pink. We immediately switched. ‘John brought me and Ade a few months ago, I think one of his friends runs it? We had to drag John out at the end, you wouldn’t think it but he’s the full Saturday Night Fever. Surprisingly good dancer for a tall man.’
Jeremy clapped his hands loudly. ‘Are we all ready to disco in the dark?’
Everyone cheered with varying degrees of enthusiasm and a second pair of black curtains opened, leading through to a pitch-black room where the party was already well under way. The bass thumped so loud, I could feel it vibrating from the floor, through the slender heels of my shoes and up my legs. My chest pounded with the music as my heartbeat was forced into a new rhythm.
‘Sumi?’ I yelled, totally thrown by just how dark it really was. ‘Where are you?’
‘Just dance!’ she shouted back. ‘Just let go!’
I watched her orange neon bracelet drift away from me, bobbing up and down as she air-punched her way across the dance floor.
I loved dancing as much as the next person, in that I danced when I was drunk or heard a Beyoncé song. When I was a teenager, we made up routines to every song on the charts and practised them until there wasn’t a single drop of joy left in Britney Spears’s entire back catalogue. Even two decades on, I couldn’t hear ‘Hit Me Baby, One More Time’ without bursting into the exact choreography we’d recorded off Top of the Pops. I couldn’t put an exact date on when we stopped going dancing every weekend – one minute we were hobbling home with our arms around each other, barefoot with our shoes in our hands, and the next we were putting each other in taxis and saying goodnight right after dinner. Maybe it was when we realized half the girls in the club were a clear decade younger than us, or maybe when working all week and going out all weekend became too much for our bodies to handle. And for some of my friends, a night at home was much more appealing when there was a significant other waiting for them there.
But this was a different kind of game. I didn’t need any warm-up drinks to find the confidence to bust out my moves, there was no scanning the dance floor to find a safe space, away from the good dancers and the hot girls and the stag parties and the drunks. Everywhere was a safe space when no one could see you.
Slowly, I began to move from side to side, hips moving gently at first, my calf-length silky skirt swishing against my skin. Before I knew it, my arms had loosed themselves from my sides and began to swing back and forth above my head. I felt incredible. I was Britney, Beyoncé and Lizzo all rolled into one. Why hadn’t anyone thought of this before?
With my eyes closed, I rolled and gyrated and, God help me, twerked on the spot, occasionally skipping across to another part of the room, just because I could. I hadn’t felt this powerful on a dance floor since that time I got smashed on three-for-two Bacardi Breezers in the student union and decided to leap on stage and perform an interpretative dance rendition of the Grease megamix. I felt so free, I felt so young, I felt – someone crash into me.
‘Fuck, I’m sorry,’ a voice said, immediately backing away, their striped blue and green bracelet moving across the floor.
‘That’s OK,’ I replied, as I waved the stranger on with a thumbs up even though he couldn’t see my gesture. Maybe it was best to keep my eyes open, I decided. With slightly more awareness, I slipped back into my groove as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Now I could make out shadowy shapes of human beings as they rolled and thrust to the music, just the outlines of their bodies, like shadows moving to a Motown beat.
The more I surrendered to the music, the further away my problems felt. No need to worry about work, no need to wonder where I was going to live. Why concern myself with Mum and Dad’s second wedding and Jo’s antics and Nana’s casual bigotry? Even my existential angst felt far away. So what if I couldn’t bring myself to look at a newspaper? Sure, climate change was destroying the planet but we could figure it out! All that mattered was the music and the