I Want to Dance With Somebody

I was going to tell Pam about my radio interview. Drop it subtly into the conversation at some point.

“Oh, I’m going to be doing an interview on local radio this weekend.”

Or

“Oh I was on the radio last weekend.”

Something like that.

Pam was from Newcastle. An exiled Geordie. I’m not sure why I wanted to impress her. Pam had a boyfriend. He was in South Africa on some sort of rugby tour. He was bald (I forget how and why that came up in conversation, but it had). I assume he was a well built guy, because that’s the physique you need for rugby. So if Pam had a type, it certainly wouldn’t have been anyone who looked like me.

Pam was working for the Royal Mail. We all were. A bunch of us. About twelve of us. It was a temporary job, three months over the summer to cover presumably for regular staff that took holidays during this time.

After I left uni, I had made a couple of unsuccessful attempts at getting a fulltime job. I applied for a position in a local computing firm. As to the sticky question of why I’d dropped out of college, I adapted a line from someone I’d been at school with who left at 16 to go work in a bank. (He wanted to start earning money straight away, not waste another two years at school and then potentially three  or four more years at university.) I told them I wanted to be doing practical work, hands on, not wasting my time on learning theory. 'On the job' experience was a better way to learn. Some such bullshit.

Naturally I didn’t get the job.

Next up I applied for a position in a local casino, as a cashier. Who knew there was a casino in Southend? It had a million penny arcades, tacky fun palaces with an excess of neon lights and the constant bleep of the Space Invader machines. It had the pleasure pier. It had Peter Pan’s Playground, a miniature theme park. And it had those crazy golf courses. But the casino was a new one on me.

I sat in a plush lounge waiting for my interview. Everything was upholstered in a luxurious looking crimson red. On a TV above the bar they were showing the latest episode of Minder – a popular comedy/drama that I knew my parents would also be watching back home, a couple of miles away.

The interview didn’t last very long. About a minute or two in the young woman interviewing me announced that she wasn’t feeling well. I briefly wondered if this was part of the interview – to test out my people skills – but I think it was genuine. I don’t remember what happened next. She excused herself, but I don’t recall the interview being rearranged for a later date. Perhaps in that first two minutes they’d seen enough. Let’s face it, I was never going to be cut out to work in a casino. Even in Southend.

Sorting mail was more my scene. I liked that it was a fixed term contract. Once the three months were up I would be able to sign on again. (After dropping out from college I was ineligible for any benefits and I was also vaguely awaiting contact from the local council demanding I return some of my grant money.) If I could sign on, then in time I would become eligible for the EAS (Enterprise Allowance Scheme) which was a government backed scheme to help fund new businesses. There was some vague method within all this madness.

The Royal Mail job gave me another new set of strangers to integrate with. There were two Tonys. Big Tony and Little Tony. Big Tony used to work as a refuse collector. A dustman. He referred to the job as ‘being on the dust’, which I guess was the slang of the time. I don’t remember what Little Tony had done before he ended up here, but the two of them were thick as thieves and like father and son. Essex wide boys, with the gift of the gab. Nice enough, but not my people. Elaine was like a mother figure (certainly towards me), a sweet natured woman who I would guess was in her mid 30s, but I was never great at ages. There were two Geordies. Besides Pam there was another young lady who I think was half Asian. She was training to be a nurse, but working here during her summer vacation. I won’t go through the whole cast, but since we were a distinct group, separate from the full time staff, we tended to all hang out together.

The work was often physical – hauling sacks of mail about the place, loading up machines that sorted the post or operating outside at the adjacent railway station where you got to load and unload the mail trains. Whichever job you did, you were always on your feet. For the first few weeks you really felt it, a throbbing in your soles that never let up. Eventually your body adapted and you didn’t feel it anymore.

The hours were varied – morning shifts often required that you start work at 5.45. Late shifts ended around 10pm. If you were on mornings you had to do a rogue Saturday shift that was like a half day. Each week they’d post up a new set of rotas and everyone would crowd into the break room to see which shift they’d been assigned. The one thing we weren’t allowed to do was actually deliver the mail. I guess they didn’t trust us with that – or else the time it took to train you up for a delivery round simply wasn’t worth it given the fact we only had a three month contract.

Everyone was sweet on Pam to some degree or other. For me it was the accent, I was a sucker for that. She was a good worker. Management liked her and were keen to keep her on as a full time employee. The problem was that in those days you needed to pass an entrance exam to become a full time postman. It was considered a responsible job. The post office had not been privatised at that point, so you were technically a government worker. You had to sign the official secrets act. (Even we had to sign the official secrets act).  Pam had proved she was great at the job and she was keen to work there full time, but the exam was relatively difficult to pass, involved maths and logic questions that she was not adept at answering.

At one point I offered to help her train for the exam. In a more outlandish moment we even considered whether I could apply for a position as well and then when it came to the exam I could fill out her name on my paper and she could put mine on hers.  It had potential, but also some negative outcomes if we were found out. (I don’t think we ever considered this plan too seriously).

I got on well with Pam. We were clearly very different people in many ways, but we always had fun when we got to work shifts together. The hit song of that summer was I Wanna Dance With Somebody, the big Whitney Houston number. She loved that song. I don’t think she’d have had much time for the music I was into. I didn’t tell her about my radio interview in the end – not because I was ashamed of how poor it had been, I just never found the right moment to bring it up. Nor to talk about the record label I was hoping to develop.

Those three months ended with a night out in Southend, a group leaving party. We were all at a pub/ nightclub somewhere in the centre of town. There was a lot of drinking and there was music and a small dance floor. As the shy introvert that I was, I spent the majority of that evening in a corner somewhere, chatting away to one of the other workers who was also less of a social animal. Meanwhile Pam was out on the dance floor having a great time with Big Tony, Little Tony and anyone else who was up for a dance.

After the evening drew to a close and the club had called last orders, everyone spilled out into the street. Most were drunk by now. People were drifting home in different directions. Pam lived several miles away out in Shoeburyness, but none of the men who’d been dancing with her that night seemed concerned as to how she would get home. So it was that I accompanied her to the nearest phone box, situated by the steps of Southend Central train station, and helped her to call a cab that could take her safely home. Then I waited for the ten or fifteen minutes that it took for the taxi to arrive. Once she’d got inside and the car had driven away into the night, I commenced the half hour walk back to my parents’ house.

That was the last time I ever saw Pam.

*

(Pam didn't get a permanent job with the post office. The last I heard of her, she was working in the bakery department at Asda in Shoeburyness.)

I could post the Whitney Houston song here, but we all know how that goes. How about something from one of her contemporaries, soul legend Sade?