NIGHT. A JANE Austen novel, this is not. Strobe ultraviolets I once told Red Monolith were designed to keep the club free of vampires highlight the playful messages scrawled across the tanned backs and taut stomachs of the hardbodies gyrating before Emperor Twilight and I as the music chews through the knots in my soul and whatever elixir Twilight hands me next dissolves my conscience or liberates my unconscious or exorcises my demons or what have you, the hot humid warm moist tropical incessant nerve-wracking heat of the dance floor undulating through waves of discordant light, colours spiralling and unfurling before my exhausted gaze as a frighteningly perfect girl in a pink two-piece outfit with abuse me written between her clavicles looks up from beneath my chin with a drugged gaze and a fecund smile, the teeth her father paid so much to straighten now set like white jewels in a crooked lazy bewitching grin as she lists the physiological unlikelihoods she wants to perform on me, either unaware or unconcerned that not only can I not hear a word she’s saying above music that sounds like a techno version of London in the Blitz, but her equally perfect and corrupt BFF already has her hand down the front of my costume clutching my member like a learner driver trying to get the gas nozzle into her car.

In the club tonight are Black Honey, the Lark, Miss Black, Mantas, Golden, Devil Betty, Manticore, Cipher, Blue Streak, Fortuna, Jackanape, Black Arrow, Calliope, Trigger, Swedish hero Thunderfall and wanted villain Killswitch, as well as lesser celebs like Keanu and Richard, Paul Rudd, Hugh Jackman, Dario Argento, Bret Easton Ellis, Jeff Buckley, Tony Hawk, Penelope Cruz, Selma Blair, Geoffrey Rush, a painfully out-of-place Richard Dawkins, Lee Majors, Varg Vikernes, William Hurt, Natalie Martinez, Rinko Kikuchi, Robyn Lawley, Chow Yun-Fat and Milla Jovovich.

It is almost foggy in here. The waiters and waitresses wear bondage gear, struggling with their orders as they mince on clog heels, constrained by leather corsets, men and women alike, leather straps and belts limiting their strides as the packed-to-the-rafters crowd hugs the dank carpeted walls and laugh and make out and smoke synthetic cigarettes and talk shit, the whole riotous zoo giving me literal flashbacks to my three-month exile, the taste and smell of the Dreamtime inescapable. I extricate the girl’s hand from my costume which neatly zips itself up in the aftermath, me stumbling away, nearly tripping over a pair of abandoned Jenniston Cross four-inch burgundy heels, ignoring Twilight’s outstretched hand as I push my way through the hordes and eye speaker stacks festooned with abandoned Stoli bottles, none of them mine, a kaleidoscope of familiar faces as I press through to the back, belt open the john door and move into unblinking white tiles hard and crisp as cyberspace. I get into a stall and shut the door and slump, head in my hands, switching from self-pity as quickly as it registers, the Enercom phone, sorting through the dozens of quickly-snapped photos taken months ago now in a hurried rush, surely much of the intel I pilfered from the Wallachians’ HQ now redundant, the trail as cold as the crime scene at Bryant Gumbel’s upstate mansion.

But the photo that looks back at me isn’t a clue. A hastily scrawled list in dark lipstick on a hotel mirror. Like a slap in the face. Ignoring the grunting of two guys digging for chocolate in the stall next door, I nod resolutely and stand, take a quick leak and exit the men’s room pushing off fawning hands of would-be underlings, a girl with the haunted look of a beaten dog falling back, disappear here and an arrow going up to her mouth in luminous blue on bare lightly sweating skin between pendulous fake breasts, silver mascara around her eyes like a substitute for tears I do not care if she ever sheds.

On the rooftop, the night is refreshingly cold and stark. I take in a deep double lungful and feel my head clear. Footsteps booming in the stairwell behind me. I point in the rough general direction ofLondonand do the crouch thing and get the hell out of there.

I HAMMER THROUGH the night, sometimes almost falling asleep as the thermals buffet me in a cosmic womb-like rhythm and I shoot across theAtlanticlike a stone thrown from the hand of Zeus. I get to about Mach Three before I slow over the Dorset coast and veer north to Manchester about twenty minutes later looking all sleepy and safe and startlingly picturesque as a milky crepuscular autumn fog blankets the neighbourhoods making my ex-wife’s new abode look more like the fairytale realm from which all England was once sprung to the abysmal horror show it is in broad daylight.

Guided by Tessa’s intel, I light upon an historic street, keeping to the shadows as an honest-to-God milkman finishes his round, me slipping in through a side gate in the tastefully retrofitted row house made fashionable by an architect’s interior redesign. The back yard houses a small aviary and the birds’ tweeting welcomes me through the gate, a single red-leafed tree towering in the surprisingly large and lush grounds, a small covered rotunda with twinkling outdoor lights still on, a table from the night before set for two with empty wine glasses and the remains of a classy meal now picked over by a fox who stares once at me before making a swiftling departure.

There is a chance to wonder what the fuck I am doing here, but the obviousness of the answer and its remedy are little excuse to turn back now. There are noises inside my wife’s love nest. Sleepy sounds for the household nonetheless captive to the cruel economics of a weekday. I rap gently on the antique door which quickly cracks ajar to reveal Elisabeth scowling at me from beneath a new, shorter and more European hair-do.

“Joe? I mean . . . Zephyr? What are you doing here?”

“I came to talk.”

“Talking. They invented something for that. It’s called a phone,” Beth says, not lacking any of her good old-fashioned American wiseass nature despite her British surrounds. “Speaking of which, why don’t you ever answer yours?”

“You left messages?”

“No I called, and. . . .” She shrugs.

“You don’t read the papers? I’ve been away. Missing in action again, they call it.”

“I don’t read those sorts of papers,” Beth says haughtily. “Papers here are more focused on real news.”

“Oh what, like the royal family are descended from Hobbits? That sort of thing?”

“The other papers.”

“Congratulations,” I say and let my way in to the darling little kitchen. “You’ve become one of those wankers in record time.”

“Don’t talk to me like that.”

We face off in the gloomy if well-appointed kitchen. All the mod cons but nowhere to hide.

“What are you doing here?” she asks. “What have you come all this way to ask that a simple phone call couldn’t achieve?”

“I want custody of our daughter.”

Beth looks at me for a full two seconds. My heart is in my mouth. A cliché I apologise for invoking, but I would rather go another twelve rounds with the Prime than have to endure moments more of this anxiety. But then, quick as it came, the tension disappears as Beth gives an inchoate shudder, eyes flicking away to the power outlet at the corner of the room and she nods, shoulders slumped.

“Fine.”

“Really?”

“Do you see me with custody now?”

“Well no, but –”

“Bring any paperwork?”

“Um, no to that either, but I –”

“Then congratulations for your achievement. You’re a father. And making about as much difference now as you ever did before.”

“Honey, come on. That’s hardly fair.”

“Thanks to you and your screwy family and your stupid fucking genetic tree there’s nothing I can do to make Tessa live with me even if I had all the court orders in the world. The girl can’t stand me anyway.”

“You ever wonder why?”

“Don’t play that card with me,” Elisabeth hisses.

“I’m not playing cards. I’m kinda hoping for . . . honesty, here.”

“I’m not interested in your honesty, Joe. You got what you came here for. Now go on. Scram.”

Her words make an awful kind of sense, a finality in their echo. I move to the door gently nodding, start to turn back in that sort of hey-we-had-a-groovy-kind-of-love moment you might expect to soften the sucker punches we just gave each other. Instead, Beth is choking up at the sink with her hands clutching the stainless steel edge. Desire as I might to go back offer comfort, Harald emerges through the door to the main living room brushing his teeth and freezes in concern at seeing me; and then his man-wife instincts get the better of him and he moves slowly behind Elisabeth to offer a conciliatory back rub with a look showing he’s been here numerous times before.

I leave them to it.

Zephyr 15.4 “Good Old-Fashioned American Wiseass” is a post from: Zephyr - a webcomic in prose