The man currently speaking is one who often appears at these meetings, in Manchester at least. He is somewhat older than the students who make up most of the circle, and wears a greying Mohawk and an old studded leather jacket patched with emblems for Crass, Napalm Death, Penetration, Rudimentary Peni, Flux of Pink Indians, Amebix, the Exploited, Dead Kennedys, Extreme Noise Terror and Head of David. George thinks he heard the man had some kind of autism or something on the one previous occasion when he met him, when the man, whose name is Steve he thinks, turned up at one of George’s Warhammer 40,000 sessions. Steve was a friend of Dan, another older man who owned George’s nearest Games Workshop and tended to preside over play. Steve was sleeping on Dan’s floor and Dan insisted that he be allowed to head a legion of Nurgle Chaos Warriors despite the fact that the teenagers making up the rest of the group felt uneasy about his intense mannerisms and reckless battle strategy. The soundtrack that afternoon was Uriah Heep’s 1972 album Demons and Wizards, a work which despite the archaic associations of its title nonetheless assisted George in the conjuration of the mental image of riding on a giant mutant rat through post-apocalyptic landscapes brandishing a stack of his enemies’ heads on a spike. Though this was not an existing feature of the standard Warhammer model landscape, George found his imagination frequently returning to it, often summoning it in the minutes before he went to sleep as an escape from the responsibilities and contradictions that pestered his waking life, as a vision of a world which if it existed would contain no responsibility and because it did not exist contained no responsibility. George was planning to make his own customised model based on this image as soon as he had a spare moment; Steve, however, reacted strongly against the sound of Uriah Heep, abruptly rising to his feet still holding the dice he had been about to throw and marching over to roughly eject the tape. ‘What’s wrong, Steve?’ asked Dan in a voice flattened by having asked this question many times before. Steve remained silent as he slammed the removed tape on the counter and rummaged in the plastic crate on top of the hi-fi system for something else to play.
I was at a bar in Goa, and it was the end of the world. The building was a kind of open hut, with bamboo canes plastered over a metal structure to create the appearance that the hut was made of bamboo, and through the side of the hut that was open to the beach I could see hot storm clouds massing over the sea. There was a song playing, which was ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ by Shakira, and a man and a woman were dancing to it between me, sitting at the bar with a rum and coca cola, and the beach. They were the only people dancing. The woman looked in her early forties, with bleach blonde hair, wearing a strapless top. She was grinding her tanned abdomen against that of a man of similar age with his hair in braids, wearing a mostly unbuttoned white shirt. Though my interest in this spectacle was largely prurient I gradually realised that the expressions on their faces were almost completely innocent and blissful, and it then struck me that Shakira’s ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ might be the most beautiful song ever written and the most fitting music to be played now, at the end of the world. The combination of its exuberant carnival rhythm and the yearning purity of the synthesized horn sounds, purer precisely for existing solely in the digital realm, seemed to gather up every moment of perfect communion ever experienced between human beings in the history of the world and re-broadcast it as the soundtrack to this bar in Goa where only a few people remained sitting, at 3.40 a.m. as the splashes of rum and coca cola on the floor became sticky and it began lightly to rain outside.
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