Porcelain

He counted one and a half minutes before she came to the door, but it was still a minute short of her record.

“No need to rush,” he said, when it opened at last. “It’s not as though it’s minus three or anything.”

She stood in the doorway, in faded slippers, a floppy t-shirt and not much else, hair hanging loose and ratty about her shoulders. “The sun’s like…not even up yet.”

“It’s eleven o’clock.”

She craned her neck from side to side, and he was reminded of herons poking their beaks into the air. “Nothing exists before twelve.”

“Fairly sure that hypothermia does,” he said. “Come on, let me in.”

He held his hands behind his back as he stepped over the threshold, wiping his shoes – black leather, she noticed, with a sheen of newness to them – once, twice, three times before stooping to unlace them.

“Don’t,” she said. “Smashed some plates in the kitchen a few days ago. There’s bits lying about.”

He looked up. His hair was shorter than when she’d last seen it, by maybe a half-inch. “Plates?”

“Been getting in touch with my Greek heritage.”

He laughed, and the movement made hairline wrinkles around his eyes. “Is that right?”

“No. I stacked them wrong and they all fell out of the bloody cupboard. Had to eat my toast in a bowl yesterday.”

She scuffed into the kitchen in her zebra slippers, scraping them against the lino, and set to shifting armfuls of unwashed pans and bowls from the worktop, digging around for the kettle. He followed after, feather-footed in his supple shoes. Twinkletoes, she’d called him as a child.

“I can hear you judging me,” she said.

“I didn’t say a word.”

“Don’t need to,” she said. “Mum said it looked like a bomb site.”

He made a noise at the back of his throat. “That’s, uh…that’s a way of putting it.”

She hoisted the kettle out from between a pair of cereal boxes as if she were pulling a body from bog mire, then gestured grandly to the three half-empty jars of coffee lined up on the counter. “What you having? I’ve got coffee, coffee, or coffee.”

He pursed his lips. “You’ve no tea, have you?”

“I don’t let that leafy nonsense in the house.”

His shoulders sank. “Coffee it is.”

He watched her closely as she moved about the kitchen, eyes tracing the lines of her white arms and legs, her limp hair. She’d always been sharp angles and lengthy limbs, a dragonfly girl, and it was that which had allowed her to push against the music on the ballroom floor, to carve shapes into the air. Spectators had called her graceful, elven, spellbinding, and he had thought so too, even towards the end, when her cheeks were hollow and her bones felt like porcelain in his arms.

“How’s Elliot, by the way?” she asked, spooning coffee into the cups. “Treating you right?”

He shook his thoughts off. “Oh, he’s well. He’s been asking to meet you, actually, since I showed him our old tapes. He’s obsessed with ballroom. Thinks you’re a beautiful dancer.”

She stiffened, just slightly. “Nice of him to say.”

“He means it. He’s not shut up about you.”

“Well, it was a long time ago.”

Her eyes were clouded. The kettle clicked, but she didn’t move to pour it. He reached for it instead.

“It’s only been two years, Jo,” he said softly, over the trickle of water. “You could still go back to it. We both could.”

Her shoulders pressed back, and he saw a little of the past in her eyes; a woman with shining irises and outstretched arms, turning and gliding like something touched by an otherworldly breeze. But in her arms and legs, in her jutting elbows, he saw someone else – the girl with brittle nails and thin hair, who cut up her food but never touched it, and looked like a child in her hospital nightgown.

“Nah,” she said eventually. “Life’s too short to wear those bloody heels.”