Dickens Charles - The Twisted Heart

There was an hour of learning steps, then an hour of social dancing. Kit learned the steps but she didnt stay for the dancing.

The hall, property of St Christophers, was more cramped and more decrepit than she had pictured it. Just to get in you had to edge round stacks of unmatched plastic chairs. The street-side windows were filled with wire glass. The walls were littered with Sellotape, tin tacks, the dog-ends of near-illegible notes: do not DO NOT boiling waThursdays EveryTime BUT . The plasterwork, too, was a mess. In another part of the world half the plaster damage might have been taken for bullet holes. Or perhaps this was another part of the world? Even the air carried the dead-alive smell of split sewerage cut with bleach products. Kit felt near illegible herself as she paced the beautiful, old, battered, softly sprung floor.

She had wavered, up in her little attic bedroom in the late summer gloom, thinking, Friday evening, should she go out and dance, or flick on the lights and settle down to some work? She had failed to imagine at all accurately what shed be in for, the dirty wire glass, wrecked plaster, eau-de-Nil paint, a maladjusted sound system, not that any of this really mattered. The moment the class had begun shed ceased to register these things, and had instead succumbed to the rote enthusiasm of the endlessly yelling instructor, Thats it, people, passion!one two, three four; come on, come on; lets see, you movehips!, TWO , three four. Excellent, nicetwo, three four; and left, and WHAP ! Nice there, betterwhap whap, whap whap; like this, like THIS ! Girls?cooee, you all right, mate?three FOUR ; keep up, keep up; and next and LEFT and hips!, and LEFT and

*

Kit, once shed chosen to go dancing, had discovered as she walked along to the bus stop that it was warmer outside than in. She had got herself to the hall, all the way across town, but that had only been the start of things because, having shown up for the Beginners try-out session, she had found that it was full. Full? It hadnt even occurred to her this was possible.

The instructor had shouted, at Kit and others, the surplus gaggle of them, that they could either try again, Okay, next week Thursday, or could wait an hour, come back and try Intermediate.

Once more, Kit had found herself wavering. Intermediate? How hard was that likely to be? Would she be able to hack it, more or less? Would it be worth the wait of an hour? And if she waited, tried, and found it too difficult, then what?

She teetered on the verge of abandoning her project. She could have caught a bus back into town never to return, and shed considered this. But, stepping out of the hall onto the pavement, she had spotted a caf opposite through a break in the traffic, had, seizing the moment, run through the traffic without especially thinking about it, over the road and into the caf, Pams Cafe, had bought herself a sandwich and a cup of tea andthere she had found herself with an hour and nothing much to do.

That was what had happened, not planned or anything.

Of course, her dash through the break in the traffic, had she misjudged it just a little, whap whap, whap whap, she could have been killed. And that would have been it.

Kit had picked this particular dance club mostly on account of its being run out of a hall up the nearest hill in East Oxford; not a hill, more a slope reallySt Christophers Social Dance Club, an easy stroll from the estates lying on the inner outskirts, as she conceived it, of the roughest edge of town. What shed fancied to herself, when she had happened upon a flyer advertising the class, had been beginner dancers dancing up the hill, twirling like deranged weathervanes on a level with the tops of the citys ghoulish spires. This much she had pictured, set within a church hall that had not, in her imagination, appeared war-damaged.

Instead of any of which, here she was at a table in a comfortless East Oxford caf with a cheese-pickle sandwich and a large cup of tea. The only work-related material she had with her was the notebook that she kept in her bag. She got it out and flipped through the pages: brief comments on a seminar from the end of the previous term, Electricity and the Imagination, heard it all before. Notes from The Times on the Bermondsey cholera outbreak, 1849, N.B. several witnesses in the Manning murder case died of cholera before they could give evidenceamusing at a distance, she reflected; though, amusing? Notes in rough for the first lesson shed given Orson:

O. TWIST PlotDickens begins it in instalments starting Feb. 1837. Almost certainly initially intended as just a few episodes, The Parish Boys Progress, social satireonly then? does Dickens decide to upgrade it to a full-blown criminal-romance serial novel. N.B. includes a brutal prostitute-murder, Nancy bludgeoned to death in her bedroom by her pimp, Sikes and

Kit was bored. She flicked backwards through the pages, stopping randomly at a list shed scribbled months earlier, names of various criminal suspects mentioned in the memoirs of John Wilson Murray, a late nineteenth-century Ontario detective: Hunker Chisholm, Knotty OBrian, Senator Voorhees, Young Billy Nay, Nettie Slack, Napper Nichols, Poke Soles, counterfeiter, or shover of the queer. Polly Ripple, Meta Cherry, Baldy Drinkwater, Ebenezer Wardwas Meta a real name? Yes, certainly it was.

After half an hour Kit bought a second cup of tea. Intermediate-level dancingperhaps, come to think of it, it was preferable to fail where there was no hope of succeeding, i.e., perhaps Intermediate would be less embarrassing than Beginners, not more so. Well, so what? The principal point was to avoid meeting anyone she knew, because all Kit was really after was to lose herself in some steps, a form of loss for which, in her view, anonymity was a prerequisite. She glanced over the road and thought, bloody hell, and wondered, what am I doing here in this shabby little caf?

Answer: she was reading, or trying to.

Kit tried to read. On the page facing the name list she had recorded the outlines of a couple of Detective Murrays cases. In one he had posed as a comatose dosser under a bench, simulating unconsciousness in order to eavesdrop on a gang of firemen who were suspected of setting fires for profit. The firemen, in turn, had seized this opportunity to urinate all over him. Pissing arsonists, Kit thought. She found she had also copied outmainly, she deduced, because the line was in metreMurrays description, p. 73, of the effect on a farmers wife of being forced to confess to murder: Her eyes were like those of an ox in whose throat the butchers knife has been buried. And then, God, below this, yes, here were notes, sentences Kit had patiently transcribed one after another, concerning the case of Jessie Keith, a young girla real young girl, these were real casesJessie Keith, who had gone missing near Listowel, Ontario, on October 19th, 1894:

The party hunting beyond the Keith home came upon the pieces of a body lying in the woods. Newly turned earth showed them where the parts had been buried. Other portions were spread out while others had been tossed into the brush. Tightly wrapped around the neck was a white petticoat, soaked crimson. The head was uncovered and the pretty face of Jessie Keith was revealed. The girl had been disembowelled and carved into pieces.

Kit bent closer to the page. In almost hieroglyphic scrawl her notes indicated that the hunting party had been able to find, and had roughly reassembled, some two-thirds only of Jessie Keiths body. Detective Murray had been called in, and had tracked down a locally escaped lunatic called Almeda Chattelle; and no doubt it was the warped lucidity of this madmans explanations that had led to his being found fully responsible for the crime. To Kit, though, rereading Chatelles remarks, he seemed about as insane as it was possible for a single human being to be. He had spoken with ostensible distress about the moment at which he had taken the pretty girl, of how it had come over him like a flash: