by Jan Jones
~~~
Only Dancing
by
Jan Jones
~~~
A romantic suspense novella
with 1970s flashbacks
Only Dancing copyright © 2015 by Jan Jones
Kindle Edition
Jan Jones has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email the author at the address below.
This is a work of fiction. With the exception of the disclaimer at the beginning of the book, all names and characters spring entirely from the author’s own imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Cover design and formatting www.jdsmith design.com
All enquiries to [email protected]
A very much abridged version of Only Dancing first appeared in 2016 as a five-part serial in Woman's Weekly magazine
Only Dancing
is dedicated to
Eve and Kay and Jane and Angela and all our dreams of the future. I hope you are living some of them right now.
This book is also for David Bowie and the music of the Seventies.
Wonderful sounds. Wonderful words. Wonderful times.
Disclaimer
Only Dancing is a work of fiction.
David Bowie certainly played in all the concerts mentioned in this work - and I went to many of them - but any events and conversations involving him or relating to him are wholly the product of my own imagination.
The David Bowie Is... exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum took place in 2013. It was completely wonderful, but the three particular exhibits I mention in the story are my own invention, purely to facilitate the plot.
Jan Jones
September 2015
Author's note
When I wrote Only Dancing, David Bowie was a living legend. I wish he still was. Timeless and ageless, it never occurred to me that he might one day not be here. Except he is, of course. He is with all of us, the thread of his music in the blood, the nudge of creativity in the soul. Boogie on, David.
Jan Jones
January 2016
CHAPTER ONE
1970. David Bowie played the Roundhouse Spring Festival. I was there.
1972. The Bowie concert in the Royal Festival Hall. I was there.
2013. The ‘David Bowie Is...’ exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum. I was here too, though I wasn’t certain if I wanted to be.
Idiot, I told myself as I hesitated, standing outside the museum in sunny, everyday South Kensington, a lifetime away from the new green girl I had been in 1970. What was I worried about? I’d visited the V&A countless thousands of times for pleasure and for work. Today would be no different. What was one more exhibition here or there? What was the worst that could happen?
Still I hesitated. Out with it, Caroline. It's because it was this exhibition, wasn't it? Was I really afraid that the magic still clinging to that wonderful, crazy, long-ago part of my memory would be lost?
As I wavered, there was movement by the doors. A porter emerged, carrying a stanchion, preparing to limit entry because the museum was busy. Not giving myself any more time to think, I ran up the steps and into the entrance hall.
Coming here was such a mistake. I knew it as soon as I pressed the button on the soundtrack headset and Rebel, Rebel hit my ears. The immediacy of the song slammed into me. My forward progress faltered until I was hardly moving across the dark, compose-yourself ante-space. I'd have gone backwards if I could. Even this slowly, with people tutting and passing either side of me, before I was anything like composed enough I came out into the light of the exhibition proper and found myself, with an almighty physical shock, slap-bang in the early seventies.
I couldn't move. Bowie surrounded me, his face on the walls as beautiful as ever, his voice in my head, his art in my face. I was ricocheted back to those vibrant, colourful growing-up years, and I ached for my long-ago bachelor flat and that lost time when anything was possible.
Tears pricked my eyes. The magic hadn’t gone, how could it? It shimmered in my past where it had always been, warm and vivid, threaded with excitement. With a fatalistic, teeth-jarring certainty, I knew that hadn’t really been what I was dreading at all.
No, I was ashamed because the woman I was now didn’t match the person I’d thought I would grow into. I'd hesitated outside the museum and dragged my feet in the ante-room purely and simply because I hadn’t wanted the knowledge forever in my head that I’d betrayed my teenage self.
~~~
My cousin Jilly was four years older than me, the late-born afterthought of Mum’s eldest sister. Like many surprise children, she was doted on with awed wonder by her parents, winding them around her little finger from the day she was born. She was alternately guarded and indulged - and entirely misunderstood.
Jilly and I spent a lot of time together. Ours is that sort of family, by and large, but also I was the little sister she never had. In a household where she was the youngest, I was someone she could show off to, someone she could dress up and boss around. For cousins, we didn’t look much alike. We had the same family-green eyes, but Jilly was tall and wild and beautiful, with flame-coloured curls. I had a slight frame and straight dark hair. It made no difference. I adored her.
As a child, I shared her trampoline, her ballet lessons, her hated corned beef sandwiches (giving her my jam ones in exchange without protest). As we grew up, we rode the London Underground like a second home. We window-shopped all the boutiques along the King’s Road and Carnaby Street. We spent whole afternoons trying on clothes. She made up my eyes with a Mary Quant kit I desperately wanted to own (though not, I have to say, as much as I later coveted her green zigzag Biba platforms). She took me to pubs and parties and told me things I didn’t understand. And all to the constant soundtrack of records, auto-changing one after the other, after the other, after the other.
The first time I saw David Bowie play live, that Sunday at the Roundhouse in 1970, Jilly had made a tactical concession to parental concerns about her activities by taking me with her. “Oh, you sillies. You never need to worry about me,” she said affectionately to Aunty Pam and Uncle Frank. “I'm always all right. Yes, I know it’s billed as the Roundhouse Spring Festival, but it’s only music. And it begins at half past three in the afternoon. What on earth happens at half past three on a Sunday afternoon? Honestly, darlings, you don’t want to go listening to people who have never been to these things themselves. Look, to prove how safe it is, I’ll take Caro.”
Here, my parents intervened in a flurry of alarm. “Jilly, dear, the posters say the concert goes on until eleven-thirty at night. Caroline has school on Monday.”
Jilly waved this away with the sunny nonchalance of someone who’d shaken the school dust off her feet for good last summer. “We don’t have to stay that late, and you know she’ll have done all her homework by Saturday lunchtime. She always does. Don’t worry, she’ll love it.”
I did love it. I went to gigs with Jilly many, many times afterwards, but they were nothing compared to that first mind-blowing experience. I was in the Roundhouse again now in my head as I stared at the poster facing me on the wall of the exhibition. It was from a later concert, but it was still David Bowie in all his magnificence. So much more untouchable and grand in costume and makeup and with the ad
renalin running high than he was all the times I met him in person.
Back then, of course, I had no idea that everyone didn’t go round to the dressing rooms after the show. That first time, the haze of patchouli and cigarette smoke, the patchy black paint on the walls and the air of faint dinginess only added to the magic as I tagged along behind Jilly, my head still exploded with music and lights and colour. We walked through the dressing room door and Jilly was instantly swallowed up by her friends. I edged over to the side of the room where I could see a seat - only to find the singer next to me, quiet and reflective amongst the noisy crowd. And fell in love. Who wouldn’t?
“Hello,” he said, turning his head as I tucked myself quietly onto a hard chair by the wall. “Who are you?”
“Caroline,” I answered.
My eyes must still have been as wide as dinner plates, because he smiled slightly. “First time gig, yeah? Did you enjoy it?”
“Oh, yes,” I said on a rush of breath. “The music and the lights and the words and... and you. I know your songs, and I heard you on the John Peel show two weeks ago, but this was... this was wonderful. It’s so different. I'm so different now. I feel as if I’ve expanded inside. I’ve filled up all my spaces. I don’t rattle around inside my body any more.”
He grinned, impishly, conspiratorially, just as if he was my age and not ten years older and a proper grown up. “Turns you on, doesn’t it? It does me too.”
“Yes,” I said, with a sigh of pure pleasure that he understood. Because that’s how I felt. As if I’d been flooded with life. Turned on.
We sat for a moment or two, isolated from the rest of the room. For years afterwards that would be my tranquil image, the place I thought myself to whenever I needed to take stock. A small bubble of perfection.
“How old are you, Caroline?”
“Fourteen.” It was what Jilly had told me to say. It would be true in a couple of months anyway. “I came with Jilly.” I peered around the press of people and saw her by the door, the centre of a laughing group.
A relaxed look came over his face. “Ah, yes, Jilly.”
“She’s my cousin. She’s pretty, isn’t she?”
“She is.” He looked back at me and stretched to put his hand under my chin. “But you - I like your look a lot. Good bones. Classic and simple. You can do something with that.” He reached absently for the festival programme I was clutching and started sketching. “You need better clothes.”
I blushed. “This is Jilly’s dress. It’s from Bazaar. I borrowed it to look right.”
“Dressing up only works if you can be the person inside the costume. Find your own style, Caroline. Shop the sales, get the best you can afford and never lose the music in your soul.” He stood, all in one sleek, unfolding movement. “I’ll see you around.” He dropped the programme back on my lap, plucked a tall woman away from the man she’d been talking to and left with her, just like that.
I looked down. He’d signed my programme and added a drawing of a grown up me with a long bob, pencil skirt, nipped-in jacket, flamboyant scarf and heels. I had no idea how to achieve the look on my slender pocket money, but it didn't occur to me not to obey.
I thought about it all the way home. Great Aunt Dolly never threw anything away. I startled Mum and Dad by voluntarily offering to go to tea with her. Actually, she was really interesting to talk to when there was no one else listening in and telling her I was too young for those sort of memories. I came away with a 1930s Chinese silk jacket in jade swirls and another in a to-die-for mulberry mosaic. I re-seamed my A-line black school skirt to make it straight and when I saw David Bowie the following month at the Atomic Sunrise Festival he gave me a thumbs-up of approval. That sealed it. Leaving aside the improbably long legs, it’s a look that has served me very well for decades now.
~~~
Such a long time ago, those years, but with the music insistent in my ears, they were suddenly vivid in my mind’s eye. I came back to the present only tenuously as I moved slowly along the exhibition, reading about David Bowie’s early life and correlating what I read with what I remembered.
Here were the Roundhouse years. The Hype, that was the name of his band then. I’d forgotten. And there was a photo of a gig, everyone absurdly young, and...
Oh...
My heart thumped. I stopped so abruptly someone bumped into me from behind. “Sorry,” I murmured, sidestepping to get closer to the photo. It was focused on the band, but there were people to one side listening.
One of them was Jilly. Tumbling hair, hot pants and a long, sleeveless, crocheted waistcoat, it was impossible to mistake her. The ache inside me intensified, the past close enough to touch. What happens to us when we get old, to make all the lost years so painful? Oh, Jilly, I miss you so much.
It should have been no surprise, really, to find my cousin on any pictorial record of any London band in the early seventies. It was her milieu - and she was very photogenic. Cameras adored her.
What made this photo different was that Jilly wasn’t simply listening to the music. Her body language said she was arguing as well. I shifted my gaze to the person next to her and received a second jolt. She was arguing with Blake! My husband Blake, much younger, before I knew him properly, before I married him.
I looked more closely. He'd changed very little over the years. Badged in the upwardly-mobile BBC uniform of a roll-neck sweater and slacks, he had the same controlled, lean form that he still had today. Even then, his hair showed signs of receding. Again, I don’t know why it should have given me such a shock to see him in the photo. Blake was always one of the crowd, albeit older and better paid and with the air - as with all writers, I think - of being an onlooker rather than a participant in the game.
No, what threw me now was that I hadn’t realised he’d known Jilly well enough to have a row with her. It made me feel as though I’d missed a step in the dark.
I moved on, a tiny unease lodged in the back of my mind. Stupid, I told myself. It was over forty years ago. Nothing that far back should affect me today. It was the fault of the music, joining up my memories and making everything seem much closer.
The headset played Bowie’s songs, snatches of interviews, audiences applauding. The exhibition brought my early life surging back. The Life on Mars tour, the concert at the Royal Festival Hall at the end of my O-levels, arguing for the whole of the previous two terms with my parents about not doing A-levels because I was just too restless and urgent and ready for life. Leaving school at the end of June and starting as a production secretary at the BBC with Jilly. Glimpsing the bands I saw regularly at the Roundhouse and the Hammersmith Odeon when they came in to appear on Blue Peter and Top of the Pops and the various chat shows. A manic, wonderful, crazy time.
Poleaxed by nostalgia, suddenly on the soundtrack I heard Jilly’s voice emerge clear as clear from amidst a babble of street noise and background conversations.
“I’m only dancing!”
My heart stuttered. I couldn't believe it. Jilly! How many times had I heard her say that? I’m only dancing. To her parents, to her current boyfriend, to me when I didn’t like the guy she was making out with on the dance floor. “Silly,” she’d say with a throaty laugh, and she'd explain it to me again, tolerant and amused. “It’s only dancing, Caro. It’s a contract, just for the length of the song. It’s fun. It doesn’t mean anything. Just dancing, that’s all.”
I blinked away tears. Where had they got her voice from for the soundtrack? Had one of the parties been filmed or recorded and the tape been lying dusty in the archives all this time? Or was it someone else talking after all and I was so meshed with the past I'd mistaken her for Jilly? Either way it didn’t matter now. Jilly was long gone. Long gone.
I leant against the wall to regain my equilibrium. I hadn’t expected, when I was hesitating about coming in here, to be rocked by emotion over Jilly, but she was woven in and out of these years like fire. It stunned me now to remember how ever-present she'd been. How ha
d I got so used to being without her, when at one time she coloured my entire life?
Stuff, I suppose. Children. Marriage. Making a living. When you are young, none of that matters, but, insidiously, the world changes alongside you and responsibilities get in the way of self.
What about the colour and the laughter? Where did that go? Yes, everything I'd done had been rewarding, but 70s orange and party-pink had given way without me noticing to 80s magnolia and 90s beige, with only an occasional lilting touch of apricot to lift it. Somewhere along the way I’d turned neutral. It was an appalling realisation.
~~~
Jilly had got me the job at the BBC. A production secretary, the same as she’d been when she’d started out. It wasn’t as grand as it sounds. I was in the drama department, which meant a lot of typing of scripts, sending memos and organising coffee. I blessed Jilly for having pointed out the sense of taking office studies - specifically typing - at school during my pre-O-level year. Even so, I saw other people rushing around being busy in more exciting departments and felt stuck in the slow lane.
“The important thing is getting in,” said Jilly. “Keep an eye on the notice boards and apply for what you fancy from now on. Just steer clear of Top of the Pops.”
But nothing did come up. My promotion to the happening end of the BBC came about in a different manner entirely.
I remember exactly why I was at the reception desk that day. I’d come down to see if a box of wigs that we’d been promised urgently was being sat on by the porters. It was a quiet war, constantly waged, nobody ever knew why. Anyway, there I was, getting nowhere, when David Bowie arrived in the foyer with his entourage - and the day suddenly turned electric.
He had got massively more important since the Festival Hall concert, but I could see the importance was just another act, another layer. That was how he was. Every time he went out in public - even across the road to buy milk and cornflakes, probably - it was a performance he felt he owed to his fans. I loved him for it.