The Safety Dance

by Justin Cawthorne

It’s a curious facet of human nature that nearly every person on the planet thinks they know at least one thing that no other person on the planet knows (and if anyone else on the planet did know it then they probably wouldn’t understand it properly anyway). In Crispin’s case he was utterly convinced that there was a secret, hidden message in The Safety Dance and, furthermore, that he was the only person who was even remotely aware of this. This was at once eminently frustrating and deeply satisfying to him. It was satisfying because he was now a member of that elite group of everyone else on the planet who knew something that no one else did, but frustrating because he, obviously, couldn’t tell anyone - and if he did he had a pretty good idea no one would believe him anyway (which left him in the precarious position of being the sole person on the planet who knew something that no one else on the planet actually wanted to know).

  What had yet to occur to Crispin was the realisation that, for there to be a secret message hidden within the bars of The Safety Dance, someone else must have put it there. Which, if course, meant that someone else knew about the ‘secret’ message, which meant that it wasn’t all that secret anyway. Even worse, if someone had put a ‘secret’ message in a song that had been heard by millions of people across the planet over the span of the last twenty years, then it wasn’t really all that well hidden either.

  Luckily, for his peace of mind, very little of this had occurred to Crispin as he walked home that evening, in the rain, listening to his C90 mix tape of The Safety Dance. He held his umbrella protectively to one side; the rain hadn’t stopped in days and he didn’t want to risk his Walkman getting wet.

  He was still struggling to understand why Gloria hadn’t liked the mix tape. If it had been another song then, maybe... but The Safety Dance was different, it was different in every way: it even told him why Gloria didn’t want to listen to the tape: “...because your friends don’t dance...”

  He didn’t mind, they were friends after all: it was precisely because they were friends that he had wanted to share his music with her. She had even invited him out for a drink after work, perhaps to make up for not listening to his tape, but all he’d been able to think about was getting his headphones on and listening to the song again. And even he understood how that might look a little odd while sitting in the pub.

  He just couldn’t stop listening to the song. He had first heard it a month ago (of course, he had heard it before then, but he had never really heard it). It was catchy, infectiously so. The way the bass riff climbed up and then down again, the fresh buzz of the synthesiser, the multi-layered lyrics: it was all so compelling. The first time he had heard it he had listened to it again immediately afterwards. And then again. After a while he just hadn’t been able to get it out of his head. He thought if he kept listening to it then it would fade eventually, but it hadn’t happened. Still, he continued listening to it, obsessively so.

  Then, last week, something strange had happened. He had been listening to the song and, just for a few brief moments, the real world had faded (left far behind?) and something had flashed into his head: an image, or maybe a thought. It went by so fast he hadn’t been able to work out what it was. It happened again a few times after that and suddenly he realised what was going on.

  There was a message hidden in the song: the song was telling him something.

  Since that revelation he had barely stopped listening to the song. He knew there was something in there, a message that only he could decipher. If he could work it out it could be even bigger than that bible code business - after all, almost everyone had heard The Safety Dance, but how many people had ever bought a bible?

  At that moment he happened to look up and stopped dead in his tracks.

  A dwarf was walking right towards him. A dwarf - just like in the video. He was so startled it was all he could do to remove his headphones and simply stare. As the dwarf walked by he looked sideways at Crispin but didn’t stop. A moment later he stepped onto a bus and was gone.

  Crispin smiled. A dwarf had just walked past him while he was listening to The Safety Dance: It could only mean he was right. Happy now, he put his headphones back on and walked the rest of the way home.

  The next evening Crispin waited by that same bus stop for the dwarf to appear again. It had been a long wait: he had already listened to his Safety Dance tape once all the way through and was about to flip it over when he saw the small man coming towards him. He jumped to his feet, holding his hand out.

  Then he thought about it and sat back down again.

  The dwarf stared at him warily.

  “Hello, I’m Crispin!”

  “I’m happy for you,” the man replied, ignoring Crispin’s hand.

  Crispin laughed nervously. “Happy! Just like in Snow White...”

  “Listen, mate, I may be short, but I can still give you a good one in the bollocks,” he responded sourly.

  “Ok, I’m sorry about that. I just wanted to talk to you.”

  The dwarf’s shoulders seemed to slump, just a bit.

  Crispin thought hard. “Maybe I could... buy you a drink?”

  He considered this.

  “How about if I pay you - I’ll give you money,” Crispin added.

  Now the dwarf looked angrily at him. “Hey! I don’t do any of that funny stuff. You can go somewhere else to get your kicks!”

  Crispin shook his head. “No! No, that’s not - honest, I just want to talk to you, I don’t want to... to... do anything...”

  “How much?” the dwarf asked.

  “What?” Crispin was puzzled.

  “You said you’d pay me: how much?”

  “Oh.” Crispin searched through his pockets, finally fishing out a few ragged notes. “I’ve got twenty quid - more, probably, if you’re not bothered about the beer.”

  The dwarf considered for a moment, looking up the road to see if any buses were coming. Finally he said: “Fine, give me the twenty. And I’ll take you up on the pint too.”

  Five minutes later they were safely installed in the The Crown. The dwarf had a pint and Crispin, not being a big drinker, had stuck to a half. Crispin had noticed the barman chuckling when he placed his order, but as hard as he tried he couldn’t work out what was funny about saying: “A pint and a half, please.”

  He was still mulling this over when he remembered that he had company. His new friend was saying nothing, just drinking his pint and glaring randomly around the pub.

  “My name’s Crispin, by the way,” said Crispin, trying to start off the conversation

  ‘Yeah, I know.”

  “So what’s your name then?”

  The dwarf took a long drink from his pint, studied Crispin for a moment, then replied: “Actually I don’t think I want to give you my name. You can call me whatever you like.”

  “Can I call you Bilbo?”

  The man almost choked on his beer. “No!”

  “How about Bill?”

  “Still no.”

  Crispin thought for a moment. “That bloke from the Austin Powers films, what was his -”

  The dwarf put down his beer. “Forget it. Just call me Pete - my name’s Pete, ok?”

  “Ok. Nice to meet you, Pete. My name’s Crispin.”

  “You already told me your name. Twice.”

  “Oh.”

  Pete carried on drinking his beer and made no attempt to carry on the conversation. Crispin wondered what to say next. He was running out of time: Pete had drunk more than half his beer and Crispin had already handed over the rest of his spare cash, leaving nothing for a second round.

  “Do you like The Safety Dance?” he eventually asked.

  Pete stopped drinking and eyed Crispin coldly across the top of his pint glass. “What?”

  “It’s a hit song from the -”

  “I know what it is. Why are you asking me if I like it?”

  Crispin shrugged uncomfortably. “Well... because... in the video they’ve-”

  Pete drained his glass and stood up sharpl
y. “Because they’ve got a dwarf in it?”

  “Yes. I wondered if you might know him...”

  Without another word Pete turned and headed straight out of the door.

  “See you later then!” Crispin called out.

  “So what would you do then?” Gloria asked him.

  Crispin had never really been able to understand why Gloria was friends with him. Certainly he had spoken to many other women in his time, but very few of them seemed to want to stay around him for very long; sometimes no more than a minute or two at the most. When he first met Gloria he hadn’t said any of the things you were supposed to say to women: he hadn’t asked her on a date; he hadn’t complimented her on the size of her breasts; and he hadn’t taken the time to enquire if the plumber was doing his monthly rounds (whatever that meant). As Gloria had continued to talk to him over time none those things had ever come up in conversation. Furthermore, a very tiny, almost inconsequentially quiet voice inside of Crispin suggested that if he ever did say any of those things to Gloria then she probably wouldn’t want to be friends with him any more.

  Unfortunately this was one of those occasions when one of the other voices in his head had spoken at exactly the same time that Gloria had spoken to him. He knew this because she was looking at him in that expectant way she did when she expected him to say something, usually in response to something that she had said just a second or two earlier.

  And of course Crispin had absolutely no idea what to say.

  “So what would you do?” Gloria asked him again.

  Even with this generous hint, Crispin still didn’t know what to say. He thought hard. Gloria had been talking to him during lunch, something to do with a date she’d been on. At one point she had referred to the man as an ‘inbreed’, but Crispin had instead heard ‘imbecile’ and from that moment on he’d had ‘... and I can act like an imbecile...’ stuck on constant rotation inside his head. It had led him to wonder if he’d ever see Pete again and, if he did, how many pints of beer and pockets of loose change it would take to get him to to talk to him again. With all that calculation going on inside his head the tale of Gloria’s disastrous date hadn’t stood a chance.

  But if she realised that then he was going to be in really big trouble.

  “Um, well, I...” he began, instantly realising that forming a clear sentence while simultaneously developing a foolproof escape plan was a feat of multitasking that vastly exceeded his abilities.

  Luckily, at that point Gloria interrupted him: “Oh, what am I doing even asking you? You haven’t been on a date since... come to think of it, when was the last time you got laid?”

  “Um...”

  “Fuck, what am I saying. It’s none of my business.”

  “Okay.”

  Gloria took a deep breath, straightened her shoulders and looked directly at him. “You know, fuck it: bastard can take a walk, that’s all. Like I’m going to put up with that sort of shit.”

  Crispin nodded. “Yeah, totally. You definitely shouldn’t see him again. That tosser.”

  Gloria patted him on the arm. “Thanks, mate. Knew I could count on you, you’re such a good listener.”

  “Any time...”

  She checked her watch. “Tell you what, this one’s on me. I’ll go pay - you better get your brolly ready, looks like we might need to do a runner back to the office!”

  Gloria got up and went back inside the cafe. Crispin studied the weather from the safety of the covered area they were seated under. The rain was lighter today, but just as ceaseless as it had been yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before -

  Then from the corner of his eye he noticed someone crossing the road just ahead of the cafe. It was Pete, but he was going the wrong way: hurrying over to the other side.

  “PETE!” Crispin called out, as loudly as he could manage. “HEY, LITTLE PETER!”

  Pete stopped in mid-stride, turning sharply around. He had just long enough to shoot Crispin a furious glare before a 4WD slammed into him from the left. Brakes squealing, the car slammed him into the tarmac and continued inexorably forward, rolling over him in a horrible parody of Harrison Ford’s famous stunt from Raiders Of The Lost Ark. By the time Crispin had raced to the other side of the road Pete had emerged from the rear end of the car and was sprawled, broken and bleeding, in the middle of the road.

  “Pete! Shit! Are you alright...?”

  Pete struggled to focus on him, his lips attempting to form one last word.

  “What, Pete? What? Tell me!”

  Finally Pete managed to raise his head a few millimetres, look squarely at Crispin and gasp: “... you... bastard!”

  Then, with a horrible crack, his head fell back onto the tarmac.

  Crispin stared down at Pete’s body, utterly distraught. Then, slowly, he stood up and looked suspiciously around the crowd that had gathered.

  Suddenly Gloria was by his side: “Crisp, fuck! I thought you’d been hit by a car. What’s going on?”

  “They got Pete...” he said to her in a hushed tone.

  She look around in alarm. “Who’s Pete?”

  Crispin pointed down to Pete. Gloria stared at the corpse. “Shit! What happened to him?”

  “It’s ok, he’s a dwarf: he’s meant to be that short” Crispin explained, still eyeing up the people around him.

  “That’s not what the fuck I meant!”

  “Oh. He got hit by a car. A really big one. I saw the whole thing.”

  Gloria stared at him. “Hang on - did you say they got him?”

  Crispin took Gloria by the arm and started leading her away.

  “Wait a minute,” she protested. “You can’t leave: you’re a witness!”

  “Just stay calm,” Crispin urged, tightening his grip.

  He walked as fast as he could, trying to get them both away from the road, away from the accident, away from all the people. “It’s not safe to stay there,” he explained breathlessly as they marched. “They just got Pete. Don’t you see? I could be next!.

  Gloria pulled her arm free. “Wait. Stop!”

  She stopped, forcing Crispin to stop as well.

  “Okay,” Gloria continued. “Now, what the fuck are you talking about? Who’s out to get you?”

  Crispin weighed up the pros and cons, and decided it was time to tell her everything: “It’s the song - there’s a message in it, some sort of secret code - “

  Gloria held up her hand, stopping him in mid-sentence. “Wait! What song? Are you talking about the fucking Safety Dance again?”

  Crispin nodded eagerly. “There’s something hidden in the song. I know it and someone out there knows that I know it. That dwarf - Pete - I was only talking to him about it last night. He was too scared to even discuss the song with me. Left the pub as soon as I brought it up. Don’t you see: he knew something and they didn’t want him talking to me. He knew they’d come after him if he talked.”

  “What the fuck...?”

  “I know! I don’t expect you to believe everything... I don’t even know completely what’s going on yet myself, but if I can just work it all out - ”

  Gloria shook her head. “Wait a minute, listen. Think about it: if you're the one who’s on the verge of discovering something, why ... why didn't they just kill you and silence you?”

  "Because I don't know anything. Yet. They’ve got nothing to gain by killing me."

  "That doesn’t make any sense!"

  "None of this makes any sense!"

  Gloria looked at him: “Crispin? Honey? I think you’re in serious trouble here, you need -”

  “I know I’m in trouble!” he interrupted. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. And if I don’t work this out soon I’m going to end up like Pete!”

  “That wasn’t what I - ”

  “I need to go back to the start, I need to go back to where they made The Safety Dance.”

  “You mean the recording studio?”

  “No, of course not. I mean where they m
ade the video. It’s the missing link. The missing piece of the puzzle. There must be a reason they filmed it where they did, there has to be a clue...”

  In spite of everything Gloria found herself starting to get drawn in. “Really? So where did they film it?”

  Crispin shook his head. “I have no idea...”

  At that moment Gloria realised she was getting a really bad headache. “So you want to go somewhere and you have no idea where it is or what it’s called - or anything about it, probably. How the fuck do you expect to get there?

  “Do you even have the slightest fucking clue where it is?”