Last night - this morning, really - my phone rang and it was you. Through sleep I heard the sounds of a club: people yelling, a deep beat, music gathering momentum. You shouted over the noise, "hey girl, they're playing our song!" and I recognised it then. Hey boys! Hey girls! Superstar DJ! Here we go! Conversation was impossible, and unnecessary. You hung up. I settled smiling down to sleep again.

We live in different countries now, but once we spent our double lives together. We sat together in biology class and shared the exotic vocabulary of the body. Best of all, the bones. Humerus, radius, ulna, carpals, metacarpals, phalanges! Phalanges was always hollered like a victory when we studied together, wiggling fingers in the air. We could see through the surface then to our very structures, delighted in our own strange mechanics.

We were learning other things too, of course. I went round to your house before a night out so that we could dress up our bodies together, paint each other's faces. These shoes with this skirt, or these boots with this dress, you would ask me; and I never noticed that you were growing up a beauty. The Chemical Brothers would come onto the television, and we would stop to dance, waving fingers in the air, phalanges! Anything was possible then. Shy and giggly at school, we could grow up confident, beautiful and smart, and the skeleton in the video could be the same skeleton that hung on the biology lab wall. Scapula, clavicle, Miss Quirke would point out on his limp frame, but by night he led a secret other life.

We went out dancing. When the song came on we waved our fingers in the air. Mouthed: phalanges! Sooner or later we both had first kisses. We passed our biology exams. My first boyfriend lay down in the grass and asked me to show him the bones. True ribs, free ribs, floating ribs, I stroked, making him shiver. We left behind the skeleton in the biology lab. We walked out into the world, the bones moving over each other, keeping us up, doing their secret dance under our skin.

Ailbhe Darcy was born in Dublin and recently moved to London to seek her fortune. She has an MA in Publishing and her poetry has featured in a number of journals in Britain and Ireland. She has written critically for the Stinging Fly and Chroma and is co-editor of Moloch, an online journal of new art and writing.

© 2007 Laura Hird All rights reserved.