He opened the door to the flat on the first floor and went in. The canned music engulfed us and it was as if we were hermetically sealed ourselves, only able to communicate with sign language or a foghorn.115

The flat was open and airy. The doors had been lifted off their hinges and from what had once been the hall we could go in a circle, from what had once been the kitchen to what had once been the bedroom, from what had once been the bedroom to what had once been the sitting room, from what had once been the sitting room to what had been a second sitting room.

The light was dimmed to a tropical dusk by means of bare bulbs that had been painted red, purple and blue. The walls – and large parts of the floor and the ceiling – had been spray-painted in a colour that lay somewhere between black and purple. The furniture consisted of somewhat forlorn black plastic chairs of the kind you used to be able to find in the waiting rooms of unscrupulous estate agents in the late sixties. So, hardly anyone sat on them.

Most people were standing or hanging from one another, and moving in a Pavlovian rhythm to the music surging in great waves from grandiose loudspeakers positioned symmetrically in all the corners. In a niche in what had once been the sitting room was a primitive bar where we could get the bottle of champagne we had already been overcharged for or part with even more cash for a wide selection of drinks, from a demonstratively solitary bottle of Farris mineral water to the most expensive brands of whisky, typically in duty-free bottles.

We started carefully, exchanged the first of the vouchers and found ourselves two chairs on the fringes of the mass of bodies, although our perspective was mostly abdominal.

This hour belonged to those weary of life. Faces that could have been Methuselah or Peter Pan danced with bodies that could have been Mae West’s or Madonna’s. Black leather skirts that barely covered thighs danced with stone-washed jeans, and off-pink stretch pants reminiscent of men’s long johns, but 116unable to conceal the contours of a mole, rubbed with languid sensuality against flapping baggy Italian pants sewn with gold lamé thread. A woman with a bust like Cleopatra, a bottom half like a third-rate variety artiste and black Egyptian-style hair, a skin-tight, sparkly gold blouse, pink tutu and black woollen tights was dancing with a long beanpole of a man dressed in a strikingly conventional blazer and charcoal-grey slacks, his chin like the landing area of a ski-jump. A bottle-blonde with an Annie Lennox face was dancing alone in a black, knitted stove-pipe of a dress. She was ecstatically caressing her own flat chest, where only her erect nipples suggested which gender she was, and unless I had seen her ID I still wouldn’t have been convinced. Beside her danced an almost two-metre-tall bald guy in a dinner jacket, probably in his late forties, with a decorative young man of about seventeen wearing painfully tight jeans and a blue-and-white striped T-shirt. A woman closer to sixty – a bombshell from the Diana Dors age – was dancing with a youngster of my age wearing a bow-tie, a spaced-out expression and a harlequin outfit like the clown he was. Behind them shadows merged with shadows, fingers moved suggestively in the vicinity of various genitalia, lips kissed necks and fresh air, tongues licked ears and hairy Adam’s apples, and amidst all this the shrill music pierced our taut eardrums like needles, at a decibel level that would cause contusions if you stayed there too long.