The Big Ask by Shane Maloney Read Free Book Online

cuttingedge dance club.
    I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. Back when I was a barman at the Reservoir Hotel, we used to get some bloke with a panel van to bring in a mobile sound system and one of those modular disco dance floors with the flashing lights underneath. But that was hardly a dance club, was it?
    Only one way to find out, I thought. The night was not yet middle-aged. Nor was I, if you counted forty as the starting point. And those bottles of beer had taken off at least a couple of years apiece. I checked out the queue.
    I put the median age at twenty-eight, give or take five years. Take, mainly. I was ten years older, but not offensively so. The boys tended to designer jeans and white T-shirts, the girls to scoop-neck dresses and balcony bras. Despite the nip in the air, there was plenty of skin on display. And some of the women were definite lookers. But I was hardly an impartial judge. After six months of celibacy, I was starting to get an erotic frisson from the dummies in shop windows. Nobody screamed when I joined the queue.
    The screaming would come later. And I’d be the one doing it.

A matching pair of blondes in micro-minis and stiletto heels stood sentinel at the Metro’s entrance. They cast an appraising eye over my navy-blue Hugo Boss suit, concluded that I was pathologically unhip but otherwise both harmless and solvent, and raised the red rope. Doof, doof, doof, came the beat from the interior. Wang, wang, wang.
    Twenty-five years earlier, I’d sat in the Metro and watched Gregory Peck and David Niven destroy the guns of Navarone. There was still plenty of smoke and noise and flashing light, but no sign of David Niven. Not his scene at all.
    The seats had been ripped out, replaced by a dance floor. The movie screen was now a wall of video monitors, an animated matrix of MTV images, winking and blinking. DJs in white overalls tended a console of turntables, the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, warp-factor nine imminent. A central bar dispensed back-lit liquors and bottles of Mexican beer with wedges of lime shoved in their necks. Beams of coloured light zapped from gimballed prisms set in huge robotic arms that swung out above the dance floor, flexing and pumping to the relentless beat. Doof, doof, doof.
    It was still early, not quite eleven, and the place was only half-full. Hardly a thousand people were milling about, crowding the bars or bopping on the dance floor. There were so many blond tips that I wondered if they were spiking the drinks with peroxide. I shed my tie, left my jacket at the coat-check counter, rolled my sleeves to the forearm and elbowed my way to the booze. The happy-hour special was bourbon. To my surprise, it wasn’t watered.
    Glass in hand, I surveyed the dancers. Criss-crossed by searchlights and enveloped in clouds of artificial fog, they moved with jerky, pixilated movements to a persistent, allencompassing, unvarying bass thump. Doof, doof, doof.
    A suspended gangway led to the balcony where I’d once sat between my parents and watched The Parent Trap . It was now a lounge, booth seats with waitress service and a view of the video wall. There was no sign of Hayley Mills. Instead, clusters of frighteningly glamorous women sat around elaborate cocktails, checking the prospects. Even if I’d had the courage to approach one of them, I couldn’t imagine bellowing pick-up lines over the top of Tina Turner. If the music got any louder, I’d start bleeding from the ears.
    What I had in mind was a statuesque redhead with a come-hither look, the ability to read lips and a lapel badge that said ‘Take Me, Murray, I’m Yours’. It looked like she hadn’t arrived yet.
    Some sort of VIP area occupied the topmost level, admission by membership key-tag only. Doubtless this was where the real fun was being had, the stuff involving rolled-up hundred dollar bills and celebrity cleavage. Techno-beat clanging in my cranium, I