STEPS

CHAPTER TEN Dancing for my mother.

William the only one enabling me to draw full breath, his presence even though brief and even if sometimes only on paper, providing the much needed oxygen, the respite from the ever-expanding restrictions to this breathing.

Afterwards, when I allowed the Prince to ride off without protest, I flew to visit William, maybe explain? He presented separate from me for the first time, leaving me crying in my rental car. What was I crying about? I never told him. I wanted to lean in, find in his embrace some solace for by then, distress had lifted anchor, breaking the surface and bringing up everything buried in the deep. What I had done, I could address it now, and there was no further escaping the evil inside me. I could feel the aftermath.

My fickleness... What William perceived perhaps, for he knew little else to counter this. I'd done it before, there was a pattern. Back when I first met him, when he teased and insinuated yet presented unattainable, testing my vulnerabilities, inciting angst, frustration. The need swelling inside me and he aware, ever aware yet keeping me suspended, never venturing beyond the innuendos, only ever the tacit assumption between us: One day. One day this may evolve into something tangible, a real something. My impatience chaotic, foolhardy; the promises spied in each brief encounter amassing, becoming a difficult, despairing load.

I hooked up with an actor; an attraction freely offered me, someone willing to afford me time, attention. That I subsequently flaunted this new conquest thinking, "William is sure he can control me? Keep me bound to his 'sometime in the future schedule'? I'll show him!"

I cheated my first husband too, before and after the ceremony. A pattern of deceit; driven by the habitual fear. Laying down temporary foundations, structures created out of stacked cards, easily collapsed, gathered up, packed away - disallowing permanence with anyone. Especially William, for he presented the greatest threat.

Had I the capacity to understand back then, hell, maybe I'd have chosen a different perspective, built stronger, more permanent foundations. Moved to his city and kept him near me, kept myself true to this one emotion. Only years later did I bring forth the words capturing this former incapacity.

"There are twin demons. One whispering, "For sure, you were so bloody wrong for leaving him alone, allowing others to move in and claim your place in his story. Time waits for no one, sweetheart." The other spitefully insisting. "It was all a figment anyway, imagined reason made up so you could read it and rejoice in the emotion take-aways." The mind between. Battling for sense where sense is merely obsolete reaction. "If this was real," one says, you'd have camped outside his body and refused to leave, instead of being here writing about it. Here, get it?" The other claims, "He should have been the one to grab your words and never let another being between them which he did, so there. So there."

Suck it up Princess. Or else go screw the nearest antidote and get life as they know it. Self-created, you let the demons take control and now you bitch about it? Surely."

To claim William was my only, my best love? To offer up any amount of justification about how this love was fucking doomed? Timing, circumstances, blah blah blah? Fact was I deceived him, a few times physically but once, a single time, through words.

Yeah. The time I sat opposite and calmly agreed the barriers were impassable. Unable to meet his gaze I'd stirred my coffee and accepted the lack of continuity he supposed.

"I can't do anything. The kids... You know."

"Yeah."

"Maybe another time, another place... Things might have been different."

"Maybe... Sure, I get it."

When I should have offered hope instead! Commitment to seeing it play out, my mind recognising the challenge - for it was a challenge - and accepting it. My pledge enabling change, my own steadfastness removing any doubts he held!

Besides, what use to say I did everything to exorcise him from my thinking after this exchange? Claiming it an attempt to free him from my obsession? In the end I held only the certainty - in his eyes at least - of presenting a systematic and deliberate pattern of deceit. Despite our many conversations, the why I was, the what was driving me remained unshared, unspoken.

He the father I never had, the father the child in me wished I'd had. Wise, assured, benign, never a voice raised in anger or a hand raised in fear. Soothing messages instead, delivered with a subtlety ensuing them ever palatable. I often claimed he founded this benevolence in the shifting sands of Egypt, the country of his birth; likened him often to some desert wanderer, a wise travelling nomad.

For he presented alone, removed from those around him despite his very visible and cordial presence. Even from me most times, only a few rare moments allowing entry. And only later did I appreciate he did so. At the time, I thumped on illusionary closed doors, jumping up to peer through shielded windows, screaming to be heard. Or I handed over pieces of paper full of my musings:

"Imagine if, William, imagine if..."

The only one who placed me outside those windows I'd forever lived behind, staring in now, wanting in.

"Find yourself a good man," he'd said, withdrawing from my tears.

My mind screaming, "What use is a good man when I've spent years pacing the edges of a great one, when I have yet to solve the mystery of the great one?" It stung me, this plea. Because I still felt incomplete, I had yet to experience a final connectedness. A good man satisfied. He wished this for me? Wished I settled on a satisfactory man, away from this 'hero within the man' endeavour consuming me - away from him? His final judgement wishing me wasted on such a man?

I tried to reason on paper. I remember; endless pages full of mutterings, angry retorts, conniving schemes, evocative entreaties...

"Sometimes in the last brief wakeful moments, pushing back surrender there is the theatre and the man and the woman who sparkles, spouting revelations. Wicked half-smile on his lips, she lifts her hand to him and then I sleep."

I always expected too much. Yeah, like the presumptions heaped on my father. He uneducated, working a lifetime with his hands, the same hands he used as every defence. My expanding vocabulary growing the chasm between us till we no longer talked, speaking different languages. Nothing to say to him anyway, nothing to listen to or heed; his advice asynchronous in the New World he'd brought me to without consultation and for my supposed benefit.

"For abetter life for you," he'd often shout. "Fuck, I sacrificed everything for you!"

Even today, I hear him sometimes mutter this. I tried once or twice, to say, "I never asked you to! I never wanted you to! I was too young for you to place this blame on me!"

Transported from everything I held familiar, deposited to this strange country where everything was different yet some things remained the same. The lust of man-devils for youth, for innocence; the desire to spoil it, corrupt it, claim it for themselves before it reached the precipice of adulthood.

He never had my back, neither in the old country or the new one. Despising instead my blossoming, for it brought closer the ever-present dread; his name and reputation more important than the welfare of his child.

Thus my connectedness, my trance-like fascination with older men, those I perceived to be real men. My perception of course tainted by my father's failings as a husband and a protector, this too at odds with his own viewpoint of being a man safeguarding his family.

How I despised him! With each new blow, my mind registering another reason to escape, further remove myself from his nightmares. I pushed him, taunting him to hit me more, in a vicious cycle of punishment and disappointment. Disappearing most nights, and knowing he'd be waiting. Aware his mind would have conjured up obscene images, his little girl fouled, spoilt during those long, dark, brooding hours.

"Bad things happen deep in the night!" he'd often yell.

Yet the dreadful things, the very evil ones only ever happened to me in the light of day. I wished I held words to tell him this. The night only ever offering me reprieve, escape from his repression. Dancing till dawn, dancing because my mother wouldn't. Dancing for my mother.