The stories of the Northern Irish writer Wendy Erskine, though colloquial and streetwise, are largely traditional in approach. She doesn’t mess the reader around. There are no games or tics, unless you count a taste for the adjective “sleek”. The titles in Dance Move, her propulsive and pleasurable second collection, tend to identify a character or characters (Mrs Dallesandro, Gloria and Max) or an emotional atmosphere (Memento Mori), dabbling at their most extreme in the meta-fictional (Bildungsroman) or double-edged – Nostalgie refers both to a song and the emotions it stirs, Cell to a faction and the virtual imprisonment entailed by membership. Even when Erskine begins with an unexplained allusion (“the night before”) or glimmer of intrigue (a man saying something not “entirely true”), the facts straighten themselves out soon enough, and just as often a situation is set down with unselfconscious baldness: “He was there as visiting professor of film”, “For the last nine years Linda and Rae had been having a takeaway together on a Friday night”.
The collection’s title is borrowed from one of the stories, though with a shift from the plural suggesting a desire for unity or cohesion. If anything serves to realise this function, beyond the Belfast backdrop and the use of the third person, it’s the emphasis on the unlived life. These are ghost stories of a kind, with alternative possibilities occupying the role of spectre. The opening tale, Mathematics, begins with a reference to the “remnants of other people’s fun” that the hotel cleaner Roberta keeps in her bedside drawer, and the closing story, Secrets Bonita Beach Krystal Cancun, ends with Rae asking Linda, “What do you think that looked like?” In between are many acts of wondering, speculation, daydreaming, fanciful forecast (“He’d have a Porsche Carerra at some point”). Rhonda, in Golem, about two couples at a country wedding, imagines absconding with her brother-in-law: “It was endlessly sunny with Edgar and sometimes they lived in a house she had seen in an interiors magazine that belonged to a professor at Stanford; a house in Palo Alto, all greenness and beautiful wood.”
