Where Have All the Boys Gone?(82)

KATIE’S HEART WAS considerably lighter by the time she got to the office. Food and somewhere to go! They might just pull this off after all.

“No,” Harry was saying down the phone in his strongest possible tone of voice. “Absolutely not. NO. I mean it!”

“Who was that?” asked Katie. “Toga measuring service?”

“Trying to stop Dougie from playing the accordion,” said Harry, covering the speaker with his hand. “It’s a bit of a full-time job.”

“Music!” cried Katie. “God, I forgot all about the music!”

Harry finished his call and stared at her. “What do you mean?”

“Well, we need a band, and a DJ and things.”

“Why?” Harry looked puzzled.

“For music. Or do you think we should do everything in complete silence?”

“Uh, no, I think you’ll find,” Harry went back to shuffling papers, “it will be harder to get people to stop playing music than otherwise.”

“How come?”

“Well, everyone plays something. Or sings or something.”

“Really? What do you play?”

Harry looked embarrassed. He was feeling embarrassed. Having finally come to terms with the fact that he did actually fancy Katie and wasn’t having a mild allergic reaction every time she walked past him, he was doing his best to put it out of his mind and let it wash over him, like pretty much every crush he’d had since he was fourteen. It was the best way, he’d found. “Um . . .”

“What? The tuba? The bongos? What?”

“The bagpipes, actually.”

Katie stared at him. “NO!”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Really? People play those things?”

“Yes,” said Harry. He was actually a very good piper. Bloody English thought it was hilarious to sneer at everything.

“I always got them confused with cats,” said Katie. “Someone once told me that you just put a cat’s tail in your mouth and squeezed its tummy, and I believed it for years.”

“You got confused between bagpipes and cats?”

“Maybe I’ll stroke yours on the head.”

“Well anyway,” said Harry. “The lads have a good ceilidh band, so there’ll be no trouble with the dancing, and those techie ponces have apparently formed a brass ensemble that can play the entire music from Star Wars, so we might have them while we’re eating . . . if we’re eating that is?”

“Ooh, we’re eating!” said Katie excitedly. “It’ll be food of the pie extraction. But that’s still better than square sausage.”

“The only type of sausage worth eating,” said Harry grinning.

“Hang on,” said Katie. “So, we’re not getting a DJ . . . but we are having dancing?”

“Uh-huh.”

Katie’s dancing was entirely limited to a fairly controlled club style (after the rather troubling wave-your-hands-in-the-air-like-you-just-don’t-care stage she’d discarded post-university, along with the tie-dyed T-shirt, the dungarees, and the whistle), and the occasional unpleasant tussle when she met one of those young men prevalent on the London scene who have been to three salsa classes and therefore think it is quite acceptable to throw you about the room like a sack of potatoes then get upset with you for failing to follow their psychic dancing instructions.

“What kind of dancing?” she asked, very suspiciously.

“Ceilidh dancing,” said Harry, as though he was explaining it to an unattentive four-year-old. “You know—the kind of dancing you do at parties.”

“Not the parties I go to,” said Katie.

“Oh, come on. You must know a few dances. The Canadian Barn Dance? Eightsome Reel? Gay Gordons?”

“Gay who now?”

Harry tutted. “What did they teach you at school?”

“How to put a condom on a banana.”

Harry rubbed the back of his neck. “So, we’re going to have this dance band . . . and all these chaps . . . and all these women . . . and nobody is going to be able to dance with each other?”

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll pick it up as we go along,” said Katie.

“Hmm,” said Harry, not convinced. “Derek! Have you got a minute?”

“Sure,” said Derek, appearing from the back.

“Could you give us a bit of puirt-a-beul?”

“What, now?” asked Derek.

“What, what?” said Katie.

“Someone needs to learn a bit of dancing,” said Harry.

“You can’t do that in here,” said Derek, looking around in dismay at the papers piled everywhere.

“No,” said Harry. “Come on everyone! Outside!”

He threw open both the glass doors and they stepped out into the summer sunlight. The dew was still glinting on the grass, and the clearing had turned into a carpet of daisies. Green light came down through the trees.

“OK!” said Harry, and Derek sat himself down on the step at the door and started to beat a rhythm on the ground with two pencils. Then he opened his mouth and started to—well, Katie wasn’t quite sure what he was doing. He was kind of singing, in a high-pitched tone of voice, but it wasn’t quite singing; it sounded more like a musical instrument, making fast rhythmic music. There were words, of a kind, but they didn’t sound like English, or anything else, more like a fast gabbling to fit the tune. Derek looked completely unselfconscious. It sounded eerie, ancient, and wonderful out in the wooded morning.