How can we tell the dancer from the Dance?

CUT TO: Grainne’s house. 6 PM. Grainne, who is in the middle of frying some onions, suddenly stops and incredulously asks: “A Rave? What are we, fuckin’ teenagers?” Seamus was a bit shocked to hear her respond in this way, but tried to convince her that it’d be fun, that they needed to do something wild once in a while. “Haven’t you had enough madness in your life for one year?”, she asked. “Not of such a controlled, predictable, enjoyable kind”, he responded, a little more pensively. “I didn't think you’d be into dancing that much”, she replied, to Seamus’ horror. He mentally rewound the last few months of his life, like he did at the moment of anagnorisis in The Sixth Sense and The Others and realised that, no, she hadn't ever seen him dance, though dancing was, til recently, one of the most important things in his life. When he was a child in school and the teacher would leave the room, he’d get up and do some 70’s pointy-finger disco-dancing. He’d often stayed up raving til dawn had not only broken but til it was too late for the kings horses to fix her again. He’d twisted his ankle and had a bottle smashed over his head in pursuit of terpsichorean ecstasy. That she’d never seen him dance was sort of understandable, that it had never come up in conversation was just plain weird. It made him more determined to bring her along to the rave tonight, even if he had to resort to some crude emotional blackmail to make that happen. “Look, I know we’re a little old for this sort of thing, that we should be going to the theatre or to late bars like other middle-aged people. But I still enjoy this sort of thing. It makes me feel younger. And if you don't come, I’ll just go by myself.” He judged that the possibility that he might meet other women if she wasn’t there was best left implicit. Thankfully, this burst of passion was enough in itself to convince her that he really wanted her to come. “Well... what time will we have to be there?”, she asked, in a noncommittal way. “The bus doesn’t leave til ten”, he responded, diplomatically. Grainne looked at her watch and decided this would give her adequate time to make some plans for Diarmuid. Then she asked Seamus if he was going to take any drugs. At first he just answered with a simple ‘no’, but then added slightly indignantly that he’d never taken drugs in her presence, and that it wouldn’t be a good idea to take E anyway as he’d just be depressed for days afterwards and that wouldn’t be helpful on the campaign trail. Feeling the need to recover the moral high ground, she said she’d do it, just for him and asked him to keep an eye on the dinner while she rang Diarmuid on his mobile, which he did in a state of giddy anticipation which would last for the next few hours. When she came back from ringing him - though she was ringing on a mobile, she still wanted the conversation to be private - Seamus was just serving the dinner, with a look of eagerness on his face that matched that of those Latin American peasants on that ad for Del Monte a few years back. He was delighted to see that the woman from El Norte, she say yes. He embraced her like a pet monkey that had gone away to join the circus but had gradually suffered pangs of remorse over the years and become contemptuous of the working conditions and made the treacherous choice to escape and swung along telephone lines the whole way home causing chaos in the telecommunications industry for a few hours. She didn't really return the gesture, as one of her eyes was straying in the direction of the dinner. Seamus, too, was ready to eat, and gobbled with a gulosity he hadn't known since his days as a construction worker, stopping only to keep refilling his pint glass with water, which renewed her suspicions that he might be thinking about doing some Es that night, though Seamus inferred this not from anything she said, but from the Esperanto of female neurotic semiotics that furrowed her brows and contributed in the long run to her becoming wrinkly though by that time there’d probably be a non-poisonous version of botox. They walked down into the place in the centre of town the look of childish eagerness on his face contrasted sharply with the gravitas of his image on all those posters they passed under. They were holding hands and Grainne, who wasn’t in nearly such a hurry, felt like she was being dragged in a literal as well as metaphorical sense. He felt all the while that she wanted to reprimand him for being so puerile in the same way he’d vainly reprimanded himself, but held back as if stoically accepting that that was the way he was. He wondered how long that would last, how long it would be before she tried to change him. Hopefully not til after they were married, which was an event he could hopefully postpone indefinitely. He had had enough changes forced on his life by some malign fate or some aleatory bunch of stuff that happened without her trying to mould him in her image. It was a typical summer’s night in the centre of Cork, with more Spanish students that locals around the place. He thought, though he didn't want to get into it with Grainne and kept it too himself, that it was perverse for so many people to travel so far together for such a reason. Mass migrations weren't unknown in human history - hey, we’d all be living in a really crowded Tanzania if they weren't - but while it was logical to flee from hunger, drought or floods, the misfortune of being brought up speaking Spanish rather than English didn't seem to warrant this annual migration to the north, though apart from being way colder, Ireland probably wasn't all that different to them, just another outpost of the American empire with it’s McDonald’s and it’s Burger Kings, its Starbucks and its Gaps. And yet, though they’d been coming in droves since he was a teenager, these Iberians still seemed unheimlich to Seamus, with their dark, clear complexions, their gaunt bone structures and their apparent total lack of self-consciousness. And yet they shouldn’t be all that different from us, having only recently had had their wild, free spirits set free from centuries of stifling Catholic theocracy. He tried to keep his eyes from fixating on the most beautiful of the students, as they almost invariably did, and clutched Grainne’s hand in an effort to bind himself to her. In a few minutes they were being greeted at the bus. Grainne didn't recognise any of the faces, though she’d invariably passed many of them on the street dozens of times. Dave introduced a few of mates, and he introduced Grainne to them. He sensed that a few of them were eyeing her up, but it wasn't that much of an issue, he did the same to other people’s girlfriends, he wasn't a monkey or an Englishman, it was gratifying rather than threatening to know that people found his belle attractive. They took their places on the bus, where some techno music was playing. At first Seamus sat on the inside, but it took a while for the bus to get going, and he kept noticing little kids, probably from the Northside, pointing to him and then at a poster on a nearby lamppost. For the first time since he’d seen his face plastered everywhere, he felt vulnerable, exposed, and asked to sit on the more anonymous inside. Grainne agreed, acquiescently and silently. In the remaining minutes Seamus tapped on his knee to the beat of the music, while Grainne just sat there, waiting for all this to be over. When the bus was finally full, with a mixture of norries and a few students, and a few, perhaps, who were both; it wasn't entirely unknown for people from the Northside of Cork City to make it into college. Soon they were mercifully out of the city and on the open road, though Seamus still didn't know the destination. It was midsummer and the sun was just beginning it’s journey to the horizon, dragging a trail of rubescent cumolostratus with it. The hedgerows were at the peak of their fecundity, the fields exhibited the widest variety of virescent hues, almost enough to make Seamus wish he was cycling gently along these roads rather than being tied with thirty-nine other acorns in a sack full of repetitive, mechanical music. Yet he knew he’d soon have an outlet for all this tension, assuming the bus ever got to where it was going. Before that could happen, the driver heard on his mobile that there was a police checkpoint ahead, and that they’d have to take an alternative route. He passed the warning on to Dave, who passed it onto everyone else via the bus’ PA system, but told everyone to get rid of whatever drugs they might have on their person, just in case, which promoted a frenzied emptying of pockets and ingestion of narcotics. Grainne noticed that Seamus wasn't involved in this general panic, and took his hand tightly as if to thank him for keeping his promise not to do any drugs. Soon they made an abrupt turn onto some godforsaken backroad. It seemed that the county manager had taken his deity’s lead and left this road to go back to nature, which was good from an ecological perspective but not from the point of view of a bus filled with wired ravers. Seamus, who was used to being on busses in such conditions, pressed his back against the seat until he could feel it’s internal wiring. In general this stopped him from falling out of his seat when the bus stopped or turned abruptly. On one occasion, however, it stopped so suddenly that both he and Grainne found there faces pressed up against the next seat. Seamus looked to see if Grainne was OK and then looked around the bus to see if anyone else was hurt, and, when he was satisfied that everything was as well as it could be in the circumstances, he joined everyone else in going up to front of the bus to find out what the fuck was going on. What was going on, the general befuddlement of everyone on the bus, no matter what state of consciousness they were in, was a road bowling match. Seamus didn't know that these still went on, assuming they’d gone the same way as industrial schools, magdalen laundries and those pink biscuits he used to eat as child. Immediately he could both compare and contrast the two activities, as a leaving cert. question would have him do. They were both essentially marginalised, counterculture activities that were organised on the hoof, both had a long tradition, if you considered raves to be descended from the old dances at the crossroads, or the old maypole dance. They both involved physical exertion, and both were associated with illegal, mind-altering substances. And yet, how different they looked, the lean, lycra-wearing ravers on the bus and the big, burly, hairy men out on the road, clutching their lead balls in their welted, pilose hands. The driver didn't have much choice but to pull into the ditch and let them go past. Everyone on the bus stared the way American tourists did at lay-bys down in West Cork and Kerry, like visitors from another age, or from another galaxy, though there couldn’t be more than two or three degrees of separation between them and the men they stared out their windows at, people who probably shared their gene pool, maybe even their names, watched the same stuff on TV when they got home. Seamus noticed that Grainne seemed even more melancholy than she had been for the rest of the evening as she stared out at them. He clutched her hand and asked her why. “My dad used to be a road bowling champion, when I was a child.” Seamus didn't know what to say in response to this, and he felt she needed a few seconds to reflect to herself, before she came out with the following: “I remember him hoisting me up on his shoulders, holding the trophy in his other hand, people cheering all around him and offering to buy him drinks, it felt like he was the king of the world, I didn't know how big the world was at the time...” As she drifted into a reverie they got back on the road, if you could call it that, this bus of bacchants banished to the boreens, like the spalpini fanach of yestermillenium, hiding from the authorities because they were doing nothing more serious than taking some drugs that would give them a brief, fleeting rush of pleasure that would relieve the monotony of their demeaning jobs or the soul-sapping educational system of which they were a part. It was starting to get dark, and the driver still hadn't put the headlights. Seamus speculations as to why this might be so got more fanciful as the night drew in. At first he suspected the headlights simply weren't working, or that the driver was trying to save the battery. Then he imagined dark fantasies of being chased by police helicopters against which darkness would prove the only cover. If this sort of thing was going on in his head, what of those people who’d been indulging in various forms of narcotic? He knew they were getting near the site when he heard the tinny backbeats of the techno they were playing, the bass line going somewhere else, perhaps back to the centre of the Earth from which it came. It wasn't like the sound of Niagara falls to the tight-assed puritans who heard it first, nor the distant rumblings from the edge of the universe which told nerdy, dysfunctional astronomers of the big bang, but it was enough to alert everyone on the bus that their weary voyage was at an end. There was the general putting on of coats and picking up of bags that always attended such moments. Seamus didn't want to waste any time. He wanted to dance. He’d come to the right place, as here in this field in the middle of nowhere, whose owner probably got thousands of pounds from the EU for growing grass but where the long arm of the law hopefully couldn’t reach, was a marquee with a sound system that must be scaring wildlife for miles and a light system that must be confusing the ones that couldn’t fly away. It seemed we couldn’t get back to the primordial without disturbing the creatures that still had a home there. And this is what Seamus thought everyone was looking for, whether they knew it or not, the connection with the visceral and atavistic that this orgy of dancing to music of pure rhythm offered. When Seamus and Grainne got inside the marquee, there were already a handful of people dancing. Seamus asked Grainne if she’d like to join them, she said she’d wait for a while. She sat down, trying not to look either bored or available, which was a tricky tightrope to walk, Seamus imagined. There were a few others sitting around, locals who’d got wind of the event and came out of curiosity. There were a few African immigrants there as well, sitting around casually waiting for thin blonde Irish girls to indulge their curiosity about whether they really were so well endowed. Seamus wondered how they’d found out about this but then reflected that when he was visiting new places he often seemed to know more about what was going on than the locals, who were stuck in their lugubrious, ineluctable ruts. That was why he, and maybe they as well, travelled. Back when Seamus was a regular clubber he used to watch a certain girl dance obsessively, even disturbingly. It was partly because she was immaculately, transcendently beautiful, but also because of the way she danced, so in tune with the rhythms that the music almost seemed to be coming from her, like in that Yeats line, How can we tell the dancer from the Dance? He wanted to dance like that, not trying to impress anybody, letting himself become an instrument which the music played, swept along on a wave of pure rhythm. And in spite of his ferocious, relentless intellect, he actually was able to do something like this, peculiarly, as he was too western and self-conscious to ever do anything like meditation, but could dance more wildly than the most tanked-up ravers. Soon his wild, unfettered terpsichorean style was making him the centre of attention, and he noticed some thin, firm-breasted young women giving him the eye. He looked over where Grainne was, but there was just a blank space where her equally supple form was a few minutes previously. He assumed she’d gone to look for the bathroom and revelled in the attention he was getting from chicks who must have been ten years his junior. He noticed them talking to each other while throwing glances in his general direction, then one of them made a move in his direction. She slithered up close to him, started licking her top lip, jiggling her breasts. Then she spun round, did the same thing with her hips, throwing back flirtatious glances in Seamus’ direction. Then she turned round again, grabbed Seamus by the chin, and, to his astonishment, tongue-kissed him. Seamus thought he felt her almost roll something onto his tongue but then told himself that was just the shock talking. He grabbed the girl by the shoulder blades and shouted in her ear that he already had a girlfriend. She reacted angrily and asked where said petit ami might find herself at this temporal juncture, or words to that general effect. Nervously, Seamus stuttered that she didn't like dancing so much and was probably gone to the bathroom. She looked like she was about to do something drastic but just turned round angrily and went back to her friend, gave her a piece of her mind, of which she didn't seem to have too much to spare, after which her friend cast angry looking glances in his direction. By now he was sick of all the attention he was getting and decided to go and look for Grainne. He felt exposed in way that he didn't when he was dancing, figuring that it was the dance people saw in the same way that it was the politics people saw when he was canvassing. Now it was just Seamus that people saw, and he was acting in a way that nervous and generally inept. He looked around the place for Grainne but couldn’t find her and felt to awkward to go back on the dancefloor so sat somewhere dark and inconspicuous. After a few minutes of this solipsism the DJ put on something more uptempo and the dancefloor started to fill up, and he felt he could just merge into the crowd. This time he didn't let the music sweep him along so much but instead tried carefully not to make an exhibition of himself. He watched what everyone else was doing, and tried to replicate their moves so that he wouldn’t draw attention to himself, throwing occasional glances back to where Grainne had been sitting. This strategy provided him with so little pleasure that he abandoned it after about five minutes, and started to dance wildly again. It was the kind of dance music - he didn't know that much about the various sub-genres - that seemed to wind itself up and then let all the energy back out in a frenzied climax. He responded by letting his own energy flow to different parts of his body, a sort of aucthoctonus tai chai. After a few minutes of this, he felt light-headed in a way he never had before and suddenly felt a great thirst come upon him, as he would have said in Irish, and urgently sought out the toilets. Normally he would have been pleased to find a toilet that filtered his waste directly back into the Earth, but it meant that there was only a bucket of water to flush or wash out of, and he didn't fancy drinking out of that. Eventually he found someone selling bottled water at some sort of outrageous price from a stall outside the marquee. Reluctantly, he handed the money over and drank about one third of it’s contents in one gulp, which reminded him of a guy from back home who didn't have proper neck muscles and could knock back a pint of beer in three seconds. Then, bottle in hand, he went to look for Grainne. He found her exactly where he’d last seen her, as if she’d never gone. He looked at her in shock, then ran up to her, pressed his sweaty form up against her, and rolled his tongue deep down her throat, and heavily fondling her breasts. She drew back, looking a bit embarrassed, said that they were in a public place. That didn't seem to matter to Seamus, who told her that all the people there were there friends, then started to roar out laughing at the irony that had just come over him. She pushed him away and asked him if he’d been taking drugs. “What makes you think that?”, he asked, genuinely surprised. “You’re just acting really strange, you’ve got this vacant stare in your eyes, and... why’d you buy that bottle of water?” “I just got really thirsty from dancing. Anyway, where were you? I was looking all over for you?” “There was a big queue for the... ladies. But tell me honestly, have you been doing drugs? You’re showing all the symptoms of someone on Ecstasy.” “Sweetheart...honey...darling...Just come dance with me, wontcha?” With an expression that suggested that she didn't want to have come all this way just to have defecated into a hole in the ground, she agreed. She pressed herself closely against him, rubbing her breasts against chest, and looking deeply into his eyes, so deeply that he thought, perhaps a little Paranoically, that she was trying to discern whether he’d been taking Ecstasy or not. Feeling uncomfortable, he swung her round and held her around her waist, kissing the back of her neck in way he knew she loved, and for the first time that night he got a sense that she was enjoying herself. Yet he couldn’t seem to stop himself, all of a sudden her body seemed so transcendentally, platonically perfect that he wanted to caress every part of it. He grabbed her breasts tightly, but, too his astonishment, she wriggled free, told him she was tired of dancing and wanted to go and sit down. Reluctantly, he let her go and looked over and noticed that the girl who’d kissed him a while ago and her friend were looking over at him. They, too seemed to have acquired a glowing, iridescent beauty. He looked around the dancefloor and he seemed to be surrounded by a group of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen, as if he’d gone to Muslim heaven. But then, to his surprise, this analogy was broken by the fact that he started thinking men were beautiful as well. He had a sort of epiphany, which didn't stop him from dancing, but changed the form from frenetic slam-dance to a sort of tantric, arm-waving dance which seemed to replicate extraneously the drawing together of different strands of thought inside his head. He remembered the first time he’d gotten drunk. He was at the school disco, where they were playing a tacky selection of eighties hits in the old school assembly hall. He was sixteen at the time, it wasn't that sweet for him, though not as sour as seventeen would prove to be. Someone handed him what he honestly thought was just a can of 7-up, and, being thirsty then as he was now, he drank quite a bit. After a while his behaviour became more animated, he got giddy, may even have made advances to some women. When he got home, his parents, who were far more experienced in this matter than he was, knew he was drunk, but he didn't. He bitterly resented their accusations until he started knowingly drinking alcohol but by then it was too late to tell his father and the moment never seemed right to tell his mother. Now it might be too late to tell her as well. He didn't want to lose the opportunity to come clean with Grainne, so he walked diffidently over to her, preparing what he was going to say. He sat down, took her by the hands, looked with his widely dilated eyes into hers, and said, “Grainne, sweetheart, darling, my love, my soul mate, my one and only, I think I’ve taken some Ecstasy. I can’t say how or why, and you probably wouldn’t believe me if I did. But I promise you that I’ll never take it again, because right now I feel more in love with you than I ever have before and I never, ever want to do anything to hurt you, my love.” In his wired, frazzled, buzzing state, he actually expected her to respond in kind. She took her hands out of his and asked abruptly how he could possibly have taken ecstasy and not known about it. Tactlessly, he started laughing and told her it was all a bit weird but that it really wasn't his fault. She stared at him for a few seconds, then gave the internationally recognised patience-losing gesture and stormed out in a soapoperish way. “Where’re you going? There’s nowhere to go”, he cried out forlornly, but knew she just had to go somewhere to work off her anger by himself, or at least he thought that was what he knew, as suddenly everything was making apparent sense to him. He went over to the girl who he thought had given him the E and asked her why she’d done what she’d done. “Because you’re fucking beautiful”, she replied. Just then he felt no anger towards her, just rolled out his tongue to see how she’d react. They started to tongue-kiss and he enjoyed it like he’d never done before. Then he shouted into her here that his girlfriend would probably leave him if she found out about this, but just laughed at the restoration-comedy farce of it all. He swung her around, then they entered into a dancing contest that grabbed everyone’s attention, drawing them into a circle of curious onlookers who needed no stewards to help them keep a respectful distance, scratching their chins while comparing their respective merits. She was sensuous and erotic, letting the energy concentrate on her hips and shoulders while chaplinesquely flirting with the crowd. He was characteristically wild, twisting his ankles dextrously and spreading his limbs feverishly, while remaining as impervious as Keaton, or a student of the Gita to the crowd around him. Yet eventually the two strains bonded into one platonic whole, as he moved closer to her, still swaying deliriously around her as she responded with the merest shuffling of her hips, almost as if they were replicating the movements of sperm round an ovary. Finally they came together, he pushing his tumescent groin against hers, then grabbing her by the hips and swinging her round, to the cheers of the crowd. Then he started to kiss her again. Just at this moment he didn't feel any guilt - he loved Grainne, he loved the girl he whose tongue was rolling around in his mouth, he loved everyone else in the marquee - what was the problem? Right now he wouldn’t care if she was snogging the sleaziest guy in the whole place. Yet after a while his thirst started to strike again and he felt the need to find his water. He led her hand in hand to the petrochemical well which he needed no diviner to find. He sat down, took a long drink and expressed the sort of relief that normally he’d only display after masturbating or urinating after a long wait. He offered her some, which she accepted, and then asked her name. “Why d’you want to know?”, she replied, with more curiosity than hostility. “I don't know”, replied a slightly befuddled Seamus. “It just seems like a natural thing to ask.” “Listen”, she leant over into his earlobe to reply, “I know you already have a girlfriend. I know she’s gone for a sulk somewhere and you’re going to have a big fight about it and then make friends again. The thing is, I don't care. I just want to be with you tonight.” Seamus didn't know how to react to this. His first response a sort of generational disdain, a feeling that, though she was only about ten years younger than him, he sort of knew, though he wasn't very good with girls back then, that they wouldn’t ever have been so free-spirited. Growing up in the eighties, he always regretted missing the sexual revolution, but now he was realising that it had been going on in his own country just as he was making his own fraught, unfinished journey from childhood to adulthood. His second was to instinctively distrust her words, to suspect that she was looking for a long-term partner and that this was just a not-all-that-cunning-really ruse. He looked into her eyes, and sounding for all the world like Charles Foster Kane in that scene where... Oh, you probably know the one I mean, he asked, “Don't you know who I am?” Bemusedly, she looked right back into his dilated eyeballs and told him he was just a guy. “You’ve never seen my face before?” “No? Should I have?” Seamus was actually in the mood to believe her and the suspicion that Grainne was only interested in him because of his status hadn't quite gone away, not even in the benign, transient glow of Ecstasy. It was perhaps the paradox that dominated his relationship, and, for all he knew, every other guy’s relationship with women, he loved them, partly in the abstract, hippyish way that he loved wild boars and slugs, but mainly in a lustful, primordial way; he loved their tender skin, their soft, supple bodies with their endlessly fascinating bodies, which, like snowflakes, never seemed to have an identical doppelganger, each one having it’s own unique, idiosyncratic charms. But he could never trust them. Sounds like a really bad pop lyric, but it was true. But even though he’d already gotten into one relationship of which no good could come, he was willing to get entangled with this girl as well in spite of the obvious dangers. He laughed to himself that he could blame it all on the drugs, in a few years time he might be telling kids on inner city estates how drugs had almost ruined his career. “Are you a vegetarian”, he asked, as they neared a suitable place to lie down and fuck, in case you hadn't already guessed that that was what his fantasy involved. “No, why d’you ask?” “No reason”, he replied, enigmatically, then feeling the grass beneath his feet for anything the land’s bovine captives may have left behind, lay down on the parched earth and beckoned the girl to follow him. He saw in her face the urbanites disdain for this sort of outdoor living and felt compelled to encourage her. “C’mon, haven’t you ever wanted to do it outdoors?” “Well, not before now anyway.” Seamus was flattered at the implication that she was only here because of him, and felt it was only fair to shield her from whatever scared her about the ground beneath their respective feet, and let her lie on top of him. Knowing there was no-one watching either of them, whatever inhibitions she had floated away like a spring zephyr. After pressing her groin against his a few times, as if to determine that it was still as hard as it was a few minutes ago, she started to unbuckle his pants and slide his pants down, which would surely create some stains that would be hard to explain away, not that he cared much. When she pulled it out, she appeared impressed by it’s girth, which flattered Seamus. He’d heard rumours that Ecstasy diminished people’s libidos but it would take more than a little white pills to stop the sperm flowing from Seamus’ gonads. Then she opened her mouth wide a few times, whether to give her mouth muscles practice for what she was about to do or just to inform him what was coming. She gave excellent fellatio, performing it with the delicacy of an artisan and the enthusiasm of a novice. She seemed to know how sensitive it was, this organ whose owners had brought life on Earth to it’s present parlous state with their violence and rapacity. She also seemed to know at exactly which time he was about to come, at which point she stopped and tantalisingly prolonged the moment by slipping out of her lycra shorts, under which she wasn't wearing any underwear. “I don't have any condoms”, Seamus told her, with a mixture of panic and anticipation. “I’m on the pill”, she replied. Are there four more beautiful syllables in the English language? If you put Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Byron, Keats, Yeats and TS Eliot all into the same room, could they come up with something more euphonious, something that promised so much pleasure and took so little time to say? D’you know, I think not, although females might argue that “I Love You” is a possible contender. Miraculously, Seamus managed to keep going for so long that she got some pleasure too, this cherub who seemed to have been sent from some empyrean Tir-na-Nog to compensate him for all the bad luck he’d had with women in the past. He almost wanted to stay inside her forever, prolong this moment, though he knew that eventually the ecstasy would wear off, they’d grow tired and thirsty, and Grainne would start looking for him. So, after the final, near-sublime climax, after he’d lain on the ground and breathed deeply of the fresh, pleasantly cool air they dragged their clothes back on, embraced once more and made their way back to the marquee. It was a little awkward, as Seamus didn't want to spoil the moment by saying anything, but he thought it would only be polite to ask for her phone number, but that doing so would be tantamount to calling her promise that this was just about tonight a lie. Eventually he thought of a strain of conversation that might be comfortable for them both. “How’d you get up here tonight?” She didn't say anything in response, just made one of those deep breaths that signifies disdain. “Did I say the wrong thing?” She paused before replying, tersely, “I was on the same bus as you. I saw you with that girl. Me and my friend were both looking over at the both of you, trying to decide if she was your girlfriend or not. We decided she probably wasn't, that she was your sister or something. We thought we saw you looking over in our direction a few times, flirting with us. I guess we were wrong.” Seamus was about to reply, but then the girl interjected with: “What do you see in that girl? She seems like such a tight-ass.” Seamus stopped in his tracks, told her she shouldn’t talk about his girlfriend that way, then told her about all she’d suffered, how it was understandable that she’d be a little uptight. The girl looked a little chastened but wondered why Grainne wasn't with someone more her own age, someone that could take proper care of her. Seamus told her how old he was, she didn't believe him at first, but gradually accepted it. “So what do you do for a living?, she asked, as Seamus knew she inevitably would. “If I told you, you probably wouldn’t believe me.” “Try me.” “Naw. We had a good time tonight, we’re probably not going to see each other again, right?” “Dude, Cork’s a small town. We’re almost certain to meet again.” Any time any Cork person used an Americanism like that, he was reminded of his Californian ex-girlfriend, who could use them without sounding even remotely geeky. Yet the statement as a whole disconcerted him so much that he felt compelled to deny it. “We’ll probably pass each other on the street alright, but we’re probably both so off our faces that we won’t remember each other at all. What was that drug you slipped down my throat, by the way?” “It was just some E”, she replied. “You realise that if I did that to you, I’d probably get done for date-rape?” She laughed in recognition that that was probably the ironic truth of the matter, but then asked again what he did for a living, saying that she could find out if she wanted. Enigmatically, like the Celtic Shaman he always wanted to be, he told her that the answer to that question looked down on her from every street corner, then worringly realised that that wasn't nearly enigmatic enough and was almost tantamount to giving her a straight answer. By now they were getting close to the marquee, and Seamus suggested they split up. To his surprise, she asked him if he wanted her phone number. Reluctantly, he agreed to take it. After she’d scribbled it on a scrap of paper and placed it in his hip pocket, making use of this final opportunity to grasp his ass, she asked for his in return. He called it out quickly, without any real conviction, knowing, fatalistically, that she wouldn’t’ take this hint and that he’d be asked to call it out again, slowly, and that she’d know if he was lying. So he called it out, let her transcribe it, and kissed her goodbye. He made his way back into the marquee to look for Grainne. By now the place was the rave was in full swing, as he got closer to it’s epicentre he could feel the heat being generated wafting towards him along with the scent of sweat and aftershave, and the rhythm moving his limbs as if by some imperceptible osmosis. But he pulled himself away from it’s febrile, kinetic grasp and vowed to find Grainne. To his surprise, he found her where they’d first been sitting. By now almost everyone was dancing, so it wasn't hard to pick her out. He sat down nest to her, and adopted as contrite a tone as he could muster as he asked, “So you came back?” “Well, like you say, there wasn't anywhere else to go”, she responded, dispassionately, then paused for a little and added, “I went out to the bus for a little bit but I got really bored, I didn't know what to do with myself. I tried to dance for a little but I felt really self-conscious and stopped, just sat down here, observed everyone else. I suppose maybe if I’d taken some drugs like you I might feel different.” This last sentence disappointed Seamus, who was hoping that that issue had gone away. “I really didn't mean to take any E, honestly”, he offered, but she quickly countered by asserting, in a matter-of-fact way that suggested she’d garnered this information from Health Board pamphlets, that while drinks could be spiked with acid, that MDMA wasn't soluble. “No, it’s not, I suppose, although, y’know, it’s not like I’ve ever taken it before or anything, but I read somewhere... anyway, you’ve just got to take my word, I really didn't know what I was doing. Do you think you can forgive me?” “I don't know, Seamus, every time I forgive you, you seem to go and do something even more irresponsible.” “Yeah, but I think you’ll keep forgiving me because you know I love you.” He chastised himself internally for the schmalziness of this line, but to his amazement it seemed to work on her. Although later he’d come to the conclusion that she’s already decided to forgive him but wanted to make him abase himself before her first, at the time it struck him that he’d never be able to talk to her like this without the influence of E, but that was what created the problem in the first place. “You do love me, dontcha?” “Yeah, I do. But you still want to know why I took the E and where I was for the last half hour, I guess?” “No.” “No?” “No. I know you really want to be with me, but I think you need a life of your own as well. After what I’ve been through, I can never be in a really close relationship. I wanted to let you go here by yourself but you were so insistent that I come, I felt I had to. I know that whatever you’ve been doing that you’ve been enjoying yourself, but I’d really rather be at home watching the TV.” Seamus knew that this statement was something she’d had to convince herself of before she convinced him, it bore the hallmarks of rationalisation the way a crippled miner carries the burden of a life’s toil. Yet, like the politician he’d surely become, he acted like he accepted it at face value. He asked her if she wanted to dance, she acquiesced with the same calculation that attended her last statements. By now everyone was dancing with the same frenetic kinesis that Seamus had been a hour ago. Right now, though, he danced in a subdued, post-coital way, while, he caught, out of the corner of his eye, the girl he’d been dancing with tossing her arms around wildly the same way he’d been when he danced with her. He bent down to kiss her neck, hoping her hair would provide him with a cloak of anonymity. Then he realised, horribly, that they’d all have to share the bus home, that after having ejaculated he’d be so tired that he’d struggle to stay awake, that they’d converse... he stopped trying to hide as he realised that he was at her mercy, this girl who he’d been inside of but whose name was a mystery, though somehow he pegged her a ‘J’, a Jenny, maybe a Jean, a Jane, perhaps even a Jony. He smiled over his shoulder at her to let her know that though they were still friends, he was saving the last fuck for Grainne. It was a better strategy, as it kept Grainne’s suspicions on the back-burner while allowing J the possibility that they might meet again. The evening was drawing to a close, it was three O’ clock and the music had mellowed from the hardcore they were playing to some nostalgic former chart music by the likes of Dee-lite, which had everyone raising their hands in the air as if making a last stand against the fatigue that would inevitably kick in before... Seamus didn't want to think about what the medium-term effects of taking E might be, if they were anything as bad as the anti-drug propaganda that filled the media would have you believe, it would be better to put it aside. When the DJ played the final song, the crowd in the centre, what he would have called the nucleus if he didn't know that the nucleus was generally an inert mass while it was the electrons that whizzed around so fast that you couldn’t see them moving, no matter how good a microscope you had, started calling for “one more tune” It would be more appropriate to call them a star, as that was where the major concentration of energy was in a solar system, but that term had been appropriated by people who seemed to imagine that the stars were above us, while there was no up or down in the universe at large. Seamus imagined this energy source had it’s own, extraneous, possibly narcotic source of energy, but that if they really wanted to burn out like some glowing supernova they’d have to take it back to one of their own houses. Seamus and Grainne staggered back to where their stuff was, and headed for the bus. It took a while for the older, patience-deficient driver to get everyone back on, and J was one of the last to get back on. She spared Seamus any embarrassment for the meantime, giving him only a subtle glance that must’ve seemed innocent to Grainne. By the time the bus started, Seamus was extremely sleepy. After a few minutes, he was in alcheringa, inevitably with the cunt. Again, he was putting up posters warning the people of Cork that the cunt was still on the loose, and that to give him money would put other Cork people at risk. It was in a weird, futuristic version of Cork, where Patrick Street was being pedestrianised and the old lampposts were being replaced with intertwining, postmodernistic new ones from a Le Corbusier wet dream. It was a crisp November afternoon, there’d been a shower and everything was bathed in the sharp, reflective light. As he stuck a poster to one of these titanic illuminates, he noticed what appeared to be some construction workers working on the roads staring at him. He didn't think much of it, he used to be a construction worker himself and knew how asphixiatingly boring it could be, and how anything was more entertaining, even watching someone stick a piece of paper to a lamppost. But a minute later, when he had moved on to the next one, which was perhaps at the corner of Marlborough Street, a police car pulled up next to him, and two officers stepped out and beckoned him over. One was a culchie from central casting, the other a short, chubby one with a camp accent which led Seamus to suspect he was a repressed homosexual. The queer one beckoned him over asked him he if he knew what he was doing was illegal. Seamus said he had no idea. They told him, Kafkaesquely, that he could be charged with both littering and hate crime. The queer one read back to him some of the information on the poster in his best imitation of a sarcastic voice, which only accentuated the campness. The culchie told him he could get six months in jail, to which Seamus incredulously responded that the cunt had been let out with a suspended sentence, the culchie gave him the standard spiel about not making the laws, blah blah blah. Then the queer erupted into strange, surreal laughter as he gloatingly told Seamus that while the new legislation was actually intended to protect minorities like gypsies, travellers, etc., they’d be happy to use it against a ‘left-wing radical’ like him. They asked for his name, then wrote down something completely different. Seamus told them that that wasn't his name, then the queer wrote, ‘false information’ Seamus woke up in a cold sweat, wondering what sort of mind he had that could dream up such a Kafkaesque dystopia where a foreign thug could enter a country, rape women and assault men and get away with it, while someone who told people about him could get put in jail. He realised this was probably just the start of his long, arduous descent from his ecstasy high. Then he looked around, saw that Grainne was talking to Jenny, and wondered, like that Chinese philosopher he was always hearing about, which was weirder, the dream or the reality. He cast a glance over in Jenny’s direction, without Grainne, who was leaning in the same direction noticing; shrewdly, J didn't return it, leaving Seamus with little option to try and plug into their conversation. After listening intently without trying to do so for a few seconds, he discovered that they were only talking about regular girlie stuff, soap operas and celebrity gossip, you know the sort of stuff, particularly if you’re a member of the gentler sex yerself. Then Jenny, in an apparent act of mercy, told Grainne that Seamus had woken up. She jerked her head round abruptly and saw that though his eyes were bleary and bloodshot, they were open, and she felt compelled to make an inquiry. “I didn't realise you were awake. I think you were having some sort of nightmare. Me and Jenny here were discussing what it might be.” Seamus gulped as Jenny tried not to snigger. With a sharpness of wit that surprised himself in the circumstances, he told her that he’d been dreaming of a world where she didn't exist, which wasn't entirely untrue, he supposed. She sighed the way girls do when guys say cheesy romantic stuff like this and leaned over to kiss him. Her eyes were closed but Seamus’ were sharply, eaglishly open to try to discern how Jenny was reacting to all of this. He couldn’t tell if she knew if he was looking at her, as he was just looking at her through Grainne’s hair, he supposed not. The look on her face seemed to suggest a combination of admiration for his legerdemain, stoical acceptance of the fact that Seamus and Grainne were together, and a hint of jealousy. Of course, there was a bit of conjecture involved in this judgement, as it would have been impossible for anyone, especially someone as inept at dealing with women as Seamus, to infer this much from looking at a chick’s face. When they stopped kissing Grainne realised how impolite she was being and introduced Seamus to Jenny and then things got a bit awkward. Seamus tried to draw on the many menage-a-trois movies he’d seen in his life to figure out what to do, but he drew an infuriating blank. He asked her, trying to affect a tone of casual curiosity, what they’d been talking about while he was asleep. “Like we said, we were just wondering wh....at you were dreaming about”, replied Jenny, tantalising Seamus with the knowledge that she could have substituted a ‘who’ for a ‘what’; as a sort of indication of the power she thought she had over him. “So what actually was going on in your dream?”, asked Grainne. Seamus felt himself in a slightly difficult position as he couldn’t possibly tell the truth; he scanned his mind for old dreams that he’d never told her about, but couldn’t think of any, so panicked and told her that it would something that he could only tell her in private. Grainne clutched his hand as he said this, but he noticed Jenny looking extremely slighted. Diplomatically, he looked over in her direction and asked what she thought he might have been dreaming of, surprised that a ramshackle bus on an Irish boreen had become such a forum for Freudian dream-interpretation. “I think I know what sort of dreams you’re going to have in the next few days”, she said, with a slightly sinister tone. Grainne, looking extremely innocent to the import of this statement, asked her what on Earth she meant, Jenny just told them she’d been to a lot more raves than either of them and she knew how long it could to recover. Grainne looked like she just accepted this but Seamus knew that this was probably an affectation and that it would only take her a while to put two and two together and figure out where he got the E from. Then she’d deny it for a little bit but then the repression this entailed would prove too much and it would come crashing down on him like a Damoclean sword. Yet there was nothing Seamus could do the halt this process, except tell the truth, and where would that get him? Tragically, he realised he was at Jenny’s mercy, and had nothing left to lose by falling asleep again. By the time he woke the bus had reached the end of it’s meandering journey. The necessity of getting up and getting his things precluded the possibility of remembering any of his dreams. He let Grainne drag his staggering, scrambled form out of the bus, and then saw Jenny waiting for them both outside. He was a bit surprised to see Grainne and Jenny hug each other and promise to meet again, but, acting like they barely knew each other, he casually embraced her, but noticed her mouthing, silently but saliently, the words ‘call me’, and watched her walk off, entertaining the fantasy that she was leaving his life forever. Grainne started to shiver in an equally pointed way, Seamus knew that this meant that she wanted to call a taxi, though having reached a critical point where he couldn’t get any more tired than he already was, he would have been willing to walk home. So they walked towards a 24-hour taxi place not so far away. By now it was about four in the morning, and this was Ireland, so all the legitimate nightclubs were closed and the only evidence of the Bacchanalian excess of a hour or two ago was the detritus blowing round the streets, the fast food left for the rats and the street cleaners, the vomit and the blood. Meanwhile, Seamus had his own mess to clean up after, but realised that he was in no state to do it right now. At the same time, he realised that the longer he left it go, the wilder Grainne’s guesses might get, they might even approximate the truth. It was like his fatigue was the tragic flaw that would prevent this particular drama from reaching a resolution... or something like that. When they’d gotten to the taxi rank and were forced, once again, to queue, the subject of where he got the E from once again raised it’s ugly, officious head. Before answering Grainne’s query, Seamus thought of how easy those other male mammals had it, the orang-utans and the elephant seals, the hippopotami and the hyenas, able to fuck all around them knowing that the females who were equally desirous of a stable partner wouldn’t be able to tell each other about the males philandering. But then it was the biggest and strongest that got the chicks in most of those species, so he wouldn’t get any tail if he was any of them. His mind always drifted away from the matter at hand, as you probably know by now. “I got the E from Jenny”, he replied, eventually, trying to give the impression that he’d been thinking long and hard about the ethics of this reply, and not fantasising about being a monkey, then added that that was probably why Jenny had struck up a conversation with her. Grainne didn't look at all surprised, just quizzical about what else might have been going on between them. “Do you really want to know? I’m with you right now, isn’t that what’s important?” “Seamus, this isn’t some Drifters song, this is reality. I need to know what was happening between the two of you.” “Well, why don't you ask her when you meet up again?”, he asked forlornly. “Okay”, she replied casually, to his intense surprise. “What do you mean, Okay?”, he asked, his jaded tone almost rising to the pitch of normal conversation as a result of his shock. “I mean Okay, I’ll find out the story from her point of view, then I’ll get you to respond, I’ll figure the truth is somewhere in the middle.” Seamus was a bit shocked at the clinical way she was going about this, but also relieved that the matter was out of his hands for a while. By the time they’d gottten into the cab they hadn't resolved the matter of whose house each of them would be staying in, which was something the driver kind of needed to know. He was happy enough to let them take their time resolving the matter, as the metre was already running. Grainne told Seamus that Diarmuid would probably have some friends around playing super nintendo and that it would be hard for her to perform her parental duty of telling him off if she was arriving in the door with her fancy man. Seamus laughed ironically, knowing that it was having to act in such a hypocritical way was one of the things that made him wary of ever having kids, though it never seemed to bother his own parents. They told the driver to let them off at each other’s places separately, and then made arrangements about where and when to see each other again. Grainne told Seamus that if Seamus really had taken E then he’d probably want to spend the whole following day in bed, so after ‘work’ on Monday would be a good time. So he got out at his place, kissed her goodbye, but noticed that she was keeping one eye on the metre as he was doing so and stopped abruptly, paid his share of the fare and staggered into a house which, after the excesses of the night, seemed empty and hollow. CUT TO: Grainne’s house. 6 PM. Grainne, who is in the middle of frying some onions, suddenly stops and incredulously asks: “A Rave? What are we, fuckin’ teenagers?” Seamus was a bit shocked to hear her respond in this way, but tried to convince her that it’d be fun, that they needed to do something wild once in a while. “Haven’t you had enough madness in your life for one year?”, she asked. “Not of such a controlled, predictable, enjoyable kind”, he responded, a little more pensively. “I didn't think you’d be into dancing that much”, she replied, to Seamus’ horror. He mentally rewound the last few months of his life, like he did at the moment of anagnorisis in The Sixth Sense and The Others and realised that, no, she hadn't ever seen him dance, though dancing was, til recently, one of the most important things in his life. When he was a child in school and the teacher would leave the room, he’d get up and do some 70’s pointy-finger disco-dancing. He’d often stayed up raving til dawn had not only broken but til it was too late for the kings horses to fix her again. He’d twisted his ankle and had a bottle smashed over his head in pursuit of terpsichorean ecstasy. That she’d never seen him dance was sort of understandable, that it had never come up in conversation was just plain weird. It made him more determined to bring her along to the rave tonight, even if he had to resort to some crude emotional blackmail to make that happen. “Look, I know we’re a little old for this sort of thing, that we should be going to the theatre or to late bars like other middle-aged people. But I still enjoy this sort of thing. It makes me feel younger. And if you don't come, I’ll just go by myself.” He judged that the possibility that he might meet other women if she wasn’t there was best left implicit. Thankfully, this burst of passion was enough in itself to convince her that he really wanted her to come. “Well... what time will we have to be there?”, she asked, in a noncommittal way. “The bus doesn’t leave til ten”, he responded, diplomatically. Grainne looked at her watch and decided this would give her adequate time to make some plans for Diarmuid. Then she asked Seamus if he was going to take any drugs. At first he just answered with a simple ‘no’, but then added slightly indignantly that he’d never taken drugs in her presence, and that it wouldn’t be a good idea to take E anyway as he’d just be depressed for days afterwards and that wouldn’t be helpful on the campaign trail. Feeling the need to recover the moral high ground, she said she’d do it, just for him and asked him to keep an eye on the dinner while she rang Diarmuid on his mobile, which he did in a state of giddy anticipation which would last for the next few hours. When she came back from ringing him - though she was ringing on a mobile, she still wanted the conversation to be private - Seamus was just serving the dinner, with a look of eagerness on his face that matched that of those Latin American peasants on that ad for Del Monte a few years back. He was delighted to see that the woman from El Norte, she say yes. He embraced her like a pet monkey that had gone away to join the circus but had gradually suffered pangs of remorse over the years and become contemptuous of the working conditions and made the treacherous choice to escape and swung along telephone lines the whole way home causing chaos in the telecommunications industry for a few hours. She didn't really return the gesture, as one of her eyes was straying in the direction of the dinner. Seamus, too, was ready to eat, and gobbled with a gulosity he hadn't known since his days as a construction worker, stopping only to keep refilling his pint glass with water, which renewed her suspicions that he might be thinking about doing some Es that night, though Seamus inferred this not from anything she said, but from the Esperanto of female neurotic semiotics that furrowed her brows and contributed in the long run to her becoming wrinkly though by that time there’d probably be a non-poisonous version of botox. They walked down into the place in the centre of town the look of childish eagerness on his face contrasted sharply with the gravitas of his image on all those posters they passed under. They were holding hands and Grainne, who wasn’t in nearly such a hurry, felt like she was being dragged in a literal as well as metaphorical sense. He felt all the while that she wanted to reprimand him for being so puerile in the same way he’d vainly reprimanded himself, but held back as if stoically accepting that that was the way he was. He wondered how long that would last, how long it would be before she tried to change him. Hopefully not til after they were married, which was an event he could hopefully postpone indefinitely. He had had enough changes forced on his life by some malign fate or some aleatory bunch of stuff that happened without her trying to mould him in her image. It was a typical summer’s night in the centre of Cork, with more Spanish students that locals around the place. He thought, though he didn't want to get into it with Grainne and kept it too himself, that it was perverse for so many people to travel so far together for such a reason. Mass migrations weren't unknown in human history - hey, we’d all be living in a really crowded Tanzania if they weren't - but while it was logical to flee from hunger, drought or floods, the misfortune of being brought up speaking Spanish rather than English didn't seem to warrant this annual migration to the north, though apart from being way colder, Ireland probably wasn't all that different to them, just another outpost of the American empire with it’s McDonald’s and it’s Burger Kings, its Starbucks and its Gaps. And yet, though they’d been coming in droves since he was a teenager, these Iberians still seemed unheimlich to Seamus, with their dark, clear complexions, their gaunt bone structures and their apparent total lack of self-consciousness. And yet they shouldn’t be all that different from us, having only recently had had their wild, free spirits set free from centuries of stifling Catholic theocracy. He tried to keep his eyes from fixating on the most beautiful of the students, as they almost invariably did, and clutched Grainne’s hand in an effort to bind himself to her. In a few minutes they were being greeted at the bus. Grainne didn't recognise any of the faces, though she’d invariably passed many of them on the street dozens of times. Dave introduced a few of mates, and he introduced Grainne to them. He sensed that a few of them were eyeing her up, but it wasn't that much of an issue, he did the same to other people’s girlfriends, he wasn't a monkey or an Englishman, it was gratifying rather than threatening to know that people found his belle attractive. They took their places on the bus, where some techno music was playing. At first Seamus sat on the inside, but it took a while for the bus to get going, and he kept noticing little kids, probably from the Northside, pointing to him and then at a poster on a nearby lamppost. For the first time since he’d seen his face plastered everywhere, he felt vulnerable, exposed, and asked to sit on the more anonymous inside. Grainne agreed, acquiescently and silently. In the remaining minutes Seamus tapped on his knee to the beat of the music, while Grainne just sat there, waiting for all this to be over. When the bus was finally full, with a mixture of norries and a few students, and a few, perhaps, who were both; it wasn't entirely unknown for people from the Northside of Cork City to make it into college. Soon they were mercifully out of the city and on the open road, though Seamus still didn't know the destination. It was midsummer and the sun was just beginning it’s journey to the horizon, dragging a trail of rubescent cumolostratus with it. The hedgerows were at the peak of their fecundity, the fields exhibited the widest variety of virescent hues, almost enough to make Seamus wish he was cycling gently along these roads rather than being tied with thirty-nine other acorns in a sack full of repetitive, mechanical music. Yet he knew he’d soon have an outlet for all this tension, assuming the bus ever got to where it was going. Before that could happen, the driver heard on his mobile that there was a police checkpoint ahead, and that they’d have to take an alternative route. He passed the warning on to Dave, who passed it onto everyone else via the bus’ PA system, but told everyone to get rid of whatever drugs they might have on their person, just in case, which promoted a frenzied emptying of pockets and ingestion of narcotics. Grainne noticed that Seamus wasn't involved in this general panic, and took his hand tightly as if to thank him for keeping his promise not to do any drugs. Soon they made an abrupt turn onto some godforsaken backroad. It seemed that the county manager had taken his deity’s lead and left this road to go back to nature, which was good from an ecological perspective but not from the point of view of a bus filled with wired ravers. Seamus, who was used to being on busses in such conditions, pressed his back against the seat until he could feel it’s internal wiring. In general this stopped him from falling out of his seat when the bus stopped or turned abruptly. On one occasion, however, it stopped so suddenly that both he and Grainne found there faces pressed up against the next seat. Seamus looked to see if Grainne was OK and then looked around the bus to see if anyone else was hurt, and, when he was satisfied that everything was as well as it could be in the circumstances, he joined everyone else in going up to front of the bus to find out what the fuck was going on. What was going on, the general befuddlement of everyone on the bus, no matter what state of consciousness they were in, was a road bowling match. Seamus didn't know that these still went on, assuming they’d gone the same way as industrial schools, magdalen laundries and those pink biscuits he used to eat as child. Immediately he could both compare and contrast the two activities, as a leaving cert. question would have him do. They were both essentially marginalised, counterculture activities that were organised on the hoof, both had a long tradition, if you considered raves to be descended from the old dances at the crossroads, or the old maypole dance. They both involved physical exertion, and both were associated with illegal, mind-altering substances. And yet, how different they looked, the lean, lycra-wearing ravers on the bus and the big, burly, hairy men out on the road, clutching their lead balls in their welted, pilose hands. The driver didn't have much choice but to pull into the ditch and let them go past. Everyone on the bus stared the way American tourists did at lay-bys down in West Cork and Kerry, like visitors from another age, or from another galaxy, though there couldn’t be more than two or three degrees of separation between them and the men they stared out their windows at, people who probably shared their gene pool, maybe even their names, watched the same stuff on TV when they got home. Seamus noticed that Grainne seemed even more melancholy than she had been for the rest of the evening as she stared out at them. He clutched her hand and asked her why. “My dad used to be a road bowling champion, when I was a child.” Seamus didn't know what to say in response to this, and he felt she needed a few seconds to reflect to herself, before she came out with the following: “I remember him hoisting me up on his shoulders, holding the trophy in his other hand, people cheering all around him and offering to buy him drinks, it felt like he was the king of the world, I didn't know how big the world was at the time...” As she drifted into a reverie they got back on the road, if you could call it that, this bus of bacchants banished to the boreens, like the spalpini fanach of yestermillenium, hiding from the authorities because they were doing nothing more serious than taking some drugs that would give them a brief, fleeting rush of pleasure that would relieve the monotony of their demeaning jobs or the soul-sapping educational system of which they were a part. It was starting to get dark, and the driver still hadn't put the headlights. Seamus speculations as to why this might be so got more fanciful as the night drew in. At first he suspected the headlights simply weren't working, or that the driver was trying to save the battery. Then he imagined dark fantasies of being chased by police helicopters against which darkness would prove the only cover. If this sort of thing was going on in his head, what of those people who’d been indulging in various forms of narcotic? He knew they were getting near the site when he heard the tinny backbeats of the techno they were playing, the bass line going somewhere else, perhaps back to the centre of the Earth from which it came. It wasn't like the sound of Niagara falls to the tight-assed puritans who heard it first, nor the distant rumblings from the edge of the universe which told nerdy, dysfunctional astronomers of the big bang, but it was enough to alert everyone on the bus that their weary voyage was at an end. There was the general putting on of coats and picking up of bags that always attended such moments. Seamus didn't want to waste any time. He wanted to dance. He’d come to the right place, as here in this field in the middle of nowhere, whose owner probably got thousands of pounds from the EU for growing grass but where the long arm of the law hopefully couldn’t reach, was a marquee with a sound system that must be scaring wildlife for miles and a light system that must be confusing the ones that couldn’t fly away. It seemed we couldn’t get back to the primordial without disturbing the creatures that still had a home there. And this is what Seamus thought everyone was looking for, whether they knew it or not, the connection with the visceral and atavistic that this orgy of dancing to music of pure rhythm offered. When Seamus and Grainne got inside the marquee, there were already a handful of people dancing. Seamus asked Grainne if she’d like to join them, she said she’d wait for a while. She sat down, trying not to look either bored or available, which was a tricky tightrope to walk, Seamus imagined. There were a few others sitting around, locals who’d got wind of the event and came out of curiosity. There were a few African immigrants there as well, sitting around casually waiting for thin blonde Irish girls to indulge their curiosity about whether they really were so well endowed. Seamus wondered how they’d found out about this but then reflected that when he was visiting new places he often seemed to know more about what was going on than the locals, who were stuck in their lugubrious, ineluctable ruts. That was why he, and maybe they as well, travelled. Back when Seamus was a regular clubber he used to watch a certain girl dance obsessively, even disturbingly. It was partly because she was immaculately, transcendently beautiful, but also because of the way she danced, so in tune with the rhythms that the music almost seemed to be coming from her, like in that Yeats line, How can we tell the dancer from the Dance? He wanted to dance like that, not trying to impress anybody, letting himself become an instrument which the music played, swept along on a wave of pure rhythm. And in spite of his ferocious, relentless intellect, he actually was able to do something like this, peculiarly, as he was too western and self-conscious to ever do anything like meditation, but could dance more wildly than the most tanked-up ravers. Soon his wild, unfettered terpsichorean style was making him the centre of attention, and he noticed some thin, firm-breasted young women giving him the eye. He looked over where Grainne was, but there was just a blank space where her equally supple form was a few minutes previously. He assumed she’d gone to look for the bathroom and revelled in the attention he was getting from chicks who must have been ten years his junior. He noticed them talking to each other while throwing glances in his general direction, then one of them made a move in his direction. She slithered up close to him, started licking her top lip, jiggling her breasts. Then she spun round, did the same thing with her hips, throwing back flirtatious glances in Seamus’ direction. Then she turned round again, grabbed Seamus by the chin, and, to his astonishment, tongue-kissed him. Seamus thought he felt her almost roll something onto his tongue but then told himself that was just the shock talking. He grabbed the girl by the shoulder blades and shouted in her ear that he already had a girlfriend. She reacted angrily and asked where said petit ami might find herself at this temporal juncture, or words to that general effect. Nervously, Seamus stuttered that she didn't like dancing so much and was probably gone to the bathroom. She looked like she was about to do something drastic but just turned round angrily and went back to her friend, gave her a piece of her mind, of which she didn't seem to have too much to spare, after which her friend cast angry looking glances in his direction. By now he was sick of all the attention he was getting and decided to go and look for Grainne. He felt exposed in way that he didn't when he was dancing, figuring that it was the dance people saw in the same way that it was the politics people saw when he was canvassing. Now it was just Seamus that people saw, and he was acting in a way that nervous and generally inept. He looked around the place for Grainne but couldn’t find her and felt to awkward to go back on the dancefloor so sat somewhere dark and inconspicuous. After a few minutes of this solipsism the DJ put on something more uptempo and the dancefloor started to fill up, and he felt he could just merge into the crowd. This time he didn't let the music sweep him along so much but instead tried carefully not to make an exhibition of himself. He watched what everyone else was doing, and tried to replicate their moves so that he wouldn’t draw attention to himself, throwing occasional glances back to where Grainne had been sitting. This strategy provided him with so little pleasure that he abandoned it after about five minutes, and started to dance wildly again. It was the kind of dance music - he didn't know that much about the various sub-genres - that seemed to wind itself up and then let all the energy back out in a frenzied climax. He responded by letting his own energy flow to different parts of his body, a sort of aucthoctonus tai chai. After a few minutes of this, he felt light-headed in a way he never had before and suddenly felt a great thirst come upon him, as he would have said in Irish, and urgently sought out the toilets. Normally he would have been pleased to find a toilet that filtered his waste directly back into the Earth, but it meant that there was only a bucket of water to flush or wash out of, and he didn't fancy drinking out of that. Eventually he found someone selling bottled water at some sort of outrageous price from a stall outside the marquee. Reluctantly, he handed the money over and drank about one third of it’s contents in one gulp, which reminded him of a guy from back home who didn't have proper neck muscles and could knock back a pint of beer in three seconds. Then, bottle in hand, he went to look for Grainne. He found her exactly where he’d last seen her, as if she’d never gone. He looked at her in shock, then ran up to her, pressed his sweaty form up against her, and rolled his tongue deep down her throat, and heavily fondling her breasts. She drew back, looking a bit embarrassed, said that they were in a public place. That didn't seem to matter to Seamus, who told her that all the people there were there friends, then started to roar out laughing at the irony that had just come over him. She pushed him away and asked him if he’d been taking drugs. “What makes you think that?”, he asked, genuinely surprised. “You’re just acting really strange, you’ve got this vacant stare in your eyes, and... why’d you buy that bottle of water?” “I just got really thirsty from dancing. Anyway, where were you? I was looking all over for you?” “There was a big queue for the... ladies. But tell me honestly, have you been doing drugs? You’re showing all the symptoms of someone on Ecstasy.” “Sweetheart...honey...darling...Just come dance with me, wontcha?” With an expression that suggested that she didn't want to have come all this way just to have defecated into a hole in the ground, she agreed. She pressed herself closely against him, rubbing her breasts against chest, and looking deeply into his eyes, so deeply that he thought, perhaps a little Paranoically, that she was trying to discern whether he’d been taking Ecstasy or not. Feeling uncomfortable, he swung her round and held her around her waist, kissing the back of her neck in way he knew she loved, and for the first time that night he got a sense that she was enjoying herself. Yet he couldn’t seem to stop himself, all of a sudden her body seemed so transcendentally, platonically perfect that he wanted to caress every part of it. He grabbed her breasts tightly, but, too his astonishment, she wriggled free, told him she was tired of dancing and wanted to go and sit down. Reluctantly, he let her go and looked over and noticed that the girl who’d kissed him a while ago and her friend were looking over at him. They, too seemed to have acquired a glowing, iridescent beauty. He looked around the dancefloor and he seemed to be surrounded by a group of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen, as if he’d gone to Muslim heaven. But then, to his surprise, this analogy was broken by the fact that he started thinking men were beautiful as well. He had a sort of epiphany, which didn't stop him from dancing, but changed the form from frenetic slam-dance to a sort of tantric, arm-waving dance which seemed to replicate extraneously the drawing together of different strands of thought inside his head. He remembered the first time he’d gotten drunk. He was at the school disco, where they were playing a tacky selection of eighties hits in the old school assembly hall. He was sixteen at the time, it wasn't that sweet for him, though not as sour as seventeen would prove to be. Someone handed him what he honestly thought was just a can of 7-up, and, being thirsty then as he was now, he drank quite a bit. After a while his behaviour became more animated, he got giddy, may even have made advances to some women. When he got home, his parents, who were far more experienced in this matter than he was, knew he was drunk, but he didn't. He bitterly resented their accusations until he started knowingly drinking alcohol but by then it was too late to tell his father and the moment never seemed right to tell his mother. Now it might be too late to tell her as well. He didn't want to lose the opportunity to come clean with Grainne, so he walked diffidently over to her, preparing what he was going to say. He sat down, took her by the hands, looked with his widely dilated eyes into hers, and said, “Grainne, sweetheart, darling, my love, my soul mate, my one and only, I think I’ve taken some Ecstasy. I can’t say how or why, and you probably wouldn’t believe me if I did. But I promise you that I’ll never take it again, because right now I feel more in love with you than I ever have before and I never, ever want to do anything to hurt you, my love.” In his wired, frazzled, buzzing state, he actually expected her to respond in kind. She took her hands out of his and asked abruptly how he could possibly have taken ecstasy and not known about it. Tactlessly, he started laughing and told her it was all a bit weird but that it really wasn't his fault. She stared at him for a few seconds, then gave the internationally recognised patience-losing gesture and stormed out in a soapoperish way. “Where’re you going? There’s nowhere to go”, he cried out forlornly, but knew she just had to go somewhere to work off her anger by himself, or at least he thought that was what he knew, as suddenly everything was making apparent sense to him. He went over to the girl who he thought had given him the E and asked her why she’d done what she’d done. “Because you’re fucking beautiful”, she replied. Just then he felt no anger towards her, just rolled out his tongue to see how she’d react. They started to tongue-kiss and he enjoyed it like he’d never done before. Then he shouted into her here that his girlfriend would probably leave him if she found out about this, but just laughed at the restoration-comedy farce of it all. He swung her around, then they entered into a dancing contest that grabbed everyone’s attention, drawing them into a circle of curious onlookers who needed no stewards to help them keep a respectful distance, scratching their chins while comparing their respective merits. She was sensuous and erotic, letting the energy concentrate on her hips and shoulders while chaplinesquely flirting with the crowd. He was characteristically wild, twisting his ankles dextrously and spreading his limbs feverishly, while remaining as impervious as Keaton, or a student of the Gita to the crowd around him. Yet eventually the two strains bonded into one platonic whole, as he moved closer to her, still swaying deliriously around her as she responded with the merest shuffling of her hips, almost as if they were replicating the movements of sperm round an ovary. Finally they came together, he pushing his tumescent groin against hers, then grabbing her by the hips and swinging her round, to the cheers of the crowd. Then he started to kiss her again. Just at this moment he didn't feel any guilt - he loved Grainne, he loved the girl he whose tongue was rolling around in his mouth, he loved everyone else in the marquee - what was the problem? Right now he wouldn’t care if she was snogging the sleaziest guy in the whole place. Yet after a while his thirst started to strike again and he felt the need to find his water. He led her hand in hand to the petrochemical well which he needed no diviner to find. He sat down, took a long drink and expressed the sort of relief that normally he’d only display after masturbating or urinating after a long wait. He offered her some, which she accepted, and then asked her name. “Why d’you want to know?”, she replied, with more curiosity than hostility. “I don't know”, replied a slightly befuddled Seamus. “It just seems like a natural thing to ask.” “Listen”, she leant over into his earlobe to reply, “I know you already have a girlfriend. I know she’s gone for a sulk somewhere and you’re going to have a big fight about it and then make friends again. The thing is, I don't care. I just want to be with you tonight.” Seamus didn't know how to react to this. His first response a sort of generational disdain, a feeling that, though she was only about ten years younger than him, he sort of knew, though he wasn't very good with girls back then, that they wouldn’t ever have been so free-spirited. Growing up in the eighties, he always regretted missing the sexual revolution, but now he was realising that it had been going on in his own country just as he was making his own fraught, unfinished journey from childhood to adulthood. His second was to instinctively distrust her words, to suspect that she was looking for a long-term partner and that this was just a not-all-that-cunning-really ruse. He looked into her eyes, and sounding for all the world like Charles Foster Kane in that scene where... Oh, you probably know the one I mean, he asked, “Don't you know who I am?” Bemusedly, she looked right back into his dilated eyeballs and told him he was just a guy. “You’ve never seen my face before?” “No? Should I have?” Seamus was actually in the mood to believe her and the suspicion that Grainne was only interested in him because of his status hadn't quite gone away, not even in the benign, transient glow of Ecstasy. It was perhaps the paradox that dominated his relationship, and, for all he knew, every other guy’s relationship with women, he loved them, partly in the abstract, hippyish way that he loved wild boars and slugs, but mainly in a lustful, primordial way; he loved their tender skin, their soft, supple bodies with their endlessly fascinating bodies, which, like snowflakes, never seemed to have an identical doppelganger, each one having it’s own unique, idiosyncratic charms. But he could never trust them. Sounds like a really bad pop lyric, but it was true. But even though he’d already gotten into one relationship of which no good could come, he was willing to get entangled with this girl as well in spite of the obvious dangers. He laughed to himself that he could blame it all on the drugs, in a few years time he might be telling kids on inner city estates how drugs had almost ruined his career. “Are you a vegetarian”, he asked, as they neared a suitable place to lie down and fuck, in case you hadn't already guessed that that was what his fantasy involved. “No, why d’you ask?” “No reason”, he replied, enigmatically, then feeling the grass beneath his feet for anything the land’s bovine captives may have left behind, lay down on the parched earth and beckoned the girl to follow him. He saw in her face the urbanites disdain for this sort of outdoor living and felt compelled to encourage her. “C’mon, haven’t you ever wanted to do it outdoors?” “Well, not before now anyway.” Seamus was flattered at the implication that she was only here because of him, and felt it was only fair to shield her from whatever scared her about the ground beneath their respective feet, and let her lie on top of him. Knowing there was no-one watching either of them, whatever inhibitions she had floated away like a spring zephyr. After pressing her groin against his a few times, as if to determine that it was still as hard as it was a few minutes ago, she started to unbuckle his pants and slide his pants down, which would surely create some stains that would be hard to explain away, not that he cared much. When she pulled it out, she appeared impressed by it’s girth, which flattered Seamus. He’d heard rumours that Ecstasy diminished people’s libidos but it would take more than a little white pills to stop the sperm flowing from Seamus’ gonads. Then she opened her mouth wide a few times, whether to give her mouth muscles practice for what she was about to do or just to inform him what was coming. She gave excellent fellatio, performing it with the delicacy of an artisan and the enthusiasm of a novice. She seemed to know how sensitive it was, this organ whose owners had brought life on Earth to it’s present parlous state with their violence and rapacity. She also seemed to know at exactly which time he was about to come, at which point she stopped and tantalisingly prolonged the moment by slipping out of her lycra shorts, under which she wasn't wearing any underwear. “I don't have any condoms”, Seamus told her, with a mixture of panic and anticipation. “I’m on the pill”, she replied. Are there four more beautiful syllables in the English language? If you put Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Byron, Keats, Yeats and TS Eliot all into the same room, could they come up with something more euphonious, something that promised so much pleasure and took so little time to say? D’you know, I think not, although females might argue that “I Love You” is a possible contender. Miraculously, Seamus managed to keep going for so long that she got some pleasure too, this cherub who seemed to have been sent from some empyrean Tir-na-Nog to compensate him for all the bad luck he’d had with women in the past. He almost wanted to stay inside her forever, prolong this moment, though he knew that eventually the ecstasy would wear off, they’d grow tired and thirsty, and Grainne would start looking for him. So, after the final, near-sublime climax, after he’d lain on the ground and breathed deeply of the fresh, pleasantly cool air they dragged their clothes back on, embraced once more and made their way back to the marquee. It was a little awkward, as Seamus didn't want to spoil the moment by saying anything, but he thought it would only be polite to ask for her phone number, but that doing so would be tantamount to calling her promise that this was just about tonight a lie. Eventually he thought of a strain of conversation that might be comfortable for them both. “How’d you get up here tonight?” She didn't say anything in response, just made one of those deep breaths that signifies disdain. “Did I say the wrong thing?” She paused before replying, tersely, “I was on the same bus as you. I saw you with that girl. Me and my friend were both looking over at the both of you, trying to decide if she was your girlfriend or not. We decided she probably wasn't, that she was your sister or something. We thought we saw you looking over in our direction a few times, flirting with us. I guess we were wrong.” Seamus was about to reply, but then the girl interjected with: “What do you see in that girl? She seems like such a tight-ass.” Seamus stopped in his tracks, told her she shouldn’t talk about his girlfriend that way, then told her about all she’d suffered, how it was understandable that she’d be a little uptight. The girl looked a little chastened but wondered why Grainne wasn't with someone more her own age, someone that could take proper care of her. Seamus told her how old he was, she didn't believe him at first, but gradually accepted it. “So what do you do for a living?, she asked, as Seamus knew she inevitably would. “If I told you, you probably wouldn’t believe me.” “Try me.” “Naw. We had a good time tonight, we’re probably not going to see each other again, right?” “Dude, Cork’s a small town. We’re almost certain to meet again.” Any time any Cork person used an Americanism like that, he was reminded of his Californian ex-girlfriend, who could use them without sounding even remotely geeky. Yet the statement as a whole disconcerted him so much that he felt compelled to deny it. “We’ll probably pass each other on the street alright, but we’re probably both so off our faces that we won’t remember each other at all. What was that drug you slipped down my throat, by the way?” “It was just some E”, she replied. “You realise that if I did that to you, I’d probably get done for date-rape?” She laughed in recognition that that was probably the ironic truth of the matter, but then asked again what he did for a living, saying that she could find out if she wanted. Enigmatically, like the Celtic Shaman he always wanted to be, he told her that the answer to that question looked down on her from every street corner, then worringly realised that that wasn't nearly enigmatic enough and was almost tantamount to giving her a straight answer. By now they were getting close to the marquee, and Seamus suggested they split up. To his surprise, she asked him if he wanted her phone number. Reluctantly, he agreed to take it. After she’d scribbled it on a scrap of paper and placed it in his hip pocket, making use of this final opportunity to grasp his ass, she asked for his in return. He called it out quickly, without any real conviction, knowing, fatalistically, that she wouldn’t’ take this hint and that he’d be asked to call it out again, slowly, and that she’d know if he was lying. So he called it out, let her transcribe it, and kissed her goodbye. He made his way back into the marquee to look for Grainne. By now the place was the rave was in full swing, as he got closer to it’s epicentre he could feel the heat being generated wafting towards him along with the scent of sweat and aftershave, and the rhythm moving his limbs as if by some imperceptible osmosis. But he pulled himself away from it’s febrile, kinetic grasp and vowed to find Grainne. To his surprise, he found her where they’d first been sitting. By now almost everyone was dancing, so it wasn't hard to pick her out. He sat down nest to her, and adopted as contrite a tone as he could muster as he asked, “So you came back?” “Well, like you say, there wasn't anywhere else to go”, she responded, dispassionately, then paused for a little and added, “I went out to the bus for a little bit but I got really bored, I didn't know what to do with myself. I tried to dance for a little but I felt really self-conscious and stopped, just sat down here, observed everyone else. I suppose maybe if I’d taken some drugs like you I might feel different.” This last sentence disappointed Seamus, who was hoping that that issue had gone away. “I really didn't mean to take any E, honestly”, he offered, but she quickly countered by asserting, in a matter-of-fact way that suggested she’d garnered this information from Health Board pamphlets, that while drinks could be spiked with acid, that MDMA wasn't soluble. “No, it’s not, I suppose, although, y’know, it’s not like I’ve ever taken it before or anything, but I read somewhere... anyway, you’ve just got to take my word, I really didn't know what I was doing. Do you think you can forgive me?” “I don't know, Seamus, every time I forgive you, you seem to go and do something even more irresponsible.” “Yeah, but I think you’ll keep forgiving me because you know I love you.” He chastised himself internally for the schmalziness of this line, but to his amazement it seemed to work on her. Although later he’d come to the conclusion that she’s already decided to forgive him but wanted to make him abase himself before her first, at the time it struck him that he’d never be able to talk to her like this without the influence of E, but that was what created the problem in the first place. “You do love me, dontcha?” “Yeah, I do. But you still want to know why I took the E and where I was for the last half hour, I guess?” “No.” “No?” “No. I know you really want to be with me, but I think you need a life of your own as well. After what I’ve been through, I can never be in a really close relationship. I wanted to let you go here by yourself but you were so insistent that I come, I felt I had to. I know that whatever you’ve been doing that you’ve been enjoying yourself, but I’d really rather be at home watching the TV.” Seamus knew that this statement was something she’d had to convince herself of before she convinced him, it bore the hallmarks of rationalisation the way a crippled miner carries the burden of a life’s toil. Yet, like the politician he’d surely become, he acted like he accepted it at face value. He asked her if she wanted to dance, she acquiesced with the same calculation that attended her last statements. By now everyone was dancing with the same frenetic kinesis that Seamus had been a hour ago. Right now, though, he danced in a subdued, post-coital way, while, he caught, out of the corner of his eye, the girl he’d been dancing with tossing her arms around wildly the same way he’d been when he danced with her. He bent down to kiss her neck, hoping her hair would provide him with a cloak of anonymity. Then he realised, horribly, that they’d all have to share the bus home, that after having ejaculated he’d be so tired that he’d struggle to stay awake, that they’d converse... he stopped trying to hide as he realised that he was at her mercy, this girl who he’d been inside of but whose name was a mystery, though somehow he pegged her a ‘J’, a Jenny, maybe a Jean, a Jane, perhaps even a Jony. He smiled over his shoulder at her to let her know that though they were still friends, he was saving the last fuck for Grainne. It was a better strategy, as it kept Grainne’s suspicions on the back-burner while allowing J the possibility that they might meet again. The evening was drawing to a close, it was three O’ clock and the music had mellowed from the hardcore they were playing to some nostalgic former chart music by the likes of Dee-lite, which had everyone raising their hands in the air as if making a last stand against the fatigue that would inevitably kick in before... Seamus didn't want to think about what the medium-term effects of taking E might be, if they were anything as bad as the anti-drug propaganda that filled the media would have you believe, it would be better to put it aside. When the DJ played the final song, the crowd in the centre, what he would have called the nucleus if he didn't know that the nucleus was generally an inert mass while it was the electrons that whizzed around so fast that you couldn’t see them moving, no matter how good a microscope you had, started calling for “one more tune” It would be more appropriate to call them a star, as that was where the major concentration of energy was in a solar system, but that term had been appropriated by people who seemed to imagine that the stars were above us, while there was no up or down in the universe at large. Seamus imagined this energy source had it’s own, extraneous, possibly narcotic source of energy, but that if they really wanted to burn out like some glowing supernova they’d have to take it back to one of their own houses. Seamus and Grainne staggered back to where their stuff was, and headed for the bus. It took a while for the older, patience-deficient driver to get everyone back on, and J was one of the last to get back on. She spared Seamus any embarrassment for the meantime, giving him only a subtle glance that must’ve seemed innocent to Grainne. By the time the bus started, Seamus was extremely sleepy. After a few minutes, he was in alcheringa, inevitably with the cunt. Again, he was putting up posters warning the people of Cork that the cunt was still on the loose, and that to give him money would put other Cork people at risk. It was in a weird, futuristic version of Cork, where Patrick Street was being pedestrianised and the old lampposts were being replaced with intertwining, postmodernistic new ones from a Le Corbusier wet dream. It was a crisp November afternoon, there’d been a shower and everything was bathed in the sharp, reflective light. As he stuck a poster to one of these titanic illuminates, he noticed what appeared to be some construction workers working on the roads staring at him. He didn't think much of it, he used to be a construction worker himself and knew how asphixiatingly boring it could be, and how anything was more entertaining, even watching someone stick a piece of paper to a lamppost. But a minute later, when he had moved on to the next one, which was perhaps at the corner of Marlborough Street, a police car pulled up next to him, and two officers stepped out and beckoned him over. One was a culchie from central casting, the other a short, chubby one with a camp accent which led Seamus to suspect he was a repressed homosexual. The queer one beckoned him over asked him he if he knew what he was doing was illegal. Seamus said he had no idea. They told him, Kafkaesquely, that he could be charged with both littering and hate crime. The queer one read back to him some of the information on the poster in his best imitation of a sarcastic voice, which only accentuated the campness. The culchie told him he could get six months in jail, to which Seamus incredulously responded that the cunt had been let out with a suspended sentence, the culchie gave him the standard spiel about not making the laws, blah blah blah. Then the queer erupted into strange, surreal laughter as he gloatingly told Seamus that while the new legislation was actually intended to protect minorities like gypsies, travellers, etc., they’d be happy to use it against a ‘left-wing radical’ like him. They asked for his name, then wrote down something completely different. Seamus told them that that wasn't his name, then the queer wrote, ‘false information’ Seamus woke up in a cold sweat, wondering what sort of mind he had that could dream up such a Kafkaesque dystopia where a foreign thug could enter a country, rape women and assault men and get away with it, while someone who told people about him could get put in jail. He realised this was probably just the start of his long, arduous descent from his ecstasy high. Then he looked around, saw that Grainne was talking to Jenny, and wondered, like that Chinese philosopher he was always hearing about, which was weirder, the dream or the reality. He cast a glance over in Jenny’s direction, without Grainne, who was leaning in the same direction noticing; shrewdly, J didn't return it, leaving Seamus with little option to try and plug into their conversation. After listening intently without trying to do so for a few seconds, he discovered that they were only talking about regular girlie stuff, soap operas and celebrity gossip, you know the sort of stuff, particularly if you’re a member of the gentler sex yerself. Then Jenny, in an apparent act of mercy, told Grainne that Seamus had woken up. She jerked her head round abruptly and saw that though his eyes were bleary and bloodshot, they were open, and she felt compelled to make an inquiry. “I didn't realise you were awake. I think you were having some sort of nightmare. Me and Jenny here were discussing what it might be.” Seamus gulped as Jenny tried not to snigger. With a sharpness of wit that surprised himself in the circumstances, he told her that he’d been dreaming of a world where she didn't exist, which wasn't entirely untrue, he supposed. She sighed the way girls do when guys say cheesy romantic stuff like this and leaned over to kiss him. Her eyes were closed but Seamus’ were sharply, eaglishly open to try to discern how Jenny was reacting to all of this. He couldn’t tell if she knew if he was looking at her, as he was just looking at her through Grainne’s hair, he supposed not. The look on her face seemed to suggest a combination of admiration for his legerdemain, stoical acceptance of the fact that Seamus and Grainne were together, and a hint of jealousy. Of course, there was a bit of conjecture involved in this judgement, as it would have been impossible for anyone, especially someone as inept at dealing with women as Seamus, to infer this much from looking at a chick’s face. When they stopped kissing Grainne realised how impolite she was being and introduced Seamus to Jenny and then things got a bit awkward. Seamus tried to draw on the many menage-a-trois movies he’d seen in his life to figure out what to do, but he drew an infuriating blank. He asked her, trying to affect a tone of casual curiosity, what they’d been talking about while he was asleep. “Like we said, we were just wondering wh....at you were dreaming about”, replied Jenny, tantalising Seamus with the knowledge that she could have substituted a ‘who’ for a ‘what’; as a sort of indication of the power she thought she had over him. “So what actually was going on in your dream?”, asked Grainne. Seamus felt himself in a slightly difficult position as he couldn’t possibly tell the truth; he scanned his mind for old dreams that he’d never told her about, but couldn’t think of any, so panicked and told her that it would something that he could only tell her in private. Grainne clutched his hand as he said this, but he noticed Jenny looking extremely slighted. Diplomatically, he looked over in her direction and asked what she thought he might have been dreaming of, surprised that a ramshackle bus on an Irish boreen had become such a forum for Freudian dream-interpretation. “I think I know what sort of dreams you’re going to have in the next few days”, she said, with a slightly sinister tone. Grainne, looking extremely innocent to the import of this statement, asked her what on Earth she meant, Jenny just told them she’d been to a lot more raves than either of them and she knew how long it could to recover. Grainne looked like she just accepted this but Seamus knew that this was probably an affectation and that it would only take her a while to put two and two together and figure out where he got the E from. Then she’d deny it for a little bit but then the repression this entailed would prove too much and it would come crashing down on him like a Damoclean sword. Yet there was nothing Seamus could do the halt this process, except tell the truth, and where would that get him? Tragically, he realised he was at Jenny’s mercy, and had nothing left to lose by falling asleep again. By the time he woke the bus had reached the end of it’s meandering journey. The necessity of getting up and getting his things precluded the possibility of remembering any of his dreams. He let Grainne drag his staggering, scrambled form out of the bus, and then saw Jenny waiting for them both outside. He was a bit surprised to see Grainne and Jenny hug each other and promise to meet again, but, acting like they barely knew each other, he casually embraced her, but noticed her mouthing, silently but saliently, the words ‘call me’, and watched her walk off, entertaining the fantasy that she was leaving his life forever. Grainne started to shiver in an equally pointed way, Seamus knew that this meant that she wanted to call a taxi, though having reached a critical point where he couldn’t get any more tired than he already was, he would have been willing to walk home. So they walked towards a 24-hour taxi place not so far away. By now it was about four in the morning, and this was Ireland, so all the legitimate nightclubs were closed and the only evidence of the Bacchanalian excess of a hour or two ago was the detritus blowing round the streets, the fast food left for the rats and the street cleaners, the vomit and the blood. Meanwhile, Seamus had his own mess to clean up after, but realised that he was in no state to do it right now. At the same time, he realised that the longer he left it go, the wilder Grainne’s guesses might get, they might even approximate the truth. It was like his fatigue was the tragic flaw that would prevent this particular drama from reaching a resolution... or something like that. When they’d gotten to the taxi rank and were forced, once again, to queue, the subject of where he got the E from once again raised it’s ugly, officious head. Before answering Grainne’s query, Seamus thought of how easy those other male mammals had it, the orang-utans and the elephant seals, the hippopotami and the hyenas, able to fuck all around them knowing that the females who were equally desirous of a stable partner wouldn’t be able to tell each other about the males philandering. But then it was the biggest and strongest that got the chicks in most of those species, so he wouldn’t get any tail if he was any of them. His mind always drifted away from the matter at hand, as you probably know by now. “I got the E from Jenny”, he replied, eventually, trying to give the impression that he’d been thinking long and hard about the ethics of this reply, and not fantasising about being a monkey, then added that that was probably why Jenny had struck up a conversation with her. Grainne didn't look at all surprised, just quizzical about what else might have been going on between them. “Do you really want to know? I’m with you right now, isn’t that what’s important?” “Seamus, this isn’t some Drifters song, this is reality. I need to know what was happening between the two of you.” “Well, why don't you ask her when you meet up again?”, he asked forlornly. “Okay”, she replied casually, to his intense surprise. “What do you mean, Okay?”, he asked, his jaded tone almost rising to the pitch of normal conversation as a result of his shock. “I mean Okay, I’ll find out the story from her point of view, then I’ll get you to respond, I’ll figure the truth is somewhere in the middle.” Seamus was a bit shocked at the clinical way she was going about this, but also relieved that the matter was out of his hands for a while. By the time they’d gottten into the cab they hadn't resolved the matter of whose house each of them would be staying in, which was something the driver kind of needed to know. He was happy enough to let them take their time resolving the matter, as the metre was already running. Grainne told Seamus that Diarmuid would probably have some friends around playing super nintendo and that it would be hard for her to perform her parental duty of telling him off if she was arriving in the door with her fancy man. Seamus laughed ironically, knowing that it was having to act in such a hypocritical way was one of the things that made him wary of ever having kids, though it never seemed to bother his own parents. They told the driver to let them off at each other’s places separately, and then made arrangements about where and when to see each other again. Grainne told Seamus that if Seamus really had taken E then he’d probably want to spend the whole following day in bed, so after ‘work’ on Monday would be a good time. So he got out at his place, kissed her goodbye, but noticed that she was keeping one eye on the metre as he was doing so and stopped abruptly, paid his share of the fare and staggered into a house which, after the excesses of the night, seemed empty and hollow.