘Crawl back into your web, bitch.’ She yanks Nunky to his feet and drags him on to the floor.

There is no shortage of men asking Dotty to dance. She is by far the youngest woman there and the girls have done a superb job of tarting her up. She looks fetching in a tight blue dress with a plunging neckline, and her bra is sending out the message: “Here come my loolybells, the rest will be along later”. Her silky fair hair, which hangs loose to her bosom, changes colour every few seconds as the lights swirl by. She abandons me without a care.

After about an hour, a proper live band takes to the stage and plays what sounds like exactly the same thing only louder, and not as well. A lot more people pair up and fill up the dance floor. Nunky grabs Dotty and brings her over to the dark corner in which I am sulking. He removes my shoes and ties my feet on to Dottie’s. We glide out of the shadows and into the thick of it without being noticed. (This is just an assumption on my part. Would an attractive woman over six feet tall clamped tightly to a midget with his head buried between her bazoomers go unnoticed?)

Captivated at being at the centre of this prismatic Technicolor dream, and in order to breathe, I have to keep turning my head from side to side. Annoyingly, at every turn, I have to blow her hair away to stop it getting in my mouth. I watch fascinated as goose bumps form on the soft juddering flesh of her loolybells.

This and the extra stimulation from her movements raises bendy bunny to unprecedented heights. Thankfully my groin is well below hers, but with no control over my feet, manoeuvring into a more comfortable position to prevent chafing requires intense concentration. And as you well know, intense concentration can only be achieved by poking out one’s tongue. I therefore have to combine blowing with licking. To my delight, this causes her nipples to bulge, and like a hungry baby I long to suckle. I am even tempted to risk a kiss, even though it is probably illegal to kiss loolybells in a public place. I must surely have reached stage two in the art of fourplay, which must be about as far as you can get whilst dancing.

Although my risqué attentions have initiated these involuntary physical responses, Dotty seems otherwise unmoved. She continues to hum softly to the dance tunes. When we practice at work, it is effortless, and it isn’t like she’s dancing any faster than usual, but after a while she gets short of breath, the humming gets louder and harsher and more rhythmical. Considering she wields a mop and brush, and pushes a hoover for a living, I am surprised she is so unfit. Another clue to her lack of fitness is the moist heat emanating from her loins.

This heat and over exposure to the fumes of her Twinkle Twat induce such a state of torpor I nod off with my head on her heavenly pillows. The first time I can recall falling asleep with a throbbing bunnyhorn and a full seed sac.

I am woken sometime later by the jarring of her walking off the dance floor. Nunky cuts me free and we sit down.

‘You’ve been dancing for ages, mi babby. You’ve quite worn the poor girl out.’

Dotty looks happy and replete, but exhausted, slumped in the chair with her legs apart. Her blank, smiling face is shiny with sweat. I suppose it was cruel and inconsiderate of me to fall asleep on the job. Carrying me around the dance floor couldn’t have been any sort of pleasure for her.

We leave before ten because I have to take Weggie for his walk. The bouncers in their bow ties and black torpedo jackets are exceedingly polite. ‘Are you taking the young lady round the back for a kneetrembler?’ they ask, offering an umbrella. One even offers to come with us and hold it over us whilst we tremble. Another asks me if I would like a stool. Should I have wanted, I could have trembled sitting down and out of the rain. Now that’s what I call service.

Dotty also declines. ‘I’m wet enough as it is,’ she says.

Being a gentleman, I ask her if she’d like to come again.

‘I refer you to my previous answer,’ she says, mysteriously. 

Nothing the poor backward girl says makes any sense to me.