Achieve.

All milky and lava-lamp-ish the street-lights reflecting on my big red car bonnet as I curl it round at night all sound and echoing engine against the cliff face slightly brick-ish. I’ve got sunglasses on and can hardly see a thing. Big dance tunes. Roaring, I am! I don’t know what the limit is and fuck it dump my leg on the accelerator as I can’t feel it anyway.

I lose the side of the thing on Trewin’s house gates. So now I’ve got to pay for that on top of the rest. Another ten grand or something I’m not keeping tabs.

I think I park neatly but a few weeks later I’m told about a fair few flowers and probably a fountain getting enraged at the battered, red, roaring, disturbance I am. Looking up after rolling out all is white and lit and ivy-strewn. Big view like sitting a half-inch from a television. Stuff sounding like boxes getting moved and rainbows through the front door and windows. And a speech-y white noise like everyone’s excited.

I push in through the front and everybody packs the room and is drinking. Some are stuck to the floor and some aren’t so it evens out and is normal. I see a few eyes swivel at me but mostly I see eyes swivelling back into place and fixing on everybody else as object of the tongue. I don’t look down and pupils suck in the light in waves I can see across the linen-surface of faces being shook. The room gets noticeably hotter for everybody, and the noise gets louder, and I move and they move but there’s a tension between the lot of us now and so long as I keep the strength in my jaw it’s up to them what happens next. I’ve got to get to the other side of the room, beyond the stairs that come out from the top like an arm turned upward and exposed, little people dotted on it, so I stride confidently, hoping to hijack nature. I’m too cool to act plain but too gone to rely on that. Barely a personality at this point in this life.

But after a bit of a vaporious lurch through the nice arms of the crowd and a few necklaces admired I hit patio and the sound of water every now and then and bubbles and body heat and there’s Trewin under a multi-headed undulating industrial oil field of shaved glistening legs and narrow fabric. He has a drink in each hand and two cigarettes in his mouth.

“It’s gone well, eh?” he says as the cigarettes bobble and hang. He takes a swig from one of his glasses and a cigarette goes out in it and he chokes.

From the left to my view a dark haired woman in a long, blue dress who stands like a statue takes one of my hanging arms and undoes a cufflink, replacing it with one much the same but that glistens slightly more.

I stand but I don’t know for how long but a curtain of people closes and now I’m kaleidoscope and vintage in a room that has more light for how it's all darker, if you get my meaning. Colour lights thick and drawing on the wall and now I’m opening my eyes a little wider out of removal and Seryn is holding me by the arms and sweating on me. This long face takes the rest of the room to wherever its coming from and kind of babbles, kind of acts like a sink. He’s looking around and he loves the DJ and all kinds of animals are rubbing up against us. Everybody’s scratching. Everybody’s dressed for sports.

“It’s gone well, eh mate?” he says.

I feel a tickling on the top of my feet and experts are removing my shoes and replacing them with ones more comfortable. I slip out of them and they put fresh socks on me too which are cool and refreshing. I never knew about these problems.

And now I can pour myself something from the shelf that’s a million miles long, I think, and has a cupboard with the good stuff in that’s only for when you’re really low on it already or really long on it and the fun ain’t in the actuality of it any more, but only how much of it there is, and you learn that wasting it is part of the getting it and really the most important bit. And I see New James across the room, sat at the long mahogany table and playing some game among tuxedos and little counters meaning something only to those who’ve bothered to count and care for them, like pets and demographics. I pour two drinks and fly over to him.

“Another win, Sir,” says a man with a voice as feeble and narrow as his moustache, and the man across from New James, who I recognise as a now destitute former owner of a record label who once snubbed us, slams his fists against the table as everybody applauds and New James smiles as I hand him a drink, which he pours into another one of a different colour and then proceeds to drink in one go as everybody applauds and says he is very clever. He looks at me with his red eyes glistening.

“It’s gone well!” he struggles to say.

I am dusted down by expert hands who look at me with admiration. I pay no attention to them and look off into the middle distance, vaguely uncomfortable but pleasured. The feeling of many hands.

I take the elevator down to the underground levels.

The doors open and, rather than a ding, or any levellian announcement, I hear Ed’s voice. “It’s gone well,” he says. I haven’t seen him for a while, but the voice on the recording sounds younger than I’d have thought.

The doors open straight onto a hangar sized room. Ed is in the middle of it, strapped, naked, onto a kind of hospital bed. Peoples from all world cultures are writhing around him and on top of him, faces disappearing and all kinds of geometry I’ve never seen beyond myth. Exhausted and satisfied, many of them are reclined or dozing or eating grapes on pillows and blankets that seem as soft as the skin that’s on them. From here I can see thin wires coming from each of Eds arms, each hooked up to a series of bags and monitors being tended to by gentle looking doctors. Above us, contraptionised in a kind of conical speaker shape is an orchestra, strapped upside down into their chairs, playing Beethoven’s 2^nd symphony.