He put down the holdall and understood that he should do this without help. He headed for the door. He knew where he was going. He wanted to call Joe, but, no, he decided, he didn’t want to frighten him.
* * *
Sefton had known there were dance clubs in London that kept going twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but he’d never been to one before. He found it in Vauxhall, a small dark dance floor in the basement of a club, the ethos of which was all concrete warehouse and the smell of poppers. Even at this hour, on a weekday, it was packed with men, dancing and occasionally snogging, when, for fuck’s sake, London was falling apart. He himself hadn’t come here to escape, but to find something. He couldn’t really look down on this lot, though, could he? There’d been a time when he’d have been up for this. The flavour of music was trance, shading into pounding industrial — the kind of music that had sounded distantly in his head back in the Portakabin. Not that he knew one style of dance music from another. He and Joe had once laughed their arses off at a club flier offering ‘intelligent handbag’. There was nothing of the Sight about this place. Nobody here had any strange weight about them.
He’d turned down a covert offer of ‘speed, trips or e’ near the door, but now he wondered if he should have taken them up on that. His reading had told him about mystics who’d made risky attempts to connect with something beyond themselves by pushing their minds into an altered state of consciousness. Doing that by drugs, or at least by street drugs, seemed too easy and would involve someone else’s designs for one’s brain. This had to be his sacrifice. It had occurred to him that he could have gone to a gym and worked his way into the state he wanted to achieve, but there there’d be someone to stop him.
He walked into the middle of the floor, closed his eyes and started to dance.
* * *
He danced for what he was sure was hours. He had his phone switched off; there was no clock visible from the dance floor. His body didn’t know what time it was. There were no clues from the light. He stopped only for visits to the water station, which he’d do at speed, throw it down, throw it over himself, go back.
At first he tried to concentrate on several repetitive phrases that he ran around his head, trying to switch off his thoughts, but found he couldn’t. He let his mind wander. He found all the different muscle groups in his legs, in his arms, his stomach, all starting to ache, so he’d shift a little when they did, and work something else. He let the euphoric breaks lift him, keep him going, then knuckled down to work hard again as the bass slammed back in. Every now and then he’d become aware of a man deliberately dancing near him, and he’d turn away.
He got exhausted and pushed through it, found new energy from somewhere, then burned that away too. He started to feel the aches from where he’d been thrown from the bus. He started to feel that he had to be absolutely weak and helpless to get where he wanted to go. That wasn’t going to be hard. He kept thinking of Jimmy, of how Sarah would be feeling now, of how he’d given Jimmy such useless things with which to protect himself, of how it didn’t feel like an investigation now, but as if they were all just children stumbling towards something terrible and huge that could pick them off when it liked. He thought of Barry Keel, that the man must have had friends, relatives, people who thought he was decent and kind and who loved him.
Was he just hurting himself? That was a deceitful, seductive thought whispering in his ear. He was harming himself in order to let himself feel better about Jimmy, in order to feel that he was working, doing something to take his mind off Jimmy’s death. No, he told himself, these were weasel words, to make him stop dancing. He needed more water. This time he ignored the thirst. He burned the doubt out of himself by keeping going. He needed to rip up all these signifiers of what he was, all these words, and find what was under them, what was real. To do that, he needed to break himself.
He kept dancing.
It began as a pain up his back and chest and into his neck, a pain he feared as the start of something serious, a stroke or heart attack. He’d been told he had to face fear to get to wherever he was going, so he embraced it, pushed at the pain, letting it rack him. He felt his teeth clench and his breath start to come in gasps, felt the air was entering him in a different way now.
He kept dancing.
The pain came properly; it was all through his body, and there were disturbances in his vision, like the start of a firework display inside his eyes.
He kept dancing. He felt a shadow fall over him. He realized he couldn’t see clearly now but he could still see the lights dancing inside his head.
Soon he didn’t know what his body was doing; he was only distantly associated with it. It would continue being alive or it wouldn’t. The pain could be ignored now, because it was only happening to that distant body.
Perhaps he was lying on the dance floor having some sort of fit. An enormous smell rushed into his head. It reminded him of childhood, but he couldn’t place it. It felt somehow like death too.
The lights in his eyes turned and resolved into one shape and locked into place.
They formed a tunnel. A smooth spin of vision showed him that it led straight down. There was a hole in the world. Oh. He was on top of it.
Sefton laughed in joy as he fell down it.
He fell into a wide open space. He couldn’t see it, he couldn’t see anything, but he could feel it. His giddy joy turned to fear. He had to reach out into the darkness with his senses, not with his body. He had to find a way to do that or he’d keep falling in darkness, forever. He was aware, distantly, of his real body, still moving, perhaps doing something different to dancing now, not as warm. In fact it was cold. He concentrated on the pain and the cold, solidified himself around grief and fear.
He felt his way into London and saw it slowly resolve into vision all around him. He felt all the people who made it. The buildings were incidental to the people. The buildings were like a bouncing line on a mixing desk, flying up and down according to the needs and wishes and secrets of the people who pushed and pushed at the metropolis around them. The people made the buildings. He stepped out into what they’d made. He walked along a thousand balconies, hopped from one to another, ran along a line he was making as he went, association to association, along a tightrope across libraries and post offices and spires, the line springing to the beat that he felt all around him. He stopped and looked down at the metropolis around him and felt the compass points, from the big to the small, to the infinity of minuscule ones in between them. He felt how roundabouts and temples of all kinds produced eddies, how big malls created deluges, all to the unconscious will of the people, all manipulated deliberately by those who knew how.
He could feel the orbits of the outer boroughs. He looked up and decided to see them. He found he could. There were lots of them, up and out of the plane of the M25, and down below it, all swinging about Centre Point at their different angles.
The Centre Point building itself wasn’t at the centre, but a little off it, so the wheel of London turned with a continual pulse beat thump around that hub. It was turning the wrong way. Anticlockwise. It was turning as if it had been set in motion with one big push. It wasn’t going in the direction it was meant to roll.
Sefton tried, just for a moment, to set his strength against it, becoming a chalk hill figure on the South Downs and heaving at it, but only for a terrifying instant before he realized that its accumulated momentum would crush him utterly if he tried.
He came out of that and steadied himself. He saw a new hopeful direction, walked the back gardens down by the railway, walked beside every train coming into every station. He felt the flow of people in and out of London. He heard on his own personal soundtrack a speeded-up version of one of those pieces of Fifties ‘bustling people’ music.