An Earthquake Hit the Discotheque

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.

Lights Extinguishing Slowly

Here before you stands as proud testament, the last words of me, Dylan Stewart.

As fetid undertaker of disbelief I stood before you in my prime as a majestic spectacle, a tight-rope walker across a circus of gaping mouths.

A wonder of the very world upon which I skipped and jumped, left my indistinct markings and then was gone without a trace.

Well now my blood runs down the walls of resentment, my mind regurgitating my daily penance for things said and done.

For all these things and countless more, I am sorry.

I am sorry for the things done and not done, achieved and fallen so far short of.

Every smog-stained commute, the city’s dust decorating the lungs with phlegm wallpaper paste.

Coming up for air and smoking cigarettes, lining the stolid veins and arteries with chemical depositories and trans-fats, stagnating blood cells with one more drink, just one more drink.

Another chance polluted, another love lost in the ether of lust, desire burnt away through years of lying rotting in one’s vanity and feculence, watching your own mind and body go to ruin like an ancient metropolis.

I look down upon the world and vomit from a great height.

Whilst I bathe in Coca-Cola the poetry of youth is stencilled in neon billboards that rape the stars of the night sky.

Maybe one day you’ll be able to download foetuses from some vast internet database, create human life from binary code, 0-1-0-1-0-1, clone yourself so that every hour of every day you can see just how beautiful you are.

Maybe one day you’ll be able to build up empires in a lazy afternoon and cast devastation upon them in a fleeting afterthought.

What if the electricity ran dry, lights burnt out, cars collided in mechanised bliss, airplanes paused before descent like a ball thrown and not caught.

I’ve seen it all and now when I stab my eyes out with kitchen utensils stained with the rust of yesterday’s food I will see nothing more.

From Belfast to Brighton, the Isle of Skye to St. Ives, Piccadilly Circus to the cobbled backstreets of fuck knows where.

It’s all a mirror-image, a tapestry sown with false promises and scarcely concealed lies.

We are the vermin!

The vermined ones who in our finest hours pose for posterity and hang photos in frames on walls, a snapshot of a second that sets into concrete a memory now long since lost.

Yes if it were down to me, I’d rain down a million Hiroshimas upon you and your vainglorious shopping selves.

Level Manhattan like a billion-dollar Hollywood movie, retire the Eiffel Tower to bed, set graffiti artists to task on the Taj Mahal, pack all the Pyramids and Roman ruins into storage, dismantle the life’s work of mankind’s greatest thinkers and philosophers, poets and priests, artists and entertainers.

The finest achievements in science and medicine, economics, space travel and academia all cast to the raging bonfire of my ennui.

I’d tear great chunks out of religious manuscripts and knaw them to a pulp between my foaming teeth, ejaculate upon Mona Lisa’s smile and lay landmines beneath the paving stones of Las Ramblas, Oxford Street, Times Square and Sunset Strip.

In the words of Mr. Carl Panzram – I wish mankind had one neck and I had my hands round it.

Suffocation in the junk dens, feral dogs, oil cartels, mass media conglomerates, used-car salesmen, disaffected travel agents and frustrated shelf-stackers in just another Walmart graveyard, perverted teachers of primary children, hysterical bus drivers who keep on pulling themselves back from veering across into oncoming traffic.

Here stands your Messiah!
Born again!!
Born again to spread famine, drought and whichever venereal disease you might choose, stamp flowers into dirt where only weeds may sprout.

But this is all for nothing these tidings I bring.

These prophesies I offer up to the world, my dictatorial rule as God and the Second Coming are routinely ignored to fall on deaf ears.

Fair enough then I say to thee.

You can just wash your acne faces in sinks of hydrochloric acid, feast on banquets laced with strychnine and hang yourselves from ceilings using your favourite neck tie.

I take it all back. I take it all back......

We might as well retire gracefully from living, extricate our being and try our hand at something new.

At the end of the day we’ve given it our best shot but things just aren’t working out.

Life is past its sell-by-date, it’s gone rotten and we don’t know what to fucking do with it.

So ends this parable from me, Dylan Stewart; could be a suicide note, could be a love letter.

Or it could be the tired old ramblings of a withered drunk, slumped on a bar, chewing on his false teeth, trying to remember the way home as the landlord tolls the bell to signal time gentlemen please.

Phew, For a Minute There I Lost Myself

So sighs the Baptist as he surrenders down the virgin’s veil in haste. He preaches serenity of silence to the doe-child and exits stage-left to the waiting stomach of the church .....

So gasps the father as he presses forehead cold to medicine cabinet mirror. Footfalls slow and serendipitous on soft carpet (cream – her choice not his) ascending the stairs with a head-full of bourbon and a heart-full of hurt. He ambles along midnight hallways and enters to tuck the little ones in for a long peaceful sleep before smearing the marital bed with graceful rose-petal strokes .....

So blushes the beauty queen as the boyfriend pauses their convertible at red beneath which rots a wretched drunk, randomly brought to rest like a paper bag from a pillow of wind. Their eyes collide for a molecule of time but that’s all she can afford since the lights have blinked green and she wants to be fucked in the Jacuzzi at least twice before the afternoon is done ....

So acquiesces the shepherd who with the power vested in him surveys his flock from up on high and, feeling shame and regret, casts casual ruin with one firm and sturdy palm to erase all and everything from view.

Phew, for a minute there I lost myself.

Immortalised in a Twenty-First Century World

In many ways April began as probably the worst month of my life. Just five days in, on a dismal Wednesday in which raindrops clung to windowpanes as though they’d been stained into the glass, my mother rang me to break the news that my younger brother Toby had died.

Far from being a shock the news came more as a deep sigh of release that unfolded into an obtuse ache, being as it was that Toby had suffered from leukaemia for much of his tragically short life. Throughout my own life I had delved into the modern world and all it had to offer me with youthful vitality, of the kind that Toby could only watch with quiet envy from sidelines as an invalid spectator. In a way his passing relieved me of the subconscious burden and inescapable feelings of guilt that I felt about his exclusion from all the freedoms and liberties of health that I enjoyed, whilst acknowledging the realisation of how selfish I was in thinking in such a way. Whilst I had been making plans for jetting off to Asia in pursuit of adventure after graduating from my Law masters degree, all Toby could do was plan ahead to the next week, the next bout of remission, the next hospital appointments to keep.

What came as effortlessly more of a shock was the suicide of one of my oldest friends just a week later. David and I had grown up side by side all the way from nursery to primary to secondary school, and in the immediate aftermath I realised that, in an equally self-centred way, I had long thought of him as the brother I’d always wanted Toby to be. Like me, David was coming up to his final university exams and had a promising career in architecture ahead of him. The acute stabbing shock of the news sent me into almost a complete mental paralysis for the following few days.

Seemingly unprompted and leaving no explanatory note, David had eaten a meal with his three housemates, carried on working on a piece of coursework and then hung himself in his wardrobe using a plug-socket extension lead. The absence of any note shedding light on his well-concealed mental instability or the rationale behind such decisive action left the rest of us reeling in a spiral of questions and upset.

At the funeral we stood as a ragged band of mourners, Myself alongside friends I had known for years; all struck dumb by the same asphyxiating grief and thirst for any explanation. Seeing his devastated parents cling to one another and hearing their cries puncture the cemetery silence was only slightly less heart-rending than the way they appeared to desperately appeal to us for an insight that we perhaps were privy to and were now united in keeping from them. Regrettably we had nothing to offer them that would ease their pain.

In the weeks following the funeral I graduated and moved down to London to begin a summer internship at a small law firm, having decided to postpone my Asian adventure. This change of situation and circumstance came as a necessary opportunity to try and put the past to one side and focus on my new life away from the now dour and solemn community of friends and family that I had left behind. As a result of being so far from home and due to my limited funds – the internship being an unpaid ‘foot in the door’ – I found myself with long evening hours to while away and it was precisely at these junctions that Toby and David would float to the surface of my consciousness once again. I would always attempt to weigh them down with the anchor of finality but invariably they were never far from my thoughts.

To pass the time in those lonely evenings cocooned inside my claustrophobic attic of an apartment just outside Fulham, I would end up ingesting sugar-coated talent shows on my portable TV and downloading shit movies with Japanese subtitles despite my internet band-width routinely failing around two-thirds of the way through.

Another favoured pastime was to vacantly surf my way through AliveTime profiles and blogs, keen to sink beneath the waves of the social network embrace and resurface upon the shores of real life as infrequently as possible. I would scan through reams of personal information and photo albums, traversing my gaze through swathes of people I may or may not have met in reality and digesting every minutiae of detail divulged about themselves and their lives out there in the real world.

I frequented the profile page of an ex-girlfriend with a shameless urgency, flicking through numerous photos of her with a new boyfriend all taken in various poses of embrace. The more I looked the more they appeared to be taunting me, as if she had uploaded endless photographic evidence of her renewed affection primarily to invoke hostility and envy within me.

It could have been one such occasion when I bitterly navigated away from her photo-walls that served as an exhibition of lusting, and came upon Toby’s profile page, scrolling down to the expansive message-board upon which scores of people had left comments expressing sorrow and remembrance.

- Jason – ‘Missing you already mate. Rest in peace man x’
- Sarah – ‘I’ll always remember your bravery and constant smiling, what a lovely guy you were. U will neva be forgotten xxx'

From there I searched for David’s profile which had similarly been hijacked by countless acquaintances all gushing their anguish and shock at the tragic news. My initial reaction, as tears began to blossom from my reluctant eyes, was a feeling of anger at these people; so-called ‘friends’ all spewing their mourning onto an internet message-board in increasingly melodramatic fashion. By adorning their posts with exaggerated emotional apparel, these people appeared to be competing with each other in an effort to display even more sorrow or regale even more personal stories shared between themselves and David.

- Mark – ‘Why’d u have to do it buddy?? I have no words rite now. Heartbroken and stunned. You’ve gone to a better place now’
- Julianne – ‘So upset when I heard this. You were a great guy who always made me laugh. Hope you are at peace now, rip xx’

Over the next few nights I found myself returning to Toby and David’s profile pages, finding an odd catharsis in scrolling through their photo walls and personal information, lists of their favourite movies, music bands, and such like. Lists and details that now served as their own self-penned obituaries.

The more I thought about it, the more it struck me that this was, in effect, a way of sustaining their lives, of keeping the flame of memory lit through their virtual profiles being frozen in time, merely paused indefinitely as the curator of these personalised museums clocked off at his shift’s end.

I began to realise that in the never-ending universe of data and information beaming back and forth between and around us, every single one of us could now become immortalised in some way by our virtual-selves with which people could still converse, only now it would be a one-way conversation. In the vast ether of the web, people would float in a suspension of time like space junk orbiting reality, in a forever-expanding cyber-cemetery in which everyone could have their own plot.

This strange realisation made me feel slightly better about things. Or at least, allowed me to view the loss from a different angle and through a different lens. Mark and Julianne, Jason and Sarah, whoever they were, might be feeling sorrow now but they could revisit at any time in their lives and still find their wreaths of text un-wilted, still symbolising their remembrance, whether sincere or not.

A few nights later after I had returned from a rare night out with work colleagues, I was just ready to shut down the laptop when I noticed in the corner of the AliveTime home page –

‘David – Online’

I lay there with my tired eyes squinting at the glare of the screen, unsure through my drunken haze whether I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. I must have remained in that state of breathless confusion and self-doubting for some time ,watching as various different people clocked on and offline whilst one constant radiated through –

‘David – Online’

The absurdity of attempting a conversation with David shone through to me despite my semi-conscious state and I convinced myself that I was witnessing nothing more than an internet mirage, a failure of the site mechanics rather than some virtual apparition from beyond the grave.
These rational arguments were somewhat diluted when David broke the silence between us with a flashing message in the corner of the screen.

- David – ‘Hi mate. U alright??’

Still the surrealism of this development dotted my vision and I rubbed my eyes, forcing myself to gain focus and dispel any alcoholic imbalance that my mind may have been operating under. There it was though, clear and true in bright pixellated form, a message of greeting from David, and I knew that ridiculous or not I couldn’t lose face by not responding. That would be unthinkable.

- Jack – ‘Hiya mate. Not bad thanks. How are you?’

Seeing my casual words typed there in front of me made me almost blush with the craziness of it, of enquiring after the well-being of someone whose funeral I had just recently attended.

- David – ‘Good to hear it. Yeah I’m good cheers mate. How’s the new job, life in the real world all it’s cracked up to be then?’
- Jack – ‘It’s a real drag tbh mate, wish I was back at uni already haha! It’s a good start, just need to start getting paid to work now!’
- David – ‘Lol. Don’t go getting ahead of yourself.’

And so the conversation progressed like this, light and deprecatory, each of us sliding back into the comfortable moulds that years of friendship had forged; the same old jokes and sore spots, the same humour and playful insults traded back and forth over the invisible void between us.

Not at any point was the harsh fact of David’s death brought up or even hinted at by either of us. It was a point around which we danced, talking instead about the progress of our mutual friends, who had split up with who and who had gotten off with who. But at the forefront of my dazed mind like an insatiable itch, was the desperate question that I dearly wanted to ask and yet knew I couldn’t. Why did you do it David? You had everything to live for, what reason could you have had to kill yourself?

This one question burned inside me and I knew that come the soberness of morning I would forever regret not broaching the subject with him. But right there, in the flow of idle conversation with my oldest friend, such an issue suddenly didn’t matter to me and I couldn’t bring myself to shatter the illusion of renewed comradeship that we had built between us somehow. In some way I didn’t want to know the reasons enough to ruin that.

I couldn’t tell you how long it was that we both shared the same space in the virtual universe in the early hours of morning; all I know is that it served to make me just that little bit more content. The raging waters became calmer and the warring factions of loss and guilt lay down their arms. With an intangible cyber afterlife I had made a connection and as we bid our farewells, wished each other all the best and together signed offline back into the real world, I knew that from that point on everything would be alright.

Out of the Quiet

A sunny day in June
Early-summer sun kissing slow streets
Wavering on the precipice of malice and regret
A benign imbalance that simmers, subsides
On this, an ordinary day refined in routine.

Normalcy’s tender betrayal
Anonymity’s bitter riposte
Teetering on the tightrope that traverses,
Seismic waves and hidden depths.

Out of the quiet – a shout, a scream
Before silence sets like liquid wax
So many tears wrought from the singular glare
Of an unflinching steely stare
Just a regular guy, your average bloke
Setting out on this, an ordinary day
One amongst many, nothing more or less
One of us, me or you.

Thug Life

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The Euthanasia Blues

There are stiff smiles and concealed tears
Remorse at my detachment, guilt and regret
That’s why I’m singing the blues to myself.

Now my family are familiar no longer
As they usher me through corridors and halls
Pale labyrinths full of fading sleep
And so I’m singing the blues all the time.

My senses are attuned to my periphery
Here in this coffin of flesh and fibres
The mind ticks over like a grandfather clock
Replaying and reliving my life’s footage
From this day to that through a sepia film reel.

A portrait in progress left on indefinite pause,
With the paint running dry in the easel.
Doors open and close, eyes flicker and look away
Then everything fades out once again
As though life were just an interlude
And I’m singing the blues no more.