Dance Music Chris Neilan You find your heart is a balloon, blown up and let down and blown up again, so you make tapes. Mix tapes, cobbled together from mix albums—Dave Pearce and Euphoria and Ministry of Sound: The Annual. The plastic hinges chip as you carry them in your rucksack to the parties, with the cans and syphoned liquors you’ve managed to finagle. Ultra Nate, Armand Van Heldon, ATB. In commuter town living rooms crowds of children listen to those tapes, when you’re able to commandeer the tape deck, paying no hint of the attention you wish them to pay, to these tapes, these pieces of your inexplicable balloon heart. A boy from your year is asleep on the sofa, the room pungent with eau de toilette and lager, young bodies. Cliques both strengthened and dissolved, boundaries shifted by the new presence of Booze. Some have been kissing. As you try to rouse the sleeping boy he vomits into your lap. Your tape is not playing. A girl you know says you’re nice, and her friend agrees, and the first of these girls drifts into your personal orbit. She lies on the floor of the sitting room alternately allowing you and a bowl-cutted boy called Matt to kiss her, and spectacularly she allows your hand up her top, into her bra. The room is dark by this point, and it’s very late—people bedded haphazardly on the floor and sofas, chatting, laughing, laughing at you. Your tape has been played, a bit: Jungle Brothers, Paul Johnson. You remember deciphering the rhythms in your bedroom, walking around town—the thump thump thump thump drop. The house is quiet now, and a-fog with scent—the acid stench of puke, fag stink, spilled lager, stickysweet Hooch, some peaty whiff you don’t yet know to identify as hash, and something else—something in the air, of hard kids, violence, the violence of contact, desire, bodies, kissing, grinding, groping, laughing, humiliating, and with it all the home smells everyone knows, of carpet cleaner and pot pourri. You turned fifteen this month—most are still fourteen. Do you wake up next to the girl? No, but under your own coat, freezing cold. It is October, and morning now, and you’re sicker than you’ve ever been. The hostess’s mother has appeared and is making, inappropriately, black coffees.
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