'Two people?' he said, then laughed, punching a fist in the air. 'Good God! Two people! Full time! Good God!'
'I thought it showed how endemic the sampling thing's become,' I said, aware my voice wouldn't appreciate such discourse in the morning; also that I'd reached a phase of my own drunkenness cycle characterised by extreme humourlessness. 'I mean, just listen to this stuff . . . this is probably one hundred per cent recycled sound, friend.'
'Then it's very nineties, isn't it?' he said, shrugging. 'Very green. Thought we were all for recycling these days. Cars, paper, bottles . . . why the hell not music?' Then I skipped a few frames and my friend was looking at his watch. 'Well, guess we're going to split soon. Sorry you're not on our taxi route, mate.'
'Yeah, I'm on foot tonight.' I shrugged, the E affecting my bonhomie. In any case, I wanted to stay for a few more numbers, now that I was clicking into the Drome's vibe. Pink smoke was flooding the floor, blue lasers tracking from the ceiling rig, and I was getting righteously into it. A track I liked came up, one of those blink-and-you've-missed-it ephemeral club hits that attains culthood, graduates to being a classic, gets heavily sampled, becomes slightly jaded, then frankly passe, winds up a dusty artefact of late-twentieth-century pop culture, all within a month or two. A bit of social commentary this, as well: 'A Killer Is Stalking Clubland'. And if you think that is in questionable taste, there was even a reference to someone's eyelids being stapled open.
Come 3.00 a.m., I decided I'd better hike if I wanted to make it to work. Had to get my coat, so I re-entered the melee, semi-dancing, pushing towards a neon sign at the club's other side, through a veil of perfumed smoke. I was halfway there when I saw the red laser stabbing through the cloud. A shrouded figure was aiming a gun at me, eclipsed in waves by silhouetted bodies, face blocked by shadows and a pair of sunglasses and framed by what looked like aviation phones, with a mike wrapping around the front.
Weirdos everywhere. Why not just bliss out, instead of getting on everyone's tits? Yeah, time to leave, no doubt there.
I'd got my coat quicker than usual, maybe because the club would stagger on for another hour or so. Outside I met a few friends who'd spent the intervening time in an all-night kebab shop. The taxi-rank was on my walk home so I loitered with them, up the rubbish-strewn streets, kicking fast-food containers, crushed tins of Red Stripe, ticket stubs. A few desultory revellers were still ambling around, trying to find somewhere open, dossers hanging outside the old pisser in the Bigg Market that looked like an Edwardian UFO, solitary cop cars kerb-crawling; cherry-lights reflected in puddles of urine. Overhead, against the winter stars, a helicopter circled predatorily, hawking the streets below, doubtless searching for stolen motors that would finish up embedded in shop fronts come morning. No wonder none of us brought cars. At the taxi-rank we split, they to their houses in Byker, me to my flat in Fenham. I didn't have far to go, really. But it's not the distance that counts, in the end.
I hiked up my hood, drowning out the plaintive car-alarms and the sirens, Walkman playing. It was a slimline job, barely larger than the tape, burnished silver like a very flash cigarette case. The C90 was a compilation I'd made up of techno and bleep stuff, vinyl picked up from Oldham Road in Manchester, plus chart house grooves and a little mainstream electro-soul, chanteuse-fronted, allegedly direct from the smokiest Berlin bars. Ultra-pure digital sounds, hypnotic synth lines, speedily distorted vocals. It was the music they played at the Drome: wall-to-wall, no dicking about, mind-pummelling noise, repetitive as Tibetan mantras, as fast as Bhangra. Allied to the Drome's effects, intense light projected through a rotating filter wheel of tinted, immiscible fluids . . . like a kaleidoscope melting before your eyes, the sound washing over like a test signal for your sozzled brain.
I'd been into it for a year or two now, and finding that the scene was established in Newcastle made up for the wrench I'd felt leaving the north-west, where the nexus of the whole thing had originated. My BT job was a piece of shit; it was the music, the club scene that I lived for. What I didn't know, as I popped the last of the E, was that it was the music that had drawn the Househunter to me.
I'd been targeted in the Drome, it seemed, and when I left with my friends, I'd been followed. Discreetly - uptown, lurking in the side streets, until I left the pack. Shrewd, as if my walk home had been half-expected. And because of the Walkman, I didn't hear the footsteps (supposing any were to be heard) as I walked around the civic boating lake.
It came suddenly: carotid-squeezing pressure around my neck. The hood was ripped from my clothes, earplugs seized, the whole ensemble of the Walkman hurled into the moon-streaked water. There was never any doubt in my mind that I'd been selected as a victim, not in that instant. I knew it was the Househunter's arm around me. And then something went through my head - a thought I'd probably shared now with a dozen others, our one instance of solidarity. I realised that all the assumptions had been wrong. Oh boy, they'd got it badly wrong. They weren't going to catch this baby in a hurry. Not if they kept on thinking--
I felt something damp smother my whole face; then, maybe a microsecond after the sensation of wetness, the dizzy sensation of etherisation. The last thing I heard was her saying, very calmly: 'Trust me, please. I'm a doctor.'
I remember coming to, briefly, in the back of a vehicle. For a blissed-out moment I didn't remember what had happened, one of those waking fugues where nothing connects, nothing matters. Eyes washed by the yellow of sodium lamps, behind grilled glass, the numbing vibration of the ride transmitted through a softness beneath me. I couldn't make out the interior too well. Then it all rammed home as I heard her speaking, behind what must have been a thin partition separating the back of the van from the driver's compartment. I struggled to move, found I couldn't. For a while it wasn't clear whether this was a result of restraints, or whether the right signals just weren't getting to my limbs. I was stretchered, braced so that it didn't roll around. My mouth was obstructed. Had she gagged me, or was I sucking on a breathing tube?
'En route from pickup point,' she said. 'Subject has regained apparent consciousness. Brief description: outward physiology normal on first inspection; WM, twenties, slim build, height five eight or nine, cropped hair, no facial distinguishing marks. No evidence for intravenous drug use . . . presence of other intoxicants, hallucinogens or mood-alterers not ruled out at this stage. Interestingly, the subject's spectacles contained flat lenses - of cosmetic value alone. The subject's auditory stimulant was neutralised during apprehension. Prognosis is satisfactory; ETA fifteen minutes, over.'
The words careered through my brain in a jumble, leaving me to marshal them. What was happening? Where was I? Why did I really not care all that much?
I allowed myself to slump, mentally, letting the restful rhythm of the gliding sodiums caress my eyelids. How easy it was to sleep, despite all that I knew!
The next recollection is an invasive howl ripping through my dreams. It seemed the loudest noise I'd ever heard, rising and falling on a dreamily slow wah-wah oscillation. Then it got worse and my skin began to prickle before the sound reached an apex and the envelope of oscillation diminished, lower pitched, gut-churning bass components phasing in.
In the Blitz, my grandfather once told me, the Luftwaffe didn't bother tuning the engines of their bombers to precisely the same revs. That way you could always tell a Heinkel from a Wellington, if you didn't know how they were meant to sound. There'd be a rising and falling signal, on top of the engine sound, as the spikes of the sound waves moved in and out of phase with one another, several times a second. And he'd move the outspread fingers of his hands across one another in illustration. He'd been an audio engineer, my granddad, for Piccadilly Radio, knew all sorts of arcana. I think it was he who made me go into electrical engineering, he that set me on course for my privacy-violating job for BT . . . though in fairness the old feller couldn't have known better.
I opened my eyes to a chipped surface of beige plaster. The tip of my nose was an inc
h or so from the wall; I was lying in the medical 'recovery' position on a soft surface. I tried moving; no joy. I was immobilised, either by weakness or restraint. Hands rolled me to my other side, so that I faced her. My mouth was free, no longer intubated or gagged. She was a pale ovoid, against a backdrop of olive green. From the angle of my gaze I couldn't see her face, just the blurred whiteness of her waist.
Then it all clicked: hospital surroundings. That explained the shabby decor, the pervasive air of decrepitude. She was a nurse or ward attendant, wearing a white overcoat and a stethoscope. Behind her were green curtains, the kind they use to fence off patients during a bed-bath. I could hear the sound of medical equipment behind the curtain, birdlike bleeps and clicks. Hey, some sod was worse than me. Life was looking up. I couldn't move much, but that didn't mean a lot. Hell, I'd just been through a bad experience, right? I was probably suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. In 1962, Vietnam seemed like just another foreign war . . . Ha ha.
Then she spoke, the same voice I'd heard in the ambulance. 'Ah good,' she said. 'Awake. That's perfect. We'll be over and done before we know it. Just a few simple tests should be sufficient.'
I strained my neck to look up. Her white coat was loosely tied over a black T-shirt decorated with a half-familiar pattern, like a contour map of the lunar surface, etched in white. The stethoscope hung down over her chest. Her hair was raked back from her brow, tied in a utilitarian tail. Her lips were pallid, eyes masked by circular black sunglasses. A pair of phones framed her head, bulky black things. Aviation phones, a cable running to a belted power pack. Noise-cancelling jobs, like helicopter pilots wore. I thought of the 'copter I'd seen that night, but no . . . there couldn't be a connection, surely.
Strange accessories for a nurse, I thought. And then, a kind of out-of-head experience, a soft voice from afar, saying: This is your rational mind speaking. You're in the deepest shit imaginable, but you won't admit it, not until that E's through with its business . . . And I ignored it, eyes tracking over her coat (more like a scientist's than a doctor's, I decided), picking out streaked splatters of rust-red.
'Could I have a drink, please?'
She reached into a coat pocket, pulled out a tiny black thing the size of a box of cigarettes. Glanced at a wristwatch.
'Log entry: time 05:30. Subject made first conditioned response a few seconds ago. Requested fluid. Hypothesis: residual mind-state must still coordinate behaviour compatible with normal dietary and physical requirements; in other words, subject's nutritional intake will fall into stereotypical pattern. Conclude that request probably the expression of a genuine biological need. Although probably unnecessary in any case, will administer 250 ccs of glycolated barley-water intra-orally. Entry ends.' Click.
She cranked something under me, making the couch angle up. Then she touched a glass to my parched lips, and I drank. God, it was the best drink I'd ever tasted: sugary-sweet and cool as nectar. Lucozade. Blanched out, towering above me, she looked angelic to my eyes, this beatific giver of nourishment to the sick.
'Let's get some air in here, shall we,' she said, without actually addressing me. She whisked back the curtain, revealing the rest of the room.
There comes a point, even in the deepest drug-induced para-reality, where sufficient data from the real world can build up and penetrate the fiction. You're in the deepest shit imaginable, that voice repeated. And I began, for the first time, to heed my own subconscious. There were no other patients in the 'ward'. The room was small, four, five metres along each damp-stained wall. They were covered with literally hundreds of . . . but no, I'll come to those in a moment, after I've set the rest of the scene. High windows on one wall admitted wan shafts of dawn light, falling in patches on the floor. There was a metal door, padlocked on the inside. The room's odour of urine and vomit reminded me of a multi-storey carpark stairwell. There was a couch, two garden seats and a wooden table, an empty wheelchair, a tripod and Anglepoise set-up holding a waiting camcorder. The rest of the room was crammed with expensive-looking electronic equipment ... racks of slim, black synthesisers, embossed with familiar names: Casio, Korg, Roland, Yamaha, Hammond, Prophet. The whole stack wired to a table-load of MIDI monitors and PC keyboards, dove-grey shells, wrapped in a tangle of cables and fibre optics. There were crushed Irn Bru cans, Lucozade and Beck's bottles, tabloids, listings magazines, ring-bound folders, cassette and video cases, floppy disks and what looked like piles of twelve-inch, white-label records. I looked closer: each sleeve had the words Digital to Analogue scrawled over it. I remembered that: one of those subsequently sampled club hits from about six months back. You heard parts of it on many new records.
The shelving held dozens of display devices with gridded screens, oscilloscopes or cardiogram machines, displaying different blippy patterns, like the contours on her T-shirt. I knew where I'd seen it now: taken from an album cover. And it wasn't some landscape at all, but the radio signal of a pulsar, a clock ticking in space. I couldn't recall who'd told me that, but it seemed bizarre at the time, an icon from the heart of science manifesting itself in a million apartments, wrapped around a piece of hallowed black vinyl. Like those Mandelbrot sets that started infesting album sleeves and vids for a few months. As if science was the ultimate subculture, somehow, the stuff beneath the floorboards you don't want to know too much about . . .
Incidental detail: the table with the MIDI-stack also held something chunky and metallic, with a pistol-grip, shaped like a Space: 1999 gun. An industrial stapler. This must be what they mean by a bad trip, ha ha.
Concerning the walls: I think the operative term here must be Shrine, in the sense that she'd pinned up dozens of monochrome photographs of me - taken during the last year of my life - some in the street, my distant figure outlined in red, others close up in some club, my eyes blankly uncomprehending. Just like CIA target-acquisition images. And more: complicated graphs and diagrams, scrawled over in felt-tip, fixed in laminated confusion on top of one another. Sonograms, sound spectra, electrical circuit diagrams, technical pieces about entrainment . . . Christ, where had I heard that before, and why did it honestly matter now? And why did she have a map of the UK, webbed with dotted ley-lines?
I was beginning to sweat. Thinking maybe my subconscious had a point; maybe this was a little unusual for a hospital.
She was fiddling with my head. I realised that I was wired up to something, little electrodes around my temples. She was fixing them down after they'd worked loose. She'd fixed things to my chest as well, white discs trailing wires to a mound of humming machines. All I was wearing was a pair of white, grass-stained jeans.
Click, with the Dictaphone. 'Log entry, 05:45. Summary to date.' She coughed before continuing in her soft, educated Tyneside accent. 'My orders were to terminate the subject on sight, in view of the danger to the community at large. At 2:45 a.m. I attempted to zero the subject in the Drome. Termination was impossible without risk of substantial collateral damage to the uninfected. I followed the subject from the Drome, hoping to get a clear shot. At around 3:30, however, I decided to break protocol and bring in the subject for captive examination. If all goes well, I'll be finished in a matter of hours.' A studied pause. 'Our operational integrity will not have been compromised, I promise. While my methods may be my own, I'm fully aware of the consequences for urban panic should our cover be exposed.' She clicked off the recorder, fumbled in her pockets and lit a cigarette from a black carton inscribed with a skull and crossbones, dragging on it thoughtfully before restarting the tape. 'I took a series of EEG readings while the subject was under,' she said, fixing a fresh marker in the little gripper of a pen-trace machine. There was a basket full of output, etched in wavering ink. The machine hummed into life, the pen gliding to and fro. 'Now I'm observing the subject's waking responses to a variety of stimuli.'
'Please don't hurt me . . . I promise I won't tell anyone if you let me go...'
She flicked ash on the floor then took another dismissive draw. 'Subject i
s now entering the plea phase, as you'll have observed. The initial euphoric state induced by the drug is fading; terror is replacing confusion and ambivalence about his situation. Soon his pleas will lose coherence; we'll observe the onset of hysterical shock, infantile withdrawal, regressive Oedipal complexes. These facades exactly mirror the usual psychoses observed in situations of extreme trauma, but are little more than mimetic survival ploys.' Then she leaned closer, so that I could see my expression in her black shades. Not looking too good, actually; I'd developed a spontaneous tic on one eyelid. She placed a set of plastic earplugs over my head, then returned to her MIDI hook-up. Touching keys, a multicoloured graphic of waveform profiles sprang onto one of the screens. Another lit up showing an annotated musical score, a third showing a plan view of a piano keyboard, overlaid with numbers and symbols. 'Don't know if you recognise this,' she said, tapping the waveform with a black fingernail, 'but we've been acquainted with it for some time now. And we've been following you for over a year.' Followed by an aside: 'Mental note: must refrain from any communication with the subject outside of programme parameters. Difficult, though: they look and smell human, and I'm only human myself. Can't help establishing weak emotional ties. Had the same problem with rhesus monkeys at the institute--'