I need a story in here from one of the late 20th-century white males who peddled white male lust and privilege in gorgeous bespoke sentences and who for a time had me in thrall: James Kennaway, James Salter, Alfred Hayes … I’m choosing ‘Dancing’ by James Buchan, about whom Michael Hofmann once declared: “I don’t believe this country has a better writer to offer.” ‘Dancing’ is the third in a series of stories that make up Slide, a book that (says the blurb) “calmly records the moral demolition of an Englishman”. The opening: “My first foreign posting was in Kuwait, where I went in 1979 as Press and Information Secretary at the Embassy”: booze, sex, death, cover-ups, tribal loyalty. The closing:
‘Dance,’ Gay shouted. ‘Dance, cunts.’
She was falling. Her hair swept a Persian rug. Her eyes were wide open, looking past me or at nothing at all. I felt my balance go. I hit the chess table, and felt it sway and teeter over. The bronze horse danced. Picture lights. Mouths agape. Blue stripes. A burst of sparks. Black shoes. Kurt Axel.
Published in Slide, Heinemann, 1991; Minerva paperback, 1992
A Personal Anthology 