One more turn

He was standing in the middle of the floor, in his shirtsleeves and his green waistcoat, with his hands held out a little in front of him as though one of them were resting on somebody's shoulder and the other were holding somebody's hand. And he was dancing.

He took three steps forward, very carefully. Then he turned. The turn was a little too wide, and his elbow met a shelf of shoeboxes, and he stopped, and looked at the shelf, and took one step back to where he had started.

Then he did it again.

Three steps. The turn. This time the turn was a good deal smaller. He came round it with his chin up and his hands still held out before him, and he finished facing the door, and he stood there for a moment as if waiting for applause from the shoeboxes.

Jonah, at the top of his ladder in the rain, found that he was smiling so broadly that his whiskers had moved.

He knew, as the whole Passage knew, that Ambrose had gone dancing in the autumn. It had been talked about in the bakery and the post office and outside the chemist's for the best part of a fortnight. Ambrose, who had not been known to dance in living memory, had gone to the dancing above the Three Lanterns with Miss Mallowdene the dressmaker, and he had danced three times, and he had walked her home arm in arm. And on Sunday afternoons since, they had been seen walking together in the square.

What the Passage had not known, and what Jonah now knew, was that Ambrose practised.

Inside the workshop, Ambrose began again. This time he hummed. Jonah could not hear the tune through the glass and the rain, but he could see it in Ambrose's shoulders, which rose a little on the first beat of every bar. His foot tapped once before he started, keeping time, the way it must have kept time under the bench all those years while his hands were busy with other things.

Three steps. The turn. He came out of the turn and added a fourth step that had not been there before, a small one, almost a skip. Then he stopped and looked down at his own feet in great surprise, as if they had done it without consulting him.

An original extract from The Lamplighter’s Round · about 2 minutes to read.