They were the green, blue and violet nobody, cleanly clothed and chemically polluted. Streams of pure color, stacked into lines, flashing against them, sound patched spaces between their bodies. The pink, yellow, orange and red everybody; warm light enveloping and encasing them. Strung out on three floors of electronic music, their voices static, coarse and cutting through it— they were at Fabric.
She was from Dorchester and twenty-nine, keeping perpetually above her own undertow, trying to stay above her feelings. She wanted to rise unscathed every morning from her down comforter by both attachment and rejection. Proud of her perpetual purgatorial state of emotion, her name was Annabel.
There was a man named Jones tapping her shoulder.
He said he needed to talk with her. He could see through her, he whispered. He thought he could see straight through her. The light in her hair coming from the DJ booth, he said, it illuminated every strand. He could see through her hair and to the glowing, red, exit sign.
“You do?”
“I do,” he said, “I see through you.”
She shut her eyes for a second, blocking the colors out. But she could still see them, behind her eyelids, like the kaleidoscope her parents bought for her seventh birthday, before she broke it, finding out that it was only beads and plastic— an assemblage of mirrors.
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
“Annabel.”
He lifted up a cigarette, and she took it. He lit it. He had one leg, and she hardly ever smoked, but she inhaled anyway.
“I used to be a professional dancer,” he told her.
“OK.”
“I used to break-dance.”
“I wish I could do that,” she looked up at the stage where people were hoisting each other up one at a time, each gentler than the next. “But I can’t.”
“This is my first time dancing in a year. This is my first time going out since I lost my leg.”
She looked down at where it would have been.
“That’s good,” she said. Her lungs felt burnt, her head floating. She lifted her eyes again now to the yellow-green lights, feeling as though it was the first time she’d felt the sun in months.
“Really? A year?” she said.
“Yes, this is my first time out in a years’ time.”
“What did you dance?”
“Everything,” he said, “I danced everything. Salsa. Hip-hop. Ballet.”
“The tango?”
“Yes,” his voice left the air then came back. “The tango. You have a special accent. It’s smashing.”
“You have an accent,” she told him.
“I’m from Brighton, but I never go back— too many of my family gone now.”
“I bought this there,” she extended her arm to him, and he touched a vintage blue and white glass beaded bracelet falling around her wrist.
“Beautiful,” he opened the clasp with his index finger and thumb then let it snap shut. “I slipped under the tube, a year ago,” he told her, not looking up.
“You slipped?”
“No one slips under the tube, do they?” he said, laughing, “that’s what you…” She couldn’t hear the next thing he said but nodded anyway. She smiled. He smiled. He reached out and touched her hand. He had colds hands. She didn’t pull away.
She was dancing. He was along the edges of dancing. He looked like he was going in reverse, starting in the place he wanted to move and losing something, going back from there.
“This is my first time out in a year, Annabel, since I slipped under the tube.”
“I’m sorry,” she said this time, “I’m glad you’re out.”
“Thank you,” he said, his eyes beginning to change, the light shifting and filling them with pools of blue where she could see herself now. She watched her image there inside of him. She saw her t-shirt, white, glowing lilac and alabaster in the black light.
“I used to dance on TV,” he said now.
A girl with bobbed black hair danced past, turning and kissing Annabel on the cheek, winking and pointing to a place on her cheek. She looked at the spot the girl had indicated, pinpointed with glitter. The girl pointed to her cheek again. Annabel kissed her cheek, and the girl slipped into the middle of another circle, into a different light.
“I know,” Jones said, taking her cigarette from her hand, finishing it. He pulled another out of the packet. He handed it to her. She put it in her mouth, leaning down. He lit it.
He lifted one of his canes in the air then brought it back down.
She inhaled and blew the smoke up to watch it spin in the lights. She coughed. He touched her hand again, and this time she pulled it away.
“I can get you into the VIP room,” he told her.
“Really?”
“Do you want to go?”
Jones smiled.
She turned towards Ruby, a girl she’d known since primary who drank too much for her frame and only said the start of swear words, even bloody. She would just say, ‘blood.’ She touched her friend’s shoulder. Ruby took the cigarette from Annabel’s hand, inhaled twice, and handed it back.
“He says he can take us to the VIP room,” she said, “what do you think?”
She looked at Jones and said no. No, he couldn’t.
“Are you serious? We’re not going anywhere with him,” Ruby told her.
Light cast a purple glow over her, and she repeated it.
“You’re not going, Annabel. Remember Jack the Ripper? He could be another one. Blood—” Ruby turned her face toward the stage where a girl had fallen, and where everyone had stopped dancing until she was on her feet again.
“I seriously doubt that,” Annabel said, turning, moving back to Jones, who was now smashing the light on the floor with one of his canes, splashing in the puddles he glimpsed around where his leg could have been.
“I think we’re staying down here.”
“No, you don’t understand,” he said, “or you would come.”
“Maybe later, maybe we’ll see each other later.”
“You don’t understand,” already seeming to lament the loss of something he never had, he added a simple: “no.”
“I’m sorry,” she said softly, turning down to the floor.
He dropped his cigarette to the concrete. It didn’t go out.
“I still feel my old leg. Did you know that?”
“I would imagine.”
“You would?”
“Of course.”
“You don’t understand.”
“My friend doesn’t understand.”
“Too bad,” he said, “I was once on Britain’s Got Talent.”
“I’ve never seen it.”
“It’s off the air now,” he said, looking up, opening his mouth but then smiling. He held up his hand up, touched her lip, pressing the glitter off of it and onto his finger. He brought his finger up to show her, then started backing away into the crowd, turning on his black canes and beginning to move toward the bar and into the place where the lights didn’t reach all the way. Fog sprayed from jets in the ceiling above him.
Annabel turned back to Ruby. One of the straps of her friend’s red top kept falling, and she kept pushing it up.
“I wanted to go to with him,” Annabel told her.
“He can’t get into the VIP room,” Ruby shook her head back and forth at her friend.
“Yes, he can. He said we didn’t understand. You didn’t understand.”
“He had one leg,” Ruby raised her perfectly plucked eyebrows.
“Exactly,” Annabel said, “and he used to be a professional dancer until he slipped underneath the tube.”
“How does someone just slip under the tube? You don’t slip,” Ruby whispered.
“I don’t know,” Annabel told her. “Maybe he was dancing, and maybe he arabesque-ed too close. Nine-million people live in London—”
A faux rain storm began then, the lights imitating lightning and thunder booming out from the sound system. A hand touched Annabel’s elbow, tracing one of her veins down her arm and holding her wrist there between his two fingers.
She felt his pulse against her skin: fast and even.
She looked down and saw the hand let go of her. It opened, white pills glowing from his palm. His hand shut again. She looked into his eyes, a dark green where she couldn’t see herself. He smiled without opening his mouth. She looked down still. He shut his hand and opened it; the pills had tiny indentations of hearts in them.
“An oyster,” he said. “Pearls. Five quid for one,” he whispered in her ear, “ten quid for two.”
His breath was warm. Annabel could feel that. She watched a pill drop out from between the cracks of his hand, between the lines of the shell.
He sunk to his knees, searching, combing the fabric of the bright oily floor with his fingers but only pulling up strands of light between them.
#
author bio:
Jordan Faber is a writer based out of Chicago, IL. Her fiction has most recently appeared in Dream Pop Journal, Lunch Ticket and TIMBER. Her work in theater has been produced at The Greenhouse and Victory Gardens theaters in Chicago. Jordan received a BA in Creative Writing from Knox College and an MFA from Northwestern University. While at Northwestern she earned a Princess Grace Award nomination. She has worked as a fiction editor for Black Spring Press in London and in development for the Sundance Channel. You can find out more about her at www.jordanfaber.com.
This story’s featured image is courtesy of Gratisography.