Dead in Time

Chapter Eleven

In the middle of the room, a tall black woman in Zandra Rhodes and luminescent paint was dancing on a teak coffee table, striking angular poses against the beat. Most of Charlie’s furniture had been pushed back, making space for the heaving press of people who were dancing, necking, and otherwise entertaining themselves on the floor.

“I know she was right here.” Charlie waved a hand vaguely. “You have to meet her. You’ll love her. Future! Future, where the hell’d you go? Oh, there she is. There’s my girl! Day, Inez, this is The Future Mrs. Davies. Say hi, baby.”

Inez stared at the creature in front of her. A dark blonde, with soft grey eyes and fair skin, her small and pointed face lent an affectation of elegance to her otherwise skinny frame. It took a few moments, but Inez realised that she recognised the girl; she was a model, familiar from a handful of hoardings between here and Piccadilly. As Inez looked over the extremely long, extremely slim, honey-tanned legs, the raw bones of elbows and knees, she recalled that the last place she’d seen this chick was buck-naked on the walls at Biba. She looked different without the thick, dark lipstick.

“Hello,” said Inez, sticking the smile she knew she was going to need onto her face. “How lovely! Congratulations.”

The girl held out a hand, all long fingers with large joints, short nails, and nicotine stains, and her limp, cool handshake lasted a little too long. Leaning forward, her voice barely audible under the pumping noise of the room, she looked earnestly at Inez.

“You hear the music, too, right?” she said, her eyes glassy but so very serious. “All bright, like a church in the sky.”

Inez felt the smile turn into a rictus. She turned her head, looking for Damon, but Charlie had already dragged him off, intent on introducing him to some hot new local talent, great guys, sounded kinda like the Sex Pistols, that was where the scene was going, man, everything else was just so much corporate crap, right, and as a matter of fact, these guys said they were gonna be supporting the Pistols at the 100 Club, wasn’t that just fuckin’ brilliant?

Inez gently removed her hand from The Future’s clammy grasp.

“So, tell me, sweetheart,” she said, edging them both carefully towards the kitchen, “what did you say your name was?”

* * *

Charlie cracked open another bottle of scotch.

“Th-thing is,” he said, topping up Damon’s glass, “it’s all changing, man. It’s all—y’know what I mean?”

“Everything changes,” Damon said uncertainly.

“Fucki— Yeah, but… but this is changing, man. Can’t you feel it?”

Damon looked from the two inches of liquid amber in his hand to the rooftops of Ladbroke and Notting Hill, stretching away before and beneath him. Funny, really. He’d thought about coming here once, when it was all distant and paved with… stuff. After Leon had lent him his copy of Absolute Beginners, and he’d read it and they’d got stoned and talked about how shitty at least half of life was, and all the crap that people did to each other and in the names of people that didn’t want the shit done, and wasn’t it about time the norms all got freaked up a little bit? Yeah, ’cos that’s what they oughta do. ’Cos it wasn’t guns that changed the world, man. It was people, and ideas.

Only… they’d never quite got here. And now it would all be different, wouldn’t it? He supposed so. Maybe it had always been different. Maybe it had always been angry. He wouldn’t know, not really, and that made him kinda feel like a fraud. Beneath his hand, mica glittered in the stonework. On the street below, an evening breeze ruffled the uncollected rubbish banked up on the pavement. That was different, too… the strikes, and all the poisonous resentment there was these days.