NEW YEAR’S GYMNASIUM STORY & MIX PT. 2 BY MARTIAL DARLING
Happy New Year!
Here is part two of the DATC mix & story. Read the story while listening to the mix, or do whatever you like with it.
The second mix is by Martial Darling. More about the DJs on the DATC mixcloud.
With all those bodies the underground stifles what you might think twice about calling air. After she dashed into the carriage on the Northern Line she was very hot, because she had as usual rushed for no particular reason except not to be stuck behind slow people. Then she stood for four stops before a nearby seat was vacated. She sat in it and removed her Uniqlo puffa and black knitted sweater despite the difficulty of avoiding the elbows pinning her in on each side. She piled them on top of her bag on her lap.
She was listening to a Martial Darling mix she’d downloaded onto her iPhone. As she ruffled her hair absentmindedly the train sped up and her mind sunk into the syncopation. This was the kind of music that best complemented the experience of underground travel. Like the beat, the train launched into a mechanical, subterranean trajectory and the bodies it carried with it became part of a rhythm, swaying dramatically in and comically out of time. As they slowed down at Leicester Square, for a few moments the adverts on the platform passed behind the windows in time to the music.
More passengers got on the train than off and a woman standing near the door to her right stumbled as they sped up once again to the groove. The woman was still wearing her large camel coat and grasped a man she was with who wore a thick black coat down to his knees. Her eyes wondered up and down the carriage and she became aware of her bare arms and she saw that a few passengers had also removed their coats. One was a man in a pale green shirt with sweat patches.
It could be a matter of the variations between individual body temperature maintenance mechanisms, or just different heat tolerance levels, with the level of self consciousness moderating the latter. What you had been doing all day and immediately before getting on the train also counts. She admired the patterns on the headscarves of two women sitting diagonally opposite her, and the way their outfits complemented the patterns. One wore a black scarf covered with pink hearts, and a pink jumper with black details, and the other a brush stroke blue and purple pattern with a light blue jumper. She realised she never saw anything about headscarf style in the Sunday magazines. There were times she had wondered whether her bare arms and loose hair offended women in headscarves, but she supposed it was as individual a variant as body temperature. As the train hurtled through its black hole she became conscious of knowing very little.
Not wanting to be suspected of looking for the wrong reasons she directed her eyes to the advert on the plastic board above them. The advert read: ‘You walked past John today. Just 40p will make sure you don’t walk past him tomorrow’. Beaten and abandoned by a mother because his father had left her John was homeless at 16. The advert asked you to sponsor a room at the Centrepoint homeless shelter for young people. She registered this story carefully, trying to imagine herself in the same position. For some reason she imagined an abandoned building by the canal – the woman she tried to imagine was not her mother. The advert didn’t invite you to imagine the father. The train had stopped again and a woman in a black leather jacket guided her son around the legs of the passengers standing around the door and supporting themselves off the glass panes and black plastic rails and her eyes fell on the large station sign on the platform wall just as the doors closed and the train began to move. The big logo on the platform read ‘Euston’. Where she had meant to get off and change.
She sank back into the hypnotic rise and fall of a melodic loop and got off at Mornington Crescent. While she passed the exit and crossed to the opposite platform she hoped that nobody would notice her. She had never registered the contact details on the advert.
She had changed again at Euston, where the escalators also seemed to carry people in time to the music, and taken the Victoria Line Northbound to Finsbury Park. The address for the party was at a terraced three story house with a shiny black door at the top of five steps. She had to remove her earplugs and she wound them round her hand before zipping them in her handbag pocket and ringing the buzzer for Flat 2B. The door buzzed back and as she stepped forward she felt something against her head: turning round she saw a bedraggled mistletoe dangling from a thin black ribbon.
Up the stairs and to the left the door was open and she felt a ‘thump, thump, thump’ coming through the walls. When she had ascended and entered a man with blond, curly hair and a long, tanned but rosy face was leaning near the intercom and talking to a fat-ish, brown haired man standing in front of him. ‘Hi’, said the blond man. ‘Hi’. The brown haired man smiled. They were in their mid-twenties, she would have guessed, and they were both holding bottles of beer.
‘Hi’. ‘I’m a friend of Marshall’s’, she said and smiled. They waved her towards the room in front of her, at the end of the short corridor, which was crammed with people. She ‘excused me-d’ her way down the corridor and stood for a while surveying the scene. Marshall was behind a table at one end of the room. He was playing a slinky track with a bouncing bassline. People were dancing, standing, sitting and squatting and there were several plastic cups on the DJ table, of varying degress of fullness. The lights were low but it wasn’t dark. She couldn’t see anyone else she knew but she saw a brighter light room in a door to the right and the white door of a fridge.
She went into the kitchen, whose surfaces were also covered with beers, various spirits, makeshift ashtrays, and people. In the opposite corner she saw Gem and Leon and Katrina. Gem was wearing a Fred Perry dress and her hair tied up on her head and Katrina was wearing a gold lamé jacket from some market. Leon was wearing a red T-shirt and jeans. Katrina saw her first and shouted ‘Lara!’ at her. With enthusiastic ‘Hellos’ they hugged and she said she wanted a drink so Gem handed her a can of Stella. ‘I don’t know who all these crazy people are!’, Leon exclaimed. They all seemed drunk and happy. Gem told a story about Leon having an argument with his mum about buying so much alcohol, embellished with impressions of Leon’s mum. Lara had been to a kickboxing class in the afternoon and the can of Stella went straight to her head. They decided to go and dance and poured themselves rum and gingers first from a bottle Gem and Leon had bought.
Some people in the room where people were dancing were dressed up and some were just in whatever coloured t-shirts and vest tops. They had shoved themselves into a space near Marshall and the girls had put their bags on the floor in the middle of them so they formed a circle. As they dance they communicate mostly by their body movements, making stupid hand movements to make each other laugh. Leon does not move his feet but only his shoulders and when a track builds up he looks down to the floor and nods with one hand in the air. She gazes round the room. A cute, tall guy in front of her, keeps getting very excited and shouting something to Marshall that she doesn’t understand. She wonders if he is drunk.
There are also three boys who are amusing her because they are moving round the room and dancing with random people. The one leading their trio round the room is even shorter than her and one of the two boys following him is much taller. The short one has light brown skin and has a shaved eyebrow and he is smiling a lot at people and raising his eyebrows confidently pointing his fingers in the air: the other two are less expressive.
There are less words in her head now because the way the music works on the scene is no longer only a secret in her head. Then the cute guy in front of them turns round and says something to Gem and she grabs him and says ‘Yay!’ and he says ‘No don’t do that I’m a bit … wobbly!’ and, dramatically, Gem says ‘You’re …Wobbly!??’ He laughs stands looking at them with a grin for a while and then turns back around and starts pumping his arms in the air.
After a while dancing she sees someone she knows from University and she wants to avoid them because she hates small talk on the dancefloor and she can’t be bothered anyway so Katrina takes her into a third room to the left of the big room for a cigarette. They lean by the windowsill to smoke and a streetlamp lights up the side of Katrina’s face. Katrina says ‘Marshall’s on point tonight’ and hands her a 10 pack of Marlborough lights. Lara says, ‘yeah, but I’m not!’ and laughs, and then says ‘I’m knackered’.
They have bought their bags with them and she drops hers on the floor at her feet as Katrina looks in hers for a lighter. Katrina can’t find a lighter so she taps a guy who is standing near them smoking and her lights her cigarette for her. The guy with the lighter starts saying something to Katrina, who laughs. She can’t hear what he is saying and it turns into a conversation so she daydreams a bit more to the music. It is bouncier now. She follows the interlocking of its elements. Then she hears ‘Lara! I thought that was you!’
Tom, the old university person is upon her. He is blond and is wearing white v-neck t-shirt and a jacket. ‘How are you?’. ‘Uh, I’m alright’. ‘Ah, well, it’s a surprise to see you. I’m here with my friend Jasper. He’s pretty cool. So uh, what brings you here?’. ‘It’s my mate’s party’. ‘What are you doing these days?’. ‘Oh you know, this and that’. There is a pause, during which Tom nods, staring intently into her face. ‘Um, what about you?’ ‘Ah I’m working for a management consultancy. It’s going pretty well’. This is said with a happy lift of the voice and a smiling nod. ‘Oh cool’. ‘Where are you living these days?’, ‘Camberwell. With some friends’. Tom still grins not getting the message. ‘Nice. I live in … yobs..’
She notices the three boys are nearby and she looks at the short one and rolls her eyes. He is wearing a white Nike jacket and still dancing and he starts moving towards them. He makes it kind of indirect by looking around him and over his shoulder sometimes. ‘…after I came back from New York: I worked there for a while.’ Pause. ‘Living in New York makes the food here seem as bad as in Terminal Five’, Tom says, guffawing. ‘Well, so, you’re doing this and that huh. I would have thought someone like you would be jet setting the world by now!’ Tom says with a smile that needs to be wiped. She looks him in the face, puzzled for a moment. Trying to figure out if there’s a smuggish mockery behind the smile, or he really is just a complete dimwit. And starts to say ‘um…’ and she sees the short guy is now standing to Tom’s left. The short guy looks Tom up and down and then turns his shoulder to him as Tom turns round to see who Lara is looking at. ‘Oh’, he says, smiling, and picks up her bag from the floor. ‘I’d keep hold of that if I were you’.
She had to get three nightbuses home but she had carried on listening to the mix on her iPhone and she enjoyed the rhythm of nocturbulus London passing the bus windows: the empty banks, the small groups of people around bus stops, strip clubs and chicken places. A little voice in her head was saying ‘I don’t give a fuck’ and ‘freeeeee’. When she got home there was a man sitting on the doorstep next to her house – he was crying, and he had makeup all over his face.
nocturbulus? as in "nocturbulous behavior" (by the suburban knight)?
Comment by tyger — January 8, 2012 @ 4:47 pmis that man by the door the same guy from the toilet in the previous story with sal on the dancefloor?
Comment by asdf — February 21, 2012 @ 11:57 pm