by Tim Pears
Ezra turned off the car engine. A throbbing beat besieged them.
‘Good God,’ Simon said, and swallowed his pill.
‘Let’s explore,’ Ezra suggested, after they’d gone inside, ‘and meet back here in, what, half an hour?’
He set off alone, but Minty followed, and he let her hold on to his hand, allowed her to be led by him through the building. Beyond the lobby, the ground floor was a single vast space, sparsely dotted with dancing bodies. At its centre was a slightly raised dais with a horseshoe of decks, behind them two DJS, each wearing headphones. One could imagine that the booming beat that blasted the room did not exist, the room was actually silent, and in the silence each of the DJS was listening to something else through his headphones, because one DJ was bouncing up and down, nodding at the few people around the room and pounding his fist in the air above his head, as if trying to communicate a message – perhaps of martial victory – coming in on his radio. While the other was bent over the decks like a scientist, performing some delicate experiment with needle and vinyl.
Upstairs, the layout was different on each floor. Ezra and Minty wandered through labyrinths of tunnels and rooms and open areas. As they entered each one Minty felt herself infused with a strange conviction: that here she’d find treasure. When it wasn’t there Minty suffered only fleeting disappointment, because by the time they entered the next section of the maze she found the same suffusion of hope rising from her belly, spreading through her body.
Ezra turned to Minty, saw her expression of anxious delight. ‘You’re coming up,’ he whispered in her ear.
As they wandered around the building it carried on filling with people, of varied age, colour, dress. Two youths in tracksuits, a girl in fluorescent leggings, a middle-aged man in a suit. Where they’d all come from, Minty couldn’t imagine. It was a miracle she and her group had found this place; that so many other people had also succeeded in deciphering those beautiful directions seemed incredible. Impossible. A woman in an antique dress, a girl in a tie-dye T-shirt, a shaven-headed boy in jeans. Some wore masks, others had faces painted like tigers. Tattoos, jewellery. Angel wings. Outfits of glowing wire; luminous tops. There were elves, aliens.
Minty followed Ezra. He seemed to be strolling at a perfect speed, not too fast, not too slow, pausing just as she realised she’d like to stop too, to look around her; and then anticipating by a fraction her wish to move on again, leading her forward.
Away from the main dance floor, the music was made up of sounds that evoked railways, factories, ships. Metallic rap and reverberation. Motors. Alarms. Along one corridor, with pipes and cables above their heads, were submarine drips, radar signals, sonar echoes in tip-tapping, percussive rhythms. Minty heard the music go into slow motion. The beats stretched out. The music pondered itself, and altered its rhythmic texture, as they moved through rooms, alcoves, hallways.
‘Whatever this is,’ Ezra told her, ‘it’s making time slow down.’
‘What is?’ Minty asked.
‘This pill,’ Ezra said. ‘Come on. We’d better find the others.’
Sheena and Simon weren’t where they’d agreed to meet. Ezra embarked on forays around the building looking for them. Sometimes Minty stayed at the meeting point; sometimes anxiety made her insist on going with him. The building was full of people lost; looking for friends, a drink, a tap, a toilet. Others seemed rooted to the spot: they didn’t know where they were any more, waited for someone to rescue them.
When Minty saw Sheena at last back at the meeting point near the front door she was so pleased to see her friend that she moved forward to embrace her, but before she could do so Sheena had addressed Ezra: ‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘We’ve been looking –’ he began, but she cut him off by turning to address Minty.
‘Simon’s sick. He’s out in the car.’
The night was still warm. Simon lay on the back seat of the Saab, his knees bent. ‘I’m fine,’ he muttered, eyes closed. ‘Just let me die in peace.’
Minty knelt on the driver’s seat. She stretched her arm over and put the palm of her hand to Simon’s forehead. Then she got out of the car and walked away from it, lighting a cigarette.
Ezra followed her.
‘If we have to leave,’ Minty said, ‘I’ll cry all the way home.’ She stopped and looked imploringly at Ezra. ‘Please don’t let him ruin this, Ezra. Please.’ She looked up at the sky as she took another drag, as if tilting her head were the only way to keep her unhappiness at the prospect of departure from spilling out and overwhelming her.
Sheena joined them. ‘What’s in those pills, for God’s sake?’ she demanded.
‘I don’t know,’ Ezra snapped back.
‘I beg your pardon?’
Ezra sighed. ‘They call them creativity pills,’ he said. ‘I got them from someone at work. They flood the synaptic pathways with, I don’t know, dopamine. Serotonin. Other stuff maybe. The marketing guys rate this one highly.’
‘Ezra.’
‘Musicians use it. What its exact name is,’ he shrugged, ‘the precise ingredients, no, I can’t tell you.’
This, thought Sheena, was the problem. You couldn’t get a better example than this. Ezra had distributed samples of some unknown, illegal chemical, to their friends who never took drugs, in some place in the back of beyond. It was the kind of thing irresponsible teenagers did, and he was thirty-nine years old, the father of three children. Her children. She was struck with force and clarity by the sudden understanding that Ezra would never grow up. She’d always assumed he would, because people did, eventually. But no, her husband would grow old, and die, without ever reaching maturity.
‘Well,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Come on, then. We’d better get going. Minty, you can sit with Simon’s head on your lap, okay?’
‘No,’ said Ezra. ‘Simon’s just come up. He’s a little nauseous, it’s normal. He’ll recover. Give him an hour or two.’
‘Are you joking?’ Sheena asked. There was a groan from the car. ‘What if he’s allergic to what he took?’ She turned to Minty. ‘Are you serious?’
‘This is Minty’s birthday party,’ Ezra persisted. ‘It’s her first and last experience of all this. Don’t you see?’
Sheena’s mouth formed a sardonic smile. ‘Of all what?’ she asked, and then glanced back at the party building. ‘That horrific noise? Those sick-looking people? Did you see the puddles and the broken glass in the toilets? The sordidness?’ Sheena looked at Minty, who gazed vacantly back at her, and shook her head. ‘I’ll drive him home, then. You two make your own way, whenever.
However.’ She turned, still shaking her head, and walked to the car.
Ezra and Minty returned to the main room on the ground floor and danced. The DJS were different now, a man and a woman who poured thudding beats down from their dais. The music inhabited not just time but space as well, beats spilled on to the dance floor and pounded about in long curlicues, figures of eight, quadrangular successions. Minty danced in their slipstream. She forgot about Simon, and Sheena. The past dissolved, the future, too.
Spasms of rhythm, judders, stutters. It occurred to Ezra, watching her, that Minty danced as if she was blind. She’d never been into dancing, she admitted: it made her feel awkward. At teenage parties Minty was the pretty girl who stood in the kitchen, smoking, drinking, wisecracking with the boys, attracting them and putting them off at the same time. But this music invited her to move. The beat became a vehicle and she climbed aboard, and her body did what it did. People danced between bodies, spraying hot faces with a cool mist, or handing out bottles of Isis Water.
Hours passed in the world outside. Minty became a better dancer in front of Ezra’s eyes: her movement had an element of surprised delight about it; the music was in her head and in her limbs, her shoulders, her abdomen. It was ages since he’d been with someone their first time. Eventually, he thought he saw her flagging, and felt it himself, and he led her off the dance floor
and upstairs. A hot, sweet aroma drew them to a room where a bearded man was doling out chai.
There were benches made of metal girders and they sat down.
‘Are you having a good time?’ Ezra asked, knowing full well how rhetorical the question was.
‘How could I not know about this?’ she asked. ‘When it was all around. How could you not tell me?’
‘I just tag along with Roger and his crowd, really,’ Ezra said. ‘London, mostly. You have a light?’
They lit cigarettes. Minty’s hand trembled. ‘Even this fag tastes great,’ Minty exclaimed. ‘And this sweet tea. And if anyone had told me this music was stupendous …’
Ezra smiled. ‘A lot of music is on nice candy.’
‘How often do you do this?’
‘Three, four times a year.’
Minty shook her head. ‘Does Sheena not like it?’
Ezra took a drag, drew it in, exhaled. ‘She always thought it was, I don’t know, undignified. I remember her asking me, a while back, if I wasn’t getting too old for this kind of thing. She said, “Do you want to die on the dance floor, Ezra?”’
They both laughed. ‘I said that no, I supposed I didn’t, but then again I couldn’t think of a better place to go. Which didn’t impress her.’
They took another, red, pill each, and smoked, and drank chai, squeezed against each other on the metal bench. Other people smiled back at them: they knew, somehow, that Minty could feel the chemical dispersing, breaking down and multiplying in a microscopic way, and flowing through her bloodstream. Was it that apparent? Her muscles relaxed, her skin prickled. Zones of her body tingled with a warm pleasure.
When he’d put his cigarette out, Ezra ushered Minty to sit on the floor in front of him, between his knees, and with his eyes closed he massaged her neck and shoulders. It was one of the things you did for someone at a party, you could do it for a friend that you were with or for a stranger, man or woman, with no ulterior motive. It was a matter of etiquette. He liked that, the way that behaviour informally became a custom.
Once Ezra felt he’d done enough, had pressed out all the knots he could find, had loosened Minty’s stringy muscles until he was sure she was relaxed before him, he brought his hands to rest on her shoulders. Electronic sounds, rising in tone, like a series of questions: they were underlaid by a rhythmically unpredictable percussion, which had the urgency of something underground approaching. Ezra let himself be infused by the music, and by this feeling it induced of continual anticipation. When he opened his eyes, it was to a roomful of otherworldly beings. The light glowed, colours distinguished themselves from one another as if colour was living matter. The room shone with the sense of imminent arrival. It occurred to Ezra that if he was lucky, if he just sat here still and open and aware, he might be graced by revelation. Some understanding was about to be given to him.
Ezra realised that Minty had laid her hands on his on her shoulders, and she let them lie there a moment before leaning forward and twisting round, putting her hands on his knees now for leverage, and kneeling up high in front of him.
What with Minty’s long legs and the metal girder resting on old car batteries, low to the ground, Ezra’s face and hers were at the same height. Minty gazed at Ezra. First meeting, then trying to avoid, her eyes, he lowered his own gaze a few inches. It struck him that Minty’s lips were full, and soft, and hungry. They parted, and moved towards him. Her lips melted into his. They kissed for a long time. Ezra was astonished by how good a kisser Minty was: both reticent and avaricious, holding back – neither giving nor taking everything – but what she did give Minty gave with a tender greed.
It occurred to Ezra after a while that this snog was so sumptuous, there was so much feeling in his lips, they might carry on all night. But then he realised Minty had drawn back. Disappointed, he opened his eyes: she stood up, and pulled him after her, and now it was her turn to lead him, on a journey up stairs, along corridors, and Ezra let himself be led.
Minty settled on a stairway that climbed in thickening darkness beyond them to a locked door. She stood on the step above him and they renewed their kiss. This time her fingers fluttered around Ezra’s head, like insects. It was like having daddy-long-legs crawling across his face, through his hair; it was just what he might have feared from the irritating manner of Minty’s hesitant yet intimate half-hug embraces. Her tongue, though, now engaged with his, and it seemed to discover a direct connection to his penis, which throbbed with pleasure and need.
Ezra took hold of Minty’s wrists. He didn’t want her spidery fingers on him. He wanted to get to flesh. Her body, her belly, her vagina. He stepped up, pushing between her legs, and as he did so he slid his hands up her skirt, raising it, and grasped her buttocks and lifted her up. He fumbled her panties loose. She undid his trousers. Her legs, Minty’s fine, long legs, wrapped themselves around his waist; she lowered herself on to him. He rammed her against the wall.
Slim though she was, Minty was heavy enough to make it hard work for Ezra to both carry her and screw her; he pressed her against the wall but each time he retreated her weight came with him, and he thrust back at her with relief as the wall took the bulk of her weight again. The pounding beat of the music pummelled up the stairs like the fanfare of some prowling, growling beast. Their bodies submitted to the beat, and the beat was eaten up by time; it was impossible to tell how long they were there. Ezra realised at length that Minty was weeping and moaning. He couldn’t work out why she was pretending. No woman had ever sobbed while having sex with him, and Ezra couldn’t understand it, until it occurred to him that he was hurting her, thumping her back against the wall. He realised more or less simultaneously that his knees and his arms were burning, with an insupportable pain. He stood still for a while, Minty pressed back against the wall. Ezra leaned forward against her, breathing hard. Then he shuffled back and sat down, Minty astride him. He had to sit forward, on the outside edge of the step.
‘You haven’t come?’ she whispered.
‘I don’t seem to need to,’ Ezra told her. ‘Quite happy, though.’ They chuckled against each other.
‘Oh, darling,’ said Minty, her voice sticky in his ear. She started to ruffle his hair with her fingers and plant kisses across his head, which, rather than dearousing him, as he expected it to, sent a tingle of annoyance to his phallus that caused it to engorge even more.
‘Okay,’ he said, taking hold of her hands, ‘that’s okay. Why don’t we just hold each other?’
Minty rested her head on his shoulder. He offered her water, which she declined with the slightest single shake. He drank some. Ezra felt himself detumescing, finally, and Minty slid off him. ‘I’d better find a toilet,’ she said, and she descended the stairs.
By the time the others got back to Oxford Simon had been resurrected from the back seat, clambered clumsily over into the front, and been yacking for twenty minutes without pause. Sheena’s annoyance with Ezra, and with Minty, had shifted to her passenger, and she was glad to reach Bainton Road and drop him off outside the Carlyles’ house.
‘Now you’re sure you’re okay?’ she asked.
‘Honestly, I feel inexplicably light-hearted,’ Simon beamed. ‘Are you positive you won’t come in? You are the most wonderful company, Sheena Pepin. I mean, we’re having an enthralling conversation; seems such a pity to cut it short.’
It wasn’t yet two o’clock. Sheena parked the car, let herself into the house. All was quiet. The kitchen was clean and tidy: Blaise had cleared up. Had she done it on her own, or organised the boys to help her? The latter, surely.
Simon was fine. Ezra and Minty were welcome to that cacophonous squalor – how could they call that a party? – let her have her birthday fling. Sheena would retrieve a few hours’ sleep from the night: a far preferable alternative. Barefoot on the carpets, she looked in on the children. Their bedroom doors were open, the light on on the landing. Louise had already kicked the duvet off his bed. In his pyjama shorts he lay on the bar
e mattress, legs tucked up to his stomach, spine curved protectively around himself. Dreaming, in exile, of the womb.
Hector lay still, barely breathing, a slight frown on his face. Sheena held her own breath, fearful of waking him: he looked like he was floating an inch below the surface of sleep, apt to rise at any moment. Her beloved boy. Would Hec find a woman to hold him, Sheena wondered, to protect him from the anxiety that gnawed at him?
Reaching Blaise’s room, Sheena trod softly over to her daughter’s bed. Blaise lay on her side. Her lips were parted; she looked so young, prepubertal; the duvet on her body gently rose, and fell, but her head was still as death on the pillow. She looked exhausted and alone.
This planet, thought Sheena, undressing in her bathroom, is so heavily populated. And the more people there are, the more loneliness there is in this world, because that’s the human condition. None more so than a mother’s, her children sleeping. Separate. Which must be why a mother learns, if she’s willing, this self-sufficiency of the heart. Because to train your children to validate your existence with their love is to inflict an unpardonable burden upon them. It is, Sheena believed, the one thing you should not do.
Ezra knew how important it was not to think, and he took Minty back down to the main dance floor. They swallowed a blue pill each, and danced. Ezra absolved himself of responsibility: Minty could try and think if she wanted to, she could try and focus her feelings on Ezra or any other thing she might wish to, but if she was dancing then the dance, he hoped, would engulf her.
The room was packed: hundreds of people jigged and tripped and cavorted. Ezra and Minty wove a way through until they found a space that they could claim, and then they joined the flailing dance. If they rested, or closed their eyes, geometric shapes formed themselves in their vision, liquid fractals that melted and reformed and changed colour with the rhythms of the music. So they opened their eyes and danced again. Around them wild-eyed dervishes danced.
