“They had good dinners at school – like a hotel, with choices. The only drawback to the whole system was that he was on free dinners.”
Overall, we are given the impression that the Skelly’s home is not a sanctuary; Nelson feels very uncomfortable and it is not an ideal place to be raising a young child. It is implied that Nelson and his mother have to live on the scheme and he has to be given free school meals because they have no other choice, they are living in poverty.
Nelson Skelly is a 12 year old schoolboy, currently in first year who doesn’t show any interest in school and regularly skives off. When we are first introduced to Nelson, he is staring into the Mothercare window:
“He looked at his patch with distaste and felt it with his finger. Bracing himself for the pain, he ripped it off and let a yell out of him”.
MacLaverty highlights this event at the beginning of the story to capture our sympathy straightaway for the young boy as he has to wear a patch over his right eye which brings him extraordinary pain when removing it. MacLaverty encourages his reader to use his/her senses when reading of this, I can imagine exactly what Nelson would feel like. The patch is often referred to many times throughout the story as symbolism to enhance our sympathy for him. When he is taken by his mother to her workplace, he is commanded to wear two eye patches so he is completely in the dark, this symbolises the fact that he is in the dark about his mother’s job because of his innocence and naivety. This innocence is lost when he suspects his mother’s bad natured job at the seedy club:
“He smelt the beer and stale smoke. Outside the room pop music had started up, very loudly. He heard the deep notes pound through to where he sat.”
After witnessing this, Nelson rips of both of the patches his mother had placed on his eyes, this is symbolising him not being in the “dark” anymore about his mother’s job because he has a hunch on the nature of it. Nelson receives a great deal of sympathy from the readers because we feel that he has lost a huge amount of the naivety he should have in his childhood, and Mrs Skelly is the one to deprive him of this.
Even though we go on to discovering Nelson’s irritating behaviour, we can’t help but experience an overpowering feeling of sympathy for him. MacLaverty uses humour to highlight how devious Nelson must be to extract spending money from his mum:
“So he had to invent other things to get the money out of his mother.”
This says a lot about Nelson’s relationship with his mother because he feels as if he can’t be honest with her as he knows he won’t be able to reason with her and her set ways; so instead, he lies to her. We feel sorry that Mrs Skelly has no problem wasting money on her “blond wig”, “perfume” and “all her bottles of makeup” but when it comes to her only son, she refuses to part with money without grumbling about it. Mrs Skelly’s outburst upon learning of Nelson’s skiving implies that she doesn’t care about his education as much as she does of the thought of herself being locked up. He can’t be expected to be serious about school and education if his mother has never showed an interest or concern in it.
“’In the name of God, Nelson, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you at school?’ She began shaking him. ‘Do you realise what this means? They’ll put me in bloody jail. It’ll be bloody Saughton for me, and no mistake.’”
Ironically, Mrs Skelly named her son after Nelson Rockefeller, thinking it would give him a good start in life, being called after such a wealthy man. Unfortunately she doesn’t contribute to this.
Mrs Skelly is the lone parent of Nelson, who she had at the very young age of fifteen and ended up as a high school drop-out without any qualifications or potential for further education. It is implied that she comes from a highly religious background and was disowned by her family upon learning of her pregnancy. On many occasions during the short period of the story, she displays very short-tempered behaviour directly towards Nelson:
“That’s the way the manufacturers make the sets. They put the picture on the front. But oh no, that’s not good enough for our Nelson. He has to watch it from the side. Squint, my arse, you’ll just go blind – stark, staring blind”
It may seem as if Mrs Skelly is constantly shouting at her son, but deep down she is scared as she doesn’t know how to handle a child all on her own and is desperately seeking help and guidance. This is displayed in the incident in Princes St Gardens when she “grabbed him by the fur of his parka and began screaming into his face”.
She doesn’t seem to know much about the father of her son although she thinks he might have been a sailor, implying that she was, and maybe still is, promiscuous. There are signs of this even now:
“Some sixth-year boys wolf-whistled after her and others stopped to stare”.
It is apparent that Nelson’s mother enjoys male attention, she seeks it. She dresses inappropriately in “black satiny jeans, very tight, and her pink blouse knotted, leaving her tanned midriff bare” even though she is fully aware that it will draw attention if she goes to a school dressed this way. This again illustrates the selfish side of her nature.
The title “A Time to Dance” is only truly appreciated and significant to us nearing the end of the story, when Nelson’s R.E. teacher is reading an extract from the Book of Ecclesiastes:
“There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens. A time to be born and a time to die: a time to plant and a time to uproot; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to wear down and a time to build. A time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance…”
This suggests that in life, things should follow a natural pattern and at different times of life, different things are most important. This is subtly applied to Mrs Skelly and her job at the strip club. At this point in her life, it definitely isn’t “a time to dance”, she should concerned about caring for her son’s welfare and bringing him up correctly instead of satisfying herself. MacLaverty has also used irony here as the teacher describes the passage as:
“One of the most beautiful passages in the whole of the Bible”.
This is very ironic as the quotation referring to Mrs Skelly is very “beautiful” whereas her exotic dancing at the strip club is the extreme opposite of everything it means and everything stands for.
To conclude, MacLaverty demonstrates an effective and thought-provoking short story with “A Time to Dance” while incorporating numerous themes such as poverty, education and responsibility. It initiates us to not only sympathise with the financial struggles faced by some, but the vast impact it has on every minute aspect of their lives, physically, socially and mentally. MacLaverty has ingeniously combined a very stripped-down, simple story of Nelson with fascinating characters who have resorted to selfishness and aggression. The story leaves me more aware of the impact of poverty on the lives of Nelson and others just like him.
