The Beautiful People

The great idea – someone else’s, not mine – is to go on to a disco at midnight. Every time I call it a disco, Vanessa pokes me in the ribs. ‘It’s a club,’ she says. ‘Discos died in the year 2000. Get with the new century.’

On the door, a bulked-out Jason Statham look alike pulls a rope across when he sees us coming, clicks it onto the chrome pillar. ‘Full,’ he says.

I take him at his word. The others, more worldly wise in disco etiquette, say it is not full, but that the arrival of eight women in their fifties is unappealing currency for such places. I’m failing to understand, until I see what happens next.

Behind us, a young couple appear from the soft darkness of the balmy night. Instagram-able, he has fulfilled his gym dream of muscular perfection, while she’s living her best life as a svelte siren, so slender she might someday slip through the slats of a cattle grid, should she ever find herself traversing one (unlikely in my judgement). They by-pass us, the beautiful people, the ethereal sprite on the arm of Thor, and the rope is hastily dropped to usher them in.

‘They were here already,’ says Jason Statham, studying the pavement. ‘Stepped out for a smoke break.’

More people leave, but apparently the disco remains full, full for us, that is, as twosomes and threesomes of younger patrons – apparently also out for a smoke – leapfrog us in the queue and shimmy in.

‘There may not ever be space for us,’ I suggest. ‘Even if we were to stand here for a year.’

I intuit a collective sigh of relief; I pick up glances of surreptitious solidarity. No one wants to be the first to say the ‘b’ word, but if the disco – I mean club – won’t let us in, then what else is there but bed? I think of my soft pillow. ‘Should we…?’ Then I add, not at all meaning it, tacked on words designed as balm to our middle-aged egos, ‘We can always have our own disco.’

One of us has a small holiday apartment nearby. ‘Come to mine’, she says, and within ten minutes the pop-up nightclub is underway. Shoes are kicked off, bare feet are planted on tiles, hips are loosened. There is flailing to The Cure, there is shape shifting to The Pretenders, there is arm lifting and body shifting to Fleetwood Mac. We are spell makers and spell breakers, we are spinning dervishes, we are a coven of banshees. We are the Tuatha de Danann, we are the daoine sidhe, the Marcra shee, the little people, the faeries, the pagan spirits of Ireland risen from the earth. We have come alive by night in ecstatic dancing.

May God bless the neighbours.

We are tall poplars in a storm. We are underwater kelp forests in a tidal rush. We are goats tripping down a mountain after a landslide. We are red kites circling over rabbits in a field, ready to swoop, prey to be hooked, ripped, devoured. We are quite, quite mad, and we are delighted with ourselves.

‘Women pay small fortunes to come to the Balearics and free themselves in dance,’ one of my fellow dancers says to me as she swirls her way to the balcony to find mars in the night sky.

Jason Statham has made the correct decision in denying us entry, we are of another world, and we are much too beautiful for the beautiful people.