and now?
Damage limitation! Damage limitation! Damage limitation! He couldn’t let the boys see him sitting here like this. They would have an absolute field day. He would never live it down. Though there was little dignity left for him to salvage he might, if he walked away now, still leave with his reputation intact, or at least not in tatters (what they don’t know can’t hurt you, right?). And he would of course put a favourable spin on events when it came to relaying them later in the pub: claim that the minute he realised what the record company was up to he had walked out on the spot, and that try as they might to convince, coerce, cajole or console him, or otherwise induce him to come back, he had refused point-blank to have anything more to do with them, regardless of all the money he had been offered (it wouldn’t hurt to colour himself heroic). And, in time, perhaps, by dint of honest endeavour, he would be able to redeem himself, to once again come to see himself as he hoped others would continue to see him. That is, as a man of integrity, untainted by material concerns, one of very few, very few, in existence.
‘There he is there, look. AH HA HA! HERE, DRAKO, MAN, SIGN THIS FOR US, WILL YOU?’
The voice was unmistakably Pabs’s. His humiliation was complete.
19
Billy drew himself forward, and stretching his chin out over the steering wheel peered heavenward through the windscreen. The sun, having gone down somewhere behind the shopping centre, coloured the evening sky with a lambent fiery redness, strongest towards the horizon but diffused across its entire expanse, imparting a faint pink glow to the edges of the foreboding clouds that were slowly amassing overhead.
He slumped back in the seat.
The traffic was backed up behind them all along the length of the flyover. It was at a virtual standstill too on all of the adjoining roads and roundabouts. And, coming in the other direction, it stretched from one end of the Boulevard to the other, as far as the eye could see.
Amid a fanfare of blaring horns Tony stepped carefully out of the car, and limping between bumpers, using bonnet and boot like crutches, crossed over the road. Leaning on the railing there he glared with an equal mix of disfavour and disbelief at the events that were unfolding down below.
Outside the night club a vast crowd had gathered, and it was gathering still. In endless procession people were flocking to it: along the Boulevard and down the steps; along the roadside by the trim-track; down the same road and out from beneath the flyover. They were trooping along the riverside past the amphitheatre, and over the mini golf course past the BMX track, converging at the footbridge and crossing en masse past the racetrack for remote control cars. They were arriving by the busload, and the mini-busload, and by car, and taxi, by bike, even, and skateboard (although these last were more probably destined for the skate park). In short, they were coming from far and wide and from every which direction, forming, in the car park outside the club, into an homogenous, indistinguishable mass.
Tony re-crossed the road and got back into the car, slamming the door behind him.
‘Fuckin low-key gig?’ he snarled.
A luminous-jacketed traffic policeman was beckoning them forward. Then, a little further on, another bid them stop. They were again beckoned forward. And again bid stop. Beckoned forward. Bid stop. Beckoned forward. Bid stop. Beckoned. Bid. Beckoned. Bid. So on. And so forth. Passed from one policeman to the next all the way round to the Asda.
‘Aw, fff…!’ said Billy. ‘I forgot to feed the dog.’
They limped and sauntered respectively down towards the club, its neon sign now glowing very palely violet against the pinks and greys of the sky.
The car park, never mind the club itself, was nowhere near big enough to accommodate the sheer number of people that was trying to cram into it. No such thing as an orderly queue existed and the surging crowd was held at bay by a concatenation of metal barriers that created a wide and narrow buffer zone around the club's entrance, closing it off from all sides. This was manned by a vanguard of stone-faced muscular bouncers wearing headsets with microphones and tight black t-shirts with “security” emblazoned in yellow across the chest. The barriers at the front of this zone – those that bore the brunt of the crowd’s eagerness – formed a sort of shallow funnel, at whose apex two more perpendicular barriers – the funnel’s stem – sharply reduced the front of the “queue” to a rough approximation of four abreast.
The fast-food vans and ice cream vans lined the perimeter of the car park and people were queuing as best they could in the congestion for ice cream or chips or burgers or soft drinks. These vans went some way towards penning in the bulk of the crowd but as more and more people arrived, pouring in through the gaps between them, others were squeezing out and milling around on the outskirts, needful of escape from the crush. There were stalls too, selling all manner of unofficial tour merchandise – t-shirts, hats, posters, programmes, etc – staffed mainly by cocksure opportunists out to make a killing. There was even someone selling balloons. And candyfloss.
‘It’s like a fuckin day at the fair, man!’ growled Tony.
Here was ‘youth culture’, in the very brightest of primary colours and cartoon character delineation, and excepting a few groups of teenage boys (who were doing surly, in keeping with this new direction in their idol’s career) the tenor of the crowd was gratingly overpitched. Effusiveness it seemed was the order of the day, something, like the very latest fashions, put on for the occasion. The perfectly natural trait of striving to contain genuine excitement, or any strong emotion that might, if surrendered to, prove overwhelming and embarrassing, was nowhere in evidence. Instead, the crowd flaunted and exaggerated what little excitement it did feel, continually fanning its paltry flame – with whoops and hollers and cheers and claps and whistles – for fear that if it were left unattended that very paltriness would become all too desolatingly apparent. Their collective behaviour, then, was nothing more nor less than they deemed fitting for such an event; exactly, in fact, but on a much larger scale, like that of someone who smiles on cue for a camera whenever the photographer says “cheeeeese”.
The overall atmosphere was one that tomorrow’s papers would no doubt describe as ‘charged’ or ‘electric’ (if tomorrow’s papers weren’t about to be dominated by an altogether more sensational story), but if it was electric it was electricity of a very low voltage, producing much light but very little real heat.
‘You realise,’ said Billy, ‘that we’ve got no chance of getting in, right?’
‘As much chance as anybody else,’ said Tony.
‘Eh, aye, except for maybe the million or so people in front of us. The place only holds about three or four hundred.’
‘Don’t worry. We’ll get in.’
‘I’m not worryin. I just don’t see how we’re...’
‘Stop fuckin moanin, man! We’re stickin to the plan and that’s fuckin that, right?’
The plan, as Tony had relayed it to Billy on the drive up, went like this:
‘Right, here’s the fuckin plan. We park the car in the skatey car park, right? The wee one round the back of the club, cause that’s where the fire door is. We go in, right...? No, not in the fuckin fire door, smart cunt! Just fuckin listen, will you? We go in and size the place up. Do a wee bit reconnoiterin… What...? Aye, fuckin reconnoiterin! You got a problem with that...? Right, then. We do a wee bit reconnoiterin, then, later on, whenever the cunt’s up singin, on my signal you go out and… What the fuck is it now...? What’s wrong with that...? No, I don’t think I’m bein a wee bit too fuckin dramatic! ON MY FUCKIN SIGNAL you go out and get the car ready and I’ll… All right, fuckin forget it, man! I’ll do it my fuckin self...! No, forget it! I’ll do it my fuckin self! You can wait in the car! Just make sure you’ve got that fuckin engine runnin, ready to make a clean fuckin getaway!’
‘What for?’ Billy had asked. ‘What are you goin to do?’
‘We’re goin to teach the cunt a lesson!’
‘We? I thought I was waitin in the car.’
r /> ‘You just do whatever I fuckin tell you, right...? Right...? Right.’
Billy of course had paid scant regard to any of this, dismissing it lightly with an inward shake of his head and marvelling at just how weak Tony’s grip on reality had become. The plan, such as it was, was, at the very least, implausible. They would be lucky at this rate to get anywhere near the club, never mind Ryan Watson. But surely, as his drug-induced delirium began to subside (he had not had a line for over an hour now), surely even Tony would realise this for himself. Right?
‘Em, the car’s parked up at Asda,’ said Billy.
‘So?’
‘So, eh, your plan’s not exactly off to the best of starts, is it?’
‘You can bring it down later.’
‘What, on your signal?’
‘I’m fuckin warnin you, man! I’m not in the mood!’
The sun went down completely, drawing the last lick of its flame down with it, and the sky, between the thickening and blackening storm clouds, became a dim pale-blue. The dry but pleasing heat of the day had been replaced with an uncomfortable stifling humidity. A warmth, hazy and vaporous, rose up from the car park among the crowd, the air was heavy and a pressure was slowly starting to build.
‘Come on,’ said Tony. ‘Follow me.’
‘To where?’ said Billy.
Tony pointed over the