Police Helicopters ahead cut aggressive circles, buzzing angrily as
they scorched the ground, searching each corner of Fitrovia with the
relentless gaze of the right-angle swivelling, blue searchlights. It was a jungle down there after the bust andthat was the last thing I needed. The artists and poets and musicians were scrabbling around for the fragments of busted inspiration. They were wasted and lost. I looked into their once creative eyes, as I might look into a friend's coffin, afraid of what I would find, but then finding nothing. Cold bruised hands, an anatomical shell, all life, all meaning and love dead.
I can run fast you know, the will of my spirit pushing the tar-burnt diesel engine of my lungs wheezily. I fled with the artists from the Fitzroy Tavern, down
Windmill Street, leaping blindly past the pilgrims to the shrine of consumer-phantasia (under the patronage of Saint Tesco). They were lashed with rain. When the copters had locked off me, (and it wasn't hard to shake them in such a crowd) I paused and turned and viewed the twilight vista: the American Church a damp husk crouching next to the filthy entrance to the station; the glass-clad matchstick of the telecom tower, snapped off just above the now disused satellite dishes. As I stood, there at the end of all things and it seemed like the whole cosmos was crumbling about my head, the warmth of neoteric narcotics enshrouded my excited neuro-tissue, with the calming tendrils of chemical comfort.
The floodlights had disabled my generation's body clocks whilst we were still in the womb and I had no idea what time it was. So I recalibrated the mini LED clock on the inside of my visor. It was time.
"Tonight we were gate-crashing the Robot's ball, boyz and Gurlz. Get ready to automate!
The message from Benjy flashed across the visor's left hand message screen. I lit a cigarette. The 'Metal Mecca' club was only two streets away so I had time. The drug bust in the Fitzroy tavern from which I'd been running was out of site and my pulse slowed to a honey beat. This was good because there'd be no drugs in the club only robo-drugs. The Metal Mecca's venue would change from year to year, or even week to week, looking for cheap rentals in Central London and these were not easy to come by and not often legal. Under constant threat of being closed down for good, intrinsically bound to its die-hard crowd of faithful machines, the event crawled round London like a drunken and degenerate Victorian circus. That night it was in an old office block just off High Holborn. Robos don't like us flesh-fucks. We remind them of their creation, invetion, inception. But the cloakroom attendant mad dogga-robbo Jun was part organic and part metal and the flesh-fuck part wasn't entirely human either. Some renegade labrador DNA woofed tail-up-happy through his arteries. And for a couple of weights of stan-x, the newest designer drug on the circuit, Jun would open the fire escape door for us at a prescribed time like a good-doggy.
Once we were inside I pushed to the bar. There were enough hybrids and half-way houses to warrant selling drinks as well as cortizone for the machines. I ordered a maple-vodka and radishade and tipped the bar tender generously , just in case he got wind of what I was. Benjy came lolling over to me glittering through the crowd of twisted platinum and grinning. He was already drunk and was wearing a cocktail umbrealla behind each ear. He bent his head, nuzzled my neck and slipped his hand into my underwear looking for a wrap. When he'd gone to do himself chemical wise I took a look around. Flesh pierced with metal, metal pierced with flesh. One robo-girl was wearing a human toe through her ear. I started to feel sick .
Cora the robo-DJ was spinning the decks. layering sound upon sound, until it reached a point of such dreamlike beauty, that the crowds' dance would reach a
point of utter frenzy, and the sound system would shake uncontrollably in synchrony with the lighting, pulsating to a rhythm, interlocked in a wild and passionate electronic orgasm.Cora herself, combined with her music to create a paradox. Barely moving, she was like a halcyon, clad in silk and metal, the calm in the centre of the storm.
The music peaked. Vision faded away, until all I saw was nothingness. Whatever, whoever I once had been had travelled far into trance. I was stuffed up with the drug love and became a phantom .
