Dub Steps Read Online Free Page A

then lay it back in the groove.
    This is the last image I have of him, the one burned into my brain: a tall, too-thin forty-year-old man in white shorts and a maroon vest, bobbing his head to candy trance, smoke rising from the ashtray, track listings scrawled in an uncontrolled hand on scraps of paper around his laptop.
    I asked him how long he had been up. He intimated via a series of nods and eyebrow raises that it had been a long time. A looong time. We did our usual dance around my disapproval and that was that. He died the next day.
    I walked through the house with cardboard boxes. The disks and the laptop and the playlists and associated DJ paraphernalia. I piled it all in, randomly lifting interesting items into an old cardboard primary school suitcase. The few boxes went into my boot, and then into my basement. Everything else to charity.
    I rented the place to a succession of young families – people too busy creating their own memories to bother about mine.
     
    So there I sat, naked in Eileen’s sweet lounge, sucking on a cigarette, taking in the realisation that by smashing Clarissa’s mirror I had probably destroyed the last career opportunity open to me in the country. Rick Cohen was a lot more than a club boss. Rick Cohen was a media mogul, an industry general. What he thought radiated out across our business in influential circles. The dinner could have been a reconciliation. It could have been an opportunity. The door had opened. The door had closed.
     
    The sun was setting. My glasses sat ominously on the lounge table. A day and half out of contact was a lifetime. I decided to go all inand make it two. I went back to bed.
     
    I turned on midway through the following day and waited for the messages.
    Nothing.
     
    I opened a new bottle and poured a big glass of red.
    And another.
    I called work.
    No network.
     
    I tried to log in and accept my fate, but there was nothing, not even an interface. Just the click of the lost Google API call. I dialled technical, but the call failed. There wasn’t a single bar on the reception tower.
     
    I turned the TV on.
     
    Static.

C HAPTER 7
The occasional bark of what must have been a dog
    Dry brown walls, stripped of their broadcast. Their colour. Their purpose. Dirty brown walls. Simple. Sagging.
    I remember them above everything.
    First and foremost, the brown.
     
    I stuck my head out the window of Eileen’s Tyrwhitt Mansions flat to see two free pigs – strange genetic cocktails, easily over 350 kilograms, big ears, straight snouts and that specifically curious air of anger and intelligence that belongs to the free pig – loping down the hill together, heads swivelling.
    As they picked up speed a small street dog – a black and brown brak, compact and wiry, likely full of rabies – fell in behind them.
     
    There was never any quiet in those first days. The air buzzed with the futility of a million abandoned alarm systems – cars, houses, offices – and their desperate, decaying batteries. As the door panels forgot the thumbprints of their owners, as the last of the power trickled out of the grid, the electric yells merged into a crescendo.
    And always the brown. The crushing, dirty brown. It had been decades since I had seen a simple painted wall, a wall without movement, without a message. The brown was bad, of course, but it was the uniformity that was so hard to digest. It stretched forever. And the closer you looked, the more alarming it was. Decay. Cracking walls. Rivers of damp, creeping, swelling. Pipes falling off the walls, cable ties and piles of bundled wiring. Slumping angles, falling arches.
     
    As my eyes adjusted to the new vista, they slowly accepted. Nocolours. No messages. No accents. No shading. Just brown, from sky to floor, top to bottom, wall to wall.
    Brown.
     
    I lost sight of the pigs. The incessant whine of the alarms, the recurring crescendos, shook me awake and forced me to consider. To think.
     
    I ran into Tyrwhitt