that the decor was more flamboyant: polished boards with tiger skins in the hall and woven beaded hangings on the wall that showed erotic scenes in a certain amount of strategic relief. The party was being held in a big double room with the dividing cedar doors thrown back: the ceilings were mostly mirrored as were the walls; the floor was a deep white cloud and there were two conversation pits, a number of low poufs covered with animal skins and a couple of things that looked like trampolines but were probably couches. In one corner of the room there was a well stocked bar. The topless attendant wore high heels and fishnet stockings and also had the job of feeding cassettes into the huge Sony tape deck.
About thirty people stood or lounged around talking, drinking, smoking, looking at themselves in the mirrors. A few swayed to the music; others just swayed. Ginny led me over to the bar, where there were a couple of shallow silver dishes filled with white powder; there was a tiny gold spoon on a long chain attached to each dish. Ginny dipped and conveyed the spoon to her nose with a rock steady hand.
‘Your motto seems to be fun is for later, Cliffy.’ She sniffed the powder up one nostril. ‘Mine’s fun is for now!’ She took a cigarette out of a box on the bar, held it for the attendant to light, puffed and drifted away. I looked along the bar at the dishes of powder and the bowls of grass with papers and filters; there were also little silver pill boxes and some small glass phials set out on pads of crushed velvet.
The barmaid’s nipples were painted black and she had some trouble keeping them out of the work area. Her eyes were bright and glittering under gold-dusted lashes.
‘Care for something?’
‘Water,’ I said.
She looked confused and took one long black-painted fingernail to her mouth. ‘I’m sorry, we haven’t…’
‘I was kidding. I’ll have a gin and tonic, light on the gin.’
She made the drink quickly and expertly and selected a long, silver cylinder from under the bar. ‘Care for a dash?’
I shook my head, took the drink and looked around for something to look at. The room was filling up fast, and I concluded that there must be other comfort stations in the apartment, because people came in through the doors with glasses full and joints aglow. I went out a door, after pausing in front of it to make sure it really was a door. The music and smoke, from other speakers and other throats, followed me down to the kitchen and into other rooms. The whole place was dark, and the decor gave it a dreamy, insubstantial quality: dark walls with deliberately shadowy corners, mirrors and leather and fibreglass furniture that seemed to writhe where it stood. Nothing was rectangular; day beds and divans were oval; the bath was a modular unit you had to dive into and curl up in; the toilet was a series of hoses with attachments moulded to fit the different private parts. One door off the main hallway was locked.
When I got back under the mirrored ceilings, the party was beginning to swing: the music was louder and the people seemed to be laughing more, and coming more often into minor physical collisions. In one corner a group of men in dinner suits had formed a sort of rugby line-out and was tossing a small woman aloft and passing her from hand to hand. A man in a long white caftan was dancing with a woman in a tail coat and all the fittings, and two women who looked like twins in identical lame dresses were inspecting a selection of their images in a mirrored corner.
I spotted Ginny through the murk, and went over to her. She was smashed to bits, but still riding high with energy and alertness. She grabbed my arm and we almost tumbled together down into one of the conversation pits.
‘Dee,’ she said, ‘here’s this fabulous man, Cliff somebody.’
‘Hello, somebody.’ Deirdre Kelly was a long, dark woman wearing a long, dark dress. She had black shiny hair and a creamy white skin. The dress left her, slim arms bare; she had wide expanding metal bands around her upper arms and metal bracelets around her wrists. When she moved her arms the muscles rippled and swelled like Lothar’s. I smiled at her and said something about it being an interesting party, while I waited for Ginny to drop me right in by saying I had business with her. But that information had dropped out for Ginny long ago; she got up to dance with a Jamaican in stretch jeans, who called her ‘Sugar’ and whose idea of dancing was to spread his big hands over her buttocks and press her hard into where the denim bulged the most.
Dee Kelly saw me watching the performance and frowned. ‘You seem a little out of place here, somebody.’
‘Why d’you say that?’
She reached for a silver dish and used the gold spoon expertly. She dipped and held it out to me. I shook my head. She smiled and took a brown cigarette from a box. I shook my head again. She took one of the little phials and held it between thumb and forefinger.
‘No again, huh?’
I nodded.
She took a disposable syringe from a pocket in her dress and pulled off the plastic caps from both ends. ‘See what I mean?’ She suddenly jabbed the needle into my thigh and pressed the plunger. I jumped and swore. She laughed. ‘You don’t fit in. What brings you here?’
I plucked the needle out and broke off the short, thin, metal spike. ‘What was that?’
‘Nothing. Water. Just a joke.’ She gripped my arm and pulled; I was struggling to get up but she seemed strangely strong. ‘Relax, relax.’
I didn’t relax; I felt frozen and dumb. ‘Ginny brought me.’
‘I know that! She’s stupid enough to do anything.’
‘Stupid?’ I got my thick tongue around the word and idea. ‘Stupid? Living like this? Having all this fun?’
She gave me a look that would have cut glass. Her face was boldly made up as if to be photographed or seen from a distance. Up close there was a grossness to her features: wide pores, large ears under the shiny hair and a suggestion of bad breath. Her mouth was loose and moist and she kept it that way by frequent use of her tongue which was purplish from contact with her lipstick. I sat down, heavily.
‘She’s stupid, all right,’ she said. ‘If you needed brains for fucking, she’d be a virgin.’ The aphorism seemed to please her; she leaned back and stretched. She had heavy, full breasts which rose and pushed out the front of her dark silk dress. She saw me looking and licked her lips, then she dipped the spoon again and sniffed the stuff down to her ankles.
I thought: Half-fucked, half-drunk, half-drugged. Dee Kelly was going all the way; she closed her eyes for a full minute and when she opened them they were alert and shrewd, beacons of her brain. ‘I’ll ask you again,’ she said. ‘Why are you here?’
English suddenly seemed like a foreign language to me. ‘To see Bill Mountain,’ I said thickly.
The name jolted her although she tried to hide the reaction. A sort of tremor ran the full, long length of her, and she drew her knees up and closed her eyes in a spasm.
‘Who did you say?’
The lassitude dropped away. Now I felt bright and chatty, communicative and in control. ‘William Mountain. He’s an amazing man. He’s writing a novel-and you’re in it, Mrs Kelly, in a starring role.’
She threw back her head and laughed in a sharp cackle. ‘Mrs Kelly! God, it’s been years since anyone called me that. What else d’you know about me?’
‘I don’t know anything about you and I don’t want to know anything. But I think you’ll lead me to Mountain.’
‘What’s your business with him?’
The music was louder still, and the party noise was mounting to a roar. I had to lean close to her to be heard, and that rank smell got stronger. ‘That’s between him and me. My feeling is he’s going to be here tonight and I’m sticking close to you just in case you’ve got some idea of warning him off. You could call your watchdog in from the door, but the noise we’d make between us’d finish off your party.’
‘I’m among friends here.’
I looked around the room: everyone I could see was drunk or stoned or both. A couple of the men looked big enough to be useful but one of them was just starting to slide down the wall and another man was staring into his own eyes in the wall mirror. I felt I could move very fast if I had to; I didn’t want to, but… if I had to.
‘I can’t see anyone here who’d give me too much trouble,’ I said, ‘and there doesn’t have to be any trouble in this for you. I just want to talk to Mountain when he comes. I hope I can make him see reason; if I can’t, some things might get broken but I’ll try to watch out for your mirrors.’
