Four am, under a weird grey-blue neon. Raucous laughter. Three and a half minutes of the B-girl life. It had been a long night for whoever captured the pictures. Shadows flickered, the camera looked here and there without purpose. The angles were inventive. Irene began with her back to the camera and her feet planted in the gutter. You could hear her say, ‘Kinny, take that away! Oh, Kinny, you bugger!’ She got her dress part way up and her thong part way down before she started to piss, but after twenty seconds slowly tipped forward into the road and began to throw up, smoothly and loosely, from the other end. Steam rose in the cold air. After a minute or so of that, she seemed to pass out. Her body tipped forward a little further, arching the lower back and pushing her face into the road, then after a moment or two of equilibrium, subsided sideways and curled up into the foetal position. Her hat fell off and rolled cheerily back and forth. The camera tried to follow it, then there was more laughter and everything went black.

‘It’s very sentimental I know,’ she told Fat Antoyne now. ‘But I loved that hat. And the bolero, with its little satin bows.’ Clothes like that weren’t really clothes at all, she tried to explain: they were semiotics in action. ‘Party semiotics in action.’ She sighed and put her hand over his. ‘It was a lovely world, and sometimes – like now, with you and me in our comfortable little ship, with all these new ornaments – it still is.’ She had been having such a good time in those pictures that she remembered nothing of it. ‘Sometimes I’m not even sure it’s me!’

He had to laugh, Fat Antoyne said. ‘Everyone deserves a good time,’ he added. ‘Their lives are hard enough.’

He smiled and closed her hand over the little cube.

‘You keep that safe,’ he said.

21 Everyone’s a VIP to Someone

TWENTY ONE

Everyone’s a VIP to Someone