It was five minutes before Violet Winters set fire to the Palace.
Apart from that, everything was exactly as you would expect it to be on a Friday night in Kilchester’s hottest bar and nightclub. The Tulip Street Gin Palace (or the Palace as it was known to those too cool to call it by its actual name) was absolutely rammed. Outside, velvet rope channelled people into orderly lines. Inside, the walls throbbed with the undulating beats of music so obscure that even the most cutting-edge of the clientele struggled to identify it.
Before it became a bastion of all that middle-aged people thought was wrong with the world, the Palace was called Pzazz. Unfortunately for its owners, it had only attracted the sort of no-budget mid-week student drinkers that were unlikely to line anyone’s pockets. As a result, like so many buildings in Kilchester, the beautiful old Victorian facades were either torn away or covered up. The red brickwork was inelegantly hidden behind the glass and chrome shards of what still passed for modern architecture.
Of course, modern drinkers with money to spend didn’t want four-shots-for-a-pound at midday on a Tuesday. They wanted one hundred and fifty different kinds of gin and fizzy drinks that came exclusively from reconditioned 1970’s Sodastreams. To get served, you first needed to decipher the booze bible and request the right brand of gin. Then you had to wait while the barman adjusted his top-knot, grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, added flavouring to it, and then shoved it into a yellowing plastic receptacle to give it fizz.
Given the enforced snail’s pace of the service, it was astounding that anyone in the place ever managed to get even the slightest bit tipsy, but at midnight on a Friday the place was bedlam.
In amongst the posing pricks and pernicious princesses, a woman staggered forward as if the earth beneath her feet was the floor of a bouncy castle and the other patrons were trying to do backflips all around her. She pushed a lock of black bobbed hair behind her left ear, then stumbled, causing the errant lock to slip loose again and obscure her face. As she tottered off the dance floor, her heel appeared to give way and she twisted three hundred and sixty degrees before snapping her head downward to glare at her shoe. The hand she reached out to steady herself inadvertently landed on a speaker, the bass slithering up her arm and making a valiant attempt at dislodging her fillings. She recoiled and spun around.
A walking homage to 80s cop movies rolled up the arms of his suit jacket a little further and slid over to the woman. His mouth opened and closed in an expectant fashion. Opened and closed, opened and closed. This close to the source of the aural assault, he could no more hear her than she could hear him, but he ploughed on regardless. She watched for a moment, then bared her teeth at him, hissing like a cat.
In one obviously practised motion, he reached his right hand for her waist and his left hand to cradle the back of her head and pull her closer. It didn’t quite work out as intended. Instead of holding her like the wrestler-sex-pest hybrid he clearly was and screaming thunderous clichés into her ears, something unexpected occurred. As his hand touched the back of her neck she slid towards the floor. Perhaps fuelled by the drink, perhaps the unfamiliarity of such towering heels. Whatever the reason, she dropped floorwards.
Somewhere between slipping through his clinch and smacking on the floor, something changed. Her legs, a moment ago jelly, suddenly solidified and she launched herself forward in a majestic attempt to prevent total collapse.
Unluckily for Mr 80s this coincided with her brow being exactly at crotch height. He doubled over as her forehead slammed into his unmentionables, but her momentum carried her forward, pushing him into a full somersault from a standing position to flat on his back, screaming into the unrelenting musical onslaught.
The woman looked left and right, perplexed at having apparently just witnessed someone vanish into thin air, then shrugged and careened away.
Onwards she ploughed, lurching between new lovers and old fights, half-hearted conversations and the spinning madness of the night club lighting until, at last, she reached the door to the ladies toilet.
Pushing at the handle, it gave way too quickly and she fell through, skittering forward and straight into a woman so perfectly-coiffed that her hair remained in a flawless beehive despite being thrust against the wall.
The drunk woman took a step back, blinking in surprise or possibly apology. The beehive gave her a death stare and smoothed down her clothes before resuming her position in front of a bank of perfume bottles, averting her gaze until a third woman emerged from one of the cubicles and went to wash her hands.
“Fragrance, Miss?” asked Beehive with the weariness of someone who despised her life.
“No, thank…”
It was too late. Beehive squirted as the cubicle woman turned, the perfume going straight into her open eyes.
“What are you doing?” cubicle cried. She grabbed a tissue and, dabbing at her streaming eyes, made a sharp exit.
“What are you looking at?” Beehive snapped at the drunk woman, who was still standing, swaying, a look of intense concentration knitting her brow. “It was an accident.”
The drunk woman’s hand flew to her mouth, her cheeks bulging like those of a jazz-trumpeter. She fell forward and, as she did, a plume of vomit arced from her mouth, showering Beehive from the top of her coiffure, across her red silk dress and down to the tips of her fake Jimmy Choos.
Beehive screamed and retched. She ran to the sink, turning on the tap and splashing frantically at her face and bare arms.
The drunk woman, apparently oblivious, staggered down the row of toilets, her shoulder knocking every stall door open until she reached the last cubicle and fell inside.
Beehive stared at herself in the mirror, picking chunks of something from her fringe. Nothing was worth this. Nothing.
They were scum. Drunken scum. If she had her way…
The club’s fire alarm interrupted Beehive’s train of thought as it screamed like an angry banshee.
“I quit,” she said to no-one before walking out of the Palace toilets, never to return.
As the door swung shut behind her, the noise of the alarm choked into silence before returning at a much lower volume, sounding more like a drowning digital duck. The place was falling apart at the seams.
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