Grease Monkey Jive (20 page)

The comment stumped Dan for a moment until he realised Alex didn’t know he owned the flat, owned the block in fact. He dismissed the idea of telling her in two eyelid twitches. She was chasing a fifty-grand dream; it would seem like showing off to tell her he owned property. It would make his willingness to help her seem all the more creepy. Even though he’d told her he didn’t want the money, she must still be thinking that was his reason for doing it, especially after hearing that stuff at breakfast.

“Yeah, the landlord is a real hard arse.”

When he left her to shower and change, it was hard for Alex not to snoop. Already, after seeing Dan surf and hearing him roasted over breakfast, the Neanderthal man had developed more depth. He was a water sprite, a little kid with a tough home life, a wild boy with an eye for mischief, and a collector of books. He was a law breaker and you only had to look at him to know he was a heart breaker. But all that still didn’t add up to one man and the temptation to peek in his cupboards to piece together more was like an unscratched itchy bite. So tempting, such a bad idea: the more you scratched, the more you itched.

She sat on her hands instead and looked into Jeff’s big brown eyes and when Dan said, “Don’t believe a word that dog tells you,” she nearly left her seat. She hadn’t heard him come in, now in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, his wet hair plastered back. She sent out a silent prayer that she’d stayed in the kitchen and hadn’t been caught checking out his drawers.

Outside the flat, Dan said, “Want to drive?” and Alex was nonplussed. He knew she had a crappy old car. Why would he want her to drive when he had two much better rides on offer?

“No,” she said. He’d wanted this day to happen; he could do the driving.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she said sharply and followed it with a sighed, “Oh!” as Dan thumbed a remote on a garage door and it lifted to reveal a shiny red mustang convertible with white leather upholstery and white walled tires. “Were you asking if I wanted to drive that?”

He just grinned and Alex saw the mischievous boy he’d been. “I’ve changed my mind.”

“I figured you might,” he said, tossed her the keys and whistled for Jeff.

They made two pit-stops, one at a deli, where Dan put a picnic lunch together, and the second at a shuttered McMurty’s garage.

Dan opened up and the smell of grease, metal, and dirt assaulted Alex’s nostrils. The floating dust motes were the cleanest things in the place. Dan’s workplace and his home were a study in contrast, one neat and tidy, the other crammed, dirty, and disordered.

He led her between two closely parked cars, one in need of a new rear end, the other crunched both front and back. She had to turn sideways and crab walk to the far corner where he flung back an old grey tarp. Under it was a car much like Dan’s Valiant, but instead of four doors it had two – or it would have if one hadn’t been missing. It was also missing other essentials: tail lights, side mirrors, and a driver’s seat. It was scratched and dented and a long way from roadworthy.

“Since you know about the argument, I thought you might like to see this.”

“A busted car?”

“It’s a 1971 Valiant Charger. It’s for Fluke. This is part of making it up to him. Mitch and I pooled our bet money and Ant will kick in and we’ll add Fluke’s cut when he knows about it. I just need more time to work on it.”

“Are you going to tell me about the argument?”

“Nope.”

“Are you going to tell me about the bet?”

Dan picked up the edge of the tarp. It would have been easier to tell her about the argument than the bet, though they were oddly linked, one leading to the other and all circling around the notion that he wanted to live differently. Not something he wanted to talk about with Alex. She wouldn’t want to touch him if she understood what he was trying to change.

“You already know. Ant bet us we couldn’t last a term.”

“But where did he get the idea from? Why make you learn to dance? I don’t get it.”

Dan shrugged.

“Was it meant to be punishment?”

He laughed. “Of course, otherwise it would be too easy.”

“Doing classes with me is punishment?”

“In a way,” he said cautiously.

“You’re some sort of masochist agreeing to dance in the competition with me? Laying yourself out for an extra whipping?”

“No.”

“Well, what then?”

Dan hauled the tarp back over the roof of the Charger. Why had he thought this was a good idea? He’d wanted Alex to know he cared for Fluke and the bet was ultimately all for a good cause. He didn’t want her to feel cheapened by it, but he’d hacked it up.

“Dan.”

“Why don’t we get out of here, hey?”

“Dan.”

“Scott told us to have fun.”

“You’d be working on the car now if it weren’t for me, right?”

Bugger. It’d been so dumb to bring her here. “Yeah,” he said, slapping the tarp back into place.

In the driveway, Alex handed him the Mustang’s keys and went around to the passenger side. It was a rejection whichever way he looked at it. She’d been so excited to take the wheel back at the flat, but now she was distancing herself. He couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t being straight with her, didn’t know if he could be. He’d wanted this day to be about sunshine and ease and he’d made it awkward and strained.

He started the car and headed for the park, Alex sitting stiffly beside him. This was why he didn’t do relationships. You had to explain yourself and make sense. When it was casual, it didn’t matter. Things with Alex were casual, less than casual, so why did he feel the need to explain things to her and to have her understanding?

Over lunch they said things like, “I’ll have the orange juice.” “Would you please pass the grapes?” “Nice strawberries,” and, “Jeff, get away from that.”

Dan watched Alex make friends with Jeff and felt inexplicably jealous. Jeff was getting all the attention, the strokes on the head, the pats on the rump. He dozed on the picnic rug as Alex and Jeff played fetch, his body heavy in the warmth and drained of motivation to move, his mind clouded.

He dreamed that he’d been convicted of a crime; it had something to do with the Charger, but that was hazy. He was sentenced to one hundred lashes. In the dream he didn’t bleed and the lashes only tickled. He laughed and the police got angry with him and made him shuffle a deck of cards over and over until they were satisfied. Then they took him to a room, small and close, full of smoke, flashing lights, and loud music. There was someone in the room, but they had their back to him, and he got the sense they weren’t real. Only when they turned he saw it was Alex and she was crying and he knew he’d been sent there to comfort her.

He woke with a start, more confused than he’d been while asleep. Alex was gone and Jeff was looking at him with reproachful eyes.

The text on his phone said,
Thank you 4 fun day. Rest up. See you @ 10,
and he’d rather have had her lash him furiously with a cat-o-nine-tails than chill him politely with SMS.

“You brought your brain, didn’t you, Dan?” said Scott, dissatisfaction making him more acid than normal. Dan dropped his hands and stepped back from Alex who he’d just tripped for the third time. He’d never felt more awkward with her.

He’d spent the night thinking about how he could’ve handled their day off differently and worried about what she’d deduced from the stories over breakfast. They were all true, but they didn’t create a pretty picture: an unruly kid who became an undisciplined boy who became a disorderly man.

Trevor was gentler than Scott. “Dan, you’re over-thinking it. You know the steps. You don’t need to think so hard. Just listen to the music and trust your body knows what to do.”

Dan ran his hand through his hair and growled his frustration. He didn’t trust his body at all. They had a whole routine now and only two remaining rehearsals before the first heat. He needed more time. Even pacing it through in the kitchen of the flat with Jeff as his audience and visualising it in the shower at night or waist-deep in someone’s engine at work wasn’t enough to make him feel like he could pull this off. He cursed himself for insisting on the day off.

“Alex, I’m so sorry.” He meant about the dance, about yesterday, about the bet, about the way he irritated her.

“Don’t worry about me. They’re right. Let go trying to think it through. You’ve got it, just feel it,” she said, and when she laughed at him, he figured he must have been looking at her as though she was speaking a foreign language.

“When you danced at the club and here when we simulated it, what were you thinking about?” she asked.

Ok, so now there were no words Dan didn’t understand in Alex’s question, but no way to answer it without sounding like a predator. He’d been thinking how incredible her body was and how amazing it was to be touching her and imagining what she’d look like in his arms in an entirely different circumstance – a clothing-optional one.

He said, “Ah,” and ducked his head knowing he might just as well have grunted, caveman style, for all the good being so tongue-tied was doing him. “I wasn’t thinking anything,” he muttered, because he couldn’t work out a better way to frame the white lie.

Scott made a strangled sound that was loud enough for them all to hear and to make Trevor tut at him.

“I’m sure you were thinking something,” said Alex, shaking her head in amusement. “But you weren’t thinking about the steps you were making. You weren’t counting in your head or trying to anticipate your next move or mine. You were just in the moment and you did fine.”

Dan sighed. “You’re telling me not to think?”

“Not to over-think.”

If only he’d had that advice yesterday.

“Who’d have figured thinking would be his problem,” drawled Scott, and Trevor said, “Sometimes I fantasise you were adopted.”

“Again,” said Scott and glared at Trevor who fired the remote at the stereo.

The opening strains of Eminem’s
Not Afraid
sounded out.

“Social commentary?” asked Dan, surprised by the choice. It wasn’t the song they were competing to. It was a song about taking a stand, facing your demons, and not letting anything get in your way.

Scott opened his mouth to agree and Alex cut him off.

“Tribute,” she said, and Scott nodded, “Didn’t really think you had it in you, caveman, but once in a decade it’s ok for me to be wrong.”

“I need more time,” said Dan, but he knew if he had a year he would still be stumbling around.

“You do need more time, Dan. But if the gods of the sprung dance floor have mercy on us, you’ve done enough to keep us in the comp for another round at least,” said Trevor.

When Dan had Alex in his arms and they were counting down their start, he said, “Tribute?” He’d had no sense in the mad press of Scott’s shouted instructions, Trevor’s demonstrations, and his own intense concentration that Alex felt anything other than concern about his ability to pull it off.

She’d been tantalisingly close, at times only a breath, a heartbeat though cotton and lycra, but distant, not unfriendly exactly, but polite and cool. Her tribute comment was unexpected, like her hand on his face at breakfast, a tiny gift he wanted to unwrap immediately.

“It’ll be a trial instead if you don’t pay attention now,” she said, stifling a smile and ensuring that he was riveted by a multitude of choreographed movements in their four minute, thirteen second routine.

Holding their last position, a dramatic dip where Alex arched back over his hand, he had time to wonder that she trusted him enough to fling herself into the movement. She might not like him or understand him, but she trusted him not to drop her. It made him smile and when she straightened up, she said, “Nice to see you smiling.”

“It’s one of those finer points I kept forgetting,” he said.

He knew he’d been frowning his way through their sessions. Most nights he left the studio with a headache from the intensity of it all. He knew the competition heat would likely flatten him, but at least for a little while he could smile and, if those gods Scott talked about were in any way compassionate, Alex would smile back.

They were. She did. Right then, still in his arms, and then later in the Valiant when she was giving him directions to her house for his costume fitting, she was more relaxed than he’d seen her. He didn’t feel tired any more, or hungry or headachy or guilty about not getting home to walk Jeff. He felt high, victorious, one small dragon slayed and one princess in his chariot. Bonus points that she was smiling.

Alex’s grandmother was probably the oldest woman Dan had ever had a sustained conversation with. She wasn’t your classic apple-cheeked, story book granny. She was thin and slightly stooped, but she didn’t look fragile. Her skin was wrinkled, discoloured, and age spotted, her hair thin, short, white grey, and her fingers were misshapen from arthritis. But she had bright, watchful eyes that made Dan slightly nervous, especially when she fixed them on him. She’d made him a pair of black trousers and a black shirt from measurements Trevor had taken, in a fabric that stretched to allow him to move easily.

The first words she said to him, other than introductions, were, “Leave those buttons undone.” It made him laugh. He’d left the two shirt buttons at the collar and neck undone, so undid the next one.

“More,” she said.

He undid another.

“More,” she said, peering at him over the top of her glasses.

He looked at Alex, lounging in the doorway. “She’s the wardrobe mistress. I’d do what she says if I were you.”

He undid another button. The shirt was open to mid-chest. He looked at Gwen, her grey-blue eyes giving him no quarter. He undid another. There were only two more before the waistband of his trousers. And that was one button more than he ever left open, even at Son of a Beach Bar, even when he was half tanked. “Gwen?”

“Leave that last one, darling. We want to see your lovely body.”

Dan had experienced more than a dozen new ways to be embarrassed over the last few weeks, mostly at Scott’s hands, but hearing the words ‘your lovely body’ come from the mouth of Alex’s seventy-five-year-old grandmother was a whole new reading on the mortified gauge. He felt heat flush up his torso and over his chest, the very areas Gwen was targeting and his hands fumbled on the last remaining done up button.