I felt Owen walk up behind me. I minimized the screen.
‘Are you going to go to that?’ he asked.
‘Might do,’ I said, glancing back at him to gauge his reaction.
Owen raised his eyebrows and nodded. ‘Cool,’ he said. And then, ‘My sister’s gay.’
‘Good for her,’ I said, and I turned back to my screen and started clicking through my emails.
‘Are you gay?’ he asked.
‘Shh.’ I nodded across to Uzo; I didn’t want her to know – not yet, anyway. She had a habit of ‘whispering’ secrets extremely loudly in the kitchen, for everyone to hear. Plus I’d heard her say ‘What a waste’ once, when we were talking about Sir Ian McKellen being gay (she had a thing for white-haired white men). I wasn’t sure she’d react brilliantly to my news.
‘Sorry,’ Owen said, crouching by my desk. ‘Are you, though?’
‘Might be.’ I felt like a bit of a fraud, to be honest. I wasn’t sure one (highly enjoyable) episode of lesbian sex was enough to qualify me.
‘That’s cool,’ he said again. ‘So’s Catwoman.’
‘As in – the comic-book character?’
Owen nodded. ‘She’s thinking of having a baby with her girlfriend,’ he said.
‘Catwoman?’
‘No, Carys. My sister.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘I’m not at that stage yet.’ I went back to my emails.
Owen didn’t. ‘Do you want me to come with you?’
‘To what?’
‘To the gay dance thing.’
A thought struck me, and I looked up at him. ‘Are you gay, Owen?’
‘No! No. No. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.’
‘Right.’
‘I’m going out with Laura, remember?’
‘Of course.’
‘I just like gay people,’ he said.
‘All of them?’
‘No, you know. Like Cara Delevingne. And Ellen Page.’
‘You mean, you fancy lesbians.’
‘No! Well – only the hot ones.’
I looked at the Stepping Out website when I got home. There was a video of the Friends of Dorothy, their Solo Jazz group, competing at the London Swing Dance Festival in sequinned hot pants (surprisingly flattering). They had won first prize. Watching the video, I felt the potent combination of nostalgia, envy and self-pity that comes whenever I watch people perform. I had gone cold turkey on dance after my ballet career ended. I thought it would be too painful to teach, or to try contemporary, or move into administration or anything; I even found Zumba classes a bit triggering. Maybe going to a swing dance class would be like opening an old wound. Maybe it wouldn’t, though. Avoiding dance hadn’t made me miss it any less. I decided to give it a go.
I made the most of the time before the first class by practising telling people I was gay. I announced it via WhatsApp to my school friends, none of whom seemed particularly surprised, and when I got my legs waxed, I told the beauty therapist that I was going to a queer dance class. ‘So I’ll be dancing with other women, because I’m gay, which means I fancy women, because of being gay,’ I told her.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Can you turn over for me?’
I also did a fair bit of lesbian Internet research. I discovered that the toaster thing was a hilarious lesbian in-joke – when a woman ‘converts’ another woman to lesbianism, she’s supposedly given a toaster as a thank-you from the lesbian community.
One click led to another, and I found myself reading a dictionary of lesbian slang. Apparently if I noticed a fellow lesbian walking down the street, say, I was supposed to say ‘She’s family’ to whomever I was with. It seemed there was a whole lesbian language I knew nothing about, but I liked that; I felt I was being invited to join a secret club. I liked the idea of being part of a family.
I found a wikiHow article called How to be a lesbian, illustrated with pictures of women in pastel clothes, smiling at each other like the couples in the erectile dysfunction ads you see on the Tube. ‘You can’t make yourself a lesbian if you aren’t one already,’ it told me. You can’t make yourself a straight, either, I thought. Yes, I’d had the odd Jarvis Cocker fantasy. I’d enjoyed the occasional fumble on a single bed. But I’d never really got the point of sex till now. Touch your partner like you touch yourself, said wikiHow. A come-hither motion always works. All right, I thought, I’ll give that a try. When I’ve found someone to be a lesbian with.
I took my time over getting ready. I changed into my best jeans and flossed my teeth, and I tried to ignore my stomach, which was making all sorts of unsociable noises.
‘I think you’re really brave,’ said Alice, standing in my doorway, watching as I put my make-up on.
‘Don’t be patronizing,’ I said. I looked in the mirror. ‘Do I look like a lesbian?’
Alice considered the question. ‘Now you mention it, yes. It’s your hair.’
‘No – it’s my shirt.’ A tartan one, buttoned to the very top.
‘Do you want to borrow one of Dave’s ties, too? You know, ram the point home?’
‘No thanks,’ I said. I stood with both hands on my hips, which makes you feel more confident apparently, according to a TED Talk I’d seen. It didn’t really work. ‘I’m off. See you later.’
‘Unless you get lucky!’ said Alice, as I edged past her to the front door. Now she’d got used to the idea, she really was very excited about the prospect of my new lesbian sex life. Come to think of it, I hadn’t heard so much of her and Dave recently.
‘At a dance class? I think everyone will be able to contain themselves.’
‘You never know.’ She gave me a kiss on the cheek. ‘Promise you won’t make any friends you like better than me?’
‘Promise,’ I said.
The class was in a pub just off Clerkenwell Green, in a pretty, Dickensian corner of the city. I felt immediately at home, as the walls were the same shade of dark red that I’d painted my teenage bedroom. The tables were crowded with thirty-something men drinking pints. There wasn’t a queer dancer to be seen. The barman saw me looking around and jerked his head towards the stairs. ‘They’re up there.’
‘Right!’ I said cheerily, pleased to have been identified as a lesbian, and walked up the creaking staircase, wondering what I’d find at the top.
I hesitated in the doorway of a large, loft-like room. Women and a few men were standing around, some chatting in twos and threes, some on their own, leaning against the radiators for warmth, arms and legs crossed for comfort. A woman wearing purple lipstick was sitting on a table at the front of the room, swinging her legs back and forth. ‘Can everyone pay me now, please!’ she called. ‘There are labels here for you to write your name on.’ I wrote JULIA on a label in thick black marker, stuck it to my shirt and walked to the edge of the room, next to a woman with short brown hair, who was wearing bright-red braces and, amazingly, a bow tie. Her clothes were intimidatingly trendy, but she moved awkwardly, as though she didn’t realize how long her arms and legs were, and that made her seem more approachable.
‘Hello!’ I said, waving at close range, the way I do when I’m nervous.