King of Morning, Queen of Day (49 page)

Elliot, it would seem, is germinal.

He thinks this sounds kind of dirty. Then he realises that the offer is in deadly sincerity, panics, and needs the combined diplomatic efforts of his work mates to prevent him from throwing all his accumulated years of equipment out his window into the street.

All the city will be there, the magazine says.

“God, they better not be,” says Elliot.

The organisers think it will be good for his karma if they bestow upon him a fistful of complimentary tickets so he can at least fill the dance floor with friendly feet. One pair of which belongs to Enye. Two hours to go and she has run out of human resources to settle his nerves. Certainly, the great acoustic barn is filling by the minute with the Bryghte and the Bootiful and the Mandarins of Fashion (who are predicting that This will be The Decade When Fashion Goes Out of Fashion) and the Socially Credible. “Could you lend me one of those swords of yours so I can quietly fall on it?”

The organisers have declared that this is to be a Theme party, though they have neglected to broadcast what the Theme is. The Theme seems to be Be Your Own Theme. Enye has come in a short hand-print
yukata
and a pair of black and gold shell-suit bottoms, slung her swords across her back, and rooted out a papier-mâché Kabuki mask which, at the moment, is pushed up onto her head. “Urban ninja,” she says. “Knight of the Neon Lotus.” Elliot is in combat pants, Jimi Hendrix “Are you Experienced?” T-shirt, Hawaiian shirt, and helicopter-pilot mirror shades. The
My Lai
look, he calls it. One forty to go and he checks and rechecks his equipment, checks and rechecks and re-rechecks. He has hired a Linn programmer and two black girls in the mandatory black leather microskirts to help him and he hasn’t seen any of them in over an hour.

“‘Next day on your dressing room they hang a star,’” says Enye. “Me go mingle. See what’s happening out there. Back before long.” She kisses him. He tastes surprisingly good.

She presses through the pressing bodies. The only dance possible under such degrees of overcrowding is a kind of shrug of alternate shoulders and side shuffle of alternate feet.

“Those swords real?” asks a sweating man dressed as an Islamic fundamentalist. He is too neurally napalmed to be worthy of a reply. Enye glares at him, slips her mask down. The heat is stifling but she has privacy.

The year ticks away.

She recognises a face from the Deep Sea Wave of faces. It is Jaypee. She flips up her mask. Jaypee recognises her. Exchanging directional hand signals, they work their ways to a rendezvous as far as possible from the band and the bass and the back seat. Jaypee looks like a dyspeptic owl. He tends to at parties. He is miffed that no one has recognised his costume: American televangelist. “Can’t you tell from the trousers?” He shows her his handkerchief with the Four Spiritual Principles fabric-painted on it. “No one here has a sense of humour. You’re looking good, Enye.”

“My job keeps me active.”

“The QHPSL rumour mill grinds exceeding fine, but word up is you’re a bike girl.”

“All stretch fabric and belt pouches, Jaypee; eighteen forward gears, no reverse, and quick release saddle.”

“Reach out and touch the screen and be healed, sister.”

“So.”

“So.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Always first on the scene at the epicentre of the social seisms, Enye, honey. You know Jaypee. Happens the art editor of that rag that purports to be a serious contributor to the cultural health of our city and one did time together at art college. Couldn’t move for complimentaries, dear thing.”

“And the… ah, the?”

“Glass Menagerie? Well, they’ve assigned one a new partner. He’s here somewhere. He felt it was meet right and his bounden duty, but one managed to lose him. Amen and Amen. He’s young. He’s dynamic, he’s thrusting; he’s not you, angel.”

“I’m touched, Jaypee.”

“The Blessèd Phaedra’s here somewhere, should you want to run her through with one of those wicked little swords of yours.”

“She did me a favour.”

“Having thigh muscles like California redwoods is a favour?”

“Ask me that from a horizontal position.”

“Enye, Enye, your exposure to the streets is turning you into a vulgar little gurrier.”

“My advice to you still stands, Jaypee.”

“Alas, dear heart, one is too great a coward to heed it. One likes one’s creature comforts. Time has made Jaypee Kinsella a great conservative. Lay hands on me, sister! I need the power of Jesus to heal me of terminal conservatism!”

Mistah DeeJay is playing hits from the past ten years back-2-back. Sometimes you can almost weep with nostalgia.

All changed, changed utterly.

“See you about, Jaypee.”

“Probably not, Enye.”

And the conflicting currents that stir the party at the edge of the decade move them apart again.

People and people and people cram into the second-floor warehouse. Under the FX lights, it becomes more and more like Mr. Antrobus’s personal hell. Human gravitation: through the orbiting bodies Enye is drawn to Omry, jigging disconsolately at the foot of the stage. She is dressed as ever, in the fabric of the decade. Enye wonders, is she going to change at midnight, whirl around like Wonder Woman to reveal the fabric of the next decade in all its wonder and glory? Omry’s theme is Herself.

“Those swords real?”

“Second person to ask that. Third person gets one run through him. Or her.”

“Great party idea. Could I borrow them sometime?”

“I think not. Too much spirit in these swords.”

Omry understands this.

“Elliot asking for you. He’s shitting blue bricks back there.”

Elliot’s is the final set of the year. The last half hour all to himself. Fifty-five minutes to launch: how time flies.

“I suppose I’d better go see him.”

The great amoebic party animal stirs.

“Just to say…”Omry shouts across the heads and the EmCee announcing the next band, “… he’s yours. I relinquish all claims. Wipe my fingerprints off his ass. I was no good for him. We didn’t commune at all. You and he, you commune all right. You have great spirits.”

Enye understands how much it has cost Omry to say those words. She shouts thanks and gratitude but they are shattered to dust by the first power chords ripping out from the new act. She slips down her mask again. She had glimpsed Phaedra, head tossed back in jewelled laughter behind an ermine domino mask on a stick. Buttons, beads, bows; Marie Antoinette. A liaison hunting for danger.

It takes the two black girls in the mandatory leather microskirts sitting on his arms and Enye sitting on his chest (Hey, what am I
doing?)
pouring antihistamines and cans of lager down his throat to convince Elliot that he is going to be, not fair, not average, not good, not great, but mega-great, superhyperterrabevagreat. Five minutes to showtime, the penultimate set of the year has ended, the hits of the past decade come right up-to-date, the faithful roadies have moved all his keyboards and rhythm generators and sampling computers onstage, the Linn programmer he has found from somewhere is posing about studying output levels and wave forms and harmonic profiles and the EmCee has the microphone in his hand and is trying to make himself heard over the general party clamour.

Elliot falls back to the floor. Enye draws the
tachi.

“If you do not go up on that stage, I will kill you,” she says.

“That sword real?” asks one of the black girls.

“Laydees and gennelmen, nonsexist persons, let’s dance the old year out with…”

Strange.
As she drew the sword, she felt, like quicksilver along her spine, the old black magic tingle of mythoconscious contact.

Mask down, she goes front-of-house to hear the set. The entire warehouse is dancing. Tight and righteous, one KW per channel, beaming out on the adrenaline frequency. Behind her mask, she smiles. He is good. She recognises her own “I could get to like this” woven into the fabric of rhythms and samples.

“Enye!” The voice shouting in her ear over the digi-beat and processed orgasmic sobs of the black girls is like a pistol shot. She whirls: eyehole to eye.

Him.

“I recognised the swords, Enye.”

“Saul! Shit, Saul…”

“You look… you look… you look.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Can’t hear you. Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”

They go somewhere they can talk, out into the cold of the end of the year, into the frost and moonshine on the fire escape. The wrought-iron vibrates in sympathy with Elliot’s transcription of reality.

“Not quite the St. Matthew Passion,” Saul says.

“If you give it enough time, you can get to like it.”

“I’d heard you were slumming it,” Saul says. “What, bicycle courier company?”

Now she sees what has always been obvious: that he wanted to possess her so badly only so that he might have a mirror in which to see himself reflected. Enye wants to hurt him with weapons duller and cruder than her swords. She wants to punish him for his sins in a way that is endlessly cruel and goes on forever and ever and ever.

“It has its compensations as a job,” she says. “All those tight little backsides. Spoiled for choice, really. I must introduce you to Elliot. He’s onstage right now; he comes off at the end of the year. You should meet. You’ve absolutely nothing in common.”

Saul stiffens. He is dressed as Rhett Butler. Stick-on moustache and suave hat. Like Percy Perinov. Look what happened to him. Should she tell him about the baby? Dandle it in front of him, then snatch it back inside her life forever?

“We’re finished, Saul. We outgrew each other. Can’t you understand that? You are so stupid. Stupid stupid stupid man. Go away, won’t you? Let’s consent to be pieces of each other’s histories.”

She can feel the old year straining at the boundaries of time, eager to be gone, heigh-ho heigh-ho. And something more: the distant, panicky nausea of mythlines gathering and gyring. A sudden wave of vertigo sends her reaching for the cold iron banister. She wants him gone. Gone now. Gone for good.

“Why did you come here? You hate things like this; you always did. You never came to any of the parties I invited you to because you hate people. You hate people because you are afraid of people. You fear the
other,
anything but yourself. You always did, Saul. Go away. I am
me,
understand. Me.”

“Let me see your face. Take off the mask, please.”

“Go away, Saul.”

He goes. And she is alone on the fire escape. And she feels very much like crying. And she feels very much like running her sword through the first person she meets on the other side of the door. And while she feels these feelings, the old year dies and the new enters in.

She returns to the party. Balloons have cascaded from the ceiling. Bryghte Thynges and Bootifuls and the Mandarins of Fashion are shrieking and spraying polymer string and champagne over each other. Ritual ejaculation. Girls with gelled hair, blue mint lip gloss, and ludicrous skirts are jumping up and down screaming while the men they came with are kissing other women altogether. The EmCee has cleared the stage after Elliot’s set; as Auld Acquaintance Is Forgot and Never Brought to Mind, he tries to make himself heard over the drunken singing.

“Citizens, comrades, people people people, let’s welcome in the next decade” (“It doesn’t start till next year!” followed immediately by the meaty knock of fist on flesh) “with an act that we know is going to be just enormous. When we saw them first on the streets of our fair city, we knew that they had to be the act to open the new decade.”

A guitar power chord, long on the sustain, fading away in a feedback howl. Pin spots wheels, searching for a target. An urgent, insistent guitar riff, repeated as a theme through a processor over which is laid layers of improvisation. The spots swivel, snap, and focus. A girt with a starburst of gelled hair and Morticia Adams makeup dives from the top of a speaker stack into the lights as the guitar theme lifts in resolution. And explodes. Floods up: the crowd roars and applauds the boy with the mirror shades and the electric guitar and the amp-pack on his back and the mad dancer with the ripped leotard.

At the foot of the stage, a long silver needle of pain drives through Enye MacColl’s brain.

“Comrades, citizens,” bellows the disembodied voice of the EmCee, “please put various parts of yours and anyone else’s anatomy together to welcome The Lords of the Gateway!”

In the same instant she knows them, they know her. The guitar hesitates in the middle of a chord progression, the dancer falters in her cascade of liquid movement for a second, for an eigenblink.

The girl dancer dives to the front of the stage, lowers herself to floor level. Kohled eyes make contact with Enye’s behind the Kabuki mask. Then she backflips dazzlingly to the rear of the stage. The parrrrtyers roar. Behind the roar, Enye hears the guitar chords take a new, dangerous cadence. The boy smiles. And the familiar, feared sensation of the bottom falling out of reality gnaws like a cancer at her spirit: mythlines caught up in a fist and moulded together.

And she understands the nature of their gift. Theirs is the power of breaching at will the membrane between Earth and Mygmus, of letting the chaotic images and half-formed archetypes fountain out into quotidian expression. And she understands in that same beat of her mind that here under the spots and strobes, before the Bryghtes and Bootifuls and Socially Credible of the city, they are going to smash the sluice gates of reality.

Enye bulls her way through the transfixed Bryghtes and Bootifuls and Socially Credibles to the fire exit. Temporarily heedless of the new life inside her, she takes the ice-slick iron steps three at a time. The cars are parked so close together she has to run along the fenders to reach her Citroen, so tight-packed she cannot open the door. She draws her
tachi
and cuts her way in through the sunroof. The Shekinah is in its hiding place under the driver’s seat, the personal organiser thrown into the back with empty Diet Coke cans. No time for refinements. She gulps down two tabs of Shekinah. She is halfway up the fire escape when it hits. The lift into mythoconsciousness almost sends her over the handrail two storeys to the cars below. The warehouse is the focus of a hurricane of mythlines; a celebration of derangement. The pull of them is almost enough to tear her from her grip on the emergency exit push-down handle. Dorothy and the tornado. The dance floor is a bedlam of slashing FX beams and mythlines. We certainly aren’t in Kansas anymore. No time for strategy. The Gateway has formed. The mouth in the air hovers over the backstage, given phantasmal solidity by the lighting rig. Shapes move through it toward the edge of her world—shapes like dolls’ prams that push themselves along with two hairy arms. Shapes like tangles of movie celluloid with an eye in each frame. Shapes like a lung bifurcated at the bottom, shuffling toward the edge of Earth in a way that can never, never be thought of as walking, its yellow crow’s beak clacking and snapping. The crammed slammed jammed people clap and cheer—they think it is special effects trickery. And the guitar hammers hammers hammers and the dancer dances like nothing has ever danced before.