Excerpt: Dance With Me

Only seventeen hours had passed since Martha got the phone call. Seventeen hours, twelve minutes and eight seconds.... nine... ten... nine... ten. Martha tapped her watch impatiently, the second hand twitching back and forth as the battery wound down. She'd have to get it replaced again, cheap piece of crap her sister bought her for Christmas last year. Was always breaking. She'd have thrown it away weeks ago only Laura was insistant that she keep it. Apparently it reminded her of a watch their grandmother once owned. Both girls had adored their grandmother, but each adored the watch more. When Ida Connoly died at the age of 65 both girls were devastated. Laura locked herself in her room for three days, while Martha remained calm and stoic to the outside world, but inside she was in turmoil. She was only 16 years old when Ida succumbed to a long battle with liver cancer, a battle which had raged inside her once beautiful but now frail body for all of Martha's teenage years, and a good few before them. Martha's only way of coping was to project the image of being strong. While all her around her broke down, Martha felt useless. There was nothing she could do to help those she loved, so the only thing she could be was the strong one. So she learned to push her feelings away and down into the bottom of her heart. This was something she could do for her Nana, she could be strong for her family, she felt she owed her that.
Their grandmother had worn that watch every day of their lives, its silver and pearl face smiling like the pale moon at the dead of night. Ida Connoly was buried wearing it, as was requested in her will, and Martha and Laura mourned the loss of something so beautiful and precious. That watch held their every memory of their grandmother in its turning hands, every event wrapped up in the cogs of time. They had hoped to be able to keep it, perhaps share it between them, and it would remain as an endless reminder of their grandmother as they grew older. But it was lost to the sands of time, just as the days they spent together under the summer sun, on holidays to the beach or walks and picnics by the local canals and ponds. Sometimes Martha pictured her Nana wearing the watch, and was glad that she got to wear it everyday, just as she always had, ticking away like a barely audible heartbeat on her wrist. Some things just shouldn't be changed, Martha thought.
The watch currently on Martha's wrist however, no longer ticked. When the style came back in fashion, Laura had bought three similar to Ida's for her sister, mother (Ida's daughter) and herself. Unfortunately, while Ida's was well built and would probably tick until eternity, these were no so well made. It once nearly made her late for a meeting with her boss, when it stopped one afternoon for a few minutes, then inexplicably started again, now running a few minutes late. Thankfully the she-witch had gotten stuck in traffic herself, leaving Martha waiting in the hotel foyer for forty minutes, watching the neatly polished toes of the rich and famous (or at least their wives) clip-clop their way across the marble floors in their £300 Jimmy Choos. Head to French-polished toe in designer lables; Prada, Gucci and Oscar de la Renta. Every day she watched the buisness men parade their trophy girlfriends in and out of the hotel (their wives were no doubt still at home playing online bingo and racking up a fortune to rival Bitsy or Izzy's accessory habit). Every day Martha smiled from behind reception, her pearly white and wide smile masking the strong desire deep in her heart to trip the plastic bimbos and watch thousands of pounds worth of jewlerry skitter across the shiny floor. Those wicked fantasies kept her going on dull and dreary days, when the hands on her cheap silver watch seemed to even be moving backwards (they never actually were; the watch was cheap, it wasn't that cheap). They made her feel better about her Next smart black court shoes and pinstripe charcoal suit from Marks and Spencers, which hugged gently to her curvy figure. To almost anyone, Martha was an attractive, twenty something career woman... but when up against those living, breathing Barbie dolls, she felt insignificant. Not that she wanted to look like them, but she envied the reaction they got from the opposite sex. She proclaimed to be a feminist, looking for a man more interested in her opinions than her bra size, but like every woman she was secretly scruitinising her figure against every other woman she met, wondering if men really did prefer a rounder bottom these days. Its the age old story that the grass is greener on the other side; women with smaller bums envy those with curves, while women bless with ample bounce in their caboose worried they were too fat to find a man.