After a long time the Japanese bloke stopped talking and the slow beat theme carried on with a less than catchy tune sounding like a mixture of late Kray Twins and early Hawker Siddley. Footballers left the dance floor in a hurry and it soon thronged full with daft twats showing off to straight girls waiting to get married and play housey housey.

Fokker nodded to some people he thought he probably new but didn’t and bought a packet of fags from a machine in the corner by the bogs, getting strange looks from a group of kids what were lurking in its shadow and who until recently had their heads buried in polythene bags full of glue. Fokker was exactly that sort of bloke what slept in the daytime and went out in the ‘nightime’ © but even he had to admit ‘true cause’ that the niteclub LAZARUS was weird:

- A TV in the corner showed a boxing match with Joe DiMaggio.

- A poster on the wall was for a new boy-band called FAECES.

- Two ex-miners were stood at the bar discussing the ill-fortune of their various video shops, opened on redundancy cash in 85 and now getting driven into crisis by Blockbuster/Ritz.

A kid on the other side of the cavernous hall caught Fokker’s eye and beckoned him over. It was all like that bit on the advert for Cadbury’s Chocolate Nooses ® where the tank is rolling past a city skyline in flames, and them soldiers on the gibbet exchange a look of love and laughter and hatred and brotherhood and struggle and passion and hope and understanding and forgiveness and violence and more love and wisdom and guilt and pride for just a few seconds before the trapdoor opens and they fall.

The kid gestured to a chair and bade Fokker sit down, a smile right on his mouth. Hi sed Fokker, hi sed the kid and Fokker palmed a little bottle of drugs the kid handed him and, after ‘sundry chit chat’ and ‘mouthing off for no reason’ © he slipped off to the loo. In the bogs a girl from New York was selling hairspray, condoms, combs and other crap, all laid out on a makeshift cardboard-box table. A bloke (maybe Austrian) was pissing in the urinal and talking to his mate but, since looking down at his dick in strange concentration now totally unaware that his mate had long gone:

“Yeah” he was saying as Fokker stumbled out of his cubicle, the drug starting to work in him already. “Marion and I hev sold de house and are goin up country for an little while. I want to live right out of there man, I mean right out there, where de air is clean you know and the Insomnia is pure . . .”