When it came he caught the barman’s wrist and leaned over the bar. ‘Is Ronnie in tonight? Ronnie Kazinski?’
But the barman raised a hand to shoosh him as the music stopped, suddenly, on a single drum beat, and reverberated around the club for several seconds. The sea of masks stopped heaving, and there was some sporadic applause as the dancers and drinkers all turned expectantly in the direction of the stage. From a door somewhere at the back, a young man who looked to be in his thirties emerged carrying an artistically tied white cloth bundle suspended on a pole over his shoulder. It looked for all the world like the cartoon bundle in which a stork would deliver a baby. And for a brief moment, a fleeting memory of Laing winged its way through MacNeil’s thoughts.
The hooded dancers had melted away, and somehow left behind them a small folding table centre stage. There were some cheers and whoops as the man placed his bundle on the table. He was dressed all in black. Even his mask was black, and he was almost subsumed by the black wall behind him. The white upper-half of his face glowed in the fluorescent strip lights, and seemed to dance around, disembodied, above the glowing bundle on the table. His hair was thin and wispy, and scraped back across a balding scalp. He spoke into a microphone, leaning on the pole, and his dead voice boomed out above the heads turned, as one, towards him.
‘Art,’ he said, ‘real art, is about life on the edge. It’s about pushing the boundaries as far as they will go, and further. What is a life lived within boundaries set by others? We must make our own boundaries, and draw them in ever widening circles, encouraging others to go with us. We are not our parents, or our parents’ parents. We are we. And we are here and now. The future is ours, and only what we make it. Only by treading that razor-sharp path between life and death, between good taste and bad, between acceptable and unacceptable, will we find true meaning in our lives.’
He looked around the upturned faces watching him in breathless silence. They knew that he was going to do something awful. It’s what most of them had come for. This was underground art. It was what had made the club cult before the emergency. MacNeil looked on, fascinated, unexpectedly caught by the hypnotic quality of the performance, completely unprepared for what was to come.
The man in black leaned over the table and theatrically pulled one end of the knot that held the bundle, and it fell open, revealing a strange, bloody-looking mulch that seemed devoid of form or shape. There was a gasp from the crowd. The man’s eyes shone like coal, black beacons in circles of white. He whipped his mask aside and seized the mulch in both hands, raising it, dripping, high above his head.
His voice, too, rose in pitch. ‘This is life,’ he said. ‘And death.’ Only the hum of the sound system breached the silence in the club. ‘It is just two hours since the heart in this child beat in its mother’s womb. Just two hours since it was ripped from its umbilical, denied any future, bereft of a past. Abortion. The rejection of life. The curse of our age.’
MacNeil watched in disbelief, frozen by horror. He heard a solitary voice whisper, ‘Oh, my God!’
‘Only in life can we find death, and only in death can we find life.’ The man in black suddenly dropped his hands level with his face. He paused for just one moment before gouging with his mouth at the bloody mass he held in them. Gorging himself on it.
Someone in the crowd vomited. There were just a couple of voices raised in disgust or dissent. The only other sounds were the guzzling and snorting of the man on stage as he fed on the contents of his hands. Then just as quickly as he had begun, he finished, dropping the remains of his meal into the bundle on the table. His face was smeared red around his mouth.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ he called, and he retrieved his props and vanished in a flourish back through the door from which he had come.
The lights immediately plunged low, and the music started where it had left off, assaulting the body and the senses. The sea of masks rose and fell in a frantic, stormy swell.
MacNeil was shocked and shaking, and wanted to throw up. He turned back to the bar and the waiting whisky and found the barman grinning at him from behind his mask. ‘Quite something, eh?’ he shouted. He was enjoying the revulsion written clearly on MacNeil’s face. ‘Who was it you were looking for?’
MacNeil threw back his whisky and banged the glass breathlessly on the counter. ‘Ronnie Kazinski.’
The barman frowned for a moment, then enlightenment dawned. ‘Oh, yeah. You mean the crem guy?’
It took MacNeil a second or two to realise that crem meant crematorium. ‘That’s him.’
‘Why don’t you ask Foetus Man?’ he shouted, flicking his head towards the stage. ‘They’re big pals, those two.’
III
The corridor behind the stage led to toilets at the far end. MacNeil could smell stale urine the moment the door from the club closed behind him. But it muted the assault of the music, and for that he was grateful. A harsh yellow strip light reflected off dull linoleum, and MacNeil brushed past framed black and white photographs of some of the celebrated performance art which had made the club its name. The dressing room was the last door on the left. A sign said Private. MacNeil pushed the door open, and Foetus Man turned from the wall mirror above his dressing table, still cleaning the mess from his hands and face with hot, wet towels.
‘Can’t you fucking read?’
MacNeil crossed the room in two strides, grabbed him by his lapels and slammed him hard against the wall, knocking all the breath from his lungs. ‘Yeah, I can read. And right now I’m going to read you your fucking rights, you sick bastard.’ He held him pinned to the wall with one hand and showed him his warrant card with the other. ‘I’ll figure out the charges later. Body snatching, foetus theft, murder, maybe. Someone as sick as you should be locked up for a very long time.’
‘Hey,’ Foetus Man protested. And he started to laugh. ‘Come on, man. You didn’t think any of that was real, did you? I mean, give us a break. I’d have chucked up all over the joint.’ He nodded towards the bloody bundle still sitting on the dressing table. ‘It’s just jam and bread roll. Can’t stand the canteen food, so I bring my own packed lunch.’
He pulled himself free of MacNeil’s slackening grip.
‘It’s just performance, man. People like to be shocked. They like to think it’s real. But deep down they know it’s just a bit of fun.’
‘You call that fun?’
‘It’s pushing the boundaries. I’m engaging the audience, provoking an emotional response. It makes them question stuff, stretches their limits.’
He sat down again and continued wiping his face, and MacNeil watched his reflection in the mirror keeping a wary eye on him.
‘I mean, where would I get a foetus from, man? I got the idea watching this documentary about a Chinese guy who did it for real. I mean, really did it. Now, that was sick. Me? I just enjoy a sandwich.’ He finished cleaning himself and stood up. ‘Was there something else you wanted?’
MacNeil looked at him, filled with anger and contempt and a large residue of the revulsion his performance had induced. He tried to focus on what had brought him here in the first place. ‘I’m looking for Ronnie Kazinski,’ he said.