The Safety Dance Read online



  The Safety Dance

  By Justin Cawthorne

  Copyright 2012 Justin Cawthorne

  for @charp – because this is all his fault, mostly

  and with thanks to @superflange who was there for me

  when I needed someone to do violence to a cassette tape

  Table of Contents

  The Safety Dance

  Author’s Note

  Other stories by Justin Cawthorne

  Connections

  The Safety Dance

  by Justin Cawthorne

  “What the fuck is this?!”

  Crispin looked up at Gloria in puzzlement. She was standing over him, holding the present he had just given her between the finger and thumb of one hand as if it was potentially contagious: her other hand rested indignantly upon her hip. Crispin thought it was quite obvious what she was holding in her hand and, in his experience, Gloria didn’t usually need a great deal of help with the obvious. This was the main source of his puzzlement. He supposed fleetingly that she could be referring to something else: perhaps something that she wasn’t holding directly in front of his face; or something that was taking place behind him; or maybe even something that was currently going on entirely inside her head. However, since Crispin wasn’t able to read her mind (although he had genuinely tried on many occasions) he had no real way of knowing if she was, in fact, talking about something else or not.

  So, when Gloria asked him, in a tone usually reserved for dealing with the legal department: “What the fuck is this?” Crispin really only had one answer to give her:

  “It’s a cassette tape.”

  This time she rolled her eyes at him, which was still quite some distance from the reaction he had hoped to inspire when he’d recorded the mix tape for her. “I can see it’s a tape, Crisp, I can see that. It’s even written here on the side just in case I had any niggling doubts about it. But do you know what year this is? It’s 2011! It’s the year after we made contact. Who the hell plays tapes any more?”

  “... I do,” replied Crispin, honestly perplexed. “Did you want to borrow my Walkman...?”

  Gloria arched her eyebrows so high Crispin briefly wondered if she was going to be able to keep her eyeballs inside her face. “Your Walkman? You have a Walkman - a tape Walkman? Shit, did you miss the nineties completely?”

  Crispin shook his head vigorously. “No way. I had a MiniDisc player once. And I saw The Matrix.”

  She sighed and shook her head in bewilderment. “Fine. Fine. Okay, let me borrow the Walkman. If it means I don’t have to listen to Miriam talking about her husband’s piles I’ll listen to anything.”

  He pulled the Walkman out of his rucksack and handed it over. Gloria stared at it for a second, still shaking her head, then walked off.

  “Cheers, Crisp.”

  Crispin returned to his work. He had five more spreadsheets to print out. Once that was done he could start writing the new fees onto them and calculate the totals. Then all he needed to do was copy the updated figures onto the spreadsheets on the computer and that would probably bring him right up to lunch time. Out of all the systems he had developed to help him through his daily work schedule this was probably his most efficient.

  Except for when it got interrupted.

  He had just started writing numbers onto the first printout when Gloria stormed back over to him. She threw the Walkman down on his desk and thrust her palms out in outraged astonishment.

  “Again, Crisp, again I have to ask you: what the fuck is this?!”

  This time Crispin really wasn’t sure what to say. “Er... a mix tape? Didn’t we already - ?”

  She leaned down. “No - no, it’s not. It’s not a fucking mix tape. The point of a mix tape, Crisp, is that it actually has a mix of music on it - different music, different songs, that’s why they call it a mix. This tape has one song on it. One song. It’s the shitting Safety Dance. That’s not a mix tape - that’s a... I don’t know what it is - it’s an embolism on magnetic media, that’s what it is.”

  “Did you listen to the whole thing?”

  “No, no I didn’t listen to the whole thing. Do you know why I didn’t? Because even I can’t listen to a whole C90 cassette tape in less than five minutes.”

  Crispin stared down at his desk for a minute: “It’s a good s-”

  “It’s a shit song, Crisp. It’s the Safety Dance. It’s shit.”

  “I like it...” he said quietly.

  Gloria raised her eyes to the ceiling, then spoke to him to again. Although Crispin didn’t realise it at the time, it was taking her full reserve of patience - which was also often the one thing that prevented her super glueing certain members of the legal department to their office chairs - not to reach out and throttle him (indeed, it was no coincidence that, later that day, certain members of the legal department would find something particularly unpleasant lurking in their coffee.)

  “Look, just tell me you put some other songs on it. I’ll go and listen to the tape if it’ll make you happy but I’m not going to go and listen to The Safety Dance twenty times... not if you don’t want me stabbing someone by the end of the day.”

  “I was going to put some other songs on it, but I didn’t see the point, and I didn’t want to leave the rest of the tape blank...”

  That finally earned him a quick cuff around the ear. “So you filled a whole tape with The Safety Dance? One whole tape with just one sodding song? Shit, Crisp, if I didn’t know you better I’d be calling the men in white coats right about now.”

  He shrugged. “I just like that song.”

  Gloria threw her hands up, as if to disown the whole affair. “It’s fine, Crisp, whatever floats your boat. Just, you know what - don’t give this to anyone else, okay? Not ever. Don’t even tell anyone it exists. No one: not a single person. Especially not anyone here.”

  “Sure. Okay.”

  She gave him one last look, something between affection and pity, then walked off again.