Chapter 14: Zoom

We were all now more or less dressed, though it was more like we were dressed ready for bed than for anything else.

Tabby looked around at the rest of us. “What are we doing now?”

“Maybe we could go back to the front room and sit down,” suggested Jenny, wanting to avoid anything too loud or active. Tabby looked disappointed but didn’t say anything. We all trooped back downstairs to the front room. I could see Tabby almost wanting to jump out of her skin. She needed to be doing something active and was forcing herself to be calm.

Jenny dived back into her doona nest, but then she opened it slightly and made room for Freddy. He squeezed in with her and she wrapped the doona around the two of them. Tabby took my hand and led me to the settee. Once I’d sat down, she sat next to me, so close that our thighs were pressing against each other. I didn’t know how to react to that, so I let it happen.

I could feel her restlessness through that close contact, and I tried to think of a way to help her out.

“Hey Tabby,” I said. “I hear you’re a dancer. Can you maybe demo one of your routines? I’d love to see you dance.”

She came alive. “I can do that.”

She jumped back up off the settee and ran to her bag.

“I’ll link my phone to the sound system so that I can play the music,” she announced.

I saw Jenny visibly flinch.

“How about you just dance,” I said. “The music will be loud enough through your phone speaker for you to get the beat.”

She looked like she wanted to argue. I silently pointed to a very miserable Jenny.

“Oh,” she said with a frown, then she deflated. “I could do that.”

We slid a coffee table out of the way and pushed the settee and the unoccupied armchair back against the wall to make room. Luckily, the armchair Jenny was in was already in a good position. Tabby lined up the music she wanted and turned the volume up high. She handed her phone to me, asking me to press play when she was ready and then hold the phone up so we could all hear the music. She went to the middle and adopted her starting pose. She nodded to me, so I pressed play and off she went.

Her dance used a type of choreography I’m not fond of. It’s all angular poses with bent elbows and bent knees and jerky movements. I didn’t like the dance, but I could see she was doing it well.

Freddy watched from his spot beside Jenny with proud eyes. Even Jenny watched with a small smile.

I think the loose shirt flapping around Tabby as she danced added something to the presentation. Usually that type of dance is done in a leotard, sometimes with a filmy skirt around the waist that does nothing but break up the lines. In a leotard, every movement of the torso is visible. Every tilt of the hips, every curve of the spine, every shift of the rib case, it’s all there to be seen. With the loose shirt, the torso movements were sometimes visible and sometimes hidden, giving us hints of the body moving inside. It was kind of artistic.

The only time the shirt caused a problem was when she did a version of what I vaguely remember is called an arabesque penchee, standing on one leg, with the other leg out behind and lifted high, but in this case bent at the knee, and the torso and head tilted toward the floor. Tabby tilted so low that her head was virtually sweeping the carpet. At that point, the shirt fell up to bunch around her armpits, give us a complete view of her body. Tabby squeaked and straightened up immediately, losing her timing and breaking out of the dance. It was hard not to laugh at her reaction. She was blushing as she straightened the shirt around her thighs, then she picked up the dance and continued. From then on, when she had to do that move, she only tilted down to about 90 degrees and the shirt more or less stayed in place.

The song finished and Tabby ended in a pose.

“That was terrific, Tabby,” I said. “Nice dancing.” Both Freddy and Jenny added to the praise.

Tabby was breathing hard from the exertion.

“Sorry about flashing my undies at you all,” she said with a blush.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s like you’re wearing the bottom half of a leotard under the shirt.”

It wasn’t really. Most half-leotards are way more substantial than her little undies, but I was trying to be supportive.

“I could do another one,” offered Tabby.

I glanced over at Jenny to see how she was coping. She saw my look and gave me a little nod.

I tilted my head. “Is that the only style you do? Maybe you could do one with a different style.”

“Sure,” was the enthusiastic response. “I do lots of different styles. I won’t try to do tap with my bare feet on the carpet. But maybe I could do...”

Tabby took her phone back from me and found a different track to play. She gave the phone back to me, then went to one side of the room to prepare.

I glanced at the phone and saw that the track she’d selected was a song called ‘Zoom’ by Fat Larry’s Band. I hadn’t recognised the first track she’d played at all. The name of this song rang a bell, but then again, I felt like there were probably several songs called Zoom or with that word in the lyrics and I had no idea which of those various songs this was.

Tabby called out, “Wait.”

She looked around at all of us nervously, and then tied the shirt into a knot at her hip so that it wouldn’t move so much. That resulted in permanently exposing her undies, but that didn’t matter given that she’d spent so much of the first dance flashing them at us anyway.

She nodded at me, and said, “Okay, go.”

The music started. It was slower and more melodic than I expected. It sounded like mostly drums and electric guitar but I could be wrong.

The first line was, “Zoom. Just one look and my heart went, Boom.”

The lyrics were all like that. The rhymes were kind of corny, but it was sweet at the same time.

Tabby launched into a smoother and more elegant dance, that fitted nicely to the music. It had acro elements in it which meant she was doing cartwheels, and back walkovers, and handstands into splits, and so on. The acro moves were linked together with smooth transitions that flowed into the more traditional dance elements. That explained the knotted shirt. Without the knot, the shirt would have spent half the dance inverted around her ears. The dance showed off Tabby’s flexibility as well as her grace and control.