Sefton had known there were dance clubs in London that kept going twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but he’d never been to one before. He found it in Vauxhall, a small dark dance floor in the basement of a club, the ethos of which was all concrete warehouse and the smell of poppers. Even at this hour, on a weekday, it was packed with men, dancing and occasionally snogging, when, for fuck’s sake, London was falling apart. He himself hadn’t come here to escape, but to find something. He couldn’t really look down on this lot, though, could he? There’d been a time when he’d have been up for this. The flavour of music was trance, shading into pounding industrial – the kind of music that had sounded distantly in his head back in the Portakabin. Not that he knew one style of dance music from another. He and Joe had once laughed their arses off at a club flier offering ‘intelligent handbag’. There was nothing of the Sight about this place. Nobody here had any strange weight about them.

He’d turned down a covert offer of ‘speed, trips or e’ near the door, but now he wondered if he should have taken them up on that. His reading had told him about mystics who’d made risky attempts to connect with something beyond themselves by pushing their minds into an altered state of consciousness. Doing that by drugs, or at least by street drugs, seemed too easy and would involve someone else’s designs for one’s brain. This had to be his sacrifice. It had occurred to him that he could have gone to a gym and worked his way into the state he wanted to achieve, but there there’d be someone to stop him.

He walked into the middle of the floor, closed his eyes and started to dance.

*   *   *

He danced for what he was sure was hours. He had his phone switched off; there was no clock visible from the dance floor. His body didn’t know what time it was. There were no clues from the light. He stopped only for visits to the water station, which he’d do at speed, throw it down, throw it over himself, go back.

At first he tried to concentrate on several repetitive phrases that he ran around his head, trying to switch off his thoughts, but found he couldn’t. He let his mind wander. He found all the different muscle groups in his legs, in his arms, his stomach, all starting to ache, so he’d shift a little when they did, and work something else. He let the euphoric breaks lift him, keep him going, then knuckled down to work hard again as the bass slammed back in. Every now and then he’d become aware of a man deliberately dancing near him, and he’d turn away.