Emotionally Weird(99)

Sadly the chandelier was unlit and the only light was provided by candles from Balniddrie, which were dotted perilously around the room, just waiting to be knocked over and catch on the drooping tattered curtains.

There was no furniture apart from two incongruous chaises-longues , covered in a red velvet that had frayed to almost nothing, and on which people were slumped like wet sandbags. Around the edges of the floor, where there must have once been elegant little gold chairs for the fairer sex to rest on, there were now heaps of old, stained mattresses. On one of these, on the far side of the room, I spotted Bob already wired up to a hookah.

The ballroom was still fulfilling its original function, to some degree anyway, as someone had set up a primitive disco with red, green and blue flashing lights and the occasional unnerving strobe. Quite a few people were dancing, if it can be called that. Andrea, still Shug-less, was one of them. Andrea had refined her rather abstract terpsichoreal style at the Isle of Wight Festival so that she now danced like a four-legged octopus in extreme pain.

To my surprise a few of the supposedly more voguish members of staff were present, although that adjective hardly applied to Dr Dick, loitering palely in a corner of the room and deep in conversation with his arch adversary, Archie. I think Dr Dick might have been drunk but Dr Dick drunk and Dr Dick sober was pretty much the same thing.

Andrea danced up to us and Robin said to her, ‘Do you want to dance?’ more in fear than hope, but I said, ‘No, she doesn’t,’ and thrust Proteus into her arms. ‘Just while I try and find Kara,’ I said, when she tried to run away. Before I could say anything else to her she was swallowed up by a mob of people and disappeared.

Robin was now dancing to ‘Spirit In The Sky’ with his eyes closed and moving like a Woodentop, jerky uncoordinated movements that at first made me think he was having a fit. The music changed to ‘Whiter Shade Of Pale’ and Robin opened his eyes and grabbed me and pulled me to his thin bird breast. His granddad T-shirt smelt of cheap joss sticks and sweat.

I was beginning to feel nauseous and oddly disassociated. I wondered if I’d accidentally eaten brownies again without noticing. There was a buzzing in my ears that I couldn’t shake out and I almost welcomed the support of Robin’s body. He started trying to kiss me but his general ineptitude, coupled with beard and droopy moustache, proved something of a hindrance, thank goodness. My head was beginning to feel very strange, as if my brain had been replaced with a skullful of wheat grains. If I tilted my head to one side all the grains of wheat seemed to roll in that direction.

‘I’ve been thinking a lot recently,’ Robin said softly, so close to my ear that I could feel how damp his lips were, ‘about Life Sentence . About the dynamic interplay between character and theme in the play. You see, Kenny’s the eternal outsider—’

‘I thought that was Rick.’ Oh no, I mustn’t enter into this conversation. ‘I’ve got to find Kara,’ I mumbled.

Robin started fumbling with my clothes. I was wearing so many that it would have taken him hours to get down to skin. I appealed to the estate agent’s son in him. ‘I think I need another drink, Robin.’

‘Right, I’ll get you one,’ he said, setting off eagerly across a dance floor that was now strewn with discarded plastic cups and the dog-ends of cigarettes and joints. The room was pitching and bucking like an ocean-going liner in distress and a strange centrifugal force affecting my body made sitting down a sudden imperative and I subsided quietly onto the spare corner of a filthy-looking mattress.

The rest of the mattress, I suddenly realized, was occupied by Roger Lake, locked on like a lamprey to a first-year girl less than half his age. I would have asked him how his wife and his mistress were but I couldn’t really speak; my tongue had grown too big for my mouth and the centrifugal force was trying to drag me down a black hole. My head had the gravity of a small planet. My mouth felt dry and clinkerish and I reached for an opened can of Export on the floor and swallowed a great draught of it before gagging it all out again, along with its flotsam of ash and butts. Someone loomed in front of me and asked me if I was all right. It was Heather, wriggling unrhythmically to ‘Go Ask Alice’, her nipples jumping in my face. Her voice boomed and ebbed in a distorted way as if we were underwater. Eventually she got fed up with getting no response from me and started talking to Roger in a familiar way which confirmed that they had previously shared more than an interest in Marxian economic theory or a copy of Cairncross.

I decided to try and make it across the floor to Bob, although it was unlikely that he would be able to do anything to make me feel better. I had once fainted in the Ladywell Bar in Bob’s company and, at a loss as to what to do, he had simply lain down on the floor next to me. An action which resulted in our both being thrown out. I could see him, without the hookah now but with the Finnegans Wake girl, who looked to be sprawled across his lap in uncharacteristic hedonistic abandon.