Dancing with Mr Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen

Bina Andrea Watsmore

She could be sitting right next to them and they wouldn’t notice her; the teachers, the boys, the other girls. She could slip into class wearing a menstrual red jumper that brought out the grey umbers and ochres in her skin, and that pulled tight across her small peachy breasts and still they wouldn’t see her.

She was the only girl amongst us who could slowly peel a banana and bite into its flesh without the boys drooling at her. She was pretty though. Everything in the right place. And when she spoke, when she bothered, it was usually to say something considered. Not timid, like you might expect.

Then one day, I watched Mr Burdage pull her to one side at the end of Art, period three. He asked her what she wanted to do with her life. She held his eye and told him: lawyer.

Is that something you want to do, or something your family wants for you, because you have a talent in art, have you thought about studying it further?

And she smiled and asked him: was art something his family had wanted him to do?

He turned cerise and got excited and said: you know it’s all going to become clear to you at university. The different ways you can live. There will be more people who… get you. Then he turned and scurried back into his art room.

Everyone knew that I liked Mani Burdage. He had never asked me what I wanted to do with my life, even though he knew that I wanted to go to Art School. He also knew that my dad was against the idea but that I wasn’t going to let that stop me. We would be good together, Mani and me. I dreamt of living and working with him in his studio. Maybe even marrying. We would be a partnership, like Gilbert and George. Or open a shop and make and sell our work like Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas did in the nineties.

Seeing as how Mani saw something interesting in Bina, I decided to adopt her; keep your rival close, they say. Also I was confident that I would look well next to her. That once I had brought her out of herself, she wouldn’t appear layered and mysterious to him. She would be just the same as everyone else. Besides I was short on friends at the time.

This was our final year at Aloysius, so I had to act now. I decided to follow him, to see where he hung out. I knew where his studio was. I’d been there in September. He worked there on Saturdays, Sundays and on Wednesdays, his day off. It took a couple of days to persuade Bina to come with me. At first she pretended she didn’t like him. Went all wide-eyed, he’s old enough to be my father, at me. But I explained to her that he was only seven years older than us. That you had to see beyond the beard. Look at the thickness of his eyelashes; it’s as if he wears mascara. See how unusual his dark blue eyes are against his green-gold skin. Watch his quick and clever hands when he draws. Feel his energy.

I wore her down in art. I threatened to tell Mani that she fancied him unless she came with me. Mani sealed it by asking us what all the fast talk and giggling was about. I looked at Bina, her name already formed on my lips and she held her hands up and said: okay, okay, I’ll come. He became nervous around us after that. Kept giving us these fluttering pretty side-looks.

Late the following Saturday afternoon we sat in my mum’s Honda watching his studio. I had parked it on a raised slip road at the back. From this position the area looked worse than I’d remembered. I could tell that Bina was not impressed; she was quiet, but not in that comfortable way of hers. The studios must have been ordinary offices once, perhaps for tax inspectors or telesales; row on top of row of balconied windows, punctuated with faded mustard panelling. Retro, but not in a good way. Many of the windows were boarded up. There were plants crushed against the glass on the inside and climbing green leaves coming through from the outside. Like Romeo and Juliet, only squalid. Perhaps if we had come at night, or if it had been a sunny day it might have looked better. The wall that half hid the skip-sized bins had been painted three shades of blue. Someone had graffittied a face with huge teeth and red and white eyes on it. Underneath they had written, Mine, all mine. I took my phone out to snap it. Bina said: you’re not taking a picture of it? It’s horrible. It’s not Banksy, you know. It’s just a crap drawing on a nasty wall using the paint left over after they’d finished decorating their bedrooms.

I had to photograph it then. Besides Banksy’s first stuff wouldn’t have been great either. Everyone starts somewhere. I opened the window to lean out. The stench outside was gagging. It stuck and clung in your nose and throat. Bina leant across me shrieking and hit my button to close it. The smell was inside now. A thick, heavy green fug. We started to laugh.

I tried to explain Mani’s work to Bina. At his private view there had been two video monitors each showing the head and shoulders of a different woman. They were both talking, one at a time, as if in a conversation, but what they were saying didn’t add up. They were isolated in these screens, not able to listen or respond to each other.

Bina shook her head: so, he’s trying to make the point that some people don’t get other people? That they don’t listen to what the other person is saying? Don’t we know that already?

I told her that there was other stuff, drawings and these hankies embroidered in lilac with random words: war treats, stone room, extra bullet. And that also to get into his studio you had to walk under a ladder. This was part of the work, a funny joke, playing with people’s superstitions and prejudices. I didn’t tell her that although he had invited everyone in his year thirteen class, I was the only one who had gone. That Mani hadn’t spoken to me until I was about to leave. Then he asked me to spell out my name for him, as if he didn’t know me: Emma I Dunsley. He scribbled it down in this little square-lined notebook and then laughed, delighted. He told me, I’m collecting anagrams and yours is unseemly maid. Thing was, Bina didn’t have to get it, because this wasn’t the world she wanted to be part of.

I told her that we couldn’t sit here in this smell. Who knows how long we would have to wait, even assuming he was in there. We would have to go inside and find him. Then she could judge his work for herself and we could see how he reacted to each of us. Bina got into a tizz and grabbed my hand and said, I can’t go in there. We were both laughing and she pumped my hand and told me: you can’t go in there, because…because…that smell is the smell of dead teenage girl. Mani lures them here and molests them, peels them alive and stitches their skin into canvases. And out of their bones he sculpts the finest, most beautiful miniature animals with his clever hands. Their entrails he just chucks in the bins with the KFC boxes.

I told her that that was the longest sentence that I’d ever heard her speak. She turned her face away and flashed her cobalt-black hair at me. I reached into it and felt the weight of it. It was thick; each piece of hair, not just the volume of it. I plucked a strand, wound it round my finger and told her that you could use her hair to sew with, it was so strong. Then I buried my face in it. It was just washed and the sweet chemicals were so strong that they obliterated everything else. I whispered to her that Mani is a conceptual artist. He doesn’t do sculpting and painting. That he doesn’t have the balls to do something as wild as that. I grabbed her left hand back and laid it on my palm. It was tiny, like a child’s, but puffy and red like an old hag’s. I told her this and she laughed so hard, she started to snort. So I told her that she snorted like a man. And she pulled her hand back and acted all offended: a man? A man? Not even a pig?

I thought I might have gone too far, so I put my lips against her stomach and burrowed and blew into it. I asked her to forgive me, told her that she was the most beautiful girl ever, more beautiful than Shilpa Shetty, hair more lovely than Amy Winehouse, eyes prettier than Mani Burdage—We were squealing and laughing so much it took us ten seconds to register the tapping sound on the glass.

The light had slipped since we had been sitting here and there was a face pressed against the window. We screamed and jumped and held on to each other’s flesh. The figure reeled back like a frightened child. It was Mr Burdage. He waved both hands at us. I dropped Bina, turned my back on her and pressed the window down. I leaned out and filled the space, putting myself between Mani and Bina, so he could see only me.

I held his eyes and started to talk. I could feel him trying to look past me, but I told him we were looking for the Moustache Bar, that it was near here and that because we couldn’t find it we were about to come in to the studios and ask someone. He gave me his down-turned smile, pretended that he believed the story and said no, he had not heard of that one. What sort of bar was it? Then he said we could try Persuasion, on the High Road. It seemed to be popular with a young crowd. Then he looked at his watch and said. It’s a bit early, though. I asked him if he goes there. And he said, not me, I’m too old for that. Then he backed away from us. When he was at a safe distance, he moved his finger as if he was scribbling lines between us and said: I’m glad you two found each other. I called after him and asked him what the smell was. He looked confused and said, do you mean the canal?

Bina didn’t say anything on the drive home. I asked her if we should try that bar. She shrugged and said that she had to get home. She was scratching a lot. Her hands, her arms, around her stomach.

In the end I said, Mani Burdage is all right, but he isn’t worth peeling your skin off for. She covered her mouth in an affected way and then leaving one finger across her lips she looked at me and said: I was never interested in Mr Burdage. I don’t know what interested me here.

I almost went after her when she left the car. But what could I say to her? Wasn’t it a shame that he came over when he did, because for a moment there I thought we were going to kiss and I ached all over and this was so pure that the words shouldn’t be spoken or embroidered or played with, and now I feel bruised and I want to sit rigid looking into her eyes, not even touching and then fall asleep wrapping myself in her hair and when we wake we are so entangled that we don’t know where Bina ends and Emma begins. And this wouldn’t be a partnership, a convenience. It would be everything.

My inspiration: In writing ‘Bina’ my starting point was Jane Austen’s Emma, a character whose comic meddling and ambitions set off a chain of events that transform her and allow her to find the love that was there all along. My Emma is the narrator of the story.