Force Majeure by Daniel O'Mahoney

tilted arrogantly back to meet her eyes. She knew him. She knew his eyes from long ago. The words she wanted died in her mouth.
    ‘So,’ she said instead, ‘if I’m working here, where would I be sleeping?’
    The nervous gob of saliva she swallowed felt like a stone passing down her gullet. He took her to a suite that she could call her own and offered her Prospero. She agreed, they shook hands, he still called her Red. They talked, no more than that, into the rest of the deepening evening, while a third voice whispered privately in Kay’s ear, calling her a coward, and frigid, and a fool.
    She left the Displaced Club after midnight at best guess. She’d stopped wearing a watch when it became obvious that its only purpose was to provide reassuring pins-and-needles tightness round her wrist. Time’s pressure only trickled in Candida, and though there were clocks, their chimes were enigmatic, measuring the day to scales she’d yet to grasp. She’d grown used to that, but she’d rarely been out this late.
    By night, Candida filled with people and light and music. Oh, especially music – flutes and zithers and hurdy-gurdies and tambourines and rebecks and Spanish guitars and cacophony. She’d heard the parties from her window, but she was always an efficient sleeper and didn’t let them disturb her. Now she was swamped and panicked, and the exposed skin of her hands and face itched. The streets and alleys, already narrow, choked with human fat. She struggled to push her way through. Overhead, the sky turned fish-pink in the glare from the ground, while spotlights made leprous white circles on the sides of the old free house, which watched over the party as an impotent and senile chaperone. Children dressed as pirates and angels strung paper lanterns between the lampposts; candles gathered on window sills and even the natural lustre of human skin added to the yellow glow creeping the streets.
    ‘Bare-faced witch!’ called a gang of boys in gross cherub masks, in foetal pig masks. She was jostled and fondled, fingers licking at the line of her cloak as she passed. There was a stitch in her stomach, a needle of pain up her thigh. It was hard to breathe. She grabbed a random thought.
    ‘Is it Christmas? Is it Christmas already?’ she hollered, but her shouts were drowned out by the din. Her mouth was dry; she spent some of her flaking money on still lemonade and the rest on a present for Azure. Shopping usually cheered her, and she needed a boost after the meeting with Xan. She was in the aftermath, the slippery, fatal downer that followed the high. She picked as her gift a wooden stick with a carved gargoyle-head. A charm, said the jigsaw-faced shopkeeper, to ward off evil spirits. It looks suggestive, she complained. He disconcerted her with laughter. It’s a dragon; it’s half-price.
    She pressed on. Laughter pursued her through every street.
    People were looking at her! Disguise, disguise, I need a disguise.
    ‘Where can I buy a mask?’ she asked, snatching at a passer-by. It turned; it was a dragon, a Chinese dragon with flared nostrils and painted zig-zag teeth. Black mirrored eyes revealed nothing of the man or woman beneath, and if there was a reply from within, it was hidden by the mask. Startled, Kay stepped away. The passer-by moved on, arms and legs pounding to a distant drumbeat, followed by a conga-train of sexless bodies swathed in red and gold and green cloth, the colours of the dancing dragon.
    Chinese New Year? Too early. Too early for Christmas too, she decided.
    She sucked in a deep breath. She stuffed the wooden charm into her pocket and it chafed all the way home.
    ‘Up-up-up, you lazy bastard!’
    Luna wore a dusty perfume that smelled like cold tea, while Quint’s skin was lightly-scented and lemon, so she knew it was them before she was fully awake. Quint was shaking her out of bed – it had to be Quint, she was the less sentimental, the more physical. An impersonal weight pressed down