LOND HO ADVENTURES PART FOUR
MAY 1993
It was nine hours since Jack and I dropped, and the dancing skeleton blotter was beginning to wear off to the point where I felt I could finally move around again. I raise myself up and stumble from our booth (cave) under the scaffolding beside the billiards tables and wander towards the orgasm of sound and light that is the dance floor. I move about as though swimming through amniotic fluid, warm, wet, and beautiful. I can see the sound, and smell the colours, and taste the beings that flow around me. Minutes, or seconds, or hours, or centuries later Jack is moving in front of me, beside me, around me. I say something to him that is lost to the surrounding cacophony. Later I find myself sitting down on a huge, black wooden block with a speaker inside, the bass reverberating through the whole of my body.
I wipe the sweat from my forehead and run my fingers through my perspiration soaked hair. I stretch my arms over my head and suddenly she is beside me. She is short, thin, cute. She is dressed in a long sleeved black shirt with a short sleeved, white Sex Pistols T over top, as well as a micro-mini with a studded belt around her hips. Her short, coltish legs are covered in thin, black tights, and on her feet are bright red Converse All-Stars. She tells me her name is Bela, and one look from those chestnut eyes of hers and I know she’s trouble. Every rational thought inside me is telling me to run, run as fast as I can, but something more basic wins out and I find myself engaging her in conversation. She’s up here visiting her father, she says, as she spends her time split between Calgary and a lugubriously named place called “Beyond Hope, Idaho.”
She axes me to dance with her and I do. She grinds her pelvis up against me and wraps herself about me like an octopus. After about ten minutes, I have to sit down before the crazy bone she’s awoken bursts from my fly like the creature exploding from John Hurt’s chest in Ridley Scott’s Alien.
I grab a glass of water from the bar and when I turnaround she is there. We get to talking again, so I take her to the booth beneath the scaffolding. She sits in close beside me and talks my ear off about herself, from the doubtful (she slept in a park last night, odd since she claimed earlier to be staying with her father at Stanley Park Place) to the completely absurd, (her mother is a scientist at Dow Chemicals who invented Post It Notes™ that she based on an idea from Bela herself!). Then comes the punch-line: she wants me to take her back to the flat. In the back of my mind somewhere alarm bells are going off, don’t do it! They’re saying, don’t get yourself into the middle of this! I turn my bleary eyes towards her as she takes hold of my hand and suddenly all apprehension vanishes. She gives me a cute, little smile that compliments her red-haired, pixie-like appearance and I know she’s got me hook, line, and sinker.
We get up and make our way to the coat check booth. I wave down Jack and tell him what’s what. He takes me aside.
“Be careful guy. That chick tried to pick me up earlier, but I got a weird vibe off of her.”
I gaze back to where Bela is slipping into the sleeves of her ratty little pink fun-fur coat. She catches my look and gives me a bight smile. I tell Jack thanks, but I have to go as I shrug into my grungy, black, chain-studded coat.
We walk back to the Lond Ho arm in arm, and in relative silence save for the occasional inquiry as to how much farther we had to walk. Once back at the flat I get us a couple of pint glasses of cold water from the jug in the refrigerator, and throw a LaserDisc® movie into the machine. The credits pop up “Un Film de Luc Besson” and she comments that it’s in French. She sounds doubtful. I tell her that it’s one of my favorite flicks and explain the premise.
“Oh,” she says, “secret agent girl. That sounds kind of cool.” I tell her that she’s really more of an assassin, a government “spook” so to speak, and assure her that it is indeed quite “cool.”
Halfway through the side B of the disc, she’s asleep in my lap. I look down at her slight form, curled up, breathing slowed in sleep mode, the scent of dried sweat and patchouli wafts from her clothes. I reach to my left and snag a couch cushion, working it under her head, the whole time squirming out from beneath her. I gently lower her pillowed head to the chesterfield and rise, wandering to the linen closet. I pull out my Empire Strikes Back® blanket and cover her up from her toes to her chin. I give her a quick kiss on the forehead before shutting off the movie and heading off to bed.
After three days Bill takes me aside into his bedroom and axes me if I have any idea how long she is going to stay. I tell him honestly that I don’t know which is not the answer he’s looking for. He’s annoyed, but says nothing more about it. The next day she announces her departure. She’s apparently heading down to her mother’s cabin in a place called Beyond Hope, Idaho. Bill seems relieved as I walk her down the hall to the lifts. She tells me I don’t have to see her off, but I insist. We head to the street where her auld man is waiting in his Mercedes E320. She says she’ll write me and call me and that she’ll miss me etc. I bend down and give her a goodbye kiss and at the last second she turns her lips away and I end up with nothing but a quick peck on her soft cheek. She waits a few moments for the traffic to die down before running to her dad’s car, throwing her gear in to the back seat, and hopping into the passenger seat. They both give me a quick wave which I return half heartedly before pulling away into the liquid night.