It was sometime around three when the firestorm hit: 45-minute warnings tumbling from the stars as so much incendiary conjecture finally came roaring to life. The first we knew was the collapse of all systems as the trip-switch whirled through the mainframe like a tornado, sweeping up everything in its path. Then fireworks, pyrotechnic explosions of yellow and pink as the sky lit up in an incandescent ball of flame. The screams of a million voices abruptly halted by a pulverising nuclear storm, whose searing torrent melted skin from bone and condensed the remainder into flowing rivers of calcium magma.
Extreme light.
Extreme dark.
Then silence.
The first thing I remember was the pounding. A throbbing, driving, electric resonance bludgeoning its way into my consciousness. My eyelids began to drift upwards like a newborn discovering life for the first time. Only – something was wrong. Life had ended, I knew that. I’d seen the previous world destroyed. I’d seen the flaming firewall racing towards me, and felt the overwhelming release as everything around was torn from its foundations. Surviving as I apparently had, I knew exactly what to expect when I looked towards the heavens: disintegrating clouds of ash, cascading like confetti. Only there wasn’t any sky above me, just a solid black wall punctuated by flickers of neon. Smoke. Chatter. A cheap bottle of Merlot.
I hadn’t survived. This was my punishment. An endless, limitless existence trapped in the bowels of Hell. Designer slacks and bad shirts unbuttoned to a third of the way down everywhere, their classless air of CK Homme topped off by the nauseating whiff of a dozen conflicting hair gels. Breasts hoiked up to somewhere near chin-level by a sea of wonderbras. The omnipresent glow of a kegful of blusher, caked onto what are only just discernible as female faces with all the precision of a plasterer’s trowel. An anonymous DJ bodyrocking over in the corner, a set of oversize cans clamped perfunctorily to one ear as he pumps out an unending stream of abysmal dance-funk. This was the source of the pounding, this living musical migraine: an unwanted prescription of numbing aural novocaine designed to galvanise the senses and stupefy the intellect. And then –
“WASTED...!”
It was then that I knew: this truly was Hell. The prospect of eternity spent in an upmarket youth bar surrounded by the faces of corporate tomorrow. Attuning my rapidly-diminishing hearing to the source of this latest assault, I quickly realised who my shepherd would be on this one-way pilgrimage to the other side: the dreaded Saturday-night war-cry had come from Deckz, a 25-year-old wastrel clad in Raybans and the worst sunshine-yellow keks/jacket combo seen this side of an early-90s workout video. He’s holding court in our corner of the room, Rizlafying £20 of Daddy’s money while a transfixed audience of pristinely-groomed slappers preen their highlights in an unnaturally perpendicular direction.
“My folks fink I’m at yooniversity, man!” he informs us, his nasal tones a grating, Tim Westwood-esque appropriation of ‘Urban British’ quite unbecoming of his over-privileged status as an upper-middle-class white man from Durham. “Troof iz, all I do each day is get wasted! Not been to a single lecture this year, man! Aaaaaiiiiiight...!”
His female colleagues giggle inanely, partly out of awe and partly too bombed from their last trip to the bathroom a couple of minutes prior to do anything but. A male friend in a gaudy Hawaiian shirt arrives, wiping the edge of his credit card from a similar excursion, and asks Deckz how he’s doing. He replies only with a sly wink, placing one finger to the side of his nose and miming a suggestive sniff. “Right on, bruvver!”, his compadré nods, slipping the sullied Visa back amongst the myriad slices of plastic adorned with his parents’ forenames. “Drink...?”
“No, man, not just yet”, Deckz replies. “Can’t mix an’ match, you know wha’I mean?”. He flashes a glance at the girl sat next to me, a jumpy, hyperactive wreck unable to regulate either thyroid or substance intake. “Yea!”, he tells her, “You know wha’I mean...!”. And then he starts to sing, badly, in a travesty not just of the original recording but of all humankind: “But the drugs don’t work, dey jus’ make you worse, but I’ve got snow all up my face again!” Laughter of mutual recognition explodes like a haemorrhage all around me until Deckz finally reigns it all in for a brief moment’s reflection.
“Fing iz tho, you gotta be on the level, you know wha’am sayin’?”, he contemplates, combing his intellectual reserves for the last vestiges of profound thought. “I mean, a song like that, you gotta be right there to get it, you know?”. His companions nod in acknowledgement: yeah, they know. “It’s like Ashcroft, right, he’s speaking to your soul wi’that one, man”. More assent from the various disciples, most of whom seem genuinely lost without their Messiah’s worldly guidance. “’Ey, I’ll tell you what, you remember the uvver night when we took all dem pills and ended up passed out listening to that song...?” The others are suddenly beside themselves with something which must be hilarity, though to me it sounds distinctly like echoes of tedium reverberating through a living nightmare. Having all fucked at one point or another, there are no secrets here, and various whoops and hollers are uttered as they all come to the same inevitable conclusion.
“No, I don’t remember either! You know what I was, man...?”, he enquires, acknowledging my presence for the first and only time, for just about long enough to invite me into a conversation to which I have, until this moment, remained utterly superfluous.
“…Wasted...?”, I reply meekly, hoping for some kind of desperate miracle to provide an alternative answer.
“YEA...!”
More whooping, more hollering. Deckz smiles his shit-eating grin at me, and at that moment it all becomes too much for my civilised soul to bear. My vision begins to spin, causing my other senses to pile into overdrive, a process which amplifies the thudding bass of the sound system to histrionic levels of torment. We’re onto Groove Armada now: rump-grind time for hepcats on the pull. Veins full of Blue WKD, confidence through the roof. Laddish banter between themselves as a pair of barely-dressed twig-women, their skirts slit to here, swan by holding hands and wafting the clinical stench of designer lesbianism. The booty’s really starting to grind now down on the dancefloor, its centre a writhing mass of cosmetic surgery, twice-weekly Botox and tomorrow’s rehab. A purple-eyed frump attempting to compensate for her pugnacious features with a skirt which even a foetus would reject as too long catches my eye, sticks her arm in the air and pretends to look away, getting down and really feeling that vibe. My horror is palpable as I find myself involuntarily nodding my head and uttering those dreaded words in her direction: I see you, baby – shakin’ that ass…
It’s gone beyond rational comprehension now to become one of Deckz and crew’s communal valium trips, only sans tranquillity. Everything begins to moves in slow-motion. Time stalls and starts to glide backwards, the hands of the clock drifting gracefully in reverse and suspending all hope with each inverted second. I slowly watch my life disappear before me as soul-fucking eternity begins to take hold. I am unable to vacate the body in which I find myself incarcerated: this is my curse. However, were it the case, I would be able to see with glittering clarity the beginning of the end.
My brain was purée by now. It was oozing through the hollow of my skull, sloshing briskly against the bone. Grasping vacantly at a nearby cocktail menu and observing the exorbitant prices attached to the likes of ‘Screaming Orgasm’ and ‘Spunk On My Tits’, my head rolled woozily backwards and the sharp pang of brick took the skull apart. There was laughter, I think, and an ecstatic yelp of “Man, you must be wasted...!” I began to slide hopelessly from the leathery couch on which I was perched, powerless to halt the slow descent towards my final destination. I dropped to the floor, by now little more than a frappéd vegetable, and stared up through dead, unblinking eyes.
The last I knew before slumping into a state of waking coma, I could hear slurping noises and a prodding sensation somewhere in the upper reaches of my cerebellum; the final image to jump across my stunted synapses was that of my avenging angel standing over me. She giggled a little, her tongue lolling insanely as she batted her lacquered lashes; in her mouth was a straw, which dripped molten medulla down onto my forehead.
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