Death & the City Book Two (44 page)

Who would Sandra come back as, given the choice of anyone in history? Listing her favourite hobbies, eating, drinking and sperm-jacking, maybe she'd come back as Lucretia Borgia. Lucretia Borgia is on my list of top fantasy dinner-party guests, along with Hannibal Lecter, Dr. Atkins, Vlad the Impaler, Oliver Cromwell, and Hitler. My bets would be on Borgia as last diner standing. Although if I added Terry Dyer to the guest list, it might be a draw. Unless Sparky was the chef, in which case all bets would be off, after the ice-cream
bombe
with fizzing sparkler-type things sticking out of it, or even earlier if pizza delivery was on the menu. I quite like the thought of Sandra as Lucretia Borgia. Puts a matching face to the famous name.

I wonder who I'd come back as. Someone with a nice quiet unremarkable life, hopefully. I used to think it would be nice to be
Mrs.
Columbo
, when I was younger. He was always talking about her when solving a crime. She must have been quite a smart cookie.

It takes me just over an hour and a half commute from door to door tonight. Phantasia isn't a club, it's a mobile theme night - more like a convention, which tours internationally and recruits locally as required. Basically a key core of D.J.s and live acts, Medieval fantasy Euro-Porn Stars, and a couple of adult Manga film-makers thrown together, in a surreal mix of music, book-signings, film promotion, photo opportunities and fantasy fancy dress competitions. Tonight's venue is The Old Apple Warehouse (the fruit, not the laptop), a farming industrial estate site, usually used for weekend antique fairs, and weekday indoor markets.

And tonight, Apple is dressed up for the occasion in bridal white swathes of taffeta, forming a space-age series of interlinking indoor marquees, tunnels and tents around the central performance stage, with the rainbow lighting, smoke machines and lasers giving the event a
Barbarella
meets
STAR WARS
meets
Lawrence of Arabia
atmosphere. It's been open all day since eleven this morning for the book and DVD sales, and author interviews, vanilla bondage etiquette demos, and interactive Q&A with film-makers and stars. Just gearing up now for the Phantasia After Dark party, which is when all the weirdos come out and supposedly sell their recreational herbal remedies. And the kinky-spank pimps, enlisting girls to hang out in fetish clubs who will falsify assault charges unless payment is extorted. Which the authorities are frowning upon, quite heavily.

As we're given the staff tour, shown around the Fire Exits, blind spots, disabled access and toilets, we're told that there will be some searching, but most of the checks will be done by walk-through body scanner, which every visitor has to pass through.

"Our company actually did the beta tests of these scanners before airports secured them in this country," the security manager tells us. Which could be true, for all I know. "So there's no surprises can be sprung on us here. We know this machine inside out."

"What about people bringing in sex toys or fancy-dress weapons?" a younger doorman asks, who reminds me in attitude and appearance of Jag Nut.

"Anything like that gets tagged and goes in the cloakroom. Unless it's illegal and has to be passed on to the police, they're welcome to collect it again afterwards," the manager lets us know. "This isn't a swinger's party or sex encounter night, it's performance art licensed only. Meaning all the usual licensing laws apply. This ain't Las Vegas, kids."

I start to worry what I might find in Las Vegas at this point. And that I'm glad Crank took the most privacy route, with his publicity consent.

The Phantasia production value is pretty high, and it's very theatrical - think
Kylie X Live
or Madonna's
Music
tour meets
Cirque du Soleil
, and the customer's costumes are just ridiculously professional. The best that the internet can provide. From full anatomically-correct Ridley Scott's
Aliens
,
to bondage armour-plated cyber men and women based on illustrations by Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell, Les Edwards, Jim Burns - and all the
Marvel
,
DC Comics, 2000 AD
hero fetish variants you could eat. Practically a cheerleader squad of Elektras, and more than just a few girls painted Mystique blue with yellow contact lenses in. But only one Durham Red, who looks miserably ticked off until I ask her if she is Red out of
Strontium Dogs
,
and suddenly her grin is wider than a Cheshire Cat.

"Everyone's been asking me if I'm
Ultraviolet
or
Bayonetta
," she groans. "Do I look like Mrs. bloody Luc chuffing Besson? I had to stick these fangs in with nail glue."

They stand out from the Medieval fantasy crowd as being 'newbies' and 'fashion fodder.' The customers who turn up in leather armour, chain mail, chastity belts, or sewn into hessian sacking as 'ragamuffin gimps' claim to be the original Phantasians, the hard core who have followed 'the Phantasia community' since its inception. It's like cage-fighting fans, since cage-fighting found its way into nightclubs as light entertainment. There's always a group who claim to have been
'Involved from the start'
. The only cage-fighter I ever had to deal with, was showing off his machismo skills while drunk on a non-cage-fighting night. I gave him a verbal warning to tone it down, before carrying out the threat of a wedgie and removing him from the dance floor by it. For some reason he never forgot that particular admonishment, and mentions it whenever I see him at The Plaza now.

My favourite customer outfits are the Morph-suits, the completely faceless, anonymous Lycra zip-up
Smarty-Party
gimps. They're harmless and disturbing both at the same time, in a sort of ultimate safe-sex kind of way. I wonder what Connor would look like in one. In fact for all I know, he could be among them. It'd be an awesome hit-man disguise, at one of these get-togethers. Except of course there's nowhere to conceal a weapon. They'd have to be unarmed ninjas, although the only place they'd be able to camouflage themselves in their bright range of colours would be at a gay
Mardi Gras
.

"That's my fella and his mates," Red confides in me, when we bump into each other again. The Morphs are on the illuminated dance-floor like something out of a
Twin Peaks
dream sequence, doing cartwheels and having spontaneous wheelbarrow races around the perimeter. "Guess which he is."

"Wow, that is a challenge," I remark. Red's about my height, and made even taller by her cyber platform buckle-and-steel-shin-pad boots, customised from iBay. Maybe she likes them tall, so I just pick the tallest of them. "Is it Mr. Dark Green?"

"No - that's actually my brother," she laughs. "It's Mr. Dark Blue. With the sunglasses over his hood."

I look and see an only slightly shorter customer than the tallest Morph, better physique, doing a bit of
The Robot
break-dancing. As good as the paid performers in their cages on the main stage, if a bit more tongue-in-cheek and relaxed. From what I can tell, through the unreadable Morph mask.

"It's his stag do," she tells me, hitching up her knuckle tape to show me a tiny black diamond, set between rubies in white gold on her finger. "We were here earlier, went out for a meal and came back. It's been a really good day, actually. He brought a white shirt and got loads of autographs on it. We like the Manga stuff best. He got Lady Lily White's autograph. Dr. Wang. You know, the psychologist that got struck off and her books withdrawn? She just does films now. She had a fashion show here earlier, for her own clothing design line. I'm going to copy my wedding dress from it."

"Congratulations. Is it your hen night as well?" I ask her.

"No, I'm here for his, he invited me because we like the same stuff," she says. "I'm not having one. Can't stand big groups of women, all squawky and loud and stupid and unladylike in public. I'm just going to go for a spa day with my mum and his mum, which they've organised. My best friend can't come because she's still on anti-psychotics since her last nervous breakdown, and I heard somewhere that complementary therapies should be avoided. Her and me will do something else."

"I've had experience of that - I was on medication for the same years ago," I tell her. "One of my friends took me to an open-air operatic and classical music concert at a castle as a treat for my birthday, because all the beauty stuff and drinking alcohol was out of bounds. It was the best time I could have had. Just loads of people having a picnic on the grass, listening to
Die Fleidermaus
outdoors."

"Yeah, that would be great," Red taps her drinking straw on her lower lip, inspired. "There's an old Medieval abbey near where I live, that does
al fresco
summer concerts, Shakespeare and stuff. My mum would enjoy that too. And his mum - in fact, I might even call it my proper hen party. Thanks. I'm really glad I stopped to talk to you."

The next group I bump into are the ragamuffin gimps, sewn roughly into their sacking like scarecrows, being led around on bits of string by men in armour and ladies in wimples, or escaping such obligations and huddled around the end of the bar.

"What are they for, exactly?" I ask a scary wimple lady, with two extra wimples in the form of her conical brassière.

"In Medieval times, it was easier to keep a human pet than an animal," she tells me, and I realise I'm about to get a history lesson rather than a bit of social banter. In fact I get almost a religious history of the philosophy of Phantasia, which I feel is more like something constructed by 'the community' around essentially a social and marketing event. I tune back in as she concludes with "…Of course, in those days, they would have been completely naked. Except in winter."

"Did they do the same as real pets?" I ask. "Catch mice, fetch sticks…?"

"Keep their owner's feet warm at night," she nods, earnestly. "It's the undisputed origin of modern role-play bondage. Think of the whole licking of the Master's shoes scenario. Humans replaced animals as pets when animals were harder to keep alive and thriving in a human household, with no knowledge or education of animal welfare available."

Phew. And I thought she was just going to say something along the lines of:
To keep my place at the bar, and look after my coat and purse when I go to the toilet
.

"Are they allowed to talk?" I ask.

"Not in character," she says. "They can bark, or growl, or miaow or purr, depending on which pet they're meant to be at the time."

Her ragamuffin gimp is currently drinking lager through a straw inserted in the oral hole in his hessian gimp mask, and belches, indeterminately of species.

"Do you go to many of these events?" I query of Scary Wimple Lady. Her hair is a very un-Medieval flamingo pink under the wimple, and her eyebrows are two rows of piercings, that look as though sprung book-bindings have been twisted through them.

"Oh, as many of them as we can. We're photographic and artist models for the magazine scene. Have been extras in about twenty films as well. I'm being digitised at the moment…"

I automatically look down, and at her oblivious gimp to check, which would have made Doorman Harry proud.

"…I'm appearing as a Dragon Lady Warrior on the battlefield in a sequence in Lady Lily White's new movie, sort of Gorgon meets Valkyrie meets Fury. It's going to be awesome. I only got to be part of it because we go to the Tokyo parties. When you've been involved as long as we have, you get to become a
Face
, and the auditions are easier to get through - you get the insider tips on when they happen, who's there, and what they're looking for."

"Cool," I say, smile, and move on.

I used to have a barmaid friend like her. Someone would make a witty social observation, compliment your style of dress, or ask a question as an ice-breaker, and suddenly she'd leap in between you like an online encyclopaedia. Telling them the entire history of trousers, or who invented the Martini, completely destroying the spontaneity of the moment, or any chemistry, before it could develop. I found it hard enough to meet new people at the best of times, let alone in the company of someone who absolutely had to be the centre of attention and the expert in any given situation, so I stopped calling her - at which point I realised she never called me anyway, so it wasn't difficult to break off. Besides that, she had a habit of 'borrowing' my books and CDs and t-shirts, without asking - or giving them back.

As I pass the ragamuffins, gathered around the end of the bar minus their owners, they're quite clearly talking amongst themselves, not in character. Discussing the last nice restaurant they each went to, and what makes a good steak house. Some of them sound quite Etonian. Takes all sorts.

I wonder what these cultural and entertainment conventions will be like in the future. What reference point in history today's society will occupy. Maybe we'll be known as the point in time where everyone was so stupidly competitive in their private lives, and small-time micro-celebrity stakes, that economic and scientific progress actually stopped altogether. While instead, generations of frustrated wannabes jumped around in legwarmers, fancy shoes, greasepaint, and fake wigs, while blogging about an imaginary sex-life, which continued until they died out through lack of human values and a real life. Rather like the French aristocracy.