Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer by Justin Sheedy

Author:Justin Sheedy [Sheedy, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9781742984797
Publisher: Justin Sheedy
Published: 2014-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

When All Hope Is Lost…

* * *

At 17 I had actually grown a grey hair or two by the end of my second-last year of school (and also upped my daily number of cigarettes), my chances of success in my upcoming final year seeming dicey at best. In any case the Christmas Holidays had arrived.

I hadn’t told Mum about my break-up with Madeleine. Though I think she’d sensed it. I wasn’t sure. Sweet Jesus save us from Adolescence: the age where you can no longer talk to your darling Mum despite having done so all the way through Childhood. For the moment apparently Dad was on another fishing holiday…

‘You can go to Melbourne now if you like,’ she said one morning. She said it flatly, firmly. No explanation of why I could go now but not before. I didn’t ask. I just went. I had phoned Germaine and she said she’d just love to have me stay for a week. Even two! Besides, she said, her parents adored me.

In Melbourne, she met me right off the train on the platform of Spencer Street Station. Same black ‘bob’ hairstyle and wicked grin, eyes like a friendly Siamese cat, she was wearing black suede pointy boots, black leggings and an American Indian poncho. From beneath it, she put out her hand. I took it.

‘Come on,’ she smiled.

On the tram ride on the way to her home, as it passed by my window I caught sight of a park through which Madeleine and I had strolled so close together, her arm around my waist, mine around hers, me scarcely able to believe that a girl so beautiful could find ME desirable yet euphoric that she did. And there it passed, the park where we’d sworn we would be once again, in Madeleine’s words, waltzing together just like in the song by The Doors. Wintertime Love.

Clearly Germaine saw my lingering gaze, and placed her hand on my forearm. ‘It’s over,’ she pressed. And I knew it was, in my mind, even as she said it. I knew also, as if something physically lifted off my shoulders in that moment, that I would never think of Madeleine again. And, until writing this, I never did.

Though early December — the beginning of summer in Australia with nights balmy to hot in Sydney — the nights in Melbourne were still mercifully cool. Cool enough to dress up and hit the town. Which we did on that very first night. And when we hit it, I realised Melbourne had something Sydney did not.

Nightclubs.

Sure, Sydney had nightclubs but not the kind that welcomed two kids under the legal drinking age with open arms — perhaps because, as was clear from the first establishment we entered, the emphasis here in Melbourne wasn’t on drinking but on dancing.

Stepping down into the ‘Groove Tube Café’, a whole dance floor full of people going coolly berserk to Stepping Stone by The Monkees, on the walls and on the dancing people were revolving cartwheels

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