Owen enjoyed wandering into the dark side of the City and frequenting bars where rogues and slatterns were said to gather. During working hours, he spent the time in an office breathing conditioned air. His job was to collate and staple sheets of paper: thousand upon thousand bearing cramped lines of esoterica. He did not need to understand more than was good for him, because his working hours were mainly in and around daylight.
Come night, it was quite a different story. Even in the City, where the street-lights blew ragged holes in the otherwise impenetrable darkness, Mystery welled up from every unsuspecting quarter. Words on a road sign became a symbol for man's gruesome reserves of communal imagination. Advertisement hoardings grew cinemascopic visions of Hell, into which one could enter and enjoy for what they were. The traffic's crawling rear-lights were a raging disease on the face of night.
Owen put his stapler away. There was nothing else in his desk, this being his only tool of trade. Even during daylight hours, he considered himself a skilled worker. He reached street level by means of the downward lift, dreading that the pavements would be amob with home-goers. Tonight, though, was different. Either he had been late in packing up or, for some reason beyond any reckoning related to daylight considerations, the usual hubbub had shifted one ratchet too soon down the commuter tunnels. The nights were indeed drawing in, but surely not that quickly.
So, tonight, he found it easier to reach the outskirts of the City, where the Council's attempts to wish back the tides of night were fast giving up the ghost. Eventually, it was only left to the dimly-lit curtains of tower blocks to cast a grimy gloom across the drizzle-sheen of pavements. The soles of Owen's shoes seemed to become stuck when they inadvertently bridged the cracks between the paving-slabs, as if some septic glue was seeping up.
Why he felt the need to enter these realms was in itself a mystery to Owen. Surely the City, when on its wrong side of daylight, would be sufficient to assuage his hunger for even more mystery and misadventure. No. He needed things far more insidious and decadent and tactile and, basically, dreadful. It was the dark side of his very brain, otherwise detached from the rest, which was the hungerer, perhaps. All very well - but, at the end of the day, it was his body that needed to undergo the incomparable dangers, so that his mind could be nourished like a limbless rottweiller inside his head.
He forged on, heart in mouth. There was an unlit singles bar only just a few hundred yards ahead, telescoped between the ranks of bricked-up buildings of Dockland.
In his younger days (and nights) parties were always in half-darknesses, when low-key smooching and canoodling and snogging and, at worst, heavy petting, had been all the rage. Now, the fashion had grown quite ludicrous, with boppers and jivers and rappers bumping into each other, bunching awkwardly, triggering quarterless rumbles. Amid the overlapping pitch darknesses of the disco strobes, only different in subtle degrees from each other by shades of black, this bar was not exactly welcoming to Owen, but its very unwelcoming nature became its resistless attraction. He hoped to latch on to someone with whom to chat, someone more or less like himself, someone else who had ventured from the City on a similar errand.
Uncertain of the company he kept, he tentatively forced his way into the bar, elbowing through the unseen masses. Each autonomous scrum of people threw out a single body, which then tried to form another ravening enclave. Later, people were coupling off like constituents in a microbiology experiment. He could hear body-popping all round him. He may even have been the catalyst. Essentially a loner, albeit yearning for some kind of completion, his game was relishing the rough, raw margins of his own body, revelling in the teetering danger of being unaccompanied and unaccompanying.
Abruptly, the main light was switched on.
Bloodshot panic was in all eyes. Mercifully, slow adjustment to the sudden illumination eased the shock. Gradual focussing and squinting however revealed that everyone had grown so damnably old since those first parties in the Sixties which had been held in bed-sits and one-bit communes. The relentless head-bang noise of the music had crawled back into the perfect egg of silence whence it should never have been hatched.
The culprit must be found. That blighter who had switched on the light, like a silent fire-alarm of deafening proportions, must be punished, since no-one wanted reminding of the death in their faces.
Owen found himself leaning against the rocker light-switch, all eyes turned in his direction. This indeed was the purest terror he had always sought. He smiled in quiet satisfaction. Being one of those few workers allowed into the City for their semi-skills, he had often seen his own face reflected in the meticulously polished metal side of the heavy-duty stapler. And he knew, he really knew, that it must be his own relative young age that was enfuriating the party-goers.
He gloated and simpered as they proceeded to make his face something worse than merely old, with their uncut fingernails, but someone or other switched off the main light, before it became too bloody, returning the place to a raucous ruck of dark bodies. It did not seem to matter, since Owen, from his position on the floor, could not have seen very well what they were doing to his face. Which was a pity.
The sound of his ripping flesh was rather nicer than the music, however, he thought, but did not say.
Published ‘After Hours’ 1994
