‘Who’s that?’ I asked, and could hear my voice jar.

‘Bella Bruflåt, a new rising star. I’ve heard rumours she’s already made a demo for her first LP.’

‘I can imagine. Except that on an LP you miss all this.’ I nodded to the stage where Bella had tellingly placed her left hand against the inside of one black leather thigh – her hand looked almost indecently white – while thrusting the mike back and forth to her mouth in even more unambiguous movements than before and emitting a primal scream, all underpinned by a piercing riff on the guitar, which caused a sensual groan to run through the whole crowd. For a few seconds the room was totally silent. The music had died, no one was eating or drinking, everyone just sat gaping with whatever orifices they possessed.

Then Bella laughed with pleasure, a rasping, provocative gurgle, and tossed her head as the applause rippled over her. She turned her back on us and stepped into the fog. And stopped. The spotlights fell onto her back, bottom and thighs. Electricity began to build in the room; the tension was at breaking point.

Slowly she began to wiggle her backside, in time to the drummer’s first, cautious whisks of the brushes. Then the bass came in: a slow, sensual beat. One dissonant, quivering note from a guitar cut through everything and was gone as Bella ground her hips in a slowly increasing rhythm.36

Jakob muttered beside me: ‘This is what I’ve always said. Religion is rhythm. Rise up and shout hallelujah, and the cry will spread through the audience without—’

He broke off and swallowed because Bella had placed one hand on her shoulder and was beginning to peel off her jacket. It slid down her bare upper arms as if she were skinning a slaughtered animal, while all the instruments converged on a single rhythm – a tap dripping through our veins from a distant kitchen.

Now her jacket was hanging loosely from one shoulder. With slow, studied movements she shifted the mike from one hand to the other and raised it to her mouth. Through the sound of the instruments you could hear a slow, crystal-clear human voice. No words, only a long, vibrating tone, a ray of golden sunshine breaking into a pitch-black room.

Then everything happened in a few short seconds. Her jacket fell to the floor. She turned round abruptly, arms in the air, and might just as well have been naked, so tight was the grey T-shirt against her body. The mike glittered between her fingers. The music rose to a rousing crescendo. In a split-second she lowered the mike again and began to sing, thrusting her crotch in rhythm: ‘Meet me in the middle of the night – Baby – Meet me when the moon has gone away – Baby…’

And we didn’t say no, not one of us. We would meet her there, all of us, in the middle of the night, when even the moon had gone to bed. And it would be just us and Bella and we would wake the dawn with our cries, we would make the dead rise and dance and the living turn to ashes around us.