The Summer Dance
A voice. One she knew so well, her mind told her, yet she couldn’t place it. Telling her a story, a fantastic tale of magical beasts, of a warrior girl, and a dark, dark foe.
The voice came and went every few minutes, or was it days? She couldn’t tell. Time really had no meaning here, wherever, whenever “here” was at the moment.
Now there was a different voice, and different sounds. A woman talking quietly, and a hiss … a pause, a click, then it started again. A soft beep; repeated, constant.
The voice she knew came and went again. Sometimes she remembered her own name, almost, then it was gone again.
Now she sensed rather than heard different sounds. Louder than before. Busy sounds. A busy place. There were different voices as well, but none that she knew. A man and a woman talking quietly, using words she didn’t understand. She tried to tell them she was thirsty, but no words of her own would come.
Then, for the first time in twenty-two days, she opened her eyes.
She should have been frightened by what she saw and felt, but it wasn’t so. A room, glaring white. A woman in a white coat, smiling. A man in blue scrubs, efficient, concerned, but smiling all the same.
Words tumbling and cascading around her. Smiles. Bags of fluid were changed or removed. A syringe injected into a tiny tube in her wrist. The tube down her throat was pulled out, slowly, by the man in the nurse’s uniform. The hiss and click stopped, but not the regular soft beep from the machine connected to the clothes peg on her finger.
Ice chips first, then sips of water. She drifted in and out of sleep.
Her mother, smiling and crying and hugging her. Her father too, then her sister.
“She needs to rest,” said the woman in the white coat after only a minute … or was it an hour? Perhaps it was more.
“We’ll be just outside when you wake up again, Jojo.” More hugs. More tears.
Jojo. Jo. Joanne. That was her name. It came to her now, but not why she was there. Then she remembered more names. Cruel names. The ones some of the other kids at school said because she was overweight. Wobbler. The name she hated most of all. Wobbler was a character in a Terry Pratchett book. Johnny and the bomb. She had once enjoyed it, but not any more.
“Regular Obs.” More smiles. More voices. Charts being checked.
The nurse and a woman in a cream uniform helped her sit up, then the bed was adjusted for her comfort. More water. Something soft to eat.
Flowers and cards on the table across her bed. She began to read them. Get well soon, of course, from her parents. A separate one, hand-made, from her sister.
An unopened envelope. Did she know the handwriting? She wasn’t sure.
Inside, another get well card from … of course. Peter. Her friend. The boy next door. Endless summer holidays and games of monopoly with him and his brother Jim; her and her sister Lynne. Ian, the boy from opposite that Lynne had fancied. Dating now. Peter and Jim’s cousin Robert. Games under the gazebo that lasted for days.
Now she remembered. It was his voice she had heard in her head.
He came every day, the nursing assistant told her. After school in his uniform, and at weekends in jeans. A kiss on the forehead when he arrived. Another one when he left. Holding her hand while he talked to her. She wished she could remember that part.
Fantasy Fiction. The words she heard, from her favourite book. He had spent hours reading it to her.
Eighteen, just over two years older than her. A-Levels. Had he finished them whilst she had slumbered?
When she next awoke, he was there, holding her hand. A smile, a kiss on her forehead. Friendship, not romance. “Welcome back”.
He had the book, held her hand, they talked about what had happened whilst she had been in a coma, then he read to her until she fell asleep again. When she awoke, it was dark, and he was gone, but there was another envelope. A small one with a card inside.
She smiled.
Peter Maynard requests the pleasure of your company as his partner on the occasion of the school Summer Dance. Four weeks hence. Her sixteenth birthday.
She wouldn’t go of course. She looked bad enough in trousers, but she looked absolutely hideous in a dress or skirt.
Peter was popular and good looking. He would have no problem finding someone else to go with him, but it was a nice thought anyway.
The following day, with her parents. Listening to the consultant.
She remembered some of what had happened. PE. The terrible jibes when she couldn’t even lift her own weight off the ground. The name calling, then the lights in the gym ceiling, spinning before everything went black.
More words she didn’t understand, but her dad seemed to. The brain sent signals to something called the Peter-chewery gland. Such an odd name. Chemical signals sent to other parts of the body.
Food was turned into energy. Any excess was turned into fat and stored, except in her case, everything she ate turned straight into fat. That’s why she never had the energy or strength for exercise. Why she was so big.
An operation. A procedure, the day after she was brought in. She ran her tongue inside her top lip, tracing a small ridge. The scar from an incision inside her lip just below her nose. Keyhole surgery inside her head, the base, the front of her brain. It was all so impossible. Something was either added or removed, she wasn’t sure which, but she would be able to eat normally after that. What did that mean? She ate normally anyway.
One more night in the hospital and then she was home.
The day after the Summer dance. Talking to Peter across the garden hedge between. Him showing her parents the picture the photographer had taken of him and his date, Anne. When she saw it, she knew she had made the right decision when Peter had asked her again to go with him.
The girl in the photo was curvaceous and had what could only be described as a magnificent bust. Peter recounted the stares, the boys asking her for a dance, the refusals, other girls envious, at least one boy slapped by his partner for looking.
She smiled at the memory. She had discovered on arriving home that she had lost fifteen kilogrammes in the three weeks after her operation, and had lost seventeen more in the four weeks since. It had been Peter’s idea to tell everyone she was called Anne. Well it was true. She was, but most people put Jo in front of it. Nobody recognised her.
She looked at Peter across the restaurant table in their favourite restaurant. Twenty years had passed, but she could still get into the same dress from that night.
Afterwards when they got home, she picked up her copy of Johnny and the Bomb and began to read, enjoying it once again for the first time in years.
She was still a big girl, but since that day at the school dance, nobody had ever again called her Wobbler.
