FROM THE ARCHIVES:At the end of a long evening investigating the mating habits of 1980 Dublin Elgy Gillespie and her friend Lyn Geldof found themselves in the Styx Club in Leeson Street. - JOE JOYCE
A YOUNG bearded guy in a check shirt came to chat up the sequinned beret [Lyn].
As I sat and watched the by-now well lubricated couples revolving, I could hear snatches of biography that would give my granny something to think about. Their names were Samantha, Natasha and Sophie; they were in advertising, they were models; they liked to go to the Canaries every winter; they only drove Mercedes for preference and found that the property markets were still buoyant in the right localities.
“Hello, what’s your name?”
I wanted to say my name was Dominique and that I was running a courier agency.
But like George Washington, my sincerity blazes like the Kish. It didn’t matter, since the man didn’t believe me for a second.
“O, yeah, newspapers, very nice. D’ja want to dance?”
Behind me, the Beard was telling Lyn that he was married with a wife and a kid and he came here every week but it didn’t work the other way, he didn’t take turns with her.
“What’s that got to do with it?” he replied when Lyn asked why not.
“And do you get off with people here?”
“Yes, if I don’t spend too much time talking to people like you,” retorted the Beard, bitterly.
“Where d’you go back to?” asked Lyn.
“God, you ask some sordid, nasty questions, don’t you?”
“Do you have to do it in the car?” Lyn went on, relentlessly. He said yes, but that she didn’t have to be such a torn pocket about it, for Jaysus’ sake.
My partner fought for a place at the bar and acquired a bottle of Gewurtztraminer.
Another man came up to the bar and said: “Oh, I believe that’s mine. I forgot it just now . . .” but my man said it wasn’t. “Awful crowd of chancers round here,” he hissed at me.
Fergal, it transpired, was a showband singer who had just finished a gig out in Wicklow and was swilling with unspent adrenalin as a result. No, he wasn’t married, was I? He thought it was sad, though, the way that girls were only out for what they could get these days.
We repaired to the dancefloor, where there were couples who must have only just met doing some rather odd things.
One bald man in artistic garb was lifting a young girl up in the air and sliding her down his body in a fashion which suggested that even if they did not go on to found a dynasty, they would certainly help each other to make it through the night, anyway.
I decided I would have to come clean with Fergal, who was getting ideas from this particular ruse.
I explained that I was working, that I was surveying the nightscene and how brief encounters were made, to prove to myself that this was indeed a fallen world.
http://url.ie/dprr