Affirmation
Experienced
- Joined
- Jun 9, 2002
- Posts
- 47
The dead minutes past midnight on a cold Saturday night in March.
I’m in a strange nightclub hidden away in a back street near to the city centre, and I think I’m being chatted-up by a young woman.
The uncertainty stems from the fact that I can’t hear a word she’s saying to me over the cacophony of drum & bass pumping out of the ludicrously efficient sound system. Thud, thud, thud, thud…. It’s like the monstrous heartbeat of a God (presumably Bacchus, or Dionysus–Good Time Gods).
The claustrophobic air is screaming for release from the all-prevailing noise. The music is tyrannical; seemingly it’s purpose is to assault our hearing, to prevent us from discerning any other sound. We are deaf.
Denied the entitlement of hearing the young girl who is leaning towards me, I instead focus my attention on her appearance, in the hope that it may provide me with some clue as to why she is currently in my orbit.
She is small and slender, and she seems very confident in herself. She is wearing a white T-shirt and black jeans, and she has a backpack carelessly slung across her shoulder, as if to emphasise her nonchalance. A pretty face is enthused with a red hue, a clear indication that she has been exerting herself (sexually? Chemically? On the dance floor?). I have no other clues as to her identity, so her proximity to me is still unexplained.
The girl seems non-plussed by my inability to hear a word she is saying, and she smiles through my awkward cries of “What?” and “Sorry?”. But eventually she recognises the hopelessness of the situation, and she quickly changes tact. Hooking an exquisite thumb in the direction of the bar, she slides away from me and moves off.
I’m momentarily bemused–has she had enough of this (of me, of my idiocy?) and decided to do something more interesting? But my panic is assuaged when I steal a glance in her direction and catch her smiling and beckoning to me. I quickly swallow some beer and make to follow her.
She sits down at a table and I sit opposite her. The thud-thudding of the music is marginally less intrusive here; my ears have stopped bleeding, anyway. The girl lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, studies me for a moment and then shouts: “You really don’t remember me, do you?”
The look of complete bewilderment on my face must have answered her question, for she now leans over and shouts:
“Bastard!”
I rack my brain for something to say, I am desperate to produce some memory of ever meeting this girl. On both accounts I come up short.
“Cat got your tongue?” She shouts. The odd thing is, she doesn’t seem the least bit annoyed. Quite the opposite. I have no idea what my face betrayed to her, but inwardly I was feeling confused and guilty and rather uncomfortable. I simply couldn’t remember her. Had she mistaken me for someone else?
“Um… You, er, know me, then?”
“You honestly don’t remember?”
“Um… No. Sorry.”
“Jo? Ring any bells?”
Alas, the bells are silent. Unless, of course, they are in full voice and I can’t hear them because my hearing has been permanently damaged by the white noise that reverberates throughout the club.
“Jo?”, I say, and she nods and smiles and takes a long drag of her cigarette. She’s called Jo. Well, that’s a start. An encouraging one at that. Jo. Now if only I could remember who the fuck she is…
Suddenly ‘Jo’ stands up and starts waving to someone behind me. I turn around to look. A tall, muscular black fellow is nodding at her.
“See ya!”, shouts ‘Jo’ as she slinks past me and heads towards Mr Muscles. This is not what I had expected. How could she leave just when things were getting interesting? How could she be so cruel as to leave me bemused and confused and without the foggiest idea of who she is?
Perhaps that’s why I had forgotten about her in the first place–perhaps because she tantalised me for a few minutes and then took off the minute I was hooked? Maybe we’ve been meeting like this for years, in extraordinarily loud nightclubs; perhaps each time we met we shouted at each other to be heard (very common amongst men and women), adjourned to a quiet table, and then confused the fuck out of each other by alternating lapses of memory.
Maybe next time it will be ‘Jo’ who has absolutely no recollection of who I am.
Or maybe next time it will be different, and we can talk in normal voices about normal things and perhaps that might lead somewhere else, and then one thing leads to another… And then, perhaps, I could wake up in the morning next to her, and she could turn to me and say:
“What did you say your name was again?”
I’m in a strange nightclub hidden away in a back street near to the city centre, and I think I’m being chatted-up by a young woman.
The uncertainty stems from the fact that I can’t hear a word she’s saying to me over the cacophony of drum & bass pumping out of the ludicrously efficient sound system. Thud, thud, thud, thud…. It’s like the monstrous heartbeat of a God (presumably Bacchus, or Dionysus–Good Time Gods).
The claustrophobic air is screaming for release from the all-prevailing noise. The music is tyrannical; seemingly it’s purpose is to assault our hearing, to prevent us from discerning any other sound. We are deaf.
Denied the entitlement of hearing the young girl who is leaning towards me, I instead focus my attention on her appearance, in the hope that it may provide me with some clue as to why she is currently in my orbit.
She is small and slender, and she seems very confident in herself. She is wearing a white T-shirt and black jeans, and she has a backpack carelessly slung across her shoulder, as if to emphasise her nonchalance. A pretty face is enthused with a red hue, a clear indication that she has been exerting herself (sexually? Chemically? On the dance floor?). I have no other clues as to her identity, so her proximity to me is still unexplained.
The girl seems non-plussed by my inability to hear a word she is saying, and she smiles through my awkward cries of “What?” and “Sorry?”. But eventually she recognises the hopelessness of the situation, and she quickly changes tact. Hooking an exquisite thumb in the direction of the bar, she slides away from me and moves off.
I’m momentarily bemused–has she had enough of this (of me, of my idiocy?) and decided to do something more interesting? But my panic is assuaged when I steal a glance in her direction and catch her smiling and beckoning to me. I quickly swallow some beer and make to follow her.
She sits down at a table and I sit opposite her. The thud-thudding of the music is marginally less intrusive here; my ears have stopped bleeding, anyway. The girl lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, studies me for a moment and then shouts: “You really don’t remember me, do you?”
The look of complete bewilderment on my face must have answered her question, for she now leans over and shouts:
“Bastard!”
I rack my brain for something to say, I am desperate to produce some memory of ever meeting this girl. On both accounts I come up short.
“Cat got your tongue?” She shouts. The odd thing is, she doesn’t seem the least bit annoyed. Quite the opposite. I have no idea what my face betrayed to her, but inwardly I was feeling confused and guilty and rather uncomfortable. I simply couldn’t remember her. Had she mistaken me for someone else?
“Um… You, er, know me, then?”
“You honestly don’t remember?”
“Um… No. Sorry.”
“Jo? Ring any bells?”
Alas, the bells are silent. Unless, of course, they are in full voice and I can’t hear them because my hearing has been permanently damaged by the white noise that reverberates throughout the club.
“Jo?”, I say, and she nods and smiles and takes a long drag of her cigarette. She’s called Jo. Well, that’s a start. An encouraging one at that. Jo. Now if only I could remember who the fuck she is…
Suddenly ‘Jo’ stands up and starts waving to someone behind me. I turn around to look. A tall, muscular black fellow is nodding at her.
“See ya!”, shouts ‘Jo’ as she slinks past me and heads towards Mr Muscles. This is not what I had expected. How could she leave just when things were getting interesting? How could she be so cruel as to leave me bemused and confused and without the foggiest idea of who she is?
Perhaps that’s why I had forgotten about her in the first place–perhaps because she tantalised me for a few minutes and then took off the minute I was hooked? Maybe we’ve been meeting like this for years, in extraordinarily loud nightclubs; perhaps each time we met we shouted at each other to be heard (very common amongst men and women), adjourned to a quiet table, and then confused the fuck out of each other by alternating lapses of memory.
Maybe next time it will be ‘Jo’ who has absolutely no recollection of who I am.
Or maybe next time it will be different, and we can talk in normal voices about normal things and perhaps that might lead somewhere else, and then one thing leads to another… And then, perhaps, I could wake up in the morning next to her, and she could turn to me and say:
“What did you say your name was again?”
