It’s 1am and we’re in the place that they discovered Amy Winehouse.

How do I know that?

Because Sam has been living on that connection for the past 20 years, his walls are covered with his own art, some of it isn’t too bad, some of it makes your eyes bleed.

We’re sat in the VIP area, it’s an annex near the stage that’s painted red – you can get six people in at a push.

There are four of us.

Us.

An American and his local hookup, they’re a cute couple and they want to talk.

We don’t.

So we do the polite things and get them talking about their lives and what their plans are.

They’re cute and they’re young.

The girl is looking at me curiously, I give her full attention.

She blushes.

I smile.

I think I do.

‘Sorry’ she says, I was trying to work out what colour your eyes are, they’re…..’

She tails off.

My eyes are a normal(ish) blue-grey but I know what she means.

Tonight, they’re different.

I can feel them almost physically burning and I caught a glimpse of myself in the window as we entered the club, it wasn’t clear what was neon and what was me.

It still isn’t.

We’ve cut a path through Soho before coming here, other bars with live music and desperate people pushing as hard as they can for that feeling of being alive – being other than what they are.

Coked up fifty year old middle managers with their younger, mostly female employees, wannabe gangsters, fear in their eyes while their faces tried for hard, security staff and older women with young clothes and pale images of their wedding bands on their bare fingers.

And us.

Out of place.

Out of time.

The music in my head is a constantly changing soundtrack tonight, my subconscious applying an overlay to the whole world.

We left one of the bars when one of the coked up superannuated hard men deliberately walked over to us with malice aforethought in his muddled eyes.

I pivoted to the right just as he was about to collide, pulled her into me and whispered..

‘Watch this.’

Inside my head, NOBODY LOVES YOU is playing, lyrics about being left to the dogs under the sky and….

He blundered past and I hooked his ankle as he picked up speed, changing his path slightly , making it faster and uncontrolled.

He crashed into a group of young blokes who could have been builders.

Something smashed with a glassy tinkle.

I glanced at her, a half smile on her lips.

So short.

So cute.

So…other.

Well tonight anyway.

Shouting and more glass breaking, the bouncers starting to flood into the bar.

I felt the neon behind my eyes kick in.

I put out my hand.

She took it and we walked out.

KILLING STRANGERS is in my head, my body walking in time with the beat, she joins in unconsciously.

Our smiles gave people a shiver, the street people gave us a wide berth as we walked.

We went to a few other bars, wandering the streets, our bodies and faces lit in lurid blues and reds, the suggestions of words reflected in our otherworldly eyes

We’ve not taken any drugs nor really drunk that much booze for us, but the night is alive to us, the streets and bars bending to our combined will.

The need to enjoy it but not to talk.

Not yet.

For we both have secrets.

And so we go from bar to bar, one drink here, two drinks there.

Gin and tequila.

Slamming them back as if we’re on the clock.

CARMELITA in my head in one bar, SAY YOU’LL HAUNT ME as we walk along.

Until we wander into Greek Street. PRAYERS FOR THE DAMNED playing in my head as we walk to the door of the bar.

A handshake from the bouncer, an acknowledgment that the VIP area will have some space for us.

And a live band playing.

Drunken and drugged up parties watching from their crowded tables, singing, dancing.

Same old songs, this band isn’t that good really, not good enough to capture the American and his paramour.

And so they ask us questions.

We let most of them slide past while keeping up the pretence of being friendly – it’s not that we’re not, but there’s an undercurrent to tonight.

Things unsaid and the feeling that the world may fracture when the words are finally released, like some dark spell that must be recited in time with the music.

We stare at each other. Our faces close enough for the skin to brush if one of us moves even slightly.

I wait for her to talk, the secrets that I hold are mine, but they’re hers too, even if she doesn’t know it yet.

She smiles again and the lights behind her eyes pinwheel, galaxies rush past, stars and flashes sparking and sending complicated messages.

The band plays a different song.

It’s ’At Last’, the singer’s voice suits this one, the first time since we arrived.

I take her hand, stand up and pull her onto the tiny dance floor, our VIP room, all four square feet of it.

I can see her getting ready for the conversation that’s going to happen at some point.

I know some of the things she needs to say, she told me some of it before on a different night when she was very distressed.

She doesn’t know any of what I’m going to say.

The song finishes and we sit down, the American’s girlie wants to know if we’re married.

‘Nottoeachotherwere justfriends’

Our voices blur.

‘You seem very close’

I shrug.

‘We’ve known each other for a very long time.’

All half truths.

We were more once, much more.

I failed her.

So.

Here we are.

Many years later, meeting up occasionally, studiedly neutral until her husband wanted to change the rules.

I order more drinks, ICH TUR DIR WEH playing in my head.

We’re sat close enough to whisper.

‘He hit me’, she says.

I know who.

Not her husband.

Something worse.

I look at her from behind unreadable eyes.

‘And he wanted me to call him names and to call myself degrading things..’

‘I know. And this is why you had that massive fight with your husband.’

‘Yes. And I was so scared that we’d see him again at a party, that I’d feel that shame and that I’d be afraid.’

She looks down.

I smile at her, I want her to feel safe, at least for tonight.

‘Did you ? See him again?’

‘No, he’s dropped out of the scene, nobody knows why.’

The scene.

The fucking scene.

Swinging.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no position to make moral judgments but I’ve met her husband.

He’s invisible in a crowd of three. But he earns a fuckton of money and he’s a decent father.

But he’s not going to get laid by going to a bar.

So.

The scene.

He’s still not getting laid though and he did a silly thing.

I smile again.

‘He’s gone?’

‘Yes.’

This is it.

The world will fracture and nothing will be the same.

PRAYERS FOR THE DAMNED provides the soundtrack.

‘I know why’

She looks at me, eyes wide.

‘It was me’

She slowly puts her hand to her mouth.

‘I found his real name, his real address and his real, very high powered, public sector wife. I found his company, his tax returns and everything about him. All from the phone number he gave you. He changed his name and profile but he used his real phone.’

She’s clamping her hand over her mouth in shock.

‘I found his swingers profile and the pictures he had on there, I found how he described himself.’

An alpha dom apparently.

Wayward wives a speciality.

Her eyes are huge and unreadable, her face is still shocked.

‘And.’

‘I emailed her at her work address- it’s public the same way she is. I asked her who Gary Chalmers was, what did she think his telegram profile would show and what could it possibly have to do with a swingers account? I said that only the owner of that phone number of his would know. I did it from behind a VPN and a burner email account on a secure platform.’

I paused

‘And then I let her do whatever she needed’

Her mouth is open with shock, her eyes brimming with something close to tears.

I’m in a cold place, RED RIGHT HAND is playing in my head, I have no fucking idea what the band are doing. There’s just the two of us now.

The fracture is open.

I wait.

‘But why? Why do that?’

And I tell her the truth.

‘Because I wanted to break every fucking bone in his body and dump him on his own doorstep with pictures from his account in his mouth. Because I wanted to break your husband’s legs so that he could still provide for you. Because I have no claim on you, now or ever, but because the alternative was far worse for both of them.’

The fracture is wide open now, we’re circling it and she’s so close that she whispers the next question.

‘Why my husband?’

‘Because he pimped you out to a man whose fucking name he didn’t even know. A man who LIKES hurting women. Because the fucking scene was more important to him than his wife.’

I pause.

Her face is a swirl of emotions, her eyes glowing again.

‘And this way was safer for you.’

She pulls me into her and we hold an embrace for what feels like eternity.

The fracture has closed and we’re on the other side of it.

And she’s not horrified, not by what I’ve done or what I wanted to do.

The world has turned on its axis and it’s slightly different now.

The bar closes a few minutes later and the American and his girlfriend talk to us for a while but they can see that we’re not really there anymore.

And we walk to another bar for an hour.

We don’t stop holding hands but we don’t do anything else.

And I pay a fortune to take her home safely in a black cab which then takes me back to my hotel for 4am.

I have to be on a train at 630.

I set my portable speaker up in the hotel room and put some background music on.

The random track from the speaker and the music in my head are perfectly in synch.

Maybe it’s a sign.

WE STAND ALONE

And the lights go out.