We are gliding along in our car in mid-Spring, travelling through the green, rolling countryside of rural Victoria. I have my musical choices playing through the car system, as usual. The next song begins. The guitars and drums come in immediately and urgently. Stabbing at the air. Prompting your body to sit up and take notice. I turn it up, as I always do when this particular song comes on and it always makes me think of that same person from all those years ago. Alex.
Alex was a smiling, boisterous class mate at high school. Tall with short blonde hair, as was the fashion, and a huge sense of fun. I wasn’t that kind of character myself but when I was with her, sometimes I could be. I have two matching photos of us on a beach on a hot 80s Perth summer day. We are striking a pose, like fashion models, in each photo – her photographing me first and then me taking a shot of her. We are both brown and shiny and smiling, shades on, bare feet planted in bright white sand, staring down the camera. I remember her dancing too – doing a great impression of Mick Jagger in the Start me Up video, hands on hips, legs strutting, chin jutting. Lips synching to the lyrics. It was funny. It was perfect. For reasons unknown to me we were very taken with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers at the time. We tried to dance like them too. I can’t remember who was who. For a while there, Fred and Ginger were our nicknames. Alex seemed larger than life but of course she wasn’t.
In November of 84 us Year 12s said our final goodbyes to each other at various parties after exams. “Of course we will stay in touch,” we said, as year 12s always do. The following year I started at UWA and into my life swept a whole new suite of friends as well as a boyfriend, which was a huge novelty for me. Life was busy. Study and socialising. Every so often I would hear snippets from school friends who were at my uni about the ones that took a different directions – to workplaces, apprentices or another place of study. I really wish I could remember what Alex did in those years.
It was my mum that told me the devastating news about her, the year after I had left uni. Once again, it was a scene in a car, as I recall. Her telling me as we drove somewhere for some reason that’s now lost on me. We were both sad but reserved about the news. Maybe it didn’t seem real and it had been four years since I had seen her. Alex had died in a car accident. Another school friend had been driving them both home from a party in the wee hours of the morning. She hit a tree. The friend survived. I found out not too long ago that the friend never forgave herself. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? What I haven’t told you yet is that Alex was a twin. My first thought went to Liz, her twin sibling. How would it be to be a twin? I couldn’t imagine. How would it be to lose a twin? I couldn’t imagine.
So I’m lacking in the details, which is probably a good thing. That means that I can think of her and just think of being seventeen. Of dancing and fun times at the beach. Of music. Of that song she loved so much and danced to at parties. It was her song, we all knew that. It was The Power and the Passion by Midnight Oil. These are the things that make me smile. Her life was so much shorter than it should have been but her friendship was a brief, brightly burning gift. Thanks for that gift Alex. Let’s hear that song again……