Stag Night

STAG NIGHT

Dedicated to the late Joey Ramone

The pogo-dancing club is on the other side of the railway bridge.
That's the main obstacle, as far as Frank's concerned. The bridge has
something of the grandeur of the industrial age, with its towering
pillars and enormous arches. Bridge seems like the wrong word. It's
more of a tunnel really.
Before entering the tunnel on the way down the hill, he is greeted not
by a triple-headed hound or a riddle spinning sphinx, nor even a
phantom gondolier, but by a mouldy, grey mattress, tarred and feathered
by pigeons. Nearby Frank glimpses a man, sprawled face down, one arm
apparently either tucked underneath him or concealed by some of the
wreckage. Must be a drunk, thinks Frank. Still I wonder why he doesn't
at least sleep on the mattress, as grim as it is, instead of trying to
use all that rubbish as a blanket. Maybe I should go and help
him.
Frank glances at another passer by, who glances at the man and walks
on. This must be normal in a large urban conurbation, thinks Frank, and
does the same.
On a hot day, with verdantly overgrown banks at its entrance, the
tunnel provides a welcome shady passage as you walk back from town.
However you're never sure if the drops of moisture that occasionally
land on your head are water or pigeon droppings. If it weren't for the
petrol fumes, you could close your eyes and imagine you were walking
through a vast man-made cave. But when you opened them again, you would
see the graffiti and bird shit splattering the blackened bricks like
paint stains on a labourer's trousers.
Not the most scenic of routes, considers Frank, a country boy. But he
has no choice. He can't chicken out of the stag night, no matter how
alien it seems to his sensibilities. He wonders what a pogo-dancing
club is. Maybe it's a new kind of fusion between pole dancing and gogo
dancing, whatever they might be. Then his eye is drawn to a pale,
streaky, dismembered letter on the wall. Remembering his Sesame Street,
he grins to himself: this railway bridge is brought to you by the
letter N. The N is truncated, as though the dauber was cut off, not
just in mid-sentence, but in mid-letter. But what does this mutilated
letter stand for? Wonders Frank. Surely it can't stand alone. 'No War'?
'No Road'? 'No Future'? 'NF'? Frank has no way of knowing whether, this
town is a stronghold of the Left or Right. He is a stranger in
town.
Further down the wall from the letter, Frank notices something else.
One of the narrow, slanting ledges near the bottom of the arch-shaped
indentations in the walls has become disfigured by a kind of dark,
greyish yellow blight. Perhaps they have become infected by steady
onslaught of moisture and aviary faeces, or perhaps this ceaseless
dripping has left unwholesome deposits on the ledges. It reminds Frank
of certain spongy rocks he once saw in Wookey Hole Caves, but he does
not investigate further. Noting the feathers glued to the ledge, he
hurries on, glad that he does not have to go through this poisonous
echo chamber every day.
It's not so much this downhill journey into town that fills him with
dread. It is, after all, not yet fully dark. Rather he dreads the
journey back to the guesthouse later on. Still, he should be fairly
obliterated by then, and in the company of fellow carousers as he
staggers home from the -
Glancing back at the tapered off N, he is struck by a thought, and
delves in his wallet for his invitation. It is the first letter of the
pogo dancing club's name: the Nutlatch.

Frank is relieved to discover that the Nutlatch is not the sleazy strip
joint he expected. He can hear a tapping from inside, multiplied into a
metal chattering. Intrigued, he enters, through a door watched over by
a pair of antlers. Frank approves - a pleasantly rustic touch! He is
less keen on the liquid-solid substance that seems to be holding the
trophy in place. Greyish-yellow it is, not unlike the substance he saw
under the railway arch. Then it was obscured by the cavernous darkness.
But it doesn't look any more pleasant in the light of the nearby street
lamp. Perhaps it's some kind of damp-proof wax sealant, thinks Frank.
But if so, it isn't doing a very good job: there seem to be whitish,
mildewed patches on its surface. Frank hurries inside.
The interior of the building resembles a church hall disco, all wooden
floors and scurried cloakrooms. Through the inner doors he can the
tapping, or rather clattering, louder now. Once inside the main door
the noise must be deafening. Nevertheless, Frank can just make out the
music, and its lyrics bleated out by the adenoidal vocalist:
Something about Cretans?. Cretans?.
Strange, thinks Frank. There was nothing on the invitation to indicate
a Greek theme. Now he braces himself for broken plates, and flying
taramosalata. Indeed, the song's warning about keeping your feet in
would suggest some kind of crazy Greek dance. From the unholy racket
behind the inner door, you'd think the dance hall contained a gigantic,
black iron typewriter. Frank notes the deft use of sharp rhymes to
drive the song's point home, and is itching to see the source of the
noises.
This doesn't seem like Barry's scene, thinks Frank, approaching the
inner door. Despite his misgivings, Frank approaches closer to the
door, as if waved on by a hand in his mind's eye. Indeed there is a
very visible hand in the corner of his eye, pointing some kind of
cylindrical object towards the inner door. Now he is close enough to
touch the door, and through it he steps.

The first thing he notices is the floor.
The name, architecture and decorative style of the building, like a
school or village hall, would lead you to expect a wooden floor, as in
the foyer of the building. That the floor is fashioned from sheet
metal, albeit dented sheet metal, goes some way towards explaining the
infernal racket now pounding on his ears, particularly in the light of
the nature of the dancing taking place in the hall.
The singer is only visible as a silhouette behind a back-lit, white
screen. The voice has become raw and croaky, now telling his listeners
about how everyone wants to look the other way. From what he can see of
the source of the voice, Frank isn't surprised.
He looks at the glinting, battered floor, than at the corkscrew pogo
sticks beating an irregular tattoo upon it. The pogo dancers wear long,
black coats that conceal their legs. In the epileptic lightning flash
of the strobe light, you could almost believe that the dancers have
pogo sticks instead of legs, even as the Ancient Greeks believed the
rider was at one with the horse, and so the myth of the centaur was
born.
But satyrs rather than centaurs are what spring to mind when Frank's
gaze reaches the heads of the dancers, which are crowned by the antlers
of what must be the skulls of stags. These head-dresses remind Frank
why he is here, and he looks around the hall for a familiar face. Maybe
his stag party hasn't arrived yet. Maybe the faces of Barry and his
companions are concealed behind the skeletal masks, but he does not
care to look closely enough at the death's heads to make contact with
whatever eyes might peer out. The oddly shifting, not to say squirming
silhouette behind the screen is now warning his listeners that he is
going to make them open up and bleed.
Trying to look at anything but the screen and the dance floor, he
notices others sat huddled on wooden benches around the edge of the
dance hall. They appear to be female, veiled, and have bare feet (not
pogo sticks) that they keep well hidden under the benches. Why are they
so protective of their feet? Wonders Frank. Is it something to do with
the song? The line about keeping your feet in from the hopping Cretans?
He is on the point of approaching these wallflowers, and asking them,
but is interrupted by a piercing scream that can be heard over both the
dancers' clatter and the thrumming music, which is now issuing a
dirge-like message about a pain that leaves no stain.
The nasal singer is right, thinks Frank: it will be easy to clean that
blood off the stainless steel floor. Obviously someone didn't keep her
feet in! The someone hobbles past, with nasty wounds like stigmata on
her bare foot, whose toes Frank now notices are joined by flaps of pale
skin. Like demented shot putters, the human corkscrews are whirling the
other women around them.
The women are wallflowers no longer. Their partners' antlers twitch
feverishly under the strobe.

Frank has seen enough.
Perhaps he has arrived too early, for he was not asked to pay any door
toll or offered cloakroom facilities on the way in. Exiting the hall,
he sees that there is now someone on the door, a middle aged man with
dark glasses and black hair oiled back.
'Excuse me, was there a stag party booked in tonight?' he asks the
man.
'Stag party?' repeats the man. 'Oh, we caters for all sorts here, sir.
Stags, hens, mermaids, centaurs, and some even I can't name. But I dare
say you could, sir. You looks like a well-read sort of fellow, if you
don't mind me saying so, sir.'
Frank acknowledges the compliment with a thin smile.
'Is there a booking for a Mr. Barry Grahams?' persists Frank. 'Only the
invitation clearly says?'
The man grabs the piece of laminated card.
'Where did you get this hand bill?'
'It's an invitation', corrects Frank. 'It was sent in the post.'
'Ah, well that's all right then, sir.' The invitation is grudgingly
handed back to Frank. 'I wouldn't like to think that anyone had been
foolish enough to flypost anything with our name on it again. I trust
you do understand my concerns, sir. It's just that if anyone sticks up
a poster with our name on it, it's us that gets hauled up before the
beak, sir. It's us that gets fined and our licence revoked, not them,
the silly young fools! But they won't be told, will they! Let me tell
you, sir, we even had one spray painting the name of the club up on the
railway bridge, or at least he tried to?'
The man on the door is warming to his theme, his blank dark lenses
staring at a point on the wall behind Frank's head:
'Thought he was doing us a favour, didn't he, sir? Giving us free
advertising, he said! Well, we soon taught him that that's the sort of
favour we can do without?'
The door keeper's black shades are pointing at the same point on the
wall behind Frank's head. Frank does not turn to see what he is staring
at, but carries on listening politely to the man's monologue. Frank
does not turn to see the pallid hand of glory nailed by its wrist to
the wall behind his head, the rusty spray can still clutched in its
stiff digits.

Outside the rain is drenching all. Frank finds this no deterrent to
leaving the Nutlatch. Rather he feels relieved to be out of the stuffy
club.
He passes a sodden takeaway carton. Already bleached by the day's sun,
the waterlogged chips float in the night's rainwater like drowned,
white worms.
He still cannot figure out what happened to Barry, and has a nasty
suspicion that he has become the butt of a cruel practical joke. But
it's the bridegroom that's supposed to have pranks played on him on
stag nights! Thinks Frank.
A nightmarish image hovers before his brain: Barry and the other Boys
guffawing and slapping each other on the back, Barry turning around to
him to jeer: so where's your classical education got you now,
Frank?
He lets the water stream down his face, washing these unhelpful
thoughts into the gutter that is babbling like a brook.
Now comes the moment he has been dreading. Now he must run the gauntlet
through the tunnel under the railway bridge. First he must walk under a
smaller railway bridge, between the thickly wooded banks, draped in ivy
tendrils at its approach (slipping on a slick dark, ice rink of pigeon
shit, narrowly avoiding a nasty fall), before scurrying through one of
the arches that lead into the tunnel. His heart pounding, he marches
rapidly through the vast, dripping cave, not looking behind him once.
He does not pause even when he emerges back into the pouring rain,
hurrying on past the abandoned mattress, not even glancing at the
one-handed, feather-splattered figure half-interred in the garbage
beside it.