My phone battery must have died at the same time I did. It was eleven o’clock when I woke. I rang my dad to come and pick me up, then after trying to wake everyone else up but only managing to wake Al, I waited for him outside. He didn’t need to know the exact flat James lived in.
“Happy Christmas Dad, sorry I’ve fucked it up,” I apologised to him as he pulled up, leaning from the driver’s side window with a roll-up between his lips.
“I wouldn’t worry Lu, you were better off here to be honest. It’s all kicking off at home already.”
“What because of me?”
“Maybe partly Lu. But then when has you being there ever stopped her going off on one before?” My dad drove unusually slow, it was almost as though he didn’t want to go home. I wasn’t sure now if I did either.
“Happy Christmas Mark!” Al said from the back.
“Happy Christmas Al,” my dad replied. “Was it just you two at James’s last night?”
“Kyle was there too,” Al said.
“I could’ve given him a lift as well.”
“He wouldn’t wake up Dad. Him and James are still fast asleep.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it Lu.” Al’s hand reached in from the back and tapped me on the shoulder. “I turned the stereo up as loud as it would go, and pushed play on that mixtape James did as we left. There’s no way they’re sleeping through that.”
“Nice one Al,” my dad laughed. “That’ll make Kyle’s Christmas.”
Unicorns an Butterflies Every Weh
February 2001.
I’d been at Precisional Electronics for four months now.
As I had suspected at the end of my first week, welding the same two components together, day after day, would be my only job. My ability to daydream was now far more advanced than ever before.
The section of the building I worked in had no windows, and I asked a colleague one day why this was. She replied, “If we could see the outside world we’d probably all run away at full speed, never to be seen again.”
I think she was probably right.
Possibly due to previous escape attempts, and to adopt a belt-and-braces approach, I was positioned, like everyone else, in a five feet square white box; with no view of anyone or anything that wasn’t to do with my job.
My world seemed to like boxes.
I decorated the inside of the box with rave flyers, where other people stuck pictures of their family, and pictures of cars or kittens; cut-out from magazines left in the canteen. Anything I could do to bring colour to my day, and stop myself being blinded by the fluorescent lights above reflecting off the white walls.
Dreamscape flyers with big heads floating in outer space surrounded by countless suns, conjured up images of a night of old skool hardcore, all horns and white gloves and people hugging each other. One Nation flyers with mechanised robot people on the front that so clearly told me it was drum and bass, a more serious night with a wind your neck in attitude where you gave each other a little bit more space on the dance floor; the dates on the ones I’d made it to tying up in my head with the particular night. Every one had a different personality to me, a different soul. Even the cheaply made flyers for nights at Club Z made it onto the walls; printed on coloured paper and headlined by unheard of DJs and MCs, my view was that if I’d had a good time then they had as much right as any to hang there, and at the end of the day anything was better than white. Apart from tape-packs they were probably the most treasured thing I owned.
To everyone else they were just a series of silly pictures, but, like the opposite of Braille, it wasn’t until ecstasy had fully opened your eyes that you could read what they said.