Tom McCarthy - C

He heads backstage after the show to look for Audrey, and finds her amidst a clutter of horse-heads, silhouette-outlines of vanquished cities, false restaurant interiors and two-dimensional cars.

“I was in a play with a car once,” Serge tells her as she pecks him on the cheek.

“You’ve acted?” she asks.

“Only as a child.”

“I bet you were as sweet as sugar,” she says. “Wait for me. I’ll take you to the Boulogne: the whole gang’s going there.”

The gang have a dining room to themselves, on the Boulogne ’s top floor. Serge hears them as soon as he and Audrey enter the restaurant: they’re singing the “abreast” song, raucously and a capella. As Audrey presents him to her fellow chorus-girls (the likes of Penthesilia, Hyppolite and Antiope seem to be dining elsewhere), they emit war-like whoops and whistles, then slide over to make room for them. Waiters bring out plates of chicken, lamb and fish, but these are merely nibbled at, passed around and played with as carafe after carafe of wine is knocked back. Pretty soon the table looks like one of The Amazonians’s battlefields, post-battle. Audrey’s friends drape their arms around each other’s shoulders, laugh and caress one another. Cigarette cases and purses change hands; trips to the bathroom are frequent.

“You come here every night after the show?” Serge asks.

“We start here, then move on to the 52,” Audrey tells him. “Here, go powder your nose.”

She hands him her vanity case; he heads off to the bathroom too. When he comes back the girls are getting ready to leave.

Just hailing a taxi

Is Amazonomachy!

several of them trill outside. They find cabs eventually, and ride the short distance to Gerrard Street. A small crowd is hovering around the door of number 52; they stride belligerently through this, are whisked en masse by the doorman down the club’s narrow staircase and ushered towards several of the dance floor’s tables, where they set up camp. The room has long, much-dented floorboards. At one end a stage rises roughly the same distance above the floor as Schoolroom One’s podium at Versoie. A jazz band is playing on this: four men-one Indian, one West Indian, two white-frenetically vibrating as they clasp their trumpets, saxophones and drum-sticks, as though these were wired straight into electric currents lurking beneath the wood. Behind them, on the wall, a moon winks out at the clientele; around the moon are planets: Saturn with its rings, red Mars, another one that could be any in the solar system or beyond; and, interspersed among the planets, cat-faces, leering like primitive masks. Trellises extend from each side of this scene and run down the club’s side-walls, trailing green foliage. Flowers are laid out on the surface of each table, in small glasses.

Champagne is ordered, and consumed. Some of the girls start dancing. They dance with one another: there are men in here, but not that many; at least half the couples on the floor are women. They vibrate like the musicians, their whole upper bodies shaking like the pilots’ used to after flights. Balloons float above them, bouncing off their heads and shoulders. Cocaine is sniffed at tables here, quite openly. After serving him up a snuff-sized pinch from the back of her hand, Audrey leans across to Serge and says:

“Let’s go to mine.”

They leave, and wander down to Piccadilly Circus. While Audrey hunts down a cab, Serge stares up at the giant electric advertising hoardings: hundreds and thousands of lightbulbs-brilliant, lasting, strong, pulsing back to life again and again as they scrawl the names of the Evening News, of Venus Pencils, Monaco and Glaxo out against the sky. The G of “Glaxo” has a swoosh beneath it, a huge paraph forming from left to right as though being written out in pen-strokes, like a signature, each bulb a drop of ink, then disappearing and re-forming. All the names fade into the black and reappear, signing themselves obsessively against oblivion. Only the tyre beneath the word “Firelli” stays illuminated constantly, its rim-circumference, spoke-radii and hub-centre anchoring the elevated and abstracted spectacle in some kind of earthly geometry. Beneath the hoardings cars stream by with their headlamps on, barges of light flowing in the darkness. One of them’s detached itself from the stream and pulled over.

“Marylebone,” Audrey tells the driver.

They start kissing in the taxi. They snort more cocaine. Audrey lets Serge slip down her dress’s shoulder; while he strokes her upper breast she runs her hand over his hardening crotch. Her flat, like his, is on the second floor. It’s strewn with stockings, blouses, camisoles. Clearing some space on a divan while she goes into the small kitchen to fetch two glasses of whiskey, Serge finds a song-sheet marked with pencil annotations; perusing it, he learns that, in the original draft of the “abreast” song, “of suits” was “in suits” and the line “Your mores or polities” was the vastly inferior “Your offers of jollities.” Beneath this sheet lies a flyer for a weekly spiritualist meeting taking place in Hoxton Hall. These papers and all other paraphernalia are swept to the floor as Audrey takes her place on the divan beside him, passing him his whiskey. They take one sip each, then continue where they left off in the taxi. She removes his clothes herself, firmly unbuckling his belt and yanking down his trousers. When they’re naked he tells her to turn round.

“Why?” she asks.

“I like it that way,” he replies.

Afterwards, as they lie on the divan, she makes quiet sniffing noises. Serge thinks it’s the cocaine at first, but realises, as the small, short sniffs continue, that it’s him she’s sniffing at, his chest.

“You smell like my brother,” she says.

“Is that good?” Serge asks.

“Yes,” she answers. “I always liked Michael’s smell.”

“You don’t anymore?”

“I doubt he smells as good these days,” she tells him. “He’s been dead for three years.”

“The war?” Serge asks.

“ Verdun,” she replies. “We’ve had contact since, though.”

“How?”

“Through séances.” Her finger draws a circle on his chest, as though sketching a group of sitters round a table. “He’s not always there-quite rarely actually. But it’s always good to go.”

“In Hoxton, right?”

“How do you know?”

“I’m psychic.”

She snorts derisively; her fingers clench into a fist and thump his chest. His own hand reaches down and, rustling through the below-divan debris, hoists into view the flyer.

“Oh, of course!” she giggles, her hand softening and stroking his chest better again. “I’ll take you sometime if you like. It’s really good.”

Serge thinks of his father’s theories about static residues, bouncing electric waves. He’s got the ammeter right here in London, in his flat: his father asked him to take readings at various spots around the city, a task he’s signally failed to carry out…

They try to sleep but can’t: the cocaine’s made them jittery. Audrey offers to go and get some veronal to help them come down from it, but Serge has a much better idea:

“Do you know where to find heroin?”

“Oh, Becky’s into that,” she says.

“Becky?”

“The one who chopped off the Sumerian warrior’s head. She was sitting across from you in the Boulogne.”

“You think she’s still up?”

“Only one way to find out.”

They take a taxi to Bayswater. Becky is up, but has no heroin. She knows where they can get some, though: a woman named Zinovia or Zamovia in Primrose Hill.

“She runs a kind of salon,” Becky tells them.

It’s mid-morning by the time they find themselves riding across town in yet another taxi. As they pass through the West End Audrey makes them stop so that she can pick up a pair of ballet shoes from Arthur Frank’s.