Once More With Footnotes

them. I'll swear he loved them all.
     
                  Yes, all righ t. But you've got to know about him to understand what happened next.
     
                  We were booked for this Hallowe'en Dance. You could tell it was Hallowe'en because of all the little bastards running around the streets shouting, "Trickle treat," and threatening you with milk bottles.
     
                  He'd sorted out lots of "Monster Mash" type records. He looked pretty awful, but I didn't think much of it at the time. I mean, he always looked awful. It was his normal look. It came from spending years indoors listening to records, p lus he had this bad heart and asthma and everything.
     
                  The dance was at ... okay, you know all that. A Hallowe'en Dance to raise money for a church hall. Wayne said that was a big joke, but he didn't say why. I expect it was some clever reason. He was alwa ys good at that sort of thing, you know, knowing little details that other people didn't know; it used to get him hit a lot at school, except when I was around. He was the kind of skinny boy who had his glasses held together with Elastoplast. I don't thin k I ever saw him raise a finger to anybody, only that time when Greebo Greaves broke a record Wayne had brought to some school disco and four of us had to pull Wayne off him and prise the iron bar out of his fingers and there was the police and an ambulanc e and everything.
     
                  Anyway.
     
                  I let Wayne set everything up, which was one big mistake but he wanted to do it, and I went and sat down by what they called the bar, i.e., a couple of trestle tables with a cloth on it.
     
                  No, I didn't drink anything. Well, may be one cup of the punch and that was all fruit juice. All right, two cups.
     
                  But I know what I heard, and I'm absolutely certain about what I saw.
     
                  I think.
     
                  You get the same old bunch at these kind of gigs. There's the organiser, and a few members of th e committee, some lads from the village who'd sort of drifted in because there wasn't much on the box except snooker. Everyone wore a mask but hadn't made an effort with the rest of the clothes so it looked as though Frankenstein and Co. had all gone shop p ing in Marks and Sparks. There were Scouts' posters on the wall and those special kinds of village hall radiators that suck the heat in. It smelled of tennis shoes. Just to sort of set the seal on it as one of the hotspots of the world there was a little m irror ball spinning up the rafters. Half the little mirrors had fallen off.
     
                  All right, maybe three cups. But it had bits of apple floating in it. Nothing serious has bits of apple floating in it.
     
                  Wayne started with a few hot numbers to get them stompin g. I'm speaking metaphorically here, you understand. None of this boogie on down stuff, all you could heat was people not being as young as they used to be.
     
                  Now, I've already said Wayne wasn't exactly cut out for the business, and that night — last night — h e was worse than usual. He kept mumbling, and staring at the dancers. He mixed the records up. He even scratched one. Accidentally I mean — the only time I've ever seen Wayne really angry, apart from the Greebo business, was when scratch music came in.
     
                  It would have been very bad manners to cut in, so at the first break I went up to him and, let me tell you, he was sweating so much it was dropping on to the mixer.
     
                  "It's that bloke on the floor," he said, "the one in the flares."
     
                  "Methuselah?" I said.
     
                  "Don't muck about. The black silk suit with the rhinestones. He's been doing John Travolta impersonations all night. Come on, you must have noticed. Platform soles. Got a silver medallion as big as a plate. Skull mask. He was over by the door."
     
                  I hadn't seen anyone like that. Well, you'd remember, wouldn't you?
     
                  Wayne's face was frozen with fear. "You must have!"
     
                  "So what, anyway?"
     
                  "He keeps staring at me!"
     
                  I patted his arm.