Dennis and Skippy, meanwhile, are over by the punchbowl watching Ruprecht, who has somehow got talking to a girl.
‘Is he the guy from The Karate Kid?’ the girl is shouting over the music.
‘He’s Professor Emeritus of Physics at Stanford,’ Ruprecht shouts back.
The girl looks utterly lost for a reply; after a few moments, she simply gives up and walks away. Ruprecht, who initiated the conversation only because the girl, dressed as a saucy waitress, was carrying a chocolate cake, which turned out to be fake, is unphased, and rejoins the others just as Mario trudges over with a grim expression.
‘How’s it going, Mario?’ Dennis asks innocently.
‘Pff, fuck these school-going girls.’ Mario makes a dismissive gesture. ‘In Italy, I prefer to date the girls who are in college – those who are nineteen, twenty, and have a good knowledge of sexual techniques. These girls, who are repressed and frigid, do not know which way is up.’
‘They don’t know much about science either,’ Ruprecht adds.
‘Also, what is with this music from days of Yore, that is badly cramping my style?’
Mario’s not the only one asking. Over in the DJ booth, Wallace Willis has just segued from Led Zeppelin into ‘All Right Now’ and is so engrossed in Paul Kossoff’s classic riff that at first he pays no attention to the irate voices emanating from somewhere below: ‘Yo, cracker!’ ‘Hey, honky – yo, you jus’ gonna ignore me?’ Finally he realizes that the voices are addressing him, and peers over the side of the booth to see two smallish, disputatious-looking boys in trousers the size of refrigerators making inscrutable hand-gestures at him. ‘That’s right, nigga, we be talkin’ to you!’
‘Dang, G, what up wid dis music y’all playin?’
Wallace, who’s dressed in a pristine white sailor-suit and holding an enormous lollipop, slides off his headphones. ‘What?’ he says.
‘Nigga, this be the shit my dad listens to!’ one of them says.
‘Yeah, homes, what is it, One Hundred Greatest Jeans Commercials?’ the other adds, waving a plastic machine-gun at him.
‘This is Free,’ he informs them.
‘G, I don’t care if it cost you fifty fuckin’ dollars, put on som’in wi’ bass!’
‘Yeah, motherfucker, this ain’t yo’ Aunt Mabel’s birthday party, play some hip-hop, dawg!’
‘No requests,’ Wallace says.
‘You makin’ a mistake,’ one of the voices warns.
‘The Acting Principal asked me to be the DJ,’ Wallace replies primly, and replaces the headphones over his ears. The two bad-tempered gangstas, both of whom are, incontestably and in spite of their best efforts, white, lour at him a moment longer, and then abruptly disappear.
Midway through the next song – ‘Hold the Line’ by Toto – the sound cuts out. The crowd shuffles to a halt, and the hall is filled with a frazzle of consternation. It can’t be the storm that’s to blame this time, because the turntables are still lit up, and the disco lights still skirling over the now-static heads. There must be a connection loose somewhere. Wallace Willis casts about for grown-up assistance, but can’t seem to locate Mr Fallon and Miss McIntyre. He unlatches the half-door to his booth, descends the steps and is stooping to examine the jumble of cables beneath it when the music starts up again. Everybody cheers and resumes dancing. But the song that is playing now is not the song that was playing a moment ago; in fact it is not a song that features in Wallace’s music collection at all. Wait, he shouts, stop dancing, this is the wrong song! This is the wrong song! But nobody appears to hear him – they are too busy throwing gangsterish shapes and shaking their booty to the interloping song’s extremely loud bass line…
Bass. It’s only now that Wallace realizes what has happened. This is not a programming error, or a crossed wire, or a freak occurrence brought about by the storm. His sound system has been hijacked! By the boys with the giant trousers!
I’m a case of champagne and she’s falled off the wagon / I’m slayin the ho like St George slayed the dragon…
Hunched over, he follows the wires in the hope of finding the point where the takeover has occurred. But it’s so dark, and behaviour on the dancefloor is getting increasingly raucous, and after he has been bumped three or four times Wallace decides to concentrate instead on finding the teachers. Even after a full circuit of the hall, though, they are nowhere to be seen. Wallace begins to get worried. The unauthorized music is having a strange effect on people, making them shoutier, jumpier, and their dance moves decidedly more provocative. Things are in danger of getting out of hand. Where are the teachers? A terrible thought hits him. Are the wide-trousered boys behind this disappearance too? He remembers those Uzis slung around their necks – is the whole party now under the control of gun-toting, rap-loving gangstas?
‘But it’s for charity!’ Wallace squeaks, out loud. No one hears. Picturing the two unfortunate teachers tied up in a closet somewhere, he hurries towards the back door, fighting his way through writhing bodies that, a moment ago, belonged to titchy piffling second-years, but now, as if bathed in some new colour of light, appear quite unfamiliar…
A group of boys has managed to fish down some of the black lost-soul-like balloons, unknotted their umbilici and sucked in their contents; now they are rapping over the bassline in voices squeaky with helium, like a chorus of gangsta rats. One of them, a Colonel Kilgore with a cheroot between his teeth and cheeks daubed with axle-grease, reaches into his fatigues and pulls out his phone: pressing a button to call up a message that reads:
LET ME IN
Strafing the dancers with his machine-gun, he moves towards the double-doors…
She gots the assitude/And I gots the latitude / We in-ex-tric-er-ab-ly linked, like heart attacks and fatty food…
The floor quivers with bass; the staticky, alien energy that had been buzzing about the edges of everything earlier in the night seems now to converge, infiltrating the space like an invisible gas.
‘Hey, Skipford, look, your girlfriend is on her own!’
‘Her friend ran off to get sick, you should go and talk to – hey, she’s looking at us! Hallo there! Hey! That’s right, over he– ow! What?’
‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘What’s the problem? You want to talk to her, right? Do you want to talk to her or don’t you?’
‘Well, yeah, but not right this second…’
‘Skippy, if you want to talk to her, I can now reveal to you a chat-up line that is one hundred per cent foolproof and fail-safe. It is something I have been developing for several months for personal use, but I will tell it to you because you are my friend, and I would rather see you nailing this hot bitch than Carl, who has spat in my lunch more times than I can count. So here it is: when I see a chick I want to score, I go up to her and say, Pardon me, you are stepping on my dick.’
Quizzical looks.
‘Because my dick is so long, you see, that it comes all the way down my trousers and out onto the floor.’
Silence, and then: ‘Let me give you some advice, Skippy – never, ever do anything Mario tells you. Ever.’
‘Yeah, Skip, just go over and say hi, that’s all you need to do.’
‘Okay, well, maybe I’ll just wait a little while and then…’
‘Do it now, her friends will be back in a minute.’
‘Yeah, or someone else’ll make a move on her.’