The Eagle and the Fear

BANG BANG – Fire, flames, smoke, Explosions and colour flashes and the screaming of the it girls at the Ball and high density copper halides and fragments of destruction – all that is fun & true, conspiring to corrupt this Friday night.

It wasn't even late, 11pm perhaps, but the games had begun and anyone with the proper experience will say that this was not the moment to relax or be the Man – Never delay your reaction to a stimulus. And what fools we were to be caught unaware. In times of chaos, this kind of approach is the final stupidity – and it means that more of this Earth will belong to the fat whores of death, not less. No, as far as I can tell - when the Great Spirits call in, we must honour the savage within us – Grab it hard and grab it Fast. Finger to the trigger, boots on the ground, eyes locked forward and dammit, the predictable rush of hormones from the adrenal gland, always.

Now, it has taken me a little under an hour to explain that properly on paper with a pen to the sound of Britney Spears' first record, from 1999 – so I am filling with rage to imagine that my clouded mind had pursued the same thought processes in two-thirds of a second flat, and arrived at the same conclusions. The human brain is an amazing organ – until it develops a tumor or suffers from an exploded blood vessel and becomes flooded with the red stuff. Wow – an anecdote of fear and laughter has descended into a battle cry for the last remnants of the 'Too Much Fun' club, awful.

So, the incomprehensible colours of fury and the sounds of a black sky rupturing above Oxford cut right through to my core, initiating a specific form of internalised whiplash – and now, we are caught up with the story, this is nice. At the first flash and percussive boom, I was gone - launching myself from the back room of this 17^th Century watering hole, out through the in door and onto the road. The Oxford girls were letting off fireworks from the College quads – synchronised across the whole city like the last days of Berlin, with fewer civilian casualties but the same smell of chemical smoke and sense of victory. Only fireworks – but the sounds were real and the feelings were real also. I had seen the Oxford crew earlier, as they headed out in their sequins and silk. If these are the best minds of our generation, then I look forward to more fireworks – more vicious in nature perhaps, and rigged so they can hold nine times the amount of black powder, with special chambers for the silver shrapnel. Even in this moment, I couldn't explain to my Lebanese companion the kind of paranoia that those girls put on me – they broke my back and spat in my mouth. Whether they meant it or not, this is the height of intimidation, with only a hint of fun behind it all. Usually, there is something liberating about the surging blood flows and tight lungs of panic - but not now, the cracks between us were sharp and focused. I am not entirely bitter though, and I wish them well in their summer celebrations – part of me is resentful at the exhaustive capacity of youth and another part of me has just learnt to recognise a bitch when I pass her on the street, sequins et al.

Of course, the it girls were to blame for disturbing our peace, but it doesn't matter – they are a healthy species, their time is now. We saw them arrive with stilettos and champagne & I was happy when they disappeared. Now, my attention was divided between my dear friend, who I had just abandoned suddenly and without any explanation in the back room, and the disorienting explosions of light. I remember thinking that together, we should quickly finish our drinks and track down their source – climb a few walls and act natural – one of us, after all, belonged here in the official sense, and had the legal documents to prove it. This is the kind of place where most things are possible if you have the right signatures and rubber seals on some heavy-gauge cream paper. But no, we would not integrate into their parties and we would not pour wine with them and I would not be chatting with the oiled men that stand in small circular groups who do nothing but laugh and shuffle around like the herd animals of old. Hell, they would ruin us, they would spear us through the heart with sharp iron, and what a spectacle that would make, man - enough to beat their own firework show. They would chase us down like dirty dogs – no sympathy for the outsider. I ran back inside to the back room to gather advice and take two minutes to drink and plot our next move. My memory is slightly hazy but I must have messed up somewhere along the line because apparently, the wild movements of my instinct were not subtle and I had started to agitate the couple sat behind us – two Latin-American types. Mexican, Brazilian, Cuban – I don't know where they came from or why they were here – luxury tourist girls, or was I bearing witness to a kind of Amazonian Lesbian mating ritual, right here in the fields of Europe. They were drinking some form of Tequila sunrise and speaking in rapid Spanish and they were both young and very attractive, especially the one that I had managed to terrify the most. She, who we shall name Guadalupe, whipped around in her chair and threw her black hair so that it streamed behind her – speaking in a delicate but heavily accented English while launching out an arm to grasp my wrist.

“Excuse me – what is going on?”

“Oh, it's just fireworks, damn, I'm just excited that's all don't worry”

“I am sorry – what is happening? You think is everything OK?”

“Sure, there's a load of parties going on and I guess they decided to make a chemical mess across the sky, ignore me, honestly I'm just excitable, I think its fun... Um...”

I'm certain that she kept on talking to me after that – surely repeating the question and cursing my staccato mumbles while trying to tame her mutant fear, but I was otherwise engaged. Actually, if I hadn't liked her big brown eyes and brown skin and the way her friend sat wide-eyed with confusion, I probably would have punched her in the fingers when she grabbed me – and spent the next five minutes apologising. That would be bad, you don't want to be someone like that. Still, when your mind locks down in a foreign country and you suspect that the demons of war and fire have finally caught up to you – you don't grab the nearest friend by the wrist, together we could be deadly, and then we'd stand a chance - so don't fuck around. Actually, it was only when she recoiled and I sat down in my chair that I understood subtext of her words. Guadalupe had been sat, enjoying God's great nectar with her possible lover when the sky opened up and she was cornered into making hasty preparations to meet her maker – at least they have celebrations for the dead in her culture. They also have television in her culture, with a state news network – so she had seen London for the tiny warzone it has briefly become, besieged by tiny squadrons of barbarians armed to the teeth with low-explosive bombs, second-hand vehicles and kitchen knives. Well, it was enough to stick in her brain and so here we were: partying our way to the apocalypse with a young, wild and free Latina and her partner thinking that the crazed terrorists of the West had finally landed on their doorstep, perfect. 

C.S Lewis and Tolkien used to hang out here at night, bouncing around the kind of crazy ideas that can only come from brains in the grip of narcotics or decades of the 'Oxford Syndrome'. No, the crazed demons of Guadalupe's nightmares are worse than anything found in the mind of Tolkien – and here lies the last frontier. The troubles & violence of her homelands are nothing & instead, it is here that she loses focus and slides into chaos. The fighter planes and all the drugs stopped working years ago – no, there is no known cure for this particular strain of virus – & all this so that now, all these years later, I can sit in my innocence and look upon a girl, twisted with the Fear, while the sky ignites around us.