by Howard Marks
Ianto feels arms around his neck and turns to face Gwenno grinning up at him and moving her hips with the lights miniatured in her dark large eyes and bouncing back off her teeth and the bolt through her eyebrow and his heart accelerates still further. She yells something in his ear and he feels her breath warm and smells it minty with a faint metallic underwhiff of MDMA, and he can’t make out her words so he leans closer and she yells it again but all he can make out is the one word ‘fine’ which is enough and he encircles her naked waist with his hands and she dances away again, punching the air with her arms above her head and her long hair bouncing, and he sees the span of her belly smooth and honey-hued between the cropped top and the belt of her faded jeans hanging low on her prominent hips, the wide legs almost entirely covering apart from the toes her mud-splattered black and white trainers. Ianto tries to move towards her, a need in him both to stoke and feed from her gorgeous delirium but she is lost in the crowd and he sees the upturned face of Margaret Jones between shoulders, lost in pleasure and surprise as she watches a small sparrow-sized bird flit into the barn through one entrance and whir through the lights and the steam above the rippling close-packed heads of the dancers and out through another entrance into the darkness again. Imagines that, that small slice of light and noisy activity between the two immensities of blackness.
Ianto is lost, spinning. A roaring ponytailed Irishman steams by with a small dark bottle of amyl pressed to his nostril, his shouting face bright red. A small blonde girl with a Welsh dragon flag draped across her back floats on by someone’s shoulders, drifting above the swarming heads like a strange fakir proving the falseness of our corporeal claims. The speed in Ianto is rampant, jackhammering his heart and bulging the veins at his neck and temples and he dances madly, twitching like some young bird attempting take-off or a puppet in the hands of a mad master, bent slightly forwards at the waist with his arms hacking the clogged air and his teeth like his fists clenched, the very image of one swiftly sluicing the rage resultant from some terminal acceptance. He sees nothing but lights and shapes and he smells nothing but fresh sweat and ganja smoke and the sweetness of trampled grass and all his muscles are alive beneath the giant organ of his skin, atingle, grasped in the ecstasy of the moment and only that, the eternal present with its tremendous release and relief and the expression of the enraptured realisation which can demand or even indeed be satiated by not one other method.
This is all Ianto requires, here, this is all he could need, just this perennial thumping second, the movement gravewards halted, and the sweat and the booming and all the motion outside his spinning sphere and if Ianto could stretch and reach and rip the moon from its moorings then he assuredly would. He dances like some laggard seeking to supercede the world’s fury, its insanity, he dances as if in fevered denial of those times he has danced alone in the cold and the darkness with no music playing, as if to disprove how difficult it is to do that. He dances among these reaching bodies in the polish and refinement of that first primal prowl and pounce, more than football, more than war. A bodily victory speech, frantic and static lap of honour circumscribing only the body’s orbit. Simple praise of itself.
He dances until thirst overtakes him and he cannot swallow, his spit is wool, so he ceases his movement suddenly no winding down just split-second cessation, one second a blur the next a person and leaves the barn in search of fluid. Parked outside the building is a small car with its hatchback up like a spread carapace revealing slabs of canned beers and soft drinks. Ianto buys a can of Challenge lager for £1.50 and shakes his head in answer to the man who asks him if he needs anything else and drinks half the lager in one warm gulp and takes it to sit under a dripping tree at the side of the path rapidly becoming a quagmire, then moves as he catches a whiff of the Portaloos nearby and finds a place beneath the low branches of another tree at the bottom of the bottom field, the hills rising above. He leans back against the ridged bark among the moths falling silently like petals, like snow, to escape the sonic seeking of the hungry bats above the trees and stands sipping at the lager, feeling the moisture dry on his face, his clothes hanging in heavy wet folds from his thin frame, his prominent bones. He smokes a cigarette and watches balloons trail their strings like tadpoles or spermatozoa across the moon’s pale face, feels the music throb in the soft earth beneath his feet, through the worn soles of his trainers. People are having sex somewhere in the bushes behind him; the almost-pained groans of the woman sound to him like the cries of a sea-bird unseen and heard across the estuarial sand flats at night-time, almost yearning, beseeching. Were he able to he would tumesce at these sounds alone, but the amphetamine has temporarily robbed his penis of all resilience and all blood and he knows from past experience the futility of kneading and palpation resulting only in a sore wrist and skin rubbed raw, although the desire is there heightened irrepressibly to grab flesh and thrust and slide, exacerbated by the sulphate, which sensuous accentuation of a need containing within it the frustration and hindrance to the satisfaction of that same need can be instanced as some summation of the war which burns in Ianto’s skull and chest whenever consciousness itself returns to him with each new day, be it in cottage or squat or cave or copse or hovel. He is tempted to squirm his hand into his jeans and pull and tug at his prick anyway because of the way it simply tingles, but he doesn’t. Then he does; he slides his hand between denim and flesh and with the fingertips of his first two fingers tweaks the end of his knob, feels it small and sulphate-shrivelled and lacking in all incipience of growth or expansion and he runs his thumbtip over the rough ridge of scar tissue and he caresses that almost tenderly then withdraws his hand and sniffs at his fingers and with that hand takes the wrap of amphetamine from the inner pocket of his jacket and dabs at it twice then tips the remainder into his lager, swishing the can around to assist dissolution and then takes rapid pecking sips at it like a bird at seed. He smokes another damp cigarette, his jaw working now like some piston-powered machine, and he notices that the pleasured sounds in the bushes behind him have ceased and there is rustling and then a boy emerges his top half swallowed in a big baggy fleece, leading, by the hand, a long-haired girl crop-topped and hipstered and Ianto catches the light reflected off her teeth as she smiles and the metal in her eyebrow and he also gets a glimpse of snub nose as she walks just-fucked, holding hands with the boy, up and into the vast mad body proper of the rave and was it Gwenno? Was it her? Ianto thinks with a lurch that it might have been Gwenno, Gwenno he heard groaning in the bushes only a few feet behind his back. Gwenno not a body’s length behind him surrendering to some stranger thrusting, insistent and she smiling. Eyes closed and lips parted.
He drains the can and tosses it away, then strides up the softly sloping wet meadow, attempting to trace the route of the maybe-Gwenno and her partner. Danny dashes out of the crowd to embrace him and slap his back and bellow something in his ear and Ianto responds distracted and perfunctory then ducks into the nearest marquee, where he is instantly assaulted by the deafening drum and bass, the body-shocking jerks of the irregular spiralling drum and the whining sliding movement of the bass, so deep and loud as to vibrate in the spongy soles of his soaked shoes and rattle the bones of his ankles. It is dark in this tent, very dark; gangling shapes vault and gibber through what weak light there is and looming still figures clustered around the sturdy central pole pass around small pipes which they entirely envelop with their hands as they suck at them. Quick glimpses of heavy jewellery and sweat gleaming on bared skin. Ianto stands and stares for a minute or two, but there is nothing for his eye to lock on to; each focal point seems to burst and re-gather in a manner unacquainted with each sudden shift in the tempo of the music and no two tableaux the same or even akin excepting the main players involved, the only constant is extreme transformation second by second by second, in an eyeblink a leaping overcoated figure has moved to the back of the marquee twenty yards away, where the overcoat becomes a bomber jacket and a large woolly hat is donned and then
there is a woman in the time it takes to blink an eye, which Ianto is doing very very rapidly now, several times per second in fact, as he buckles under yet another powerful sulphate rush and the immediate world is coming at him in shredded tendrils sundered and unconnected, so he leaves that tent in one fluid movement turn and dash and trips over a guyrope and falls headlong in the mud. Lying there still and face-down and blaming the planet, the way it spins for ever. How he can never feel its whirl. Quickly there are hands in his armpits lifting him upright.
—You all right, man?
A friendly black face looks concerned into his. Ianto nods and spits mud.
—Fuckin lethal them things are, aren’t they? Went flying over one meself earlier. Should paint em white or tie ribbons on em or something so we can see. Sure yer all right now, yeh?
—Yeh.
—Good.
He pats Ianto’s back and disappears into the drum and bass tent and Ianto rubs the mud off his hands on to his jeans and uses the hem of his shirt to wipe his face clean and crunches grit between his teeth and will not feel embarrassed. A passing man in a woolly hat sees Ianto spit and offers him a bottle of Volvic, which Ianto takes and drinks gratefully and greedily, then returns it and wipes his lips with the back of his hand which comes away dark-striped and he moves towards a squat stone outhouse-type building across the field outside which very young people, say mid-teens, are gathered looking almost terrified, white-skinned and stalk-eyed like the damned. Ianto moves through them stopping once to stare unabashed at a very young girl whose white and growing breasts are spilling out of the top of a pale blue Wonderbra and she thrusts these out at him, insulted and defiant hands on her hips, and Ianto grins loose-lipped at her and opens his mouth to say something, but is then bundled by a bouncing crowd of school-age people into the gabba and is in half a second battered and left jellylike by the insane thrashing ear-raping noise and the epileptic lights and the MC screaming in the voice of a demon. Ianto shakes his head and roars and plunges gleefully into this collective fit, sweat looping through the lights and the heat instantly resoaking his clothing and he has forgotten the maybe-Gwenno or remembers her only half-lit and vague and stumbled as he would perhaps a dream, but the hot fist still remains clenched in his breast goading him to leap and seethe along within this crazed demented noise and tempest, the people moving like smithereens each one random and uncontrolled and haphazard with no real purpose pre-mapped or pre-empted, none apart from the brief but vital destruction of all that lies beyond the encircling ring of lakes and mountains in the quiet houses under the falling drizzle and yellow sodium of the street lights. That’s all. Some of these people here, sixteen maybe seventeen, sat down in this but hours ago as the amps and decks were being brought in and banged up on skag or temazepam or methadone or any other brain-hammering opiate derivative and they will remain here through the same unchanging hysterical shrieking frenzy without rest or respite until the dancers drift damaged and ghost-like away and the music winds down twenty, twenty-four hours ahead in the formless future. They sit there now nodding at the edges of the dance floor slick with liquid spilled, secreted, their backs propped up against the sweating stone walls, moving only to lean to the side and spew or slowly to lift their heavy slack unsteady heads and grin.
Ianto moves madly, bouncing and spinning and kicking and pumping his arms, injecting the chaos of this furnace place with the hot blast of his own fury, and he does this and does this and does this over and only ceases when the urge to piss is so great that his belly hurts and his thighs are damp with impatient pee and the need to drink scorches his throat. He can see blue morning sky through the open door of the hut. He leaves and stands there rocking in the daylight with the muscles in his legs screaming and his ears throbbing and a cliff-face of slag about to shift and slide in his humming head. The speed wars with the exhaustion within his body, the need to lie down, rest and sleep punched dumb by the amphetamine. He walks unsteady up the mud-swamp track to the Portaloos, one of which is engaged and the other of which is sizzling over with shit stinking so he pisses up against the side of it, groaning in relief, his knees trembling as his cloudy yellow urine meanders through the grass to join the wider and deeper tributary of the track.
—Aw Jesus. You dirty bastard.
A man has left the previously engaged toilet and is standing there in disapproval watching Ianto piss.
—Fucking disgusting that. Could you not have just waited? I was only a couple of minutes, man. Christ, have you no control? There’re kiddies gonner be playing around here in a minute. God, have some respect for others, ey? Least you could’ve done is gone in the woods, like, if you were really desperate. Full view of everybody.
Ianto bites his lower lip and shakes off and shoves his dick back into his soaking jeans and walks over to the man, three strides, and punches him full in the face.
He feels the connection in his shoulder and neck and the impact explodes in his bunched knuckles and the man falls back flat in the running midden of mud and piss, his nose a flattened burst of rapidly spreading redness and his eyes rolled back, showing nothing but slightly yellowed whites fine-laced with bloodshot veins. Ianto pulls his foot back to kick and probably kick again, but there are faces watching him from inside a parked car so he simply steps over the man as he would any other small obstacle and follows the track down and around to the bottom of the site by the small birdless pond, where a low khaki tent emanates soft music tinkling like rain off forest leaves and a wooden crate by the entrance has been painted with the white words: CHILL OUT/FOOD/FIRST AID. This is what Ianto needs.
And they have him, these days, these moments of misrule; possessed of them he is quick and entire in his thin, zinging skin, alive, real, on the planet. In them and of them he stirs on this earth, connected to others and himself also in a peril formed from his own forcing, spun from his zinging skin. Better this mess of a life than a life so pointless. Better this botch of a life than one so drab.
Sheepshagger, 2000
Charlie Hall
The Box
I COULD HAVE said some kind words before I went to sleep, but my travel anxiety was already bubbling and the coke kept me awake, so I smoked a spliff. As I got back into bed, she curved herself into me and it made me feel like I was made of crystal and I was afraid I’d shatter. Jesus, I’d only got back from the Complex buzzing a few hours before. I’d spliffed up with the boys and they’d gone and I was left with her, so I went to bed and lay listening to her wondering if she was awake, the tension throbbing in the air, words on my lips. I could have just said something. Her hot legs on mine, I was so jittery I wanted to punch her but the spliff calmed me down. I managed a half-hearted cuddle which made the words want to come out more. Just as I was drifting off, the alarm went.
We’re all gazing up at the screens like obedient schoolkids. The flight number comes up and we race off with our trolleys. Like I’ve any confidence my boxes will come bursting joyously first in line on to the carousel! On the other side of the rubber curtains, I can hear the handlers chatting to each other as they sling the bags on to the belt like so many corpses. Here they come: battered suitcases; chirpy rucksacks; sleek executive walk-in wardrobes.
Just about everyone lunges forward at the luggage and then hesitates. ‘No, wait a minute. In this light I’m not sure. I thought mine was bluer?’ They glance around, harassed. The dilemma, ‘If anyone grabs it then it’s theirs, but if it’s mine and I hesitate then it’ll go back through the rubber curtains and the handlers will have carte blanche to tear it open, squirt toothpaste all over my underwear, nick my . . . Oh fuck it, it’s mine, it’s mine . . .’
I tough it out, trying to look unconcerned, just wanting a fag. If this was Italy we’d all be puffing away, leaning up on the ‘No Smoking’ sign, which is always situated by an overflowing ashtray. But this is Sweden where you get nicked for smoking in the street.
I hardly know her. Usual story – arrived at the club that night whenever it was (l
ast week? last month?) and I saw her again. We’d sort of been on each other’s case here and there. You know, a bit of back-room flirting in the Ministry; skinning up together as I waited for David Holmes to finish his set at Final Frontier; plenty of laughs out in the garden at the old Full Circle. We’d had our eye on each other, both thinking maybe we knew each other too well. I used to get home from a night out, lie in bed and she’d come to mind. I’d still be awake with the drugs slowly draining through my system, tweaking the last synapses and I’d want to call her. But I wanted to be good, didn’t want to make it all just a wank. I wanted to be fair.
I had been on a roll the night we finally got together. High summer and for once London was kicking. You’d come out of a club and there’d be people standing about in the street messing around. The atmosphere was stupendous and everyone was there. Good times to be a DJ.