thirty-five

It was gone half-past-two by the time I got home from Antonio's. There was hardly anything left in the house to eat (aside from tins of cat food). I couldn't be bothered to go shopping, so made do with a bowl of cornflakes drowned in instant milk, whisked up in a glass from spoonfuls of powder, all weak and warm.

Upstairs, my room was a mess. Debbie hadn't bother to make the bed or anything. Having taken off my Doc Martens (shoes not boots) I collapsed onto the mattress, pulled the twisted mass of duvet and old blankets over me and lay listening to the American Chart on Radio One. I must have fallen asleep for a while, because the next thing I knew it was twenty-to-five and there was some live concert on.

For a couple of minutes I lay there, enjoying the warmth of the bedclothes and trying to work out who the band was. I gave up in the end, tiring of a protracted clap-along drum and base solo (during which I suppose you were meant to imagine the singer swigging from a bottle or turning sweaty somersaults across the stage or something). I clicked the radio off, struggled out of bed and traipsed down to the basement room to watch Final Score.

The basement room had in the past been used as a fourth bedroom. But we hadn't been able to find anyone who wanted to rent it. We'd even asked Tony if he'd like to move in with us, but he'd politely declined the offer. He said that the room was damp and, besides, he should stay at home with his mum, seeing as she was on her own, which was commendable I suppose. However, to be honest, most of the time his mum seemed so isolated by her sedation, she probably didn't notice whether he was there or not.

I guess, in truth, Tony was uncomfortable with the squalor and closeness in which we lived. And his mother's loneliness was merely a convenient excuse for him to remain cocooned in her clean, uncluttered house where he could sit undisturbed and carefully construct his dreams of guitar stardom.

As Tony hadn't wanted the basement room we'd decided to turn it into a kind of underground lounge, furnished with a couple of old sofas and a second-hand colour TV (which occasionally went haywire but was generally watchable). We'd put up posters on all the walls except one, where we were building a mural of empty beer cans (our aim being to completely cover the wall from top to bottom by the time we left the house). As a result, the basement did tend to smell like a brewery, but as Stewy's brother said, it gave the place a kind of homely feel.

The football results were almost over by the time I got down to the basement, the Scottish First Division fizzing silently on the screen, watched by Stewy and a plump but very pretty girl with a pierced nose (who I assumed had been the shape giggling under the blanket that morning). The air was thick with dope.

"Hi," I said, turning the sound up and sitting down.

"Did you see how Spurs got on?" I asked.

"I think they lost two nil to Leicester or something," said Stewy, passing me a cone-shaped joint.

Despite my iffy guts, I took a long drag, and held the sweetly scented smoke deep in my lungs for a couple of seconds before exhaling.

"I thought they were at home to Coventry," I said, my skull ballooning (like I was in that Jimi Hendrix poster on my bedroom wall).

"Well they definitely lost," said Stewy.

"Typical," I sighed and turned the sound on the TV back down and offered the joint to the girl.

She took it carefully, returning my smile as I made prolonged eye contact to avoid leering at her impressive breasts, their enormity exaggerated by a much too-small T-shirt, which she wore with black jeans and the inevitable DM boots, painted with small, bright flowers.

"Oh, by the way," said Stewy, passing me an empty can which I dutifully added to the wall. "Tony called round whilst you were out."

"What, this morning?"

"No, about three o'clock."

"I was here then."

"You can't have been."

"I bloody was."

"Well there wasn't any answer when I called up the stairs," said Stewy. He turned to the girl. "Was there?"

She shook her head vigorously.

"Oh great, just great," I said.

"It's not my fault if you're fucking deaf," said Stewy resentfully .

"I must have been asleep," I said. "What did he want, anyway?"

"How should I know?" said Stewy.

"Didn't he say something about meeting us later on?" said the girl helpfully.

"Oh yea," said Stewy slightly guiltily. "Oh yea, he did say something about meeting you down at the Asylum."

"Oh right," I said. "What time?"

"I don't know, nine or something," said Stewy.

"Yea, it was nine," said the girl, nodding.

"Well, thanks for letting me know," I said, pulling a cushion from the back of the sofa and chucking it at Stewy's head.

He raised his arm to deflect the cushion and handed me the remains of the spliff.

"Mellow out," he said, grinning.

I pincered an inch of Rizzla-wrapped roach between thumb and forefinger and dizzily sucked in one last burning lungful.

"Good gear, eh?" said Stewy.

"Great," I said, choking on smouldering cardboard. "Fucking great."

The Asylum (which had on occasions been known to live up to it's name) was by far the best (if not the only) place to go on a Saturday night in Westing. The club was housed in an old storeroom at the end of the High Street, and was similar in shape and size to the building where I worked for Target. However, whereas in the Target building there was a reception desk just inside the front door, in the Asylum there was a bar.

The bar was triangular in shape and, like everything else in the club, was painted white. Because the front end of the bar was immediately inside the door, as soon as the bouncers let you into the club you automatically stepped into the queue for drinks, and had to push your way through a throng of pint glasses and elbows to secure a bit of spare floor space around one of the club's two blue-baized pool tables.

Beyond the end of the bar, the wall was covered from floor to ceiling in mirrors. The wall opposite was also completely mirrored - reflection upon reflection creating the illusion (especially if you weren't familiar with the club) that inside was a vast hall full of hundreds of people. At the end of the bar area was a short corridor with toilets to the left and more mirrors to the right. The corridor led to a large, wooden-floored room with a small raised stage at the far end as well as three or four white tables and about a dozen chairs along each wall. Like everything else in the club, the stage and the floor had once been painted white, but the scuffing heels of a thousand boots had long since covered every surface in rubbery grey grime.

On each side of the stage were fire doors lit with green EXIT signs. The doors were generally left open, especially when bands were playing to let them get themselves and their gear on and off stage from 'the dressing room,' a detached hut in the car park round the back (a hut which for many years had been used to store noxious chemicals and still smelled like an experiment gone wrong). On some nights, the back room was practically deserted, a cool refuge from the crowds at the bar. But when a band was on and the room was packed with people jumping around, it became like a sauna, sweat dripping from the low ceiling, even with the doors open.

The Asylum was partly owned by Damien (who, of course, ran Andy's Music where Tony worked) and also partly by a certain Mr Rahmani, who also owned a few of the more dilapidated properties in Battle Street. Mr Rahmani had apparently paid for his portion of the club with cash, thirty-five grand in a suitcase (according to one of Debbie's friends whose dad was a manager at the Westing branch of Barclays).

When the plans for the club had first been mooted, there had been the usual letters of objection to the Westing Chronicle, complaining that it would destroy the character of the town. This was, of course, a laughable suggestion as any character the town might once of had, had long since been eaten away by the motorway and its attendant ring roads, a cancerous network which had given rise to tumourous estates of houses and factories that strangled the town and let in secondary parasites, the ubiquitous, all-conquering outlets of clothing, hamburger and video chains (whose arrival was praised as progress by people too ignorant to understand the distinction between the creation of wealth and merely its movement from redundant craftsmen in crumbling cities to those automatons of avarice who thrived in their freshly concreted-over woods and marshes).

Despite the numerous letters and petitions and public meetings - permission for the club to open had eventually been granted by a large majority of councillors who (following one or two visits from Mr Rahmani and his magic briefcase) had decided that the young people of the town really did need somewhere centrally located where they could meet of a Saturday evening.

Although the sincerity of certain councillors who'd so adroitly expressed these sentiments was (as I have suggested) rather suspect, the end result was that, at last, we had somewhere to go, somewhere you could wear what you liked, listen to decent music, get pissed, play pool and generally have a good time (which, considering all the fuss there'd been, didn't seem that much to ask for).

God knows who decided to call the club The Asylum. Mind you, as far as club names go, I suppose it could have been worse - the Blue Parrot or The Pink Pussycat, or one of those dreadful Americanisms such as Cadillacs or Manhattans. On reflection, the name of the club seemed quite apt - not because the place was patronised by a bunch of basket-cases, but because (to quote the basic dictionary definition of the word asylum) it was actually 'a place of refuge.'