He gave a two-chuckle laugh, feeling no amusement. There seemed nothing for it but to follow her up the stairs.
They went up to what seemed to be the family’s flat. It was a good-size space that was modestly furnished in what had once been called Danish modern but now was Danish retro. She led him through a sitting room and into a kitchen, where she pointed to the table and told him to sit. She turned on a radio that sat on the spotless white work top, and she fiddled with the knob till she had a station that she seemed to prefer. It featured dance music of the ballroom type. She said, “That’s nice, isn’t it?” and kept the volume low. “Now.” She put her hands on her hips. “What do you fancy, Cadan?”
It was just the sort of question one saw in films: a Mrs. Robinson question while poor Benjamin was caught up still thinking about plastics. And Dellen Kerne was a Mrs. Robinson type, no doubt about that. She was, admittedly, a bit gone to seed, but it was a voluptuous gone to seed. She had the kind of curves one didn’t see in younger women obsessed with looking like catwalk models, and if her skin was grooved from years of sun and cigarettes, her masses of blonde hair made up for that. As did her mouth, which had what they called bee-stung lips.
Cadan reacted to her. It was automatic: too long a period of celibacy and now too much blood heading in the wrong direction. He stammered, “I was…that is…going to…tuna and sweet corn.”
Her full lips curved. “I think we can manage that.”
He was vaguely aware of Pooh moving restlessly on his shoulder, claws digging a little too deeply into his flesh. He needed to remove the bird, but he didn’t like to put the parrot onto the back of a chair since often Pooh took a removal from Cadan’s shoulder to a perch as a sign he was meant to drop his load. Cadan looked about for a newspaper that he could use beneath a chair, just in case. He spied one sitting on the counter, and he went to fetch it. Last week’s edition of the Watchman, he saw. He picked it up and said, “Mind?” to Dellen. “Pooh needs to perch and if I could put this on the floor…?”
She was opening a tin. She said, “For the bird? Of course,” and when he had the paper spread and Pooh on the back of the chair, she went on to say, “An unusual choice of pet, isn’t he.”
Cadan didn’t think he was meant to answer, but he did so anyway. “Parrots c’n live to be eighty.” The answer seemed to be sufficient unto itself: A pet who could live eighty years wasn’t likely to be going anywhere, and it didn’t take a degree in psychology to sort that one out.
“Yes,” Dellen said. “Eighty. I do understand.” She cast him a look and her smile was tremulous. “I hope he makes it. But they don’t always, do they.”
He dropped his gaze. “I’m sorry about Santo.”
“Thank you.” She paused. “I can’t talk about him yet. I keep thinking that if I just move forward a bit, even try to distract myself, I won’t have to face the fact that he’s dead. I know that’s not true, but I’m not…How can one ever be ready to look squarely at the death of one’s child?” She reached hastily for the knob of the radio and raised the volume. She began to move with the music. She said, “Let’s dance, Cadan.”
It was a vaguely South American rhythm. A tango, a rumba. Something like that. It called for bodies moving together sinuously, and no way did Cadan want to be one of them. But she moved across the kitchen towards him, each step a swaying of the hips, a rolling of one shoulder then the other, hands extended.
Cadan saw she was crying in the way that actresses cried in films: no redness of face, no screwing up of features, just tears marking a forking path downward from her remarkable eyes. She danced and she wept simultaneously. His heart went out to her. Mother of a son who’d been murdered…Who was to say how the woman was meant to act? If she wanted to talk, if she wanted to dance, what did it matter? She was coping as best she could.
She said, “Dance with me, Cadan. Please dance with me.”