Time raced past on a zip-line in the schizophrenic fragments of strobe and dry ice. In the labyrinthine depths of the superclub partiers oscillated with the bass beats throughout the four separate floors. The glowing bar was anchored with the weight of burly men bearing down upon it, each one surveying the landscape of the bar either side of him as though about to take a chance across a busy carriageway. The queue was reaching its zenith, around 5 bodies deep, everyone swaying in agitation and texting for the whereabouts of friends from whom they were now hopelessly stranded.
On the dancefloor the hive of ravers waved hands and gyrated as one, in salutation to the DJ in his booth, acting over the congregation like a bishop in his pulpit. In a psychic frenzy he would conduct the atmosphere of the mass collective before him and suspend them in his grasp, accelerating rhythms and beats and dropping refrains from the summer’s biggest tunes all congealed together as one fluid torrent of pulsating sound that frequently ran the risk of imploding in on itself, swallowing all and everyone within a black hole of static and white noise.
Pinned into one of the booths running the length of the dancefloor, Robbie was appealing loudly and gesticulating even louder to the group that surrounded him on the leather cushions, eager for them to move upstairs to the relatively quieter zone of the club. “Cumon guys, let’s get upstairs, keep the bant going!” he shouts at the top of his lungs only to have his words dissolve away in the bass reverberation.
Trapped into the cubicle he looks like a hyperactive child in a public baths locker-room, desperate to preserve the banter that has been so strictly enforced and maintained throughout the evening, and not allow it an easy escape down the ever-widening rabbit warren of drunken detachment. The girls in his enclave play down his protests and distribute glasses of an exotic blue lagoon cocktail from a pitcher that contains a few inches of alcoholic liquid swimming around a miniature Antarctica that’s been divided up and dispensed in convenient cubes. They text away on phones and survey the rippling communion before them, eyes drifting on past the many men that dance in peacock strides before them.
Over on the dancefloor Roger has his usual circle of youthful admirers around him, faces lit up at the sight of him swivelling his 75-year-old hips – twice replaced – and shaking his bald old head in time to the fractious electro streaming through the sweat-starched particles of the air. Roger is a regular on the club circuit, so much so that his commitment to ‘staying young’ has earned him a free membership card that he stows away in his wallet behind his bus pass, and a legion of ‘fans’ despite the minute parameters of irony in the affection being stretched to their elastic limit.
However, he is essentially harmless, a figure of fun, a court jester, a raving Hugh Hefner, living proof that age knows no boundaries, as he delights his audience with break-dancing that could double for awkward spinning in his fast-approaching grave, and poses with possible great-granddaughters who fawn over him with the patronising affection they might have for an invalid.
Over on another dancefloor – this one dug down into the floor like an underground bunker – Toby grinds away with Nicole. Toby is by no means ugly or unappealing; he wears the right clothes and is clearly doing the best with what he’s got at his disposal. Truth be told, Toby has always been a bit shy around members of the opposite sex, a trait symptomatic of growing up with a domineering mother and four brothers. Odds are strong that one will grow up to be gay but he’ll be damned if it’s going to be him.
Having said that he’s not had a decent shag in almost a year and so is more than a little ecstatic at this beautiful stranger lavishing him with sexual attention. Out of all these other guys in the club as well! Toby, he thinks to himself, you really are a sly one sometimes. As he shuffles himself slightly to conceal his stiffening cock from Nicole’s rotating arse, he runs a hand through her ebony locks and notices her group of friends acknowledging their improvised union.
Nicole swivels round and writhes stomach-to-stomach with Toby who allows himself a quick glance around the steps leading up and away from the dance pit, lined with sand dunes of onlookers, all grazing and on the prowl whilst the lucky ones below them embark on their hastily-concocted pre-mating rituals.
Nicole also notices her friends’ disapproving faces and reads their judging behind mascara squints and lipstick pouts. Fuck ‘em she thinks, it’s been over a week since Darren ended it with her, leaving her pride - if she’s entirely honest with herself - smarting blacker bruises than her heart. She wanted to go out and cut loose tonight, which she has, and if she wants to go ahead and fuck some stranger on a rare one-night stand then she will. The initially alarming realisation that Darren was on the same dancefloor with his dirty hands grasping over some common slag did, it has to be said, spur on her own efforts somewhat.
As she tries to size up this guy’s erection with her arse, she takes a good look at who Darren’s managed to ensnare – the kind of blonde scrubber who probably carries around her venereal disease of choice in a clutch bag and will more than likely spend mornings swigging Special Brew outside school gates before the age of 30.
Besides, Nicole reasons with herself, this guy is sort of cute in an awkward way. She knows she could do a lot better if she strutted around one of the other floors a bit longer, but she decides she can’t be fucked. He’ll do. The sight of her svelte curves unfurling around the nervous, stiffening limbs of this new guy will only serve to incense Darren even more when he notices.
Down on the first floor, a mass of students partying their way through Freshers Week, squirm and slide through an avalanche of foam that has just been spewed from a ceiling-mounted phallus of hydraulics and plumbing vents. The music swirls to decibels of indiscernible heights, ricocheting off the bodies and walls in a sonic pummelation of the senses that could pause heartbeats if they weren’t so wired on vodka and Red Bull.
When the first tremors start to bubble through the superstructure of the building like an approaching tube train, no alarm is raised or fears sparked amongst the clubbers. The accelerating drum n’ bass coagulates and forms a soundtrack as the seismic pressures radiate through the floors, gaining in confidence and strength, until the force of the quake is threatening the needle to the upper climes of the Richter scale.
At the peak of the undulations people are thrown over and under one another, as though all suddenly taking part in some spontaneous act of drunken shamanistic ballet. The dry ice pours out as thick as a dust-drenched blanket and the lasers shimmer like spotlights roving through mist for floundering survivors of a shipwreck. People are dismounted from podiums like a bucking bull, a section of the roof above the bar caves in, spilling concealed vents and drainage installations out into the open like intestines from a massive stomach wound.
The screams only start once the peak of the sensations has passed and the aftershock ripples have dissolved, and even then they are muffled by the deafening sounds of the speaker system going through white noise convulsions. After a few minutes of drunken panic and trying to assess the extent of the damage to themselves and their immediate surroundings, the clubbers begin to rise to their feet feeling bruised and confused. It doesn’t take the more sober of those among them to realise that all escape routes from the floor to one of the lower levels have been cut off by the building’s hasty rearrangement of its structural apparel.
Over by the set of double doors leading out from this dancefloor a steel girder has detached itself from the skeleton of the building like a fallen tree branch, bringing down with it a significant portion of the suspended ceiling panels and crushing the hulking bouncer who had manned the door. His bald head like a fleshy bowling ball is visible beneath the chaotic rubble with an ear-piece still embedded, still perhaps crackling with information and futile instructions on how to control the crowd in light of this unforeseen disaster.
Over in the sunken dance pit, ravers are picking themselves up, offering hands of assistance although now there is a stale air of drunken every-man-for-himself prejudice between them all. Nicole scrambles over to Darren and they embrace amongst the crowd, clearly recognising the fact that they must stick together in order to get out in one piece, all previous bitterness and envy dissipated into obscurity by the quake.
Meanwhile Toby, who was thrown clear of Nicole during the more violent of the tremors, is frantic that this geological interruption not quash the sexual liaison that he and Nicole were about to pursue and moves to challenge Darren. Since, however, Darren is a good few inches taller than Toby and with slightly more hours invested down the gym, Toby’s flaring temper is quickly suffused by a few gentle blows to the abdomen and head region. Nicole slithers back into her man’s firm embrace, relieved at their rekindling passion wrought back from the fires of defeat, confirming in her own mind that they were meant to be together all along.
All the while her group of girlfriends are desperately searching through the smog and debris for a suitable man to act as their impromptu knight-in-shining-armour, for them to cling to in the hope that together they have a better chance of survival from this discotheque tomb.
People scramble past Roger who is now slumped against a haemorrhaging wall, one of his replacement hips cracked once again. No one cares or notices him now that his dance act has been stifled; he is merely an old man whose novelty factor has been permanently fractured in the eyes of this fickle community. The scales have been shaken from their vision to reveal him as a phony, an imposter on their youthful playground whose motive now strikes as being just too desperate or sinister rather than amusing or admirable.
On the floor below, Robbie picks himself up from a momentary lapse of consciousness and takes a squinting glance around him, trying to determine details in the gloom that has fallen from the lights having failed. He cannot see but the girlfriends that held him back from ascending to the level of his choice have been dealt a fatal blow by a large mirrorball falling from the sky like a comet colliding with Earth. He crawls along the floor, his palms embedded with the loose grit of shattered glass and his eyes stinging from the first vestiges of smoke from fresh flames that have sprouted amongst the wreckage.
In his booth the DJ looks upon his splintered assembly with a frantic temerity. Quickly as he can he wrestles with his laptop connections and EQ settings, trying to salvage the situation as best he can in getting the party back on track. His carefully prepared playlists now abandoned he throws caution to the wind and drops ‘Born Slippy’ by Underworld into the fray.
The instantly recognisable synth notes sound out as a call to arms to those survivors who edge out from the collapsed tables and fallen wall panels, clinging to newly-found lovers as a shield against the hurt, a reassurance that in this new subterranean bunker that they alone inhabit, cut off from the rest of the world through a freak act of nature, they will not succumb to solitude. They forge a relationship, however fleeting or vacuous, merely to ensure that they should not have to prolong their existence down here alone.
As they amble out, dazed and with reeling heads, some hand in hand, others gathered together in loose cliques of solidarity, they slowly dance with a fervent determination that the show must go on, the night must not be indelibly tarnished by this crushing setback. As the beats kick in (shouting lager-lager-lager-shouting-mega-mega-white-thing) the clubbers reengage with their party spirit, reenergised with the lifeblood of the music and raise up bruised arms in jubilation and confirmation that they would indeed continue to go higher and higher for nothing must bring them down tonight.
No comments:
Post a Comment