Afterlight

CHAPTER 58
10 years AC
O2 Arena - ‘Safety Zone 4’, London



Jacob had been transported to another world; a world of neon lights rushing past his car on either side leaving lens-burn streaks of colour, pinks, electric blues, aquamarine greens. Vertical billboards glowed dancing Japanese characters, and streets thick with whizzing brand names he vaguely recognised: Sony, Atari, Panasonic, Mitsubishi.
Flashing yellow chevrons appeared in the corner of the wide plasma screen in front of him; an early warning of a sharp right-hand turn coming up ahead. He eased back on the arcade booth’s accelerator pedal and prepared to make the turn as soon as he could make out where the turning was amongst the hectic whir of flashing graphics on-screen. It wasn’t often he missed his old glasses, cracked, scuffed and discarded a lifetime ago, but he certainly missed them now.
Easing back further on his pedal, the engine noise, pumping out of the seat speakers either side of his head, dropped in timbre from a high-pitched Formula One scream to the throaty roar of a performance car. He picked out the turning ahead and was spinning the wheel in both white-knuckled hands when Nathan’s glistening Lotus blurred past, shunting him into a barrier for good measure and leaving him in his wake as he accelerated up the dual-lane Tokyo highway. The boys gathered around Nathan’s booth, leaning on the headrest, roaring with laughter, slapping his shoulders and urging him on.
Jacob struggled to reverse out of the barrier as other cars barged past him knocking him back into it, one after the other. He could hear fresh choruses of laughter coming from the other player booths further along.
Yeah, everyone pick on me, why don’t you?
He muttered under his breath, not concerned that anyone was actually going to hear him over the pumping beat of music and the mechanical whine of a dozen racing cars. There was no one gathered round his booth urging him on.
He was just about managing to disentangle himself once more from the barrier when the words RACE OVER punched their way out of the screen.
Everyone howled in unison as the results flashed up on-screen. He could see Nathan hadn’t won, but had done well, fourth out of twelve. Jacob watched his friend, several booths along, clamber out of his seat casually knuckling and high-fiving the swarm of boys around him.
Jacob climbed out of his seat and was quickly replaced by another, smaller, boy lingering nearby, eager to get in on the next race.
A strobe on the large circular lighting rig above the stage kicked in amidst whirling spotlights that cast multicoloured beams down through the thin pall of cigarette smoke above. The strobe made everyone appear to move with a jerkiness that reminded him of one of those Victorian moving picture-show drums that played a looped animation you could view through a slit. He squinted. His eyes were already tired from concentrating on the race and stinging from the smoke. The strobe wasn’t helping things.
He caught sight of Nathan’s face over the heads and shoulders of his fan club. Eye contact for a brief moment. His friend nodded and winked at him as he took a pull on a long crinkly cigarette pressed into his hand by someone.
Jacob wasn’t ready for that. Not for the dope. Not that anyone had bothered asking him yet.
Then Nathan was gone, whisked away by several boys, shouting over each other, wanting to see how big a deal he was on ‘StreetFighter’. Nathan said something that had them all roaring with laughter again as they bustled him away through the maze of machines.
Jacob slurped another mouthful from his can. The cider had tasted pretty good with the first bubbly mouthfuls. But now, running flat, he could taste the burn of alcohol. Not a particularly nice taste but at least the buzz he was beginning to get from it was making him feel a little better.
Another race had started and boys were cheering and jeering and trash-talking each other. Nathan was gone. He felt self-conscious standing amidst the carnival of flashing computer game colours and the press of sweaty bodies, pushing hurriedly past him from one group of arcade machines to the next. Holding on to his can of cider and looking for someone, anyone, to talk to, he felt conspicuously alone.
He wished Leona was here.
She’d be loving this, the lights and the pumping sound system. He imagined it was just like one of those rock festivals she used to go to. He looked around. He presumed there’d be more girls than he could see here, though, at a rock festival. Amongst the fifty or sixty boys at the party and not on duty, he’d counted only about a dozen girls. All of them about Helen’s age or thereabouts, drinking and smoking, getting the occasional go on the pinball machines.
His eyes followed them, glancing at their bare midriffs, the odd enticing flash of a pale leg, the curve of a slender shoulder. Some of them wore make-up smudged on so thick they looked like the models he’d seen on faded advertising billboards; all charcoal dark eyes, ghost-pale cheeks and coral-pink lips.
He was beginning to feel a frustrating yearning in his groin; frustrating because the girls all seemed to be taken; chaperoned . . . led from one machine to the next, more often than not, with one or more male arm wrapped protectively around their necks or waists. Led like poodles being taken for a walk.
Even if there weren’t other boys around - boys who looked like they’d knuckle his face if he even tried looking at their girl - he doubted he’d know what to say to one of them anyway. Although the cider was giving him a tingling urge and just a little courage, he was still about a million miles away from actually walking up to one of them and trying out a simple ‘hello’.
He felt a heavy hand land on his shoulder. He turned round to see it was Snoop’s second-in-command, Dizz-ee.
‘A’ight?’ he greeted him loudly.
Jacob nodded and cracked an awkward too-cheerful grin. ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ He nodded. ‘What a great party!’
Dizz-ee hunched his shoulders casually. ‘Once a fortnight. S’what we got goin’ on here. Right?’
Jacob nodded his head vigorously. ‘Cool.’
‘Praetorians play real hard. S’only ’cause we grind hard too, man. This time tomorrow you gonna be all sweared-in and wearing one of the orange jackets. Get dues from the others.’
Jacob’s vacant smile told Dizz-ee he was falling behind.
‘Get respect, bro . . . the jacket gets you respect.’
Jacob got the distinct impression Dizz-ee had been sent over to chat to him. There was something forced about his grin, the body language. As if he’d much rather be elsewhere.
Dizz-ee nodded at the racing booths. ‘So, you play the games?’
‘Yeah, they’re excellent fun. I think I’m a bit rubbish, really. I—’
‘What about them?’ Dizz-ee said, tipping a nod towards a young girl nearby, watching the current race as she tottered unsteadily on heels too high for her. She pulled slowly on a long joint, trying to look grown up and sophisticated as she did so. The make-up, glittering rouge plastered on her cheeks and crimson lipstick smudged around her mouth, oddly made her look younger, like a child playing at dressing up in her mother’s clothes.
‘You like the look of our girlfriends?’
He watched as young male hands crawled over her like spiders; cupping, squeezing. The girl ignored the pawing, glassy-eyed and lost somewhere beyond the plasma screen in a cartoon Sega-world of golden rings and sprinting hedgehogs.
‘They’re . . . sort of . . . yeah, very pretty.’
Dizz-ee found that funny, shook his head. ‘Pretty? Heh, that’s the gayest sounding shit I heard today.’ He slapped Jacob’s shoulder again. A smile smeared too easily across his face.
He’s laughing at me.
‘Hey, jus’ kidding, man. Listen, you ever boned, bro?’
‘Boned?’
‘You ever do a girl, Jake?’
He was about to ask what Dizz-ee meant by ‘do’, but then the penny finally dropped. He realised Dizz-ee was talking about shagging. No. He’d never. There were plenty of times he wished he’d had, though.
‘No, I uh . . . never had a girlfriend. Not yet. I was—’
‘F*ck!’ Dizz-ee doubled over laughing. ‘Come on, you shittin’ me?’
‘No . . . I’m not sh—’
‘So, lemme go set you up with a girlfrien’, bro. Right now.’
‘What? No . . . I, no really I’m—’
Dizz-ee grabbed hold of both his shoulders firmly, spun him round and began pushing him forward, threading him across the crowded stage, past games booths, past clusters of turning heads, amused faces, some slyly smiling, others laughing openly. Jacob felt his face flush bright crimson, sensed he was being set up for some kind of a very public prank. He caught a glimpse of Nathan on the other side of the stage, playing a dancing game, a joint hanging from his mouth. Snoop was beside him cheering him on as he duelled deftly on a grid of glowing pads against some other boy.
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Hey, be chill,’ replied Dizz-ee.
In the middle of the arena’s circular black stage was an opening that led down a short flight of stairs into darkness.
‘What’s down there?’
Dizz-ee, still steering his shoulders, pushed him forward down into the opening. ‘We call it the cattle shed. Gonna get you some fresh p-ssy.’
As they made their way down the stairs, he noticed a sign stencilled on the wall beside him; ‘Sound System Storage: Stage Hands Only’.
‘What’s down here?’
‘You’ll love it.’
‘You got animals down here?’
Dizz-ee snorted and shook his head, laughing. ‘Zoop-zoop!!’ He flicked his wrist, clacking one finger against another. ‘No, man, it’s not cows an’ donkeys an’ shit. It’s where we keep the girls.’
A row of spotlights, recessed into the low ceiling, cast muted light down on a short passageway off which two dozen black doors opened. On each of them were words stencilled in scuffed and peeling white paint: ‘Amps’, ‘Spkrs’, ‘Cables’, ‘FX units’, ‘Lighting’, ‘Monitors’, ‘Props’. Like the Chief’s backstage quarters, grey corded carpet lined the walls and deadened the sound. Unlike the Chief’s quarters, though, across much of it the boys had left their mark, personalising it with livid-coloured graffiti tags and cartoon depictions of the dome, of London, fire, riots.
Most of the storage room doors were open. Jacob realised the girls he’d seen upstairs on the stage . . . these were their bedrooms. This backstage or, more precisely, beneath-stage, storage area had been converted into a dormitory of sorts. He noted sturdy-looking brass padlocks dangling from each door handle.
Dormitory? More like a prison.
‘We got a new one down here. One that come in recently and needs some breakin’ in.’
‘I’m not sure I—’
‘So, you serious? You never boned, right?’
Jacob shook his head as Dizz-ee guided him towards a closed door at the far end of the passage.
‘What about a bee-jay, man? You ever been blown?’
Jacob shook his head, not really sure what he was being asked. He supposed he’d probably know if he’d ever been ‘bee-jayed’.
‘Shit . . . you ever even felt up a girl, bro? You know? Got a titty-squeeze or something?’
‘No . . . I . . . I’ve never done a . . . a titty-squeeze.’
Dizz-ee shook his head again, incredulous. ‘Where the f*ck you been all these years? You ain’t lived at all. Sex is the shit. Getting the poonie is tight. Better than getting all f*ck-faced on that bodizzie, better than dope, man.’
Jacob felt the very first tickling of excitement. It felt wrong, but also unavoidably insistent.
The last time he’d felt like this had been the time he’d walked in on Anita and Claire; two middle-aged women who’d both put some ‘wants’ on the shopping list but failed to turn up at the canteen to collect. Pulling aside the beach towel ‘door’ to their quarters, he’d seen them entwined with each other; he’d seen absolutely everything. There’d been many other times, of course. The accidental revealing of flesh here and there; unavoidable really. There was even a stack of flesh magazines that he and Nathan had found in a shop ashore and shared between them. He’d found a little guilty relief with them over the years.
But nothing compared to the growing buzz of excitement he could feel right now.
‘The girlfriends are the best. We’ve trained ’em up to do anything. I mean, you ask, man, and they’ll do it for you. Anything you want.’
They stopped outside the closed door. ‘New one’s in here.’ He let go of Jacob’s shoulder and turned him round to face him. ‘She’s a newb. So you and me goin’ to be in for a bit of bucking and tossing, a’ight? You gotta hang on to stay on, yeah?’
Dizz-ee pulled out a key ring that jangled noisily. ‘You need me to hold her down for you? No problem. You need to do that for me, too.’
Hold her down.
There was something about that phrase that instantly deflated his hunger. Hold her down? Jacob had assumed there was a girl in there who might just want him - just like those ladies in their flesh magazines, with their come-and-get-me-now eyes and their legs spread wide.
‘Hold her down?’
Dizz-ee grinned. ‘Yeah, man. She’s gonna buck and twist for you, bro. They always do first few times. S’what makes the new ones fun.’
‘This girl,’ Jacob nodded at the door in front of him, ‘she . . . she won’t want me?’
Dizz-ee cocked an eyebrow. ‘You shittin’ me, right? She’s gonna buck and scream like a banshee.’ He grinned. ‘Like one of them cowboy rod-e-o rides. The harder they fight you off, better it is. Trust me.’
He slipped a key into the lock and turned it. The thick brass padlock sprung open with a heavy click. ‘An’ shit . . . if she don’t want play along, you can slap her up. Just don’t knock her out or nothing, okay? There’s other boys I promised could cotch with her later on tonight.’ He grinned again. ‘Know what I mean?’
‘I don’t want to do this any more,’ said Jacob.
Dizz-ee looked at him as if he’d spoken some foreign language. ‘You don’t want to get a f*ck?’
Jacob shook his head.
‘Shit, man, it’s a perk of the f*ckin’ job. It’s here on tap. You gotta take some p-ssy. It’s like medicine. Rite of passage an’ all that.’
He pulled the heavy door open.