the consultant

chapter one    my mother’s son


-it’s never enough is it?
-what?
-one. it’s never enough.
-no.
-it’s not is it? you have one, you want another one. kids in a bloody sweetshop….

3.40 in the morning. sat in an empty back corridor of a cavernous club. we’re the only foreigners in the place, along with dan, whose gone missing. probably wandering the labryntine rooms jabbering to himself, or to anyone who dares to catch his eye, any of these nice people, girls with angelic bodies wearing massive round sunglasses, big boots and miniskirts, guys with mad hair and dayglo faces, looking like they've just tripped out of a manga cartoon, a happy, sweet cartoon.

-and then there’s that thing I was on about earlier, that thing about parents
-what?
-parents, the way… don’t you remember?
-no
-I was on about parents, the way that every parent in the world tells their kid the same stuff
-like what
-well, how many people do you know that know the same stuff? all those little facts, not like some trivia king, but the stuff everyone knows, that you can never amaze people with, cos, they all know it anyway?

this is mark, my buddy for the evening, of many an evening. off his face, and talking shite. or at least I think so. you never know, when you’re in this state, suddenly what sounded a moment ago like utter bollocks can be transformed into the most enlightened utterance.

-like what?
-like, ticks can jump ten times their own height. ants can carry twenty times their own weight on their backs. or um, the nile is the longest river in the world.
-ok, now you sound like a trivia king
-no, ok, well I can’t think of good examples now, but there is this sort of inherited knowledge, this kind of received wisdom, if you want to call it that, cos it’s just the repetition of fact, really, but it just tickles me to think–
-tickles you?
-aye
-who the fuck says tickles me these days?! brilliant
-thanks, anyway, it tickles me to think of these parents, our parents, not necessarily particularly dumb nor overly intelligent people, but average, if you will, normal -god forbid, like us? –
-speak for yourself
-to think that they have kids, and they wait for years for the right time, when jabbering drooling little child becomes sort of, I don’t know, sentient? to begin to slowly divulge these facts that they themselves learnt from their own parents, to their own kids. and they love it, they love saying things like ‘did you know…?’ to their little kids, to see the wonder in the kid’s eyes, cos they can’t tell anyone else their little facts, cos everyone else already learnt it all from their parents. do you get what I'm on about?
-uh, yeah… I think I do. and it might be brilliant! so if your theory is correct, we’ll be passing the same stuff on to our kids that we learnt from our parents
-yeah, like –
-like, the sky is blue cos of the reflection off the oceans! elvis died on the crapper! maybe that’s why we all think our dad’s are the smartest people in the world
-exactly, for a while anyway, like um, china has the largest population in the world, you can see the great wall from space, or all about the titanic, ‚the ship that couldn’t be sunk‘, all that banal stuff
-banal but, interesting banal stuff
-oh definitely. stuff that we all need to know! thank god for parents eh
-it must be shit when it all runs out though
-yes!
-cos then, well, you’ll probably be fearing the day your kid realizes that you in fact know very little about the world
-god yes. all-knowing dad becomes, well, just another bloke. if you went back in time to the stone age could you make a match? something as fucking simple and necessary as a match?
-not a chance, bit of sulphur, a stick - that’s all I know about matches. and that they’re often made in sweden… odd that. iut’s as if 95% or so of the population of the earth actually have no idea how it all actually works – including us
-you know, a friend of mine once said to me, when you’re a kid you think - so long of course as some uncle isn’t abusing you and robbing you of your childhood innocence - you think that all the grown ups have got it sorted and know what’s going on, and you just potter about playing with barbie or building forts, climbing trees and what have you, thinking, or rather being allowed to think, that everything’s hunky bloody dory, and  then – then,  you grow up and realize that, lo and behold, no fucker has any idea what in the heck is going on, and that everyone’s just making it up as they go along
-hallelujah brother, speak the truth
-I will!
-did you know that when you type in ‘barbie’ on a computer, when you’re using Word, if you don’t put in a capital B for the first letter of the word itself, the computer automatically changes it to a capital anyway
-no, that is disturbing
-I know! I mean,  how did they remember to do that? and does anybody need it? where’s danny?
-dunno. how the heck do you know that anyway? anyway, if you think though, barbie is probably the most popular doll, toy even, in the world, there’s probably a whole gigantic sub-culture of barbie fanatics, all ages, that write ‘barbie’ probablly very often. it’s probably very convenient to have the small b turned into a big one automatically. barbie, the world’s most popular toy, that’s quite depressing come to think of it. shouldn’t kids want more than a miniature person to play with? maybe not though. ‚here my child, become god!‘… I wonder if any parent has ever actually called their kid barbie?
-brilliant. I’d pay to meet anyone that has. somewhere in texas, a barbie is walking about, a living breathing, most likely rotund and spotty faced barbie! I’ll bet they’re proper fucked up.  ‚i‘ as well, as soon as you type in ‚i‘, as in myself, that comes up as a capital too. maybe though i don’t want to be an I?
- ‚i don’t want to be an I!‘ sounds like a rallying call for this fucked up generation! here’s something else you’d pay for, another friend has a great dane, and he reckons that one day, when they were out walking over some fields, the great dane jumps a fence and kills a calf
-what?! kills a baby cow?
-so he reckons
-hang on, is he trustworthy? are we talking a mauling here?
-he is, and yes, I’d say so
-god, I would pay to see that. front row. I mean who wouldn’t?
-maybe we can film it, get him to do it again, get it on youtube, we’d be overnight sensations

we’re interrupted from our musings by a mashed up looking japanese girl who stumbles through a door. she looks like she’s about to collapse at any second, she staggers down the corridor to fall onto one knee right next to mark, wipes her hair from her face to reveal a pretty smile and wandering blue eyes, seems to be about to speak but instead produces a stream of green vomit from her shimmering orange lips that brings back fond memories of cheesy horror flicks. mark looks at me with a surprised smile and I know he’s as impressed with this as I am, to have witnessed this most beautiful of vomitings– suddenly I'm reminded of bowling one night, long ago in Bangkok, a bowling hall full of handsome petite women wearing those wrist protector things, all metal and leather, and their own cute little bowling shoes spinning pristine, swaying, arabesque curved-swords of strikes the whole deep, sultry night through (‚my heart is your polished aisle‘, I remember drunkenly thinking), there was something so beautiful in that -  and damn, that vomit is green. sure, you wouldn’t want to kiss her right now, but there was a definite, dare I say infinite grace to the way she did that. mesmerising! now she’s got one hand on mark’s shin, forehead on his foot, her hair is mopping up her projected bile, and she’s dry wretching – which is really not so pretty. maybe her name is barbie, I find myself thinking. then, is she okay?

mark’s just about to place his hand on her back and to no doubt ask her that very question when three guys appear from the door this vision just came through, three of the unfriendliest faces I’ve seen out here, three figures looking so out of place in this club of fluorescent limes and pinks, manga boys and space girls, three ugly shaved tramlined heads, shite Gucci copy wide-as-a-cadillac sunglasses, fat arse jeans and massive t-shirts. I really do hate the wannabe hip hop scene here. it’s all about being a cretin, seems to me. they’re all looking at the girl, and at us, and the vomit, possibly, but more likely at and mark’s hand hovering above her bare back an inch off that neon blue butterfly tattoo, which I just now notice, kind of common but well done, and they don’t look impressed. one, the biggest, shouts

-yukue! yukue! get your arse over here!

yukue lets out a groan, some spit, and a last chunk or two of whatever she ate for tea. then

-go fuck yourself, Shit Drip

me and mark look at each other, then at Shit Drip. mark chuckles, just a little, but he definitely, audibly, chuckles. Shit Drip looks at his pals, says something, then leaves – perhaps to go fuck himself. you never know. he may be very obedient.

yukue, for her part, is again smiling. a trooper. she stands up, straightens her hair, mumbles a sorry, adjusts her mini, and staggers off, rather elegantly, it must be said, for one wiping sick from the corners of her mouth, every minute detail of which is watched attentively by mark and myself. she pauses just for a second to look back at us over her shoulder, then pushes a door open and disappears. something in me - almost imperceptible – almost, but not quite – tingles, ever so slightly.

-well.
-well indeed.
-what a woman!
-I'm using this word too much tonight, but that was brilliant. truly. brilliant.
-ShitDrip!
-ShitDrip!

we eventually haul ourselves up and go for a bit of a dance, I bump into koji, a good friend of mine and dan’s, we have a hug and a quick chat, but the energy is dissipating rapidly, so after saying our goodbyes to him and some others we know,  we head out into the streets again, those quiet lanes of early morning Tokyo, to find a ramen shop for some much needed sustenance, not that I feel much like eating at all. as we leave there’s still people queueing up, more of the dayglo kids but now some heavier looking folks too, the dance til noon gay crowd, a couple of girls with matching hair and matching cuts all over their forearms (that’s a very niche clique – being japan, you’re never sure if they mean it or if it’s more of a fashion statement), then a bunch with faces covered in varying lumps of metal and gel-slicked fringes, and some more of the hip hoppers, probably carrying supplies to hold the crowd inside through til lunchtime.

we’re beginning to come down properly now, at least I am, though mark looks like he’s with me. that tiredness of movement, the heavy lids, loosened beyond weary limbs, and there above us that hint of the city dawn, smog-subverted matisse-like colours, wrapped up in the dying neon particles being spewed out into space, the inevitable, merciless dawn that makes you just a little ashamed to be your mother’s son, out at this time, in this state, at this age. we put our backs against the wall of the club, down the side away from the queue, and I roll a cigarette. through the wall and through my bones I feel the thud of the bass from the club’s sound system, thudding like a tumor in my ribcage, and it saddens me, not just a little.  I know what this place is. this place we’ve emerged from after six hours of mayhem, a box, a giant thumping strobe-filled box of lost and stoked up souls, stoked up to the gills on chemicals designed to accommodate release - release from me, from you, from anything real, from anything that can touch you – from everything that does touch you. I dunno, maybe there’s a service being provided here – in fact I don’t doubt it for a second – it just feels so hollow. I used to think that all this really was something essential and human, that yeah, something was happening. but not anymore. I wonder now after every night out why the fuck I do it. I'm at the point, we all get there eventually, where the down outweighs the up. I'm not religious at all, but the guilt that accompanies me on my comedowns these days is catholic in nature, catholic with a big C. it’s like I have my own personal Comedown Pope to feverishly beat the guilt of being into me…


-fucked

says mark

-too right

says i

and I close my eyes, take a long drag, fill my poor lungs, then exhale, see colours pour out of me through membrane and tissue, escaping my fleshy border,  pouring out much like the seratonin that poured into my receptors the wrong way round earlier, now reduced to a trickle - the abuse our bodies can stand up to never fails to amaze me. I just wonder if the mind is made of stuff as stern. no, I know it isn’t, what am I on about. I open my eyes at the sound of a boot crunching gravel and catch sight of some black object hurtling towards my stomach, just enough of it to realize from it’s direction and velocity that I am about to be beaten in the gut, it hits, this thing, whatever it is, a pipe maybe? and I tense doubling forward and catch the laces of a big boot before my distended eyes, head whips back violently from the force and hits the wall behind. and the last things I remember are the words ‘shitdrip that, bitch’.