The dance studio was smaller than Zoe expected: just one narrow room, two or three floors above a corner shop. On the shelves at one end, there were logs of green yoga mats, half-deflated pink balls, and a huge variety of coloured foam blocks. It smelt of rubber and incense. She was early – the first one there – and after she’d paid, she retreated into a small changing room off the studio. She took her clothes off slowly, easing on her leggings, folding her jeans. When she came out into the studio, two girls had arrived and were warming up. One was face down on the floor, writhing. She turned over onto her back and kicked her legs in the air. The other girl was just moving her arms, but in such a fluid and accurate way that Zoe could tell she was good at this.
Zoe turned away from them and started doing self-conscious, half-hearted stretches in a different corner. The room began to fill up. She looked round tentatively when someone new came into the room, and then quickly turned away. Then, with a sickening feeling, Zoe thought she recognized Kathryn: pale skin, a flippy, mousy ponytail, thin and angular, in leopard-print leggings and a tight vest. Zoe turned her back to her. She had come with the precise intention of this happening and now that it had, she felt incredibly vulnerable. What if she gave herself away? Possessing information that would make such a difference to someone else’s life made her feel frighteningly powerful, and dirty.
The teacher arrived. Zoe was mesmerized by her body and the way she moved, so smooth it looked almost involuntary. They began with a warm-up exercise: everyone had to start walking around the room in any direction they liked but if one person stopped, everyone else had to stop too. It involved a curious combination of self-possession and an almost unbearably acute awareness of everyone else in the room. She began to sneak looks at the other dancers. They were almost all women and mostly, they looked right: tall and thin and young and pretty. She began to distinguish them: the girl who had writhed on the floor at the beginning; the tall, slim black girl with an afro and a headband. Kathryn. The only man. She noticed a small, curvy woman with a round, open face, in a large T-shirt and leggings. Unlike the rest of the class, she was deliberately non-intimidating, smiling and laughing every time she nearly bumped into someone. Zoe warmed to her. The movement increased: they had to run, jump, touch the walls. If one person went down on the ground, they all had to get on the floor ‘in whatever way you feel’. Zoe started to feel ungainly and creaky: some of them could be sprawling on their front in seconds flat, while Zoe barely managed to crouch, and then they were up again, whirling round the room. She tried to concentrate on what she was doing, keep Kathryn in her vision and not stare at her too much.
The next exercise was called ‘the triangle’. The teacher demonstrated it with the writhing girl and another girl she clearly knew. They formed a triangle and the three of them had to keep the same distance between them at all times. If one person drew in, they all did; if someone pulled away, the other two did as well. The triangle expanded and contracted regularly according to the whims of its points. But they were not allocated groups of three: you had to choose the people you formed a triangle with silently – and someone else could have picked you for part of a different triangle.
Zoe wasn’t really sure how it was going to work, but the music started, and she picked the two people nearest her: the only man in the group and a girl near him. The man was easy to keep track of, but she lost the girl; she’d never properly distinguished her from the others. For a while, it felt a bit like she was just chasing the man around the room. She tried to be subtle: it seemed somehow unsavoury to let him know that she’d picked him as one of her ‘points’, when he could be following someone else. And what if someone was following her? The whole exercise was designed to induce social paranoia. Then she became aware of the smiley girl following her. It was reassuring, but odd, the thought that someone had been reacting to her without her knowing it. It was embarrassingly intimate, and Zoe tried not to make eye contact, just be aware of their bodies ebbing and flowing. But then it was working, they were dancing: the three of them were a triangle, pulling in together and then all moving away.
The exercise finished and they stood around in a circle. She allowed herself to look at Kathryn directly, to take her in, and realized, with intense relief, that it wasn’t her. Her face was too angular, her mouth too wide. Zoe conjured up the photo she’d seen, and the more she stared at her, the more she was convinced that it was not the same woman. She felt as though she could look round the class directly, now she had nothing to hide, and she caught the eye of the smiley girl in the big T-shirt. The girl beamed back at her directly; something about it was familiar, and then the realization hit. She was Kathryn. Kathryn had been following her. Zoe had liked her.
The main part of the class began, where they learnt a choreographed routine. Zoe tried to steal glances at Kathryn while pivoting, crouching, kicking, lying face down on the floor and swinging her arms and legs about. There was something appealingly youthful about her. Her T-shirt had underarm holes and it was the sort of off-white that suggested it had been around a long time. She was unshowy and engaging, laughing at herself when she got things wrong. She had a bird tattooed on the inside of her wrist. Kathryn’s smile, her scruffiness, her confidence began to enrage Zoe. She was nothing like she’d imagined. She was nice. What could Adam possibly dislike about her?
Zoe longed for the class to end. It was agony; why had she put herself through this? When it finished, Kathryn got to the changing room first and pulled off her T-shirt; she wasn’t wearing a bra underneath. Zoe grabbed her clothes and left, running down the stairs two at a time, trying to work out if she’d got what she wanted. She had no idea.