Weary after such a long and eventful day, Danny collapsed on the living room couch and slowly ran his hands across his face. Realizing he was being watched, he turned to look at Liz, who was smiling at him from the picture frame on the coffee table. Danny smiled back.
“What the fuck am I doing, Liz?”
CHAPTER 10
Reluctant to return to the park without a license and not yet ready to face the wrath of more angry parents and their shin-kicking gremlins, Danny spent the following day at home.
Inspired by his conversation with Tim, he sat down to make a list of all the things he could do that people might want to pay him for, but ten minutes later the page was still blank, so he decided to make a list of all the things he couldn’t do instead.
He couldn’t play an instrument, that much he was sure of. Nor did he have the time to learn one, except for perhaps the triangle, which he’d briefly played in the school band before the music teacher decided it was a little above his station and demoted him to the kazoo. Even if he had been the world’s best triangler, however, the Mozart of the triangle world, the Jay-Z of the idiophone, Danny highly doubted that a panda whacking a three-sided piece of metal on a string was enough to draw the crowds, no matter how skillfully he whacked it.
Magic was another thing that Danny knew nothing about, even though his father had pulled off a vanishing act that David Copperfield would be envious of, but like all true magicians, the man had never revealed his secrets and he never returned for an encore. As for juggling, Danny couldn’t even catch a cold, let alone a handful of bowling pins, tennis balls, oversize nuts, or anything else that people threw and caught for the amusement of others—but he was still better at that than he was at dancing, a word he underlined twice and accompanied with several exclamation marks.
He and Liz were similar in so many ways—they both wore their socks in bed, they both liked Marmite, they both knew all the lyrics to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song, they both had Piers Morgan on their list of people to invite to a poisoned dinner party—but they couldn’t have been more different when it came to the dance floor. Liz could move to anything. Pop. Classical. Punk. Trance. Reggae. Country. She could even dance to post-rock, something Danny didn’t even realize was possible. Movement came so naturally to her that her mother used to say that she could dance before she could walk. That’s why they’d signed her up for ballet lessons at such an early age, but ballet was too restrictive for Liz. She didn’t have the patience or the discipline to dance according to somebody else’s rules. The more rules there were, the less fun it was, and if it wasn’t fun then it wasn’t dancing. It was performing, and Liz didn’t care about performing, which was why she became a part-time teaching assistant at the local primary school instead of pursuing a dancing career, a decision that Danny had quietly respected despite knowing what a rare and remarkable talent she was wasting.
He knew she had a gift the very first time they’d met, when Katie, a mutual friend of theirs who ended up marrying a remarkably unattractive and overweight man who, irrespective of his shortcomings, still managed to find at least three people to have affairs with, invited Liz to Danny and Katie’s school disco, an event that lived long in the memories of those who attended for no other reason than that somebody actually danced that night. Kids didn’t go to the disco to dance. They went to cop a feel, or to try to cop a feel, or pretend to cop a feel so they could tell their mates about it. The dance floor was treated like a weird uncle at a birthday party: it had to be there, but everybody went out of their way to avoid it. Everybody but Liz, that is. While the other kids were fumbling in the dark or pretending to be drunk on the one sip of the one Bacardi Breezer that somebody had managed to smuggle in, Liz was busy tearing up the dance floor, much to the joy of the otherwise redundant DJ. When the music finally stopped and the teachers sent the kids home so they could get their own party underway, Katie, Liz, Danny, and his friend Mike went back to Katie’s house where, in the absence of her parents, who had gone away for the weekend, the four of them drank a crusty bottle of ouzo they found in the back of the liquor cabinet, a decision that resulted in Katie waking up facedown in the flower bed, Mike waking up with two of his teeth in his pocket, and Danny and Liz waking up together, fully clothed, in each other’s arms, with no recollection of how they got there but no immediate desire to disentangle themselves.
Whereas his late wife was something of a natural on the dance floor, Danny was closer to a natural disaster. His problem was simple. He had no rhythm. He could follow a beat and he could just about bob his head along to it, but everything seemed to fall apart the moment his limbs got wind of the party. His arms and legs would run riot whenever he tried to dance, kicking out here and lashing out there like a deep-sea diver suffering from the bends. They didn’t obey the music. They didn’t even obey Danny. The only thing they answered to was the God of Shitty Dance Moves, a merciless deity who could only be appeased by the public sacrifice of Danny’s dignity, which was why he never stepped foot on a dance floor unless the rest of the room was on fire.
Still, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that whether he liked it or not—and he didn’t, in the slightest—dancing was his best course of action. Unlike musicians and magicians and the various other performers he’d seen, dancers didn’t require any special equipment to get an act up and running. All Danny needed was a CD player, which he had, and his legs, which he also had, at least for another six weeks or so. Gently rubbing the bruise on his shin, Danny also reasoned that children would find it much harder to land a decent kick on a moving target than they would on, say, a guitarist, or a mime, or anybody brave or stupid enough to choose the life of a human statue.
He stared at the word he’d scribbled down. Dancing. The sight of it made him shudder, but then he thought about Mr. Dent’s hammer and his shudder turned into a full-body spasm, the type that occurs when your shirt label tickles your neck and you momentarily think it’s a spider.
He was still spasming when his phone rang.
“What type of panda are you?” said Ivan.
“What?” said Danny.
“Panda,” said Ivan. “What type?”
“A Chinese one, I guess? I don’t know. Do pandas come from anywhere else?”
“For panda license,” said Ivan. “I maybe find person who can help but they ask what type of panda are you. You sing? You dance? You play harmoshka? What?”
Danny stared at the pad on his lap.
“Danny?”
“I dance,” said Danny. “I’m a dancing panda.”
CHAPTER 11
Danny was watching TV alone when Ivan called the following evening. Will had asked to sleep at Mo’s (well, Mo had asked) and Danny had reluctantly agreed, but he was glad of the arrangement when Ivan said to meet him at midnight in Peckham. Ivan offered to lend him the thirty pounds that the license was going to cost, but Danny politely refused, not wanting to be in debt to any more people than he had to be, even if one of those people was a friend. He had some rapidly dwindling savings to be used in absolute emergencies, most of which had come from Liz, or, to be more precise, Liz’s parents, who used to give her envelopes full of money for every birthday, Christmas, and any other occasion they could think of. It used to annoy Liz, who rightly or wrongly perceived the gifts as some kind of jab at their less-than-impressive income and refused to spend the money, but Danny was suddenly grateful for those envelopes as he plucked three notes from the small bundle that remained and stuffed them into his pocket.