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quiet-loud call of the night-time streets.
    “Who?”
    “I’m Swift! Matthew Swift!”
    “So?”
    “I need help!”
    “I don’t know you!”
    “Tell Vera it’s Swift!”
    “Fuck off!”
    Our stomach was a vat in which old bones were dissolved for glue. Each cell of blood in our body had grown little centipede legs that tickled and crawled along the inside of our veins.
    I said again, “I need help.”
    “Go to the fucking police!”
    “I’m a sorcerer . . .”
    “Yeah, right.”
    So we looked up at her and said, “We are the angels. Help me.”
    And the darkness in the window hesitated. We raised our hand towards her and let the blood trickle between our fingers, and as it flowed, it wriggled and wormed, coherent rivers of red breaking away into fat liquid maggots on our skin that writhed and hissed off each other, burning cold blue electricity over our flesh. “We are . . .” we called through gritted teeth, as the light of our blood turned our face electric blue, “. . . we are the blue electric angels. Please - help me.”
    The woman in the window said, “Crap.”
    The door opened.
    We went inside.
     
    The door led to steps, the steps led to a basement.
    The basement was a club. The walls were painted with dancing people, most of whom were wearing very little clothing.
    They were frozen on every wall and across every counter, stretched out over every pillar and rippling up onto the ceiling. The place stank of paint, magic, beer, smoke and sweat. A few hours earlier, these pictures would have danced with all the rest; the floor was stained with a thousand prints set in paint of high heel, trainer, loafer, boot, sandal and every kind of shoe that knew how to party. Some of the marks were still wet, and as we walked, our shoes - not our shoes, no, not quite - left blue footprints across the floor. Up was trying to be down, colour was trying to be sound, sound was trying to be sense, all things playing tricks, the painkillers nothing more than a cobweb through which the pain slashed.
    The bouncer who met me at the bottom of the stairs had skin turned almost purple with the weight of tattoos on it. Unlike the tattoos of the jailbird on the bus, these stank of raw, sweaty power burnt into the skin. He looked me over in the half-gloom of the silent, stinking club floor and said, “This way.”
    I followed him without a word behind the bar to another metal door guarded this time by a furious polar bear whose fanged teeth dribbled silver saliva that rolled as I watched down his flat frozen skin, and whose eyes never left mine. The door led into a corridor whose walking space was 80 per cent empty beer bottle. White strip lighting hummed and buzzed irritatingly overhead. The corridor led to an office, all leather sofa and important desk, cluttered with empty coffee mugs and more abandoned bottles. The bouncer pointed at the sofa and said, “There,” and I obeyed, sticking my legs up over one arm and my head back over the other. More painkillers. From where I lay I could see a brass-covered coffee machine, a photo of some minor celebrity whose name I couldn’t remember, and a monolith-sized chunk of concrete. I didn’t need to smell the power coming from it to guess what it was - magicians of every generation have always collected artefacts of power. I wondered how much the Whites had paid, or if they’d paid at all. Pieces of the Berlin Wall fetched a good price, these days, and for good reasons, although very few people appreciated what they really were.
    There were pieces of slogans still visible on the wall. A remnant of:
    —ISTIAN LIEBE FAMK—
    Or:
    GEBEN SIE MIR MEINEN HU—
    Or a sad half-remnant of the CND logo, framed in flowers.
    I crawled to the end of the sofa, unable to resist my curiosity despite the fire cha-chaing up my nervous system and the ice weighing the rest down. I reached out to touch the concrete, brushed my fingers over a dozen layers of bright paint, tasted . . . grey dust in the