After the Party Read Online Free Page B

over the handle. He typed in the settings, stumbling for a moment as he always did over the number 42 when asked to input his age—really, it seemed so unnaturally old—and then he started to walk. He’d forgotten his earphones so had to make do with watching the screens overhead silently. Screen one showed an R&B video; three sphinxlike women in red hot pants and bandeau tops, gyrating, pursing full lips, passing hands across taut bellies. Ralph watched for a while, wondering why every time he came here a woman under the age of thirty wearing hardly any clothes was gyrating unsmilingly on that screen. Every single time. Ralph thought of Scarlett, imagined her here beside him watching that screen, her pale jaw hanging slightly open as it always did when she watched TV. What would her small, spongelike brain make of these women, impossibly engineered, humorless, characterless, thrusting, shining statues, imploring the world to buy some man’s music with every flick of their hips? And if Scarlett was to watch her, and women like her, all day long, what would she learn of womanhood, what would she think of musicianship, what would it say to her about fame?
    Ralph shook his head sadly and glanced at the next screen. A real-life action show: paramedics prising a middle-aged man out of an accordioned car. His head was held in place with a plastic neck brace, his nose and mouth covered with an oxygen mask. His eyes flicked from side to side as he allowed a man in a fluorescent jacket to gently pull him away from beneath his bent steering wheel. A few moments before, he had been a bloke driving somewhere, who knew where, to buy cigarettes, to work, to pick up a new bit for his power drill? Now he was trussed up inside a written-off car, about to spend the day, at the very least, in hospital, all the while being filmed by a man with acamera, to be broadcast on national television. How much more surprising and unsettling a turn could a normal day take? Ralph knew that the man was alive and well because they kept cutting to clips of him in a studio, reliving his nightmare to an off-screen interviewer, but still, thought Ralph, an ordinary life, touched forever, never to be the same again.
    In contrast, screen three showed a series of slightly overweight models parading up and down a tacky TV studio in “outsize” clothes. Ralph wasn’t sure where he stood on the subject of overweight models. Or overweight women in general, really. Try as he might to be piously PC about the whole thing, he couldn’t quite get beyond thinking that women that shape generally looked better in corsets and French knickers than they did in tailored trousers and natty waistcoats. But he did know that the pompous little man officiously directing the big women up and down the studio floor as if his job were on a par with oncology would probably have benefited from an unforeseen car crash and a little new perspective on his existence.
    On the fourth screen there was a news report from somewhere in Middle America, square-faced men and women with signs, lambasting pissed-off-looking people in cars for not adhering to some scripture or other that governed their lives. Their faces were hard with blind belief, their mouths were oblongs of disregard for other people’s values. The people in the cars batted them away as if they were wasps bothering their lunch. How could the people with the signs possibly believe that these actions would lead to any more believers? How could they not know that all they were bringing about with their shouting and their bombast and their ugly talk of Christ and saved souls was repulsion?
    Ralph looked around him at the sparsely occupiedgymnasium. Were there believers in here? he wondered. Were any of these normal-looking men and women likely to pick up a sign on a Saturday morning and yell at people for not seeing the world the same way they did? He glanced again at the screens overhead, at the thrusting