The Spell (12 page)

“I really want you to have a good time tonight. This is your night.”

“Is it? Thank you…” said Alex, though still with a feeling that he was being pitied or at least humoured, and that it was “his” night in the exceptional way that a birthday was, or the annual visit to town of a terrified old relative. “Well, I’m in your hands.”

Danny nodded his head with a firm, self-confident moue. “I thought we could go to Chateau, it’s pretty fantastic right now. If you’d like to.”

“Great,” said Alex. He’d seen the club’s name fly-posted over derelict shops and on switch-boxes at traffic-lights, and would recognise its logo of an exploding castle. If it had truly been his night he would never have thought of going there. But he kept to his deepening sense that he must put his trust in Danny, who had been sent by the magic of coincidence to take care of him. And he loved dancing, even if he hadn’t done it much in the past ten years; when he imagined bopping around it was to a song called “Let’s Hear It for the Boy,” which he knew had been the big hit of summer 84. Sometimes he walked past the queue of a club after a dinner in the West End, saw people keyed-up in front of the ropes, and felt his own inhibitions like forces in the air, dark columns of crushing barometric pressure.

While they waited for coffee Danny went to the loo. Alex watched his swinging shirt-tail as he sauntered between the tables where suited older men and their glossily coiffed women were expensively stuffing themselves. He found there was something sexy after all in having come to this starchy place, where he and Danny struck a note of casual deviance. Then he watched him coming back, the unemphasised beauty of his strong young body in the bright baggy clothes, the mixture in his face of natural eagerness and moody self-possession. Alex thought to himself, “This isn’t going to happen,” and at once offset the idea with a resolution that he would simply get what fun he could from it. The mechanism of disappointment in him was rapid and supple with use.

The coffee came, and Danny sat back, turning the little cup with outstretched fingers. “Have you ever done E?” he said, and gave him an amiably calculating look.

Alex said, “No,” firmly and quietly, perhaps primly. “No, I’m a narcotics virgin, really”; he might as well own up, and indeed he wasn’t ashamed of this, though his choice of words seemed to hint at the need for a deflowering.

“Nothing?” said Danny, with kindly incredulity. “Never?”

Alex pondered. “Well, you had to smoke dope at school. But it never did much for me – I stopped when I grew up.”

“Ouch,” whispered Danny. “You know what I mean.”

“Didn’t you and Justin do drugs?”

“Justin has a horror of drugs – if you don’t count alcohol, of course.” Alex paused, still unsure if he should talk about the foibles and phobias of someone he loved and who now stood in a nameless relation – uncle, stepmother – to Danny himself. “He had a bad trip on acid once, when he was a student. He looked in a mirror and his face was all made of animals. He never took anything after that.”

“Very Arcimboldo,” said Danny.

Alex was looking ahead, down an avenue of easy-going criminality, with busy shadows between the wide-spaced pools of light. He was pliant and emotional with drink, and said humbly, “You’d have to look after me.”

Apparently Dave, a friend of Dobbin’s, was the man they had to find. When they were out in the street, Danny recovered his air of bossiness and mystery, like a prefect in the school of pleasure. He conferred on the mobile for a minute, then led the way through a couple of alleys, with people pissing and snogging in them, and out into another busy street, bright with restaurants and cafes, and crowds of drunks threading among the stalled traffic. Alex looked up at the narrow strip of night sky, a pinkish grey, any stars smothered by the glare of the district. Then he found Danny had doubled back abruptly and darted in through the door of a shop; Alex followed him as the strings of the bead curtain swung into his face.

Dave sat among the shiny flesh-colours of shrink-wrapped pornography and rubber sex-aids like a big black deity in a garish little shrine. He had the jaw and the firm weight of a boxer, but his hair was dyed, like blond astrakhan, and his voice was jaded and high as he tried to hustle a punter into buying a video. “Yeah, you’ll like it. There’s a bit of leather in it. It’s got older guys. You don’t like that? Well, it’s got plenty of young guys too. It’s got everything really…” He winked at Danny as the man, with a briefcase under his arm and perhaps a train to catch, squinted hotly at the TV screen on which an extract was playing. “Can I help you?” he said to Alex, as if dealing with a notorious browser. Alex jumped and clung to Danny’s arm.

“We’re together!”

He felt compromised being here, he found pornography depressing, and the glimpse of the video, in which a man was rolling a condom on, was a flustering anticipation of what he hoped himself to be doing in a few hours’ time. He stepped back and wandered round, insofar as wandering was possible, coming face to face with the raring phallus at every turn, like a surreal sequence in a fifties thriller: there was no escape from his depravity. He picked up a magazine called
Big Latin Dicks
, a title more blunt than exotic;
penes
magni
, he thought, and for some reason found himself imagining the men who printed it, perhaps as equably as if it were
Homes and Gardens
, and the men who put it together (“What does your dad do, by the way?” “He’s the deputy editor of
Big Latin Dicks
. I thought everyone knew that.”)

Now they were alone and Dave and Danny were talking coolly about doves, pyramids and bulldogs. Alex wasn’t innocent to this of course, and found it had an anxious-making glamour. Dave stood about in the shop, in his tight pin-stripe jeans. “I had Tony Betteridge MP in again tonight,” he said.

“What was he after?”

“Oh the usual. I sold him this piss video, that’s his thing, We
Aim to Please
it’s called, great title. He said, “I’ve had this video before.” I said, “I thought you were into recycling.” ”

Alex sort of got it, and actually that was one of Justin’s preoccupations that he never went along with. He wondered if Robin was more obliging. “I didn’t know he was gay,” he said.

“I ought to have photos of them outside, the MPs and that. What do you call it…‘by appointment.’”

“Testimonials,” said Danny.

“So what was it?” Dave asked, with a seller’s confident return to the subject of mutual interest. Danny took Alex aside and muttered,

“Have you got sixty quid?”

Alex paused. “I can get it.”

He slipped out of the shop and hurried up the street, already half-expecting to be jumped by the drug-squad, and possibly the vice boys too.

He paid off the taxi outside the club, and kept close to Danny as they strode past the hundreds of people queuing. At the crowd barrier Danny leant over and kissed the bomber-jacketed security guy on the lips, a few jeering fondnesses were exchanged, and that was all it took – the barrier was pushed back and they walked through, a ripple of nods and calls going over their heads from echelon to echelon of bouncers and greeters to signal their exemption and desirability. Inside the door a beautiful black woman as tall as Alex said “Hello darling” in a chocolatey baritone.

They were moving at once in the element of music, the earth-tremor bass and penetrating shimmer of high metallic noise. Alex checked his jacket, and as he stepped down with Danny on to the edge of the immense dance-floor, swept by brilliant unpredictable stabs of light, a shiver of recognition ran up him from his heels to his scalp, where it lingered and then gently dropped downwards again through his shoulders and spine. On the wall behind him was a sign saying “Dangerously Loud Music.” Alex was shocked and laughing at the sound. Crowds of men were moving in blurred inexhaustible unison with it. Others, in tiny shorts and lace-up boots, danced alone on platforms above the heads of the crowd, some strutting like strippers, others sprinting on the spot with a flickering semaphore of the arms. And all around the floor, and trailing away into other unguessed spaces, there was an endless jostling parade of half-naked men, faces glowing with happiness and lust. Alex howled “Do you want a drink?” into Danny’s ear.

They took their Es at the bar. “Get yer gear down yer neck,” Danny said, with a big rascally grin, pushing the tab between Alex’s lips with his thumb to make sure it went home, but watching him carefully too as he swallowed and screwed up his face at the bitter admonitory taste.

“Anything that tastes that bad must be good for you,” Alex said, imagining the small grey pill tumbling down inside, dis- persing its molecules of pleasure and risk. Danny knocked his back with a swig of Vittel.

“You’re going to have a fabulous time,” he said. He pulled Alex’s head down close to his and shouted confidentially, “You tell me if you feel anything bad, if you’re not well – tell me straight away.”

“I will darling.”

“You’re going to have a fabulous time!” He was jiggling about and his smile seemed full of affection and something close to mockery as he watched Alex drifting towards his unimagined thrill. “I’m really envious.”

“But you’re doing it too.”

Danny shook his head. “There’s nothing like the first time.”

Even so, within a few minutes Alex saw him altering. They were out on the floor, in their own disputed little space among the thrashing dancers. Everyone was staring, but like people gripped by thought, without much knowing what they were looking at. Alex kept being jabbed by elbows and hands that milled to the beat like tick-tack or lightning kung-fu. The boys glistened and pawed at the ground. They looked like members of some dodgy brainwashing cult. Alex pursed his lips at so much willing slavery, and imagined it all going wrong for him, and the incomprehension of his family and colleagues as to why he had done it. He felt abruptly sober and self-conscious about his expressive, old-fashioned 1984 style of dancing. Danny flung an arm round his neck in his sweet way, and he was warm and excited, like a drunk who has lost his sense of the other person and asks a question because he wants to tell you something. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” said Alex, with vague irritable pride, like someone immune to tickling or hypnosis. “I mean, I don’t feel anything.”

“God – I’m spinning!” Danny said, but drew away from him very slowly, his hand round his waist. Another little clinch. “Tell me if you don’t feel okay.”

“Yes, darling.” He saw it wasn’t quite like drunkenness, Justin for one was never so trusting and attentive. Danny danced up against him, lovingly, but unaware how he was lurching into him.

After thirty minutes Alex acknowledged to himself that he felt quite pleasant, but he could easily argue the feeling away as the elation of drink and dancing and the company of a thousand half-naked men. Though the men were beautiful, it was true, in the cascades and strafings of coloured light. Each of the men round him seemed somehow distinct and interesting, in a way he hadn’t understood when he wandered in past the long line of cropped heads and top-heavy torsos. But of course people were unique, one tended to forget. He twirled round with a smile and saw Danny getting out of his short-sleeved shirt without stopping dancing. He thought he was lost in a world of his own, chewing and licking his lips, fumbling as he tucked the shirt through a belt-loop. Then both arms were round Alex’s neck:

“Fuck, these are strong, I’m going to sit down for a bit.”

Alex hugged him loosely, with a slight queasy sense that in fact it was he who was going to have to look after his guide. Danny took his hand and they sidled through the crowd and flung themselves down on a wide raised step that ran along the wall. Others were there already, heads nodding, dancing in a way though they were sitting down. Alex still felt shocked at this wholesale surrender to the drug, but the abandon was beautiful too, he could see that. The music built and built in ways that were inevitable but still exceeded anything you could expect – arms were raised towards it in a thronging silhouette against jets of dry ice; and that was the last time Alex saw anything sinister or inhuman in it.

Danny said, as if unaware of a break in the conversation, “Wow. How are you feeling, darling?”

“Fine. I don’t feel anything much yet” – with an exaggerated desire not to exaggerate, to be sure of whatever happened when it did. He looked at his watch.

“How long?”

“Forty-five minutes.”

“Just sit back, breathe deeply, don’t fight it, Alex!” – with a tiny spurt of annoyance, as if the novice was stubbornly defying the master.

He did as he was told, and found himself putting an arm round Danny, his fingers playing dreamily on his bare biceps, his head against the wall rocking as the music climaxed and broke off in gorgeous piano chords.

“Mmm. The music’s fabulous.”

“I know.”

“What do you call this music?”

“It’s house.”

“So this is house. Why’s it called that?”

“Not sure actually.”

“It’s fabulous.”

“I know.” Danny smiled at him with what might already have been the tenderness of love when it is first revealed. “Go with it…Think what you want. Say anything you want.”

He didn’t know about that. He closed his eyes and snorted in air as if about to dive for something he’d lost. Now Danny’s arm was looped over his knee, his hand fondly but abstractly stroking his shin, which had never seemed so sensitive a place. The music pounded and dazzled but had its origin in somewhere subtly different, grand and cavernous; yet when Danny spoke again he didn’t need to shout – it was as if they’d been granted a magical intimacy in the heart of a thunderstorm. What he said was, “Fuck, this is good.” And then again, with what seemed an angelic concern, “Tell me straight away if you don’t feel all right.”

Alex felt a trace of shyness still because what he wanted to say was deeply to do with Danny. He closed his eyes and his mind sped ahead down the glittering tracks of sound. It wasn’t a hallucination, but he saw his own happiness as wave on wave of lustrous darkness, each with a glimmering fringe of light. The words when they came were totally inadequate, but he knew at once that Danny would understand them and read his indescribable sensations back into the tawdry syllables. He said, “I feel ravishingly happy. I’ve never felt so happy.”