Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

They were moving at once in the element of music, the earth-tremor bass and penetrating shimmer of high metallic noise. Alex checked his jacket, and as he stepped down with Danny on to the edge of the immense dance-floor, swept by brilliant unpredictable stabs of light, a shiver of recognition ran up him from his heels to his scalp, where it lingered and then gently dropped downwards again through his shoulders and spine. On the wall behind him was a sign saying “Dangerously Loud Music.” Alex was shocked and laughing at the sound. Crowds of men were moving in blurred inexhaustible unison with it. Others, in tiny shorts and lace-up boots, danced alone on platforms above the heads of the crowd, some strutting like strippers, others sprinting on the spot with a flickering semaphore of the arms. And all around the floor, and trailing away into other unguessed spaces, there was an endless jostling parade of half-naked men, faces glowing with happiness and lust. Alex howled “Do you want a drink?” into Danny’s ear.

They took their Es at the bar. “Get yer gear down yer neck,” Danny said, with a big rascally grin, pushing the tab between Alex’s lips with his thumb to make sure it went home, but watching him carefully too as he swallowed and screwed up his face at the bitter admonitory taste.

“Anything that tastes that bad must be good for you,” Alex said, imagining the small grey pill tumbling down inside, dis- persing its molecules of pleasure and risk. Danny knocked his back with a swig of Vittel.

“You’re going to have a fabulous time,” he said. He pulled Alex’s head down close to his and shouted confidentially, “You tell me if you feel anything bad, if you’re not well – tell me straight away.”

“I will darling.”

“You’re going to have a fabulous time!” He was jiggling about and his smile seemed full of affection and something close to mockery as he watched Alex drifting towards his unimagined thrill. “I’m really envious.”

“But you’re doing it too.”

Danny shook his head. “There’s nothing like the first time.”

Even so, within a few minutes Alex saw him altering. They were out on the floor, in their own disputed little space among the thrashing dancers. Everyone was staring, but like people gripped by thought, without much knowing what they were looking at. Alex kept being jabbed by elbows and hands that milled to the beat like tick-tack or lightning kung-fu. The boys glistened and pawed at the ground. They looked like members of some dodgy brainwashing cult. Alex pursed his lips at so much willing slavery, and imagined it all going wrong for him, and the incomprehension of his family and colleagues as to why he had done it. He felt abruptly sober and self-conscious about his expressive, old-fashioned 1984 style of dancing. Danny flung an arm round his neck in his sweet way, and he was warm and excited, like a drunk who has lost his sense of the other person and asks a question because he wants to tell you something. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” said Alex, with vague irritable pride, like someone immune to tickling or hypnosis. “I mean, I don’t feel anything.”

“God – I’m spinning!” Danny said, but drew away from him very slowly, his hand round his waist. Another little clinch. “Tell me if you don’t feel okay.”

“Yes, darling.” He saw it wasn’t quite like drunkenness, Justin for one was never so trusting and attentive. Danny danced up against him, lovingly, but unaware how he was lurching into him.

After thirty minutes Alex acknowledged to himself that he felt quite pleasant, but he could easily argue the feeling away as the elation of drink and dancing and the company of a thousand half-naked men. Though the men were beautiful, it was true, in the cascades and strafings of coloured light. Each of the men round him seemed somehow distinct and interesting, in a way he hadn’t understood when he wandered in past the long line of cropped heads and top-heavy torsos. But of course people were unique, one tended to forget. He twirled round with a smile and saw Danny getting out of his short-sleeved shirt without stopping dancing. He thought he was lost in a world of his own, chewing and licking his lips, fumbling as he tucked the shirt through a belt-loop. Then both arms were round Alex’s neck:

“Fuck, these are strong, I’m going to sit down for a bit.”

Alex hugged him loosely, with a slight queasy sense that in fact it was he who was going to have to look after his guide. Danny took his hand and they sidled through the crowd and flung themselves down on a wide raised step that ran along the wall. Others were there already, heads nodding, dancing in a way though they were sitting down. Alex still felt shocked at this wholesale surrender to the drug, but the abandon was beautiful too, he could see that. The music built and built in ways that were inevitable but still exceeded anything you could expect – arms were raised towards it in a thronging silhouette against jets of dry ice; and that was the last time Alex saw anything sinister or inhuman in it.

Danny said, as if unaware of a break in the conversation, “Wow. How are you feeling, darling?”

“Fine. I don’t feel anything much yet” – with an exaggerated desire not to exaggerate, to be sure of whatever happened when it did. He looked at his watch.

“How long?”

“Forty-five minutes.”

“Just sit back, breathe deeply, don’t fight it, Alex!” – with a tiny spurt of annoyance, as if the novice was stubbornly defying the master.

He did as he was told, and found himself putting an arm round Danny, his fingers playing dreamily on his bare biceps, his head against the wall rocking as the music climaxed and broke off in gorgeous piano chords.

“Mmm. The music’s fabulous.”

“I know.”

“What do you call this music?”

“It’s house.”

“So this is house. Why’s it called that?”

“Not sure actually.”

“It’s fabulous.”

“I know.” Danny smiled at him with what might already have been the tenderness of love when it is first revealed. “Go with it…Think what you want. Say anything you want.”

He didn’t know about that. He closed his eyes and snorted in air as if about to dive for something he’d lost. Now Danny’s arm was looped over his knee, his hand fondly but abstractly stroking his shin, which had never seemed so sensitive a place. The music pounded and dazzled but had its origin in somewhere subtly different, grand and cavernous; yet when Danny spoke again he didn’t need to shout – it was as if they’d been granted a magical intimacy in the heart of a thunderstorm. What he said was, “Fuck, this is good.” And then again, with what seemed an angelic concern, “Tell me straight away if you don’t feel all right.”

Alex felt a trace of shyness still because what he wanted to say was deeply to do with Danny. He closed his eyes and his mind sped ahead down the glittering tracks of sound. It wasn’t a hallucination, but he saw his own happiness as wave on wave of lustrous darkness, each with a glimmering fringe of light. The words when they came were totally inadequate, but he knew at once that Danny would understand them and read his indescribable sensations back into the tawdry syllables. He said, “I feel ravishingly happy. I’ve never felt so happy.”

Danny had his arm round Alex’s shoulders, they half twisted towards each other and kissed, though the wonderful thing was the silky feel of Danny’s neck and arms and the heat of him in the sweat-damp tank-top. Alex saw that what he most wanted was happening and groped marvellingly between the different kinds of happiness, the chemicals and the sex. It seemed that happening and happiness were the same, he must remember that, to tell everyone. Danny sat behind him and hugged and stroked him. Wherever he touched him little shivers swept over his skin. Alex gripped and stroked the arms that were stroking him, and pulled Danny’s feet round inside his legs. He wanted them to touch all over simultaneously. He could feel Danny’s nipples as they rubbed against his tingling back.