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As I drive around the city with my five-month-old son in his baby capsule, the radio plays another David Bowie song. It’s been a few days since his death and I’ve no doubt radio stations around the world are doing exactly the same.
Bowie’s death brought with it an outpouring of grief across the world with millions of fans mourning the loss of their rock idol. I wasn’t a huge fan. Arguably his best work in the 1970s was a tad before my time. But as the opening bow-bow-bow-oohs emerge from my car speaker, a memory blossoms in my mind from the little space that the Starman will forever occupy.
I was twelve years old when I went to high school, Year 7. Suddenly, my primary school colleagues and I went from a safe little class of fifteen kids to a terrifyingly enormous one of a hundred and fifty. Plus we were no longer the big fish in a small pond. We were guppies in an ocean of great whites.
As befitted my new environment, I decided to shake off my primary school crush – a sweet, curly-haired girl named Joanne who I’d loved since kindergarten – for someone more mature. Her name was Julia, she had straight black hair, and it took me six months to find her. She was in another of our Year 7 streams – small classes we were divided into for the sake of practicality and teaching. I was in Year 7 Orange, she was in Blue.
About a month after we’d settled into our streams, rumours spread across the playground. Our teachers had decided to create a new class comprising the dregs of every other class, all the deadbeats, miscreants, troublemakers and bullies pooled into one cesspool of failure and despair. Being a straight-A student, you can imagine my shock when I found out I was to be torn away from my new classmates and dumped into the ill-fated new stream. It appeared our astute and well-informed teachers had decided that a few good eggs were needed in the new class to keep the bad ones in line. What was worse, we were to be Year 7 Yellow. Yellow. The same colour as cowardice, and of urine.
It was hell. Every single everlasting day of it.
I somehow surived Year 7 Yellow. By the skin of my teeth. But it did me no favours in the romance department, crashing and burning with Julia before the year was out. I then proceded to ride my bike past her house every day through summer in the hope of ‘accidentally’ bumping into her and somehow having my love requited on her hot concrete driveway. But our paths never crossed. Perhaps it was just as well since her older brother was a weighlifter. By contrast, I had arms like breadsticks, Coke-bottle glasses, and a quintessential bumfluff moustache. I was a catch alright.
I ended up pathetically carrying a flame for Julia for two more years. Until Year 10 when Jennifer came along.
She was the new girl in school. Blonde hair, cherry red lips. I spied her early and didn’t waste any time. She lived between my house and our school, and rode her bike to class every day. Suddenly, I was no longer catching the school bus, and instead hanging around the bike sheds in the afternoon, waiting for her to emerge, and then casually asking whether I could nobly escort her home. I still remember her effortlessly riding that fixed-gear bicycle, her back all straight, her hair painting the air and her lips kissing the breeze. It was as if she’d leapt from the pages of an Edwardian novel, while beside her I grunted like a hunched ogre pedaling a department store racer.
Before anyone else realised her understated beauty, I asked Jennifer if she’d like to be my date to that all-important occasion in a teenager’s adolescence: the Year 10 formal.
She said yes. I was exultant. I was triumphant.
Word soon spread around the playground. Jennifer said yes? To who, who asked her out? Who? Who’s he?
I broke my piggybank and bought her the biggest corsage my savings could afford. They didn’t extend to a limo. My bowtie and cummerbund were to be emerald green and match her satin dress and captivating eyes.
About a week before the formal, one of the delinquents from my Year 7 class approached me. His name was Jake, and I remember we were once paired together on a project for geography class that I ended up doing solo. We shared the grade. It was his first ever A.
‘Look Pete,’ he said, ‘I like you, which is why I’m telling you this on the sly. By all means, take Jen to the formal, and have a good time. But, from what I’ve heard, if you try to hang around her afterwards, or get in the way of anyone else who does, you might end up remembering the night for all the wrong reasons.’
It was the first time he’d talked to me in three years.
It was only then I noticed the sideways glances I was getting across the playground. These weren’t looks of admiration or envy. They were unspoken threats.
I wondered whether to say anything to Jennifer about the target on my back. Perhaps it would bring us closer together? A formal date was always hard to read – whether it was just that, or anything more. I had visions of teen movies, of a confrontation, of David beating Goliath using his brains because he had no brawn.
In the end, I kept quiet. I shaved off my bumbluff, put on my black tails, and met Jennifer at the formal venue. I pinned my corsage to her dress and held her hand. I re-filled her lemonade glass umpteen times through the night because I ran out of awkward conversation topics. I was the best date/waiter imaginable. We had chemistry as friends, but that was all. The occasion only seemed to reinforce that.
I had my formal photo taken. While others were photographed with their dates, I was noticeably alone. The look on my face was a combination of disappointment and fear, my lips as straight as my rented green cummerbund.
I didn’t pursue Jennifer at the end of the formal. She went to one unsupervised after-party and I went to another. I think we ended up at the same one for a brief period, where she was apparently seen on the arm of a convicted felon from my graduating year. But by that stage, I’d almost finished my third beer and was well on the way to transforming into Ziggy Stardust. This was because the last track played at our formal – the slow dance – was a David Bowie song.
I absolutely love you / But we’re absolute beginners / With eyes completely open / But nervous all the same
Released in 1986, Absolute Beginners was the theme tune to the somewhat forgettable film of the same name. It’s a song that fused 1950s American doo-wop with Bowie’s classic 1980s sound, and was a retro-sounding ode to blossoming love. Maybe that’s why the DJ selected it. It was the only dance Jennifer and I shared all night. I felt all eyes upon me as we took to the floor, before I closed mine and rested my head on her shoulder. When the swaying was over, she kissed me lightly on the cheek, and disappeared into the night.
My son cries, the song ends, and so does my memory of that warm night in 1990. The radio station does the right thing and plays the full-length version, all eight minutes. The DJ played the same version at the formal. He knew we all wanted the slow dance to last forever.
Bowie recorded Absolute Beginners at the famous Abbey Road Studios in north-west London. Coincidentally, the studios in St. John’s Wood are only two miles from where my son was conceived in West Hampstead. The 139 bus that once took my wife and I home at the end of each night drove right past Abbey Road Studios and up West End Lane. Absolute Beginners was far from Bowie’s biggest hit, but such was his genius – he meant so many different things to so many people. The greatest artists all do.
I wonder if I’ll tell my son this story when he’s older, all about the woman who could’ve been his mother if his father hadn’t feared for his geeky adolescent life. Probably not. Though maybe, if the song again prises open the same little corner of my mind, I won’t be able to help it.
About Peter Papathanasiou
Peter Papathanasiou was born in a small village in northern Greece and adopted as a baby to an Australian family. His writing has been published by Fairfax Media, News Corporation, The Pigeonhole, Caught by the River, 3:AM Magazine and Going Down Swinging, and reviewed by The Times Literary Supplement. He has been profiled as a feature writer in Neos Kosmos and is represented by Rogers, Coleridge & White literary agency in London. He divides his time between Australia, London, and a small village in northern Greece.
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