A Blink of the Screen (15 page)

So I thought, what more do you need to run a disco?

Well, basically just about everything which Wayne hadn’t got – looks, clothes, common sense, some kind of idea about electric wiring, and the ability to rabbit on like a prat. But at the time we didn’t look at it like that, so I flogged the Capri and bought the van and got it nearly professionally resprayed. You can only see the words Midland Electricity Board on it if you know where to look. I wanted it to look like the van in
The A-Team
except where theirs can jump four cars and still hare off down the road mine has trouble with drain covers.

Yes, I’ve talked to the other officer about the tax and insurance and MOT. Sorry, sergeant. Don’t worry about it, I won’t be driving a car ever again. Never.

We bought a load of amplifiers and stuff off Ian Curtis over in Wyrecliff because he was getting married and Tracey wanted him at home of a night, bunged some cards in newsagents’ windows, and waited.

Well, people didn’t exactly fall over themselves to give us gigs on account of people not really catching on to Wayne’s style. You don’t have to be a verbal genius to be a jock, people just expect you to say, ‘Hey!’ and ‘Wow!’ and ‘Get down and boogie’ and stuff. It doesn’t actually matter if you sound like a pillock, it helps them feel superior. What they don’t want, when they’re all getting drunk after the wedding or whatever, is for someone to stand there with his eyes
flashing
worse than the lights saying things like, ‘There’s a rather interesting story attached to this record’.

Funny thing, though, is that after a while we started to get popular in a weird word-of-mouth kind of way. What started it, I reckon, was my sister Beryl’s wedding anniversary. She’s older than me, you understand. It turned out that Wayne had brought along just about every record ever pressed for about a year before they got married. Not just the top ten, either. The guests were all around the same age and pretty soon the room was so full of nostalgia you could hardly move. Wayne just hot-wired all their ignitions and took them for a joyride down Memory Motorway.

After that we started getting dates from what you might call the more older types, you know, not exactly kids but bits haven’t started falling off yet. We were a sort of speciality disco. At the breaks people would come up to him to chat about this great number they recalled from way back or whenever and it would turn out that Wayne would always have it in the van. If they’d heard of it, he’d have it. Chances are he’d have it even if they hadn’t heard of it. Because you could say this about Wayne, he was a true collector – he didn’t worry whether the stuff was actually good or not. It just had to exist.

He didn’t put it like that, of course. He’d say there was always something unique about every record. You might think that this is a lot of crap, but here was a man who’d got just about everything ever made over the last forty years and he really believed there was something special about each one. He loved them. He sat up there all through the night, in his room lined with brown envelopes, and played them one by one. Records that had been forgotten even by the people who made them. I’ll swear he loved them all.

Yes, all right. But you’ve got to know about him to understand what happened next.

We were booked for this Hallowe’en Dance. You could tell it was Hallowe’en because of all the little bastards running around the streets shouting, ‘Trickle treat,’ and threatening you with milk bottles.

He’d sorted out lots of ‘Monster Mash’ type records. He looked pretty awful, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. I mean, he always looked awful. It was his normal look. It came from spending years indoors listening to records, plus he had this bad heart and asthma and everything.

The dance was at— okay, you know all that. A Hallowe’en Dance to raise money for a church hall. Wayne said that was a big joke, but he didn’t say why. I expect it was some clever reason. He was always good at that sort of thing, you know, knowing little details that other people didn’t know; it used to get him hit a lot at school, except when I was around. He was the kind of skinny boy who had his glasses held together with Elastoplast. I don’t think I ever saw him raise a finger to anybody, only that time when Greebo Greaves broke a record Wayne had brought to some school disco and four of us had to pull Wayne off him and prise the iron bar out of his fingers and there was the police and an ambulance and everything.

Anyway.

I let Wayne set everything up, which was one big mistake but he wanted to do it, and I went and sat down by what they called the bar, i.e., a couple of trestle tables with a cloth on it.

No, I didn’t drink anything. Well, maybe one cup of the punch and that was all fruit juice. All right, two cups.

But I know what I heard, and I’m absolutely certain about what I saw.

I think.

You get the same old bunch at these kind of gigs. There’s the organizer, and a few members of the committee, some lads from
the
village who’d sort of drifted in because there wasn’t much on the box except snooker. Everyone wore a mask but hadn’t made an effort with the rest of the clothes so it looked as though Frankenstein and Co. had all gone shopping in Marks and Sparks. There were Scouts’ posters on the wall and those special kinds of village hall radiators that suck the heat in. It smelled of tennis shoes. Just to sort of set the seal on it as one of the hotspots of the world there was a little mirror ball spinning up in the rafters. Half the little mirrors had fallen off.

All right, maybe three cups. But it had bits of apple floating in it. Nothing serious has bits of apple floating in it.

Wayne started with a few hot numbers to get them stomping. I’m speaking metaphorically here, you understand. None of this boogie on down stuff, all you could hear was people not being as young as they used to be.

Now, I’ve already said Wayne wasn’t exactly cut out for the business, and that night – last night – he was worse than usual. He kept mumbling, and staring at the dancers. He mixed the records up. He even scratched one. Accidentally I mean – the only time I’ve ever seen Wayne really angry, apart from the Greebo business, was when scratch music came in.

It would have been very bad manners to cut in, so at the first break I went up to him and, let me tell you, he was sweating so much it was dropping on to the mixer.

‘It’s that bloke on the floor,’ he said, ‘the one in the flares.’

‘Methuselah?’ I said.

‘Don’t muck about. The black silk suit with the rhinestones. He’s been doing John Travolta impersonations all night. Come on, you must have noticed. Platform soles. Got a silver medallion as big as a plate. Skull mask. He was over by the door.’

I hadn’t seen anyone like that. Well, you’d remember, wouldn’t you?

Wayne’s face was frozen with fear. ‘You must have!’

‘So what, anyway?’

‘He keeps staring at me!’

I patted his arm. ‘Impressed by your technique, old son,’ I said.

I took a look around the hall. Most people were milling around the punch now, the rascals. Wayne grabbed my arm.

‘Don’t go away!’

‘I was just going out for some fresh air.’

‘Don’t …’ He pulled himself together. ‘Don’t go. Hang around. Please.’

‘What’s up with you?’

‘Please, John! He keeps looking at me in a funny way!’

He looked really frightened. I gave in. ‘Okay. But point him out next time.’

I let him get on with things while I tried to neaten up the towering mess of plugs and adapters that was Wayne’s usual contribution to electrical safety. If you’ve got the kind of gear we’ve got – okay, had – you can spend hours working on it. I mean, do you know how many different kinds of connectors— all right.

In the middle of the next number Wayne hauled me back to the decks.

‘There! See him? Right in the middle!’

Well, there wasn’t. There were a couple of girls dancing with each other, and everyone else were just couples who were trying to pretend the seventies hadn’t happened. Any rhinestone cowboys in that lot would have stood out like a strawberry in an Irish stew. I could see that some tact and diplomacy were called for at this point.

‘Wayne,’ I said, ‘I reckon you’re several coupons short of a toaster.’

‘You can’t see him, can you?’

Well, no. But …

… since he mentioned it …

… I could see the space.

There was this patch of floor around the middle of the hall which everyone was keeping clear of. Except that they weren’t avoiding it, you see, they just didn’t happen to be moving into it. It was just sort of accidentally there. And it stayed there. It moved around a bit, but it never disappeared.

All right, I know a patch of floor can’t move around. Just take my word for it, this one did.

The record was ending but Wayne was still in control enough to have another one spinning. He faded it up, a bit of an oldie that they’d all know.

‘Is it still there?’ he said, staring down at the deck.

‘It’s a bit closer,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it’s after a spot prize.’

…
I wanna live forever
…

‘That’s right, be a great help.’

…
people will see me and cry …

There were quite a few more people down there now, but the empty patch was still moving around – all right, was being avoided – among the dancers.

I went and stood in it.

It was cold. It said:
G
OOD
E
VENING
.

The voice came from all around me, and everything seemed to slow down. The dancers were just statues in a kind of black fog, the music a low rumble.

‘Where are you?’

B
EHIND
Y
OU
.

Now, at a time like this the impulse is to turn around, but you’d be amazed at how good I was at resisting it.

‘You’ve been frightening my friend,’ I said.

I
DID NOT INTEND TO
.

‘Push off.’

T
HAT DOESN’T WORK
, I
AM AFRAID
.

I did turn around then. He was about seven feet tall in his, yes, his platform soles. And, yes, he wore flares, but somehow you’d expect that. Wayne had said they were black but that wasn’t true. They weren’t any colour at all, they were simply clothes-shaped holes into Somewhere Else. Black would have looked blinding white by comparison. He did look a bit like John Travolta from the waist down, but only if you buried John Travolta for about three months.

It really was a skull mask. You could see the string.

‘Come here often, do you?’

I
AM ALWAYS AROUND
.

‘Can’t say I’ve noticed you.’ And I would have done. You don’t meet many seven-foot, seven-stone people every day, especially ones that walked as though they had to think about every muscle movement in advance and acted as though they were alive and dead at the same time, like Cliff Richard.

Y
OUR FRIEND HAS AN INTERESTING CHOICE OF MUSIC
.

‘Yes. He’s a collector, you know.’

I
KNOW
.
C
OULD YOU PLEASE INTRODUCE ME TO HIM?

‘Could I stop you?’

I
DOUBT IT
.

All right, perhaps four cups. But the lady serving said there was hardly anything in it at all except orange squash and home-made wine, and she looked a dear old soul. Apart from the Wolfman mask, that is.

But I know all the dancers were standing like statues and the music was just a faint buzz and there were these, all these blue and purple shadows around everything. I mean, drink doesn’t do that.

Wayne wasn’t affected. He stood with his mouth open, watching us.

‘Wayne,’ I said, ‘this is—’

A
FRIEND
.

‘Whose?’ I said, and you could tell I didn’t take to the person, because his flares were huge and he wore one of those silver identity bracelets on his wrist, the sort you could moor a battleship with, and they look so posey; the fact that his wrist was solid bone wasn’t doing anything to help, either. I kept thinking there was a conclusion I ought to be jumping to, but I couldn’t quite get a running start. My head seemed to be full of wool.

E
VERYONE’S
, he said,
SOONER OR LATER
. I
UNDERSTAND YOU’RE SOMETHING OF A COLLECTOR
.

‘Well, in a small—’ said Wayne.

I
GATHER YOU’RE ALMOST AS KEEN AS
I
AM
,
W
AYNE
.

Wayne’s face lit up. That was Wayne, all right. I’ll swear if you shot him he’d come alive again if it meant a chance to talk about his hobby, sorry, his lifetime’s work.

‘Gosh,’ he said. ‘Are you a collector?’

A
BSOLUTELY
.

Wayne peered at him. ‘We haven’t met before, have we?’ he said. ‘I go to most of the collectors’ meetings. Were you at the Blenheim Record Fest and Auction?’

I
DON’T RECALL
. I
GO TO SO MANY THINGS
.

‘That was the one where the auctioneer had a heart attack.’

O
H
.
Y
ES
. I
SEEM TO REMEMBER POPPING IN, JUST FOR A FEW MINUTES
.

‘Very few bargains there, I thought.’

O
H
. I
DON’T KNOW
.
H
E WAS ONLY FORTY-THREE
.

All right, inspector. Maybe six drinks. Or maybe it wasn’t the drinks at all. But sometimes you get the feeling, don’t you, that you can see a little way into the future? Oh, you don’t. Well, anyway. I might not have been entirely in my right mind but I was beginning
to
feel pretty uncomfortable about all this. Well, anyone would. Even you.

‘Wayne,’ I said. ‘Stop right now. If you concentrate, he’ll go away. Settle down a bit. Please. Take a deep breath. This is all wrong.’