‘We’re outlaws now,’ Terri said dreamily; ‘we have to go where desperadoes go.’
‘Where’s that?’ Chick asked. ‘Glasgow?’ and Terri said, ‘No, but it rhymes with that.’
‘Where?’ I said. ‘Aleppo? Cairo? Truro? Fargo? Oporto? Quito? Jericho? Soho? Puerto Rico? Kyoto? Chicago? Bilbao? Rio de Janeiro? Io? El Dorado? Kelso?’
‘Who would have thought,’ Andrea said wearily, ‘that so many places rhymed with Glasgow?’
‘There’s more if you’re interested.’
‘Where’s Io?’ Chick asked.
‘She’s going to that party tonight,’ Andrea said, ‘the one in Broughty Ferry.’
‘Why didn’t you say that before?’
‘I didn’t know whose baby it was,’ she said huffily; ‘they all look alike to me.’
Bob was excitedly explaining to Robin what had happened in the concluding part of Dr Who’s latest adventure,
The Curse of Peladon
, which he had just viewed. ‘And then this evil alien ambassador, who’s just a brain on wheels basically –’
‘Where do you suppose Shug is?’ Andrea said, interrupting this sophisticated critique and speaking to Bob as if he was a slightly retarded chimpanzee.
‘Dunno,’ Bob said.
‘Did he say anything to you?’ Andrea persisted, ‘about me, for instance?’
‘He said . . .’ Bob closed his eyes.
‘He’s thinking,’ I explained to Andrea.
‘He said – “Don’t forget to bring the Thai sticks.”’
Andrea sniffed the air and set off, following her moonstruck nose. Bob followed her, leaving me with Robin in the kitchen of the house which was dimly illuminated by one yellow lightbulb. A trail of people were coming and going, all in a desultory state of drug overload – the doctors and dentists of tomorrow presumably. On offer was the usual student party fare – a couple of large pan loaves and a block of red Scottish Cheddar, cheap wine and a metal keg of gassy lager squatting in the walk-in pantry, the floor of which was swilling with spilt drink. The bottles of wine on the table were almost all empty by now, although a milk crate of Balniddrian elderflower champagne remained untouched.
Robin poured the remains of a massive bottle of Hirondelle into a couple of plastic cups and gave one to me. Miranda, the dopey goat executioner, wandered into the kitchen, an almost visible aura of torpor about her, and started knocking back Tiger’s Milk from the bottle. She caught sight of Robin and gave him a lethargic ‘Hi.’ I don’t think she recognized me. Was she a fit person for me to hand Proteus on to, I wondered. Hardly. I asked her if she’d seen Kara and she made a vague gesture towards the door before slumping onto a chair and apparently passing out.
I pushed my way out of the kitchen, past a crush of people in a hallway and up a staircase, Robin trailing on my heels. We came upon what appeared to be a small ballroom – a space that was like a cross between a railway station and a bordello. There was a fireplace at either end of the room in that red-and-white marble that looks like uncooked beef and huge mirrors fixed to the wall, set in ornate ormolu frames. A massive milk-glass chandelier shaped like a palm-tree hung from the middle of the ceiling and smaller versions sprouted from the walls. I could almost imagine myself being waltzed off by a dashing cavalry officer, my
mousseline de soie
skirts swirling, a dance card dangling from my wrist.
‘Really?’ Robin said, apparently quite aroused by this vision. Something rather slimy, like a snail’s silver trail, had dribbled down his beard.
‘No, not really.’
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.
I stood up and the room immediately broke up into thousands of little dots, as if I’d suddenly stepped inside a pointillist painting. I couldn’t be sure, but I could have sworn I saw the elusive shape of the yellow dog on the far side of the room. I wondered if it was an hallucination or a mirage? And was the yellow dog now my quest since Terri had gone to hide in a place rhyming with Glasgow? Perhaps, Lassie-like, it was trying to show me the way to Kara.
I struggled heroically across the wasteland of the ballroom floor, occupied now by a frenzy of people dancing to Santana, only to find when I arrived on the other side that there was no sign of Bob anywhere, or of the yellow dog. It was very hot and airless by now and a herd of people milled around aimlessly, amplified and distorted by the candlelit mirrors and my dappled vision. My blood pressure was low and falling and there was a blackness closing in around me and I knew I had to get out of that room or I was going to pass out, and the last thing I wanted was attention from any of the drug-fuelled medical students in Forres.
I finally managed to fight my way out of the room, passing Davina on the way –
I tried a door at the far end of the billiards room and found it opened into a small room that was entirely dark, save for the light coming from a television set that was showing
Dad’s Army
. In the doorway I bumped into Shug, who said, ‘Out on the ran-dan, eh, hen?’ and put his arms around me. He was very drunk and said, ‘So how about it – you and me?’ and I had to push him away and remind him that he was ‘Bob’s pal’ and therefore couldn’t shag me. Where
was
Bob? Shug shrugged (as he had to do sooner or later). ‘Dunno.’