dum dum dum dum, to which heads bopped, hips thrust, elbows flapped, knees jerked, feet turned, sentences tumbled, blood pumped. The air tasted of salty teaspoons, smelt of thin slices of cucumber peeled away with a razored steel blade, and sweat, and static, and of course, there it was slicing through it all, a flash with every beat, the scarlet stench of magic. You don’t have a shapeshifter guard the door unless there’s something worth guarding.
There weren’t any stools at the bar. Comfort wasn’t part of the atmosphere. I leant on the counter and rubbed my temples, tried to drive the ache from the strobe out of my skull. Oda leant next to me, smiled at the barman and said, “You got anything that isn’t alcoholic?”
The barman looked at her like she was a mammoth.
She shrugged. “My hopes were few.”
There was a list of cocktails laminated to the surface of the bar. For each cherry-topped drink, I could have had three home-microwaved suppers. I pointed at one and said, “That.”
“A Hot Red Sex?”
We weren’t sure how to answer. “Sure,” we mumbled. We’ll try anything, once.
The barman turned; the barman worked. The thing he ended up putting in front of me was, in the UV light, the colour and consistency of lumpy custard. We sniffed it carefully and smelt booze and peach juice. We dipped a finger in it, licked it dry, couldn’t really taste anything. We held it up to the light. Oda said, “Are you going to drink it or not?”
We took a careful sip. It was like swallowing a fermented mango soaked in a vat of acid. We wheezed. Oda turned away, and smiled. Teetotal. It made a sort of inevitable, self-righteous sense. I pushed the glass across the counter to a safe distance, just in case it started to melt, and turned my head towards the dance.
Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum
“See anything that sets your Satanic senses buzzing?” asked Oda nicely.
“Yes.”
“Going to do anything about it?”
“Don’t know. Don’t know what it is yet.”
“That’s the problem with mystic forces,” murmured Oda. “They tell you that you’re going to die, but they never specify how. It’s so you can feel the fear before the end, as some small redress for the life of arrogance you have led.”
“You know, you could learn something from Anissina.”
“I don’t think so.”
“No, seriously. You could learn how to be quiet.”
“Information,” she replied primly, “is not truth.”
Mo’s shoes didn’t seem much help any more. Now that we had arrived, they didn’t even seen inclined to dance. I looked at the people on the dance floor, faces coming and going like a jerking film in the glare of the strobe. All young: kids, teenagers, dressed in the kind of scruff that needs a rich man’s budget, jeans slashed the right way, skin pierced with the right studs, hair done at a hundred quid for each gelled-up spike, brands artfully aged on cotton deliberately stained. The bouncer had been right - we didn’t fit in. Too old, too mundane. Only our shoes were in the right area, all style and huff.
Their dance had a strange uniformity. It wasn’t what we’d imagined dance should be; our thoughts filled with ideas of roses, moonlight, a boy, a girl, or at the very least two individuals with a thing for each other, an expression of something for when the crude mundanities of speech failed, a way to mention sex - a concept we found absurd, if fascinating - without having to go into biology. This was about sex; there was no denying it. But it had no sexiness, no intimacy nor sensuality, but was merely about fondling as many bottoms as you could in a single night, or peering down as many tops as your height would permit, all the time wiggling and shaking with strange expressions on your face as though to say, “you think I can do this with my hips now, wait till you see me naked”. Some did it better than others, and danced in a way that spoke of sex but promised you this was the nearest you’d get, distance making it more alluring. Others just fumbled and writhed, but always, always the floor twisted and rose and fell and turned and moved to the relentless bass coming out of . . . where? I couldn’t see speakers, couldn’t see any source for the sound, it just seemed to shimmer into being behind the eardrums, not bothering to soften down its