The Scoop

 It started with the shadow dance. The few people in the know thought this dance craze was just another physical expression of body and soul to follow on from the jive, the jitterbug, the black-bottom, the twist…

People had been jabbing their limbs about since time immemorial, it seemed, just as inexplicable and pointless as all the other amateur artistic activities such as daubing, musicking, moulding, scribbling …

Life’s survival, the workaday existence from dawn to dusk, needed these light reliefs for their own sake. Especially you who had a most lugubrious life outside of your penchant for wild-limbed dancing. Your various exes would have had a lugubrious life, too — simply by being your exes, if without such scatty bouts for dancing. With no dancing side to yourself there would have been no exes, and no eyes upon you. Indeed, there may not even have been any you at all.

So pointless, yet not pointless. A strange paradox. There was no end result to dancing, unless, of course, one were a professional dancer. And you never aspired to anything beyond the dancing itself. Maybe, however, an odd ex here and there harboured different feelings about the dancing shared over the years with generations of you. One ex, for example, during the Blitz years, admittedly considered dancing as not having an end beyond itself, but, against that, dancing, for this ex, was a thing-in-itself, a tangible artefact, a visual retrievable mass of limbs and faces that lived on forever even without the aid of film or any other means of recording by artificial device or by human memory. It simply was. And still is. Your dance with that ex. It didn’t even need words to describe it for it still to be able to remain forever as a thing-in-itself. It did not even need knowing about by others. All of us would see it (experience it) soon enough. The dance was almost an aid to immortality, but that often came too late. Especially for any ex-exes of yours.

So, the shadow dance, then, was at first the simple act of an ex walking arm-in-arm with you (leading rather than being led) through London’s blacked-out streets: more a shallow dance, because the night was like a tunnel, with no sky, until the bombers droned ever nearer over city mansions in tune with opportune sirens and visibly protective flak higher up than the earlier ‘tunnel’ roof.

“How much further?” you asked. Neither of us could see each other at the moment. But the ‘dance’ existed already: our future life together, given certain eventualities that probably would never happen. Eventually, however, we did reach our destination. Much hustling and shooing by bouncers at the doorway so as not to allow any light to escape from the hall to alert the enemy bombers. But soon you and I as this certain ex in your life were together in the blinding expanses of the Palais de Danse, amid what felt like literally millions of milling dancing pairs, fleshy dodgems vying for romance as well as for the simple pointless pleasures of the ongoing waltz. But waltzes don’t last forever… After the foxtrots and the quicksteps, there came an even more crazy craze.

History books have not told of all the fads and fancies that came into their own through the various periods of human conflict. The Scoop was one clincher of a smooch that nobody got to hear about. One with no wild limbs, no hints of future Dad Dancing in the gauche nineteen eighties, no separate jigging on the unromantic spot that so typified the later discothèques…

The Scoop was a sleek, lithe snaking-together as both partners slowly consumed each other piecemeal during the deepest, darkest kiss that tongue-tied shyness might otherwise have prevented. We watched the others perform, before I took you by the hand, with a slight anticipatory peck on your cheek, tugged you to the centre of the ballroom floor, both of us like vessels being launched into the brightness of a bashful dream.

The single ghost between us that left the shattered palace did not exist as an example of an ex. But it was an ex that paradoxically still existed forever as pure dance. A dance with words as written by an upside down nib.