Dance Move by Wendy Erskine

Review by Claire Carroll

Readers of Sweet Home, Wendy Erskine’s award-winning 2019 debut collection of short stories, will be aware of her skill with the form. Erskine is perhaps best known for her unique dexterity in conjuring a world of emotion that sits quietly—just out of reach—behind the quotidian veil. Sweet Home was a tough act to follow, but Dance Move, shows a further refinement of Erskine’s Chekhovian brevity and pathos. The prose is lean and sharp, with Erskine’s native Belfast revealed in relief as a backdrop to her characters’ lives.

The idea of the dance move—a repeated action that is learned, perfected, reimagined, forgotten and picked up again—is a compelling emblem for this collection. The intersection of memory with movement, gesture and touch, persists throughout the stories. A woman remembers a teenage encounter with an older man, the memory of his hand on her lip interloping into her daily life. Two strangers share a brief, intimate moment after witnessing the death of a motorcyclist, and a bereaved mother longs for the comfort of another. These gestures, or rather, the absence of them, appear to nag at the characters, giving way to the very a specific form of pathos. Erskine’s ability to convey the type of quiet, yet palpable, stasis brought about by a multitude of losses is unmatched.

In these stories, the sensation of time passing, and time lost, hangs over the experiences of the present. In ‘Bildungsroman’, teenage Lee goes to stay with Eileen, a neighbour’s sister, whilst on a work placement. His visit takes a dark turn, and in the present day, Lee is plagued with a sense of responsibility towards Eileen which is never quite resolved and eats away at him into adulthood. In ‘Cell’, Caro is haunted by her radical past, flickering at the edges of her quiet life.

It’s in quiet moments that the past seeps into the present for Erskine’s characters. The eponymous Mrs Dallesandro—wealthy and well-groomed—has on the surface, possession of all of the comfort and material wealth that modernity has to offer. But it’s whilst alone in a backstreet tanning salon that a memory intrudes of a messy and exhilarating sexual encounter from her youth. These intimate internal moments creep up on the reader, plunging us abruptly and deeply into the characters’ psyches. Before we have time to catch our breath, the tanning bed has been switched off and we’re back in the outside world. We feel intensively Mrs Dallesandro’s loss—her longing for the past—but just for the briefest moment.

Loss is a recurring theme. In ‘His Mother’, Sonya roams the streets, removing the degraded posters calling for the safe return of her missing teenage son. As with so many of Dance Move’s characters, the past encroaches, unbidden, on Sonya’s present, although she cannot quite process what happened to her son. In Sonya, Erskine gives us a character who is weighed down by her grief, not quite ready herself to face the events that have occurred. ‘She didn’t feel like talking, anyway. She didn’t feel like listening’. Without resolution, the reader must bear the weight of Sonya’s grief.

In ‘Memento Mori’, an awkward overlapping of tragedies occurs, when the railings of Gillian’s house—inside which her partner is dying—become a memorial site for a murdered teenager. Gillian is one of the collection’s most intriguing characters; she is at once closed off and warm; awkward yet tender. She feels relatable and alive. Similarly nuanced is the character of Kate in the title story, whose stiff and judgmental exterior is challenged by her daughter’s sexual precociousness. Kate’s story is loaded with hints as to the origin of her uneasy demeanour, yet nothing is fully revealed.

Short stories are perhaps one of the most challenging forms to master. A writer has little time to bond with their reader in short form fiction, and cannot make use of complex plot or world-building. Instead, they must rely on a strong sense of place, and razor-sharp characterisation. This is where Erskine’s strength lies; in showing us a Belfast that is expansive and multifaceted, and in creating characters who often say very little, even to themselves, and yet give us so much.

Dance Move is published by Picador, 17th February 2022