Chapter 56

Dance the Night Away

Iris

2055

Iris knew the risk she was taking, of course, as did all her friends. Who didn't? The terms of the State of Emergency imposed on the citizens of the Kingdom of England were spelt out clearly and unambiguously. All public gatherings of a hundred or more people were banned without special dispensation and this included events of the sort Iris was now at.

London's night clubs had been shut down by command of the law for several months now, so the venue at which she and her friends were dancing couldn't really be called a night club. In any case, when such venues were legal, would anyone have honoured a decrepit warehouse in the desolate wilderness of East London with the title of a Night Club? There was no bar. There were no bouncers at the door. The dance floor was hard concrete with no flashing lights arcing above and there were most definitely no foam baths.

There were, however, plenty of drugs, booming dance sounds and hundreds of dancers. There were far more than the few dozen people that Iris had vaguely expected for a clandestine rave at such a remote address. There were many times the number of people allowed by law to assemble at any one place and all of them were going wild for it as the sound systems echoed across the cavernous spaces of a building that had once been used for assembling car parts and had been deserted for decades. Such was the hunger for a good night out and the opportunity to get down to the electronic rhythm of what had once been a normal accompaniment of nocturnal English life now mostly only available on foreign websites. Iris could at last share her passion for the deep bass rhythms and the wonky treble of the beats that came from the dance capitals of the world such as Chongqing, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai and even Glasgow in the neighbouring Kingdom of Scotland.

It was obvious that Iris' group of her friends weren't the only ones with a passion for the latest sounds. English radio, especially not the EBC, no longer broadcast a selection of music for the young that wasn't either just saccharine mush or more than ten years old. All the same, not even the Government of National Unity could legislate against music from liberal and progressive nations such as Malaysia, India and Scotland. These days, only President Bill Hannity's increasingly unhinged government of the United States could compete with the English government for its enthusiasm for curtailing the freedom of the young, the poor and the ethnically compromised. Against this background, the long awaited gig at Stratford, in a derelict warehouse built on the site of the London Olympic Games just forty years earlier, was bound to pull in the crowds.

"This is fucking great!" said Malcolm, Iris' boyfriend, as the two of them shimmied, bumped and twisted to the fractured rhythms of twenty-first century Sichuan. "I knew this beat was gonna be sick, but I didn't know just how sick."

"On decent speakers that bass is fucking dope!" Ember exclaimed.

Iris knew only too well how much difference a good sound system made. That was the essence of dance music in a live setting. When she was younger and clubbing was something she took for granted she'd not given it much thought. You expected the gut-shaking, floor-trembling, but still so crystal-clear sounds of a nightclub to do better service to the tracks you'd downloaded off the internet than your stereo system at home. Whatever the manufacturers of sound cards and speakers claimed, nothing could compare with the real deal: especially at the hundred decibel mark. There was also nothing that any amount of technology could do to match the buzz of an E or two, enhanced by a line of sulphate, a sniff of coke and the distant memory of a preparatory spliff. Who needed a fucking bar anyway?

Not so long ago this would have been a normal Friday night and Saturday morning. However, the dance floor would have had more bounce, the music wouldn't have suffered from the echo that came from hosting the event in a venue that had never been designed for its acoustic properties, and the booth where the DJ sat wouldn't have been shrouded in shadows in a corner where the lighting had no resonance at all with the music. In Iris' early years of clubbing a DJ like Xanthippus Middleton would have been a superstar surrounded by groupies, hangers-on and minders. He'd have had the wealth to afford to fly to foreign countries whereas few people nowadays could afford to travel even by train or coach. He probably still had an international reputation big enough to fill stadiums in Russia, Argentina and Canada, but he was one of the few who'd chosen not to desert England in its hour of need when most DJs, rock stars and jazz musicians had moved elsewhere. And most of those who'd stayed behind played music bland enough to be acceptable to the arbiters of impoverished taste in Prime Minister Eisenegger's cabinet.

Perhaps Xanthippus Middleton was still a frequent flyer. He'd certainly been able to get hold of not only the sounds Iris and Malcolm and the others had heard on internet radio interspersed between words in Hindi, Spanish or Mandarin broadcast over nanotube cables, but plenty of other sounds from the cutting edge night clubs of Shanghai, Auckland and Pyongyang that were both unfamiliar and exactly what Iris now knew was what she'd always been missing for all these years.

Iris had only been dancing for an hour or so but she no longer had the energy she'd once used to have. She wasn't a teenager anymore. And, in any case, it was a long time since she'd last been to a night club. Defeated, she and Malcolm walked hand-in-hand off the dance floor still sufficiently E'd up to appreciate each other's body even more than usual. Malcolm was normally rather a quiet guy and most happy reading a book or hacking together app interface code, but he could loosen up on occasion. However, there weren't many opportunities these days for him to relax and this wasn't just because the government had closed down the night clubs and imposed restrictive licences on entertainment venues. The relaxation on the laws that had protected victims of racism combined with the vigorous government campaign against illegal immigration had made life much harder for anyone like Malcolm who, even though his family had lived in England for nearly a century, just happened to have black skin. Malcolm was no stranger to racist abuse, but it now happened much more often.