How I Left the National Grid

by Guy Mankowski

  As he pushed through Sam noticed fingers poking into bags of white powder. Latex tights, the arch of their gloss rising in silver arcs as women danced. Sam stooped over, clutching his jacket around him. Marilyn Manson’s ‘Great Big White World’ chattered into its chorus, the thick, treated noise sweeping him along. Sam looked up. His eyes were met by a profile he recognised, veiled in red light.

  Wordlessly, Theo motioned them up to his table. They pushed past the coupling bodies towards it. There, Theo was sat on a couch, holding court. ‘You two,’ he said, waving them over with a fey hand.

  From the ceiling the woman spun down the thick ribbon, her slim body uncoiling it. Below her, the crowd gasped its appreciation. Her legs sawed at the lowest point as she gathered the ribbon around her torso again, like a spinning top. Strobes flickered over her clenched thigh muscles, her burning eyes, her glittering hair. Her carefully honed talent a cheap buffet people gorged on at will.

  As Sam looked for a place to sit he noticed something about the people around Theo. They each had over-earnest expression, and occasionally they looked down guiltily. There was a chemical pinch to the air, a sense of conspiracy. At the centre of it was Theo’s fixed smile, scanning over it all. The two of them sat down opposite him. ‘So,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘What did you think of my set?’

  ‘I never thought I’d hear Throbbing Gristle played in a club.’

  ‘I’m embracing my new image. I’m going to be the next John Peel, but with better hair. Wasn’t his hairdo rubbish? No wonder he was on radio. Don’t you find it strange? You can make a whole new career, based on a few quips you once made on national television.’

  ‘Lives turn on such moments,’ Sam said.

  ‘Indeed. So, Bonny tells me that you’re desperate to find Robert?’

  Sam looked at Camille. ‘Yes, I suppose that’s true.’

  His eyes skittered over Sam, black eyeliner crumbling in the corners.

  ‘So do you think you’ll succeed?’

  ‘With the help of people like you, maybe.’

  He held Sam’s gaze for a second too long.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘But first thing’s first.’

  At his side, a man pulled out a small bag of white pills and dipped his hand into it. Palmed the contents onto Theo. Theo looked around him, and then spread out his fingers. He held two white tablets, with the imprint of a dove upon them. ‘So we’re going on a journey together. Aren’t we, Sam?’

  A waitress in a baby-doll dress passed, placing bright cocktails in front of them. They teemed with mint leaves and crushed ice. ‘Bottoms up?’ Theo asked.

  Camille looked carefully over at Sam.

  ‘Want to take the trip or not, Sam?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You know where the door is, Sam,’ Theo said.

  He thought of the shards of glass on the carpet, as the car passed outside in the night. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said, looking at Camille.

  ‘Let’s,’ Camille echoed.

  11

  ‘Don’t let him get in your head. He wasn’t trying to mess with you. He was probably just having some fun,’ Camille called. In that outfit, her dynamism made Sam mentally pair her with the lights. Dazzle and danger whirled around him, with all the worry of recent days now accelerated, expressed in a carnival of overwhelming stimuli.

  ‘You’re right,’ Sam shouted, over sirens and keyboards. They dipped like rollercoasters, swerved into his senses like sharp corners on the track.

  Everyone else was laughing as he watched Camille dance.

  Theo stayed on the balcony, watching over proceedings. People bit their bottom lips and stamped to the industrial grind of the song. Has it kicked in yet, Sam wondered?

  ‘Once we’ve partied for a bit he’ll open up,’ Camille shouted, sipping her cocktail. ‘Let’s have a good time.’ She looked exhilarated, sensual.

  Sam saw that the other people who’d also taken pills were now surrounding him. One by one, they were rolling up the bottom of their jeans to expose their calves.

  They’re out to get me, Sam thought. They’re all in on it, and they know that the one person who doesn’t roll up their trouser legs isn’t one of them.

  Camille was smiling, lolling her head back. He resented how easily she fell into a beautiful motion, while, like most men, he languished on a high bank of irony and fear.

  She leant into him, her skin sleek. Cupped her hand over his ear. As she talked Sam imagined her lips moving, thick and moist. ‘I think it’s hitting me now,’ she said, enjoying every consonant. He felt her thighs press against his, the fabric of her dress stretched as one long leg moved between his. Her arm curled behind his back, pulling her into him. It would be so easy, Sam thought, for us to dance into a corner. For me to unbuckle the zip at her collar, and watch the tight leather peel from her hot flesh.

  The chorus of the song swooped in, the digital crash of sound sweeping him along. Everyone continued their enclosed, suspicious dance. Sam felt a hissing in his blood, had the sense of something crumbling inside him and reaching up, with clammy, chemical fingers, to quiver in his veins. It shimmered around his hands and wrists, and danced through his fingertips.

  ‘It’s hitting me too,’ he said.

  Sam looked up to the balcony. It was empty.

  Camille pulled him into her, the dance floor flooding as the music grew louder. For a moment Sam imagined her as the queen of a tribe, the raw appeal of her body drawing a rabid semi-circle of men to worship her. With the right soundtrack, he thought, they would all kneel down and kiss her heels.

  Moments later she caught his eye, as if to say it was hitting her again. ‘I’m going to enjoy this,’ Sam thought. ‘For a few moments of my life I don’t have to worry. When this hits me, I can finally break free of it all.’

  It was at that moment that the song peaked. Sam felt a pulsation at the back of his neck that pushed him into a cloud of pleasure, made him giddy with each throb. Each wave had an after-effect that attached to the first, until there was this joyous, bouncing Möbius Strip of sensation that charged him to lift his chest, raise his voice, celebrate. Men from the balcony put their arms round him and he looked at their laughing, grimacing faces and felt a kinship. A synthetic sense of safety. Camille joined hands with them too. He felt ecstatic. ‘I’ll tell her everything,’ he thought. The drugs bubbled and fizzed in his body, making him pop out his legs, jaggedly splay his arms, whoop for pleasure whenever another chorus hit.

  A woman grabbed him by the elbow. ‘Got any MD?’ she said. He shook his head. ‘I want some MD,’ she pleaded, pulling at his shirt.

  Camille suddenly looked serious, and asked a man something. He nodded, pointed to the stairs. She motioned to Sam that she was going to have a cigarette. Did he want one?

  The veranda was deserted, except for a hunched man, bizarrely absorbed by his calculator watch. ‘I think I need some water,’ Camille said. ‘Is it just me, or do you want some water?’

  ‘I want some clean air,’ Sam said.

  They sat down on the grated metal, looking up at the sky. Coldness pinched around them, a coldness serrated by the dispersion of the pill in his blood. Camille sparked up a cigarette and inhaled. ‘Don’t worry if you don’t get to talk to Theo,’ she said. She looked down, knocking the cigarette with a painted finger. ‘You do know I think you’re doing a great job?’

  He looked up, and at that moment a plasticky joy hit his jaw. He felt as if his head was bobbing as another bustling wave cascaded through him. He heard his words come out, cool and deliberate. ‘I am glad that you’re around to help out with this. You know?’

  She smiled, and looked down at the metal. ‘I think you’re going to make something really special.’

  ‘You’re helping me,’ he said, charged by the way she smiled as he leant closer. ‘You’re encouraging me.’

  She inhaled, and blew a plume of smoke upwards. ‘No. You’ve encouraged me. Everyone else says I was stupid. Moving from my
home to England for a load of bands that no longer exist.’

  He could picture her clearly. Lost in a distant town. Trapped inside the porous boundaries of a book or record.

  ‘Did you like Paris?’

  She looked down at the floor. He wondered what mental riffs made her reflective expression so natural. He could imagine her as a teenager, spending whole summers inside the sleek interiors of Savage Garden albums. Wishing her life was more like that.

  ‘Not towards the end,’ she said. ‘I’m still waiting for the London I’d heard about.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. You can still find traces of it.’

  She smiled. ‘You know, that is true.’

  ‘Course. It’s impossible to prove how shaped we are by art we love. You have to live off the traces.’ There was a knot in his stomach, born of a need to lift her mood.

  She laughed. ‘They are there, aren’t they?’ she said.

  ‘I could take you to clubs in Manchester. Although most of them have been bulldozed over to make branches of Wetherspoons. But in some of them, just in certain corners, you can sense the musicians who danced there in their early days. It sounds mad, but sometimes I think I can almost experience the thoughts behind the songs I love.’

  ‘I’d love to experience that. The teenage part of me is still looking for those things.’

  ‘Then we will,’ he said, putting his hand on the compressed leather of her arm. She didn’t move it, and she smiled again. Slowly this time. He wanted to move his hands through the precise abandon of her hair. He thought of Elsa, and stopped himself. He felt painfully alone, but knew it would be extinguished with a kiss. Don’t, he thought. Be genuine to Elsa. Without that clarity, nothing makes sense.

  ‘I hope I’m still around when you finish this book,’ she said.

  She seemed to be considering whether to place her head on his shoulder, or snake her hand through his hair and kiss him. At that sensual moment any delicate trap felt courageous and right. Her perfume clouded round him, a seductive haze in which Sam felt anything could happen.

  As she leant forward the harsh light of the balcony lit her hair. He felt her proximity, the fragile nourishment he knew he could glean from a kiss. Holding back felt cowardly, despite the memory of Elsa. But he reminded himself that he was not a character in a book, who would indulge for the whims of a reader.

  She looked slowly away, as if amused at her predicament. ‘That might be the last of it,’ she said.

  ‘Are you going to offer me some of that cigarette or what?’

  She nodded. The plastic sensation was returning. He wanted to express something to her so directly that it would cut through all the confusion around them.

  She coughed. The music inside grew louder. She licked her lips slowly.

  ‘We should go back in,’ he said.

  It was almost four a.m. when the two of them found a seat in the McDonalds. Theo had proven elusive, escaping with two burlesque dancers in black corsets at three a.m.. They recognised the person who offered Camille a lift home from the balcony. One of the few fans who’d made it to the after-party. While the tendrils of the pill still soothed them it felt natural for Sam to join Camille for the ride. But the lift only took them as far as the outskirts of the city, leaving them at an all-night McDonalds near the motorway. As the euphoria of the night faded the two of them realized they would have to wait until the six a.m. bus to get to Camille’s. Even as the buzz had retreated, it had left behind a fragile shell that they’d lingered in together. As the new morning had pressed through the lights from the car park, Sam realized how exposed his comedown would be. Soon the adrenalin would go, and the payback would begin.

  He dreaded the moment this would occur, on a strange pop-up site spinning off the M25. Yet given his company something told him it would be painfully, synthetically beautiful.

  He looked at the margin of their reflection in the window, and for a moment wondered if he could slip inside that silvery realm, be irretrievable. Permanently wrapped in the unique Lucite of the morning.

  There were only a few people in the McDonalds. Half an hour ago a stag do had pounded on the Drive-Thru window, finding it closed before carving inside the restaurant. Their muscular bodies teemed with togas and testosterone. They had gathered on the table behind Sam as they sat down. Sam had tried to catch the sharp motifs of their in-jokes, punch lines spinning aimlessly as the discarded burger wrappers in the car park. Now they were gone they had permitted a cherished silence. With her hair ruffled, and lipstick dried to a narrow shade of decadence, Camille had gone into another realm. She looked as if she not only had all the answers, but as if she was tired of their aggregate weight.

  Camille looked out at the strip-lit car park, the vehicles now like mini spaceships. She smiled. The smile seemed to acknowledge how painful the morning light would be. As he sucked at his Pepsi, Sam wondered if the wind had shifted outside. He felt as if his soul had been shrink-wrapped, prevented from familiar lunges of emotion, instead left to cower and wait. He succumbed to the hard edge of chemical coldness that sat inside him. Camille met his eyes and shivered.

  When their meals came they could only poke at them.

  The rush of the evening had awoken a sense of entitlement that felt so modern it was almost satisfying. At the counter they had both ordered swathes of cheeseburgers and fries but now they sat on the table, as if behind a plastic screen. The pill had, at one point, rendered everything delicious. But it had only taken a slight shift to show what a confidence trick that all was.

  ‘I’ve never felt this cold before,’ Camille said. ‘I feel as if I’ve shrunk inside.’

  ‘I know,’ Sam replied. They looked out at the car park, beyond it the temporary lights of the city.

  ‘Are you sad you didn’t get to talk to Theo?’ she asked, taking a sip with her bloodless lips.

  Sam felt an urge to trace the side of her face with one finger, place a stray black lock into the rest of her hair. She recognised the impulse, indulging Sam with her eyes.

  ‘I’m realizing that it doesn’t ever seem to work like that. Perhaps I can’t expect people to be so attainable.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, shaking the Pepsi. ‘Perhaps we need more enigmatic figures. People who give us the room to work ourselves out while we go after them.’

  ‘So in that case, finding Wardner would have a cost?’

  She looked out of the window. ‘I don’t know. Are you not going to touch your food?’

  ‘Not just now.’

  ‘Don’t blame you. This place isn’t going to win any Michelin stars. I can’t see Martin taking his wife here for an aperitif any time soon.’

  As she looked out of the window Camille seemed to be looking through the car park, through the lights. Behind them. ‘You alright?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She inhaled, and held the breath. ‘You see those dots on the horizon, Sam? I think all of them are like little universes, aren’t they? Homes, cafes, nightclubs, cars. They move and switch on and off. From here they seem insignificant, temporary. It is barely worth following them because soon they will pop, pssh, and be gone.’

  ‘So what if that’s true?’

  ‘Well, perhaps we are just like them?’

  ‘Barely worth following?’

  ‘Exactly. All this, the book. Trying to make sense of people’s histories, what it all means. Everyone is looking to the past for answers, as if the blueprint was left there. But it’s all just distant dots. Soon they will wink off too.’

  Sam put down the Pepsi. ‘I sometimes think about how we’re all looking back. We should be trying to change the present, but people have become so reductive. Nowadays they seem only interested in money, sex and attention. In getting cheap laughs. When I was younger, I genuinely believed the future would be made in the margins.’

  ‘The margins? The fringes of society?’

  ‘The people who still believe in music.’ He leant forward. ‘I me
an the margins where it’s uncertain. That bit of room we have, where we decide how to behave. Those margins where interpretation and sensuality are. I used to believe we could use them to invent new lifestyles.’

  ‘But how could we make that happen?’ Her eyes narrowed, the long lashes trembling.

  ‘By changing the script. By not acting as we’re expected. At gigs, at parties, places like that. When I was young I thought people went with an open mind. I thought if one person there suggested using the furniture for a strange act of make-believe then everyone just joined in. I watched David Bowie on Top Of The Pops and thought, ‘That is the spark.’ I thought, ‘From now on, people will relate to one another through personas. There’ll be a sexual revolution.’ But everyone just looks for the normal way to behave. Tries to find the agreed script, even if it doesn’t really exist.’

  ‘Not online though.’

  ‘Online isn’t real life. Not yet.’

  ‘You’re right. Wouldn’t it be fun to stay in a hotel and just try out a new identity? See whether you prefer that one instead?’

  ‘Exactly. Perhaps we should do that.’

  She nodded, and looked out at those lights.

  12

  Elsa knew Malcolm was the sort of man who took pride in never appearing ruffled. But as he hurriedly threw shirts into a leather suitcase, a blaze of frustration flushed onto his face.

  ‘You don’t need to leave,’ Elsa said.

  He looked up, and she noticed he was panting a little. ‘I set this up carefully,’ he said. ‘Some of the richest and most discerning art buyers in the world are, as we speak, milling around in the downstairs lobby. I wanted to introduce them to you this weekend. Yet for some bizarre reason you insist upon throwing all that back in my face.’