As I watched Lottie slide between the natural-finish dining suites, with a makeshift tray cut from a cardboard box, I wondered how much longer I’d last in my career as furniture sales coordinator. I knew I wasn’t dull enough to excel in the position. My heart didn’t soar at the sight of a well-plumped chenille sofa bed. A firing was imminent. I doubted I’d get much support from my colleagues. They didn’t care too much for me, and the feeling was pretty damned mutual.
At 6.00 p.m. came closing time, and blessed release from the grim pedantries of supervisor Max and weird Lottie, from ambitious Darryl and stupid Dokie, who sang off-key while he picked his nose and loaded tables and chairs and sinks into the company vans. After work I caught a bus over the bridge to Vauxhall, where I shared rented accommodation. Vauxhall makes Mexico City look like Beverly Hills. As one of the ugliest, dirtiest, most dangerous London boroughs it is primarily famed for the vindictiveness of its skinheads, the terrorised exhaustion of its remaining elderly residents and the vastness of its fume-choked traffic system.
Reaching home, I locked myself in my room and lay back on my bed, dreaming of places I would never visit and people I would never meet.
I know how that must sound—like someone with a grudge against the world. I don’t mean to give you the wrong impression. Like a zillion other people, I was stuck in my attempt to figure out what to do with my life. I had to keep the job at Thanet even though I hated it, because I wasn’t exactly overqualified for any other position of responsibility. I’d failed most of my exams at school, including woodwork, which nobody ever failed. I was still trying to decide what I was good at.
I’d recently applied to take evening classes in business studies, but the courses in my area were full and I couldn’t afford to pay for private tuition. I combed the papers for more interesting employment, but every post I applied for seemed to be filled a few nanoseconds before my phone call.
I spent a lot of time lying on my bed, wondering and worrying about the future. It didn’t look too bright.
I felt as if there was a fault line running through me, something that constantly diverted my energy into the wrong moves. I had a damp rented roof over my head, hardly any friends and a lousy job. Twenty-three years old and already my course was set, a narrow-gauge track leading around in a circle.
But on Tuesday night, something happened to break open that track and set it free.
About an hour and a half before it did, I was scuffing my hair with a towel and checking the crotch of my Levi’s to see if they had dried on the radiator when there was a knock on my bedroom door. It was my flatmate Zack, awkwardly asking about my share of the electricity bill. Zack had the larger bedroom because he paid more rent, or rather his parents did; he’d made them feel so guilty about not being able to find a job that they posted him a monthly cheque. Zack hated talking about money. He considered such conversation capitalistic and offensive. He’d long ago stopped looking for work because he’d lost faith in the system. Instead Zack believed in conspiracy theories, alien abductions, corn circles, Atlantis, satanic cattle mutilations and anything else that cropped up in his extensive collection of occult magazines. I got the feeling he didn’t really like me because I had a job and was therefore ‘part of the problem, not the solution’, as he put it. But he had to admit that I was a useful source of cash at the end of every month.
‘Are you going out tonight, Martyn?’
Zack hovered half in, half out of the doorway, aware that, Dracula-like, he hadn’t been invited to cross the threshold.
‘I’m trying out a new club,’ I said. ‘Free ticket.’
‘Who from?’
‘From whom. A friend.’ I didn’t want to admit that the card had been thrust into my hand outside Burger King on Tottenham Court Road. You could collect hundreds of flyers walking through the West End, tickets for every conceivable kind of club night. All tastes were catered for at the end of the twentieth century. ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘do you want to come along?’
‘Nah.’ Zack’s lank black hair fell across his face like a pair of old curtains. ‘Debbie’s coming over. We’re gonna watch a video. You’ve got a massive spot coming up on your neck. I can give you some stuff for that.’
‘No thanks.’ I’d seen the mildewy muck Zack kept in brown glass pots in the bathroom. ‘I’ll leave you a ticket, in case you change your mind about the club.’
Zack studied the ends of his hair, abstracted. ‘Thanks, man.’
I had to gently push the door shut to get rid of him. Zack was capable of standing in one place staring at nothing in particular for hours. There was no sense of urgency in his life. Once, some neighbours he’d managed to annoy by requesting they turn down their rap music at 3.00 a.m. smashed his bedroom window with a milk bottle, and I had to organize a glazier because he didn’t even pick up the broken glass for three weeks, let alone arrange to have the pane replaced.
I donned the damp jeans and a blue sweatshirt, and checked my appearance in the mirror. I was not unattractive, but then I was not a lot of things; not short, not fat, not shy, not slow-witted. My qualities usually revealed themselves in the negative. I possessed an abundance of one quality, more of a curse—my powerful imagination. At school I had missed entire chunks of history and geography because my attention was fixed elsewhere. Lessons passed in a mist while I drew meticulous depictions of space battles in the back of my exercise book. Being caught and warned a hundred times made no difference.
Teachers gravely warned my parents that I was a dreamer. From the way my father reacted, you’d have thought he’d been told I was dealing heroin. But my brother Joey explained that dreaming was good so long as it had a goal. So one day I sat down and drew up a list of goals, beginning with university and ending with the Nobel Prize. I thought that having dreams would make me different from other people, that another set of rules would apply. I wanted to be unique. It took me a while to realize that this was what everyone else wanted too.
In the face of such competition it was a foregone conclusion that I would fail my exams. My father shouted, my mother cried, so I worked harder. Eventually my grades began to improve. Teachers smiled, keep this up, Martyn and you’ll pass your finals with flying colours. Your dreams will come true.
They would have, too, if Joey hadn’t died.
I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to that fateful Tuesday evening. Before I left the flat I made my bed, binned my laundry, phoned my mother, drank some suspicious-smelling milk and ate a Sell By Date: Yesterday frozen lasagne from the otherwise empty fridge. I nodded to Zack, who was sitting cross-legged in front of the TV watching baboons picking meat out of their teeth, and went to the club.
It was still raining when I arrived, and a long queue had formed outside the building. The organizers had obviously given away too many tickets. A sheet of tacked-up orange cloth read blUeTOPIA above a cellar entrance. I joined the tail of the line and shuffled slowly forward, gradually getting soaked. Someone handed me a flyer detailing the week’s one-nighters. Tomorrow it was the turn of Club Dread. Saturday was Rubber Bunny. Fetish night. Forget it, I had enough trouble finding a clean shirt. The queue moved on.
My ‘free’ pass wasn’t anything of the kind. The gorilla on the door gave me a smug look as he relieved me of a ten pound note, handing me back two coins and a vodka voucher. At least, I thought, it’ll be warm and dry inside. My reflection in the stairway mirror showed a person who appeared to have fallen in a river. My short blonde hair was plastered to my head like a bad wig. My jacket was already starting to steam.
Below, the techno/rave/garage/house/whatever-it’s-called-this-month pounding of the dance floor beckoned. I enjoyed dancing, and usually in the way of things found a partner to move with. It was an impersonal arrangement, me and the girl shuttling past each other like crabs, never making eye contact and parting when the track collapsed, but I liked it well enough. On the matter of sex, let’s just say that while I currently had no girlfriend I was certainly no virgin—t
hose negatives again—still, I moved well and women liked me because I was attentive, or perhaps they just sensed that I was a reasonably honest sort. I didn’t communicate well with them because I’d never had much practice. My sister and I rarely discussed the things that mattered to us.
I went to the bar and ordered a beer. The girl next to me was trying to get her finger out of a bottle of Evian water.
‘Try butter,’ I suggested, giving a pleasant smile.
‘Try slamming your dick in a door,’ she replied, returning her attention to the bottle.
I didn’t dance that Tuesday night. I felt uncomfortable in the new club, which smelled of fresh paint over damp patches, and bore no stamp of character. I watched the barmen bickering over till arrangements, the supposedly-VIP guests crushed into a ludicrous roped-off corner, the ill-timed blasts of dry ice that caught unprepared dancers, and wondered why I had come here at all. In its half-hearted attempt to be bizarre and different it was exactly the same as every other club. And I was the same as every other punter, looking for something better to do and somewhere better to be. Think positive, I told myself, lighten up. I looked around, trying to see if I knew anyone.
I recognized two girls on the dance floor, distantly pleasant types who went everywhere together in complementary sixties-style clothes. Lost in their own world, they would sometimes stop by to speak to me in forgotten TV-catchphrase jargon, most of it coined before they were born. They were friendly because I could do the vocabulary thing with them, but weren’t really interested in outsiders. There was a huge Jamaican guy whose drink I had once accidentally spilled, and who glowered menacingly every time I looked over because he thought I was trying to pick up his minuscule girlfriend. And there was Darren.
‘Lo, Martyn.’ I felt his fingers on my back before I saw him. He peered over my shoulder and stared at me with unfocused eyes, his hands in touchie-feelie mode, a sure sign that he was enjoying the drug of his choice.
‘Thought you’d be here. There’s nobody else here. They’re all somewhere else.’
I wished he was somewhere else. Darren was thin and yellow beneath the lights, and looked like he could do with a hot meal and a bath. He had come down from the north to find work as an electrician, and like so many others had wound up dealing ecstasy in clubs. He was nice enough in a walking-wounded way, but I had once lent him some money, which meant that every time I ran into him he was forced to perform an elaborate charade about returning it.
‘I’ve been out of town for weeks,’ he began, ‘managing a band, so I’ll have your cash really soon because we’re this close to a really massive major deal. You should hear them, because they’re just incredible.’
‘Where are they playing?’ I asked, calling his bluff.
‘They’re not doing live gigs. It’s all sampled electronic stuff. They don’t relate to an audience.’
‘Okay.’ Took this on board. Waited a second. ‘What are they called?’
‘Arthritis.’
I couldn’t wait. ‘Forget the money,’ I said wearily.
This was his cue to pantomime outrage. ‘No way! I owe you, and I’ll pay you back. No bullshit.’
‘Look, don’t worry about it.’
‘You saying I don’t pay my way? Is that what you’re saying?’ His voice was high and his face looked inflamed. I didn’t want to argue.
‘No, just forget about the money.’
‘Nobody calls me a liar. Fuck you, Martyn, all right?’
He released his grip and blundered off into the crowd. I decided I was getting too old for all this aggression. Last week I had asked a girl to dance and she had told me to go fuck myself with a cactus. What was it with people?
I tilted my watch toward the strobe light but couldn’t read the face. I remember feeling more than just uncomfortable; time was dislocated. I was sure that outside, far above us, the winds had changed and the sky was odd. Inside, I stood beyond the dance floor, trying to decipher the music as it vibrated the rivets in my jeans. I drained my third beer and set the bottle down. Uneasiness was creeping into my bones like frost. I tried to make sense of the sensation, but thinking about it only made it worse.
I realized with horror that I had been absently staring at the Jamaican guy’s tiny girlfriend. Her protector suddenly lumbered away from the bar with blood-rage in his eyes, stabbing his finger in my direction. I froze, fearfully rooted to the spot.
‘It does feel strange tonight, doesn’t it? Like something is about to happen.’
I turned to find a man standing close beside me. It was almost as if he had deliberately interposed himself between us. The Jamaican guy reached him and seemed to lose interest in clouting me. He paused, studied the floor in puzzlement, then wandered away.
Startled, I shifted back slightly and examined my rescuer. The eyes instantly drew my attention, green and iridescent, as beguiling as a cat’s. The lower half of the face was in shadow.
‘The wind has shifted,’ he said. ‘Turned with the tide and the pull of the moon. Madness has settled. Anything can happen from this moment on.’
The figure stepped into the light.
One hand was hiked into the pocket of a nineteen-fifties dinner suit with lapels like black mirrors. He was dressed for the wrong era, but somehow it suited his style. Although he had roughly the same height and build as me, the sharp symmetry of his face made him extraordinarily handsome; too perfect, like a retouched photograph. An odd, spicy scent hung about him.
I could think of no way to respond. I occasionally spoke to single women, but never to men. In a place like this they were most likely to be dealers.
‘You know what your trouble is, Martyn? You hate your life because you don’t know how to control it. You do what you’re told. Most people do, of course. One chooses from the selection provided instead of seeking a new selection. That’s how everyone stays in line.’
‘How do you know my name?’ I turned on the stranger a little more aggressively than I had intended. ‘Do I know you?’
He shook his head in self-rebuke. ‘Sorry, I forgot that can be a little unnerving. I couldn’t help noticing the name on your travel card.’
Some explanation. My travel card was in my wallet, and that was in the back pocket of my jeans. After checking that it was still there I examined the smiling face before me, trying to place it. ‘Have we met before? Who exactly are you?’
‘Exactly? The shortened version of my name is Spancialosaphus Lacrimosae. Still a bit of a mouthful, I’m afraid. You can call me Spanky.’
With another luminous smile, he held out his hand. I gingerly shook it. I have that natural suspicion of strangers which tempers the sociability of all city dwellers. Standing beside each other like this, I suddenly noticed how alike we were. True, my companion looked a little older, and his hair glistened in loose black curls, but we had the same mannerisms, the same way of standing. Spanky had something extra, though, an indefinable magnetism that caused a pair of passing girls to pause and glance him over.
‘Tell me, Martyn, do you ever feel that you’ve missed your exit on the highway of life?’ he asked, passing me a fresh beer, the exact brand I had been drinking. ‘Do you always want an Egg McMuffin just after they’ve stopped serving breakfast?’ Modern phraseology seemed unnatural on his lips. His accent was dated, very British and charming, like an old Ealing film.
I had been about to accept the drink when I stopped and asked myself how I had managed to do it again. Just lately I seemed to attract lunatics, babblers, religious nuts on tubes and buses, in parks and pubs. Why did they always aim for me? How were they best dealt with?
‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ I replied, looking away at the dance floor.
‘It’s okay, I’m not some born-again deadhead looking for converts. Let’s not get embarrassed about having a conversation. I’m extremely sensitive to emotional vibrations, and I can sense a feeling of grave dissatisfaction around you.’
‘I don’t
believe in all that new age stuff,’ I replied, affronted. ‘I think you’d better go and pick on someone else.’ I began to move away, but he followed me across the floor.
‘Martyn, surely you agree that some things can’t be explained by rational scientific thought?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘You mean you have an explanation for everything?’
I remained silent. If he didn’t receive a reply, I figured he might go away.
‘Black holes, the mysteries of the body, the infinity of the universe, the popularity of quiz shows? Don’t you ever think, when you lie on your bed staring at the ceiling, How did I ever get stuck on such a narrow track? Why don’t my dreams make me different from others? When will I become unique?’
He was still there, still smiling.
This was too weird. He knew my thoughts.
‘That’s what happens, Martyn. The life you had planned for yourself suddenly becomes the life you had planned. For too many people the future becomes the past without ever being the present.’
I could find no explanation for it.
‘So there is something you can’t explain. Look at me.’
Before I could react, he reached forward and clasped my hands together, bringing them up before my face. As he released his grip, a tingling sensation prickled across my fingers. I slowly unfurled them to find a pale blue flame burning lightly in my palms. Several inches high, it radiated coolness and threw a soft reflected glow on to the sleeves of my jacket.
At the centre of the nacreous light the figure of a woman turned, tiny and translucent, a naked homunculus that span faster and faster on the tips of my fingers, proliferating into two, three, four of the sensual creatures. Gradually they ceased dancing and attended to each other, arms clasping thighs, necks and spines arching as they joined in ecstatic embrace. As they filled my vision, the exposed vulgarity of their sexual appetites was shocking and arousing.
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