Summer Flings and Dancing Dreams by Sue Watson Read Free Book Online

flamenco – let’s stop putting it off – we can open that little school in Southern Spain and feel sunshine on our faces instead of tears.
    I’m told it’s so warm in Granada they dance flamenco outside and the rhythm echoes through the streets. They live in the ‘now,’ like gypsies, free of all shackles, living only for the dance. And it’s there waiting for us my darling – we just have to reach out and take it.
    Let us not be pulled back by the past... let’s move forward, I know it’s the right thing to do.
    Please stay?
    Yours always
    Ken x
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    W ow , I thought. I never knew my dad had such passion, it was like beautiful, sad poetry. There was so much to take in, so much said in such a few words, my world, the one I thought I knew was suddenly wobbling. My tears were cold, sliding down my cheeks and dripping onto the letter, blurring the words. I tried to wipe it with my hands but that made it worse and made me cry harder. My dad was so passionate, so determined, what happened for him to change his mind about leaving everything behind to dance in Spain? And what happened in their marriage that Dad needed to send a letter like this? Who was Mum thinking about that made her unreachable to him? Was it another man? I couldn’t imagine what could possibly come between them, but Mum’s illness had never really been explained, so perhaps she’d had a breakdown. After an affair? I felt like I’d been kicked in the chest. My poor dad, betrayed by the woman he loved. All the dancing and the laughter and the love – the perfect couple – had it all been a lie? The letter sounded just like my dad, listing the things they’d do, planning a future they would never reach. He never made it to Spain, and Mum never went there either – neither of them danced the flamenco. He spoke of winning the waltz category in Blackpool, so the letter was written around 1980. I racked my brain to try and remember anything of significance between them that would give me a clue about what had happened. Mum had been ill on and off for a few years then, so if it was an affair it had happened years before. It must have put a great hole in their relationship, an unspoken rip, right through the middle of their marriage that they couldn’t even talk about it. I went back over my childhood, clawing at the past, desperately trying to recall anything, like a detective searching for clues among the endless bloody sequins. I seemed to remember a time when Mum wasn’t ill, when she laughed a lot. But then a curtain came down... when was that? She changed somewhere in my childhood – I remember the first time she went away because Dad bought me a Tiny Tears doll, so I would be about four or five years old, what had happened? Dad told me she was poorly and had to spend time in hospital... why? He’d said in his letter he couldn’t reach her, I understood that feeling and recalled the ‘faraway look’ he mentioned. What sequin-covered secrets had my mother kept hidden? Perhaps things weren’t so wonderful between them after all, because the more I thought about it I realised the only time she was really happy, when she came alive, was when she was dancing. Ironically it was dancing at the place of their imagined Waterloo where all their dreams died – at the Blackpool International Dance Championships. How cruel life could be, I thought, picking up the letter and going over the words. I was a child when I knew my dad, but reading the letter I saw him through adult eyes. It was hard to equate the happy, spontaneous, loving father I remembered, with someone filled with such pain. Almost forty years later, I could hear his voice, feel his arms around me – and learning that he’d been so badly hurt made me want to hug him so much.
    I looked over the letter again. It was yellowing with age and had obviously been read so much the folds were almost worn. How could she? How could my Mum betray my father? I read and re-read his words, looking