How I Left the National Grid (15 page)

‘What I can say for certain is that this is a performance and an art exhibition, not a press conference. But watch this space,’ she said, waving her glass before moving to depart the stage. She snapped back the microphone once more. ‘And buy my paintings!’ she shouted, to a slightly bloodless cheer.

Sam noticed her expression instantly harden, as she motioned with a finger across her throat to the sound technician. Stagehands started to remove the equipment.

In lieu of Wardner, the crowd expressed their excess excitement on the paintings. With mischievous eyes, Sam and
Camille assumed a position against the end of the wall on which pictures were mounted.

A black-lipsticked woman and her partner jostled for a view of them.

‘Everyone knows Wardner didn’t escape to Europe. That was the whole reason he left a copy of
Passage To India
on his bed,’ the man announced.

‘It wasn’t
Passage to India,
came the riposte. ‘It was Jean Genet’s
Our Lady Of The Flowers.
I think it was his way of telling us he was going to hide in Paris.’

‘He’d have been recognised in Paris, don’t you think? The LP went gold over there.’

A woman with purple hair had been biding her time to speak. ‘Not if a suicide attempt had damaged his face.’

Camille rolled her eyes.

Sam was relieved to see he wasn’t alone in taking the band too seriously.

‘One thing’s for sure,’ the man said, craning in. ‘Bonny has a new future.’

‘Well if so, why are the band even involved?’ came a reply.

They stood for a moment, facing the pictures in a reverent semi-circle. Sam considered the picture, the slight ache of the sombre colours, the way that the etched words blended into one another. A flowing sea of messages.

‘Theo might know where he is.’ Camille said.

The bassist had now undone his jacket, a thin sheen of sweat visible on his brow. He clasped a glass of champagne tight in his fist. ‘But my dear, champagne is the true drink of the socialist,’ he was saying, to a young journalist. ‘Ask any of the New Labour cabinet, even now Blair’s abandoned ship.’

The fans hadn’t dispersed: merely coagulated around the entrance. Waiting for something to happen. Bonny had clearly trained the staff to push them towards her paintings, as the usual crowd seemed reticent. The fans are waiting for me to leave so
they can get me, Sam thought. Camille’s arm brushed his and he wondered if it was a sympathetic reflex, or something more.

The crowd gathered round Theo, and Sam noticed a change in his manner. He could see the louche socialite he remembered gradually emerge from the past. Theo caught his eye.

‘Is there any chance you could sign this?’ a fan asked. ‘Could you put something wise on it?’

Theo scribbled.

‘Autographs are pointless,’ the fan said, reading it out. ‘Brilliant.’

‘You were amazing,’ another fan fawned. ‘Are you touring any time soon?’

‘No. I have this dream of playing a gig at which there is no music, no audience, and no performance. If we can ensure we’re dead as well we’ll be as famous as God.’

‘Is it strange performing in front of a video of Robert?’ Camille asked him. Theo passed back a pen and considered her slowly.

‘Nothing is strange these days, darling. Everything is permitted. Now. What a gorgeous dress you are wearing.’

Camille raised her hand to the leather above her cleavage. The dress shimmered, one long illumination that shook up a pleat in her skirt and dispersed around the fabric at her neck. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘A friend of yours?’ Bonny asked, looming over to Theo.

‘Bonny, this is Camille, who also works for my publisher,’ Sam said.

‘Ah, Mason House. You’re the guy who’s writing the book on us, aren’t you?’ Theo asked.

Sam felt several sets of eyes shift onto him.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I was hoping Wardner would be here, to give us his side of the story.’

‘You’ve scared him off,’ a voice behind them said.

Theo’s eyes moved from Camille and bobbed onto Sam’s face
for a moment. He leant in. He smelt of expensive aftershave and cheap chemicals, but Sam could still see him seducing a young fan. ‘We should have a drink, after my set,’ Theo said. ‘You can tell me how close you are to finding him.’

‘I was hoping you could tell me that. I have no idea.’

‘Sign our bodies first, Theo!’ shouted a girl wearing a miniature top hat.

In the nightclub Sam could see a slender woman, in black tights and a corset, climbing a ribbon towards the ceiling. As he ascended the stairs and walked in, a blast of sound hit his ears. Camille followed behind him, the second meaning of her black leather unleashed by synthetic beats and close dancing. Sam marvelled at how easily people walked off the street and into these decadent dioramas. It was spooky how easily people’s inner landscapes were expressed in enclosed booths and glittering bars. Their private nightmares slid into the moulded furniture as if it had been designed for them. People discovered a new sense of stasis in these places, Sam thought. A moral as well as social stasis. He thought it fitting that the music was bloodless electro, as affectless as the cities in which it was created. Sam felt for the phone in his pocket, and set it to vibrate. Would he feel it if Elsa replied, he wondered? He was dreading the caustic reply he’d get when she read that he’d gone to London.

Bodies half-turned towards him, sleeked in sweat. Camille’s hand snaked around his arm. Her leather stuck to his and all the activity around them seemed unable to separate it. As he turned to her she pointed up the stairs. ‘Bonny said he’d be up there,’ she said. ‘Recovering from the strain of having spun records for twenty minutes.’

Sam pushed through the dance floor to the elevated seating. The proximity of Camille’s leather-clad body made him feel debauched. All around limbs parted, their mechanical movements embodied by something he couldn’t see. The white
strobe shivered over each frame. Everyone’s flesh shone, the crowd one oscillating body that moved like a shoal of fish. On the crest of each wave the sparkle of jewellery, the shimmer of latex, the lustre of sprayed hair. Private agonies finding their only outlet through intense, idiosyncratic dancing.

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.’