Read Let's Dance for Free Online

sleep, not when you eat. I didn’t know what hell was, but I’m telling you now, that’s exactly what it is. And if that’s hell, this is heaven.’
    The wind gusted strongly in their faces. George challenged himself not to walk slower in the face of such force and an uphill gradient: it was a discipline to walk at the same pace at all times. Get the heartbeat going, set a steady pace and keep it up for at least an hour, make a bit of a sweat, but not too much, and just keep going, enjoying the sensation of muscles at work. Once he had established a pace, then he could look around. See nothing but the fields, feel the mud beneath his boots, catch from the corner of his eye the fungus on that tree, the squirrel leaping from one bare branch to another, the fat blackbirds near the house. When the dog lumbered away in comic and futile pursuit of a rabbit, George almost doubled up withpleasure. ‘You can’t explain it to no one else,’ he told her. ‘Not to no one who doesn’t know what you mean already, why you should chase that thing, and I should be so happy. I doubt if Mrs Burley knows it either, but at least she never asks questions. You can’t explain being happy, that’s for sure.’
    He had the dreamer’s knack of forgetting. Out here, or in the garden with the dog who was the receptacle for all his secrets, George could think of his own home with less revulsion. Not a home, more of a billet, a bed-sit in a hostel for so-called hopeful cases, people from abnormal lives on their way to what passed for normality. He had lived there for four years, a halfway house in a new town which had become home. Get a job, they said, ha, ha, ha. Should be easy for a well-built man like you, factories around here not fussy about a record as long as you work: amazing, but it’s still difficult to find someone willing to put in the hours and besides, you won’t have much opportunity for your little game among all the heavy machinery. He had stuck it for a month, then gone berserk, run out of there screaming, sacked next day. We don’t mind the record, the boss told his social worker, but he can’t stand being crowded and we can’t be doing with the disabled. Which George somehow dimly knew himself to be. Despite his physical strength.
    â€˜And how did you get to be here?’ That was Janice asking. He could laugh at the memory of her curiosity, the affront to her of something happening without her knowing.
    â€˜Oh, I was just walking by. Saw Mrs Burley trying to trim that bush outside the gate. She couldn’t do it, so I said, give us those shears, Missus, I’ll do it for you.’
    Something like that, a lifetime ago. He did not mention the lassitude of those long walks before Serena had found him. Long walks in the countryside reached in his battered car, the only solace he knew for despair. Those empty days before Serena had asked him in for tea and behaved as if she had known him for ever, no questions, no judgement, simply acceptance.
    Greyer clouds rolled forward over an already grey sky, the beginning of the afternoon darkness, and George marvelled at how much of these mean days he was able to spend with the light on his back. His red hair was thin on top, his ears stuck out, but he refused the benefit of hat and gloves which Serena pressed on him. Makes me too hot, Missus. He swung his legs over the gate and marched round the back of the house. There was the familiar smell of homecoming, and also, in the sight of Isabel’s jaunty little car, the sulphurous smell of a crowd, and the whiff of danger. He frowned. He was trying to extend towards Isabel Burley some of the vast affection he felt for her mother, but he could not. All right: he hated her and she disliked him. She was not a patch on her mother: she had no class, and she made him tremble with the old, familiar shame.
    He could hear the murmur of voices from the living room. On the