THE STORY CONTINUES. 2 The Disco

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I’d not done much the first year at ‘uni’, as I now called it Aussie style, except study. For one thing, I was nervous about picking up academic work again after four years. Could I still do it? And on top of that I’d had two years to do in one.

    So it hadn’t mattered that I was a few years older than most of the undergraduates. In any case, I wasn’t at uni for the social life this time round. I was there to get a qualification.
    Now, in my final year, I had the spectre of exams in eight months’ time. Another reason to keep my head down.
 
The carefree days of Australia already seemed a long time ago. The memory lodged inside me like a golden egg and sometimes I wondered if I’d ever feel like that again.
  

Alison had been my neighbour in a block of university flats during my first year.

    As we shared our new house together I grew to know her a little better, but whenever I told her bits and pieces from my past she was shocked and said she didn’t want to know.

    She was ‘saving’ herself for her husband, when she found him. She believed in true love.

    Oh well. She made me feel a little grubby but all the more reason to keep myself to myself.

 

Graham, one of the men in the house, was a postgraduate, studying for a doctorate in the physics department of the university. He was therefore older and I felt a kinship with him that I didn’t feel with other students. Experience perhaps.

    He asked me to accompany him to a physics department ‘disco’ and, in spite of my priorities and a reluctance to give him the wrong idea about our relationship, something made me say yes.

The disco, a get-together for staff and students, was held in one of the nightclubs on Exeter’s Quay. Graham and I arrived early.

    The DJ wasn’t in his booth yet and a music tape played softly over an empty dance floor. A mirror ball revolved above it sprinkling snowflakes of light.

    Without the usual press of people to disguise it, the rest of the place was far from salubrious: threadbare velvet upholstery, mirror-shiny tables and a stench of cigarettes, sweat and beer.

    I excused myself and went to the Ladies. I wanted to establish my independence. I wasn’t Graham’s girlfriend and I didn’t want to be.

    In any case, I was having my usual wardrobe crisis. With my fluctuating weight there was no point buying clothes and today I was wearing an ancient summer skirt, held up with safety pins which were digging into me. I needed to make some adjustments.    

    When I emerged I could see Graham standing next to the dance floor talking to someone who was waving his arms about in agitated fashion. He had a mane of dark wavy hair reaching to below his shoulders, and a bushy black beard. As I drew closer I could see that he was wearing a faded blue and white tie-dyed shirt, so threadbare it was almost transparent.

    ‘They made me leave my cloak in the cloakroom,’ I could hear him gabbling. ‘It’s my cloak. I can’t be separated from it. They made me leave my cloak in the cloakroom. They don’t understand. They made me leave my cloak in the cloakroom.’

    Graham and I exchanged a look. I wondered how long the man had been going on for.

    And then I realised who it was. It was the man in the red cloak whom I’d seen in Cornwall House the other night. It had to be. Who else would wear a cloak?

    Perhaps I could break his flow. Someone had to bring order to the proceedings.

    ‘But why do you wear it anyway?’ I interjected, remembering the dichotomy I’d noticed in his behaviour. ‘Is it that you want people to look at you or is it that you don’t?’

    The man stopped dead and stared at me. For a moment, he appeared almost normal. And then he spoke, in an almost normal voice, but slowly and carefully as if he was only then learning how to speak.

    ‘That . . .depends . . . on who it is.’

    His eyes were fixed on mine and now it was my turn to stop dead.

    I knew this man. I knew everything about him. I’d met him before in a previous life, in previous lives. They stretched out behind me in an echoing corridor.

    It was like falling off a precipice. I couldn’t breathe.

    I grabbed Graham’s arm. ‘I need a drink.’   

‘Who was that,’ I asked as I dragged Graham away.
    ‘Him?’ he said. ‘Oh, that’s John. He works in the department. Bit of an idiot.’