Free Cuckoo by Wendy Perriam

couldn’t think, could only submit to the music and let it master her.
    Suddenly, there was a shattering blast of silence. She faltered a moment, almost fell. Her life-support system had been switched off and the harsh fluorescent lights switched on. The band had stopped for a break and a beer. She felt jolted out of a dream. People were pressing all around her, laughing and shouting, surging towards the bar. Ned was joking with a clutch of colleagues.
    â€˜Drink, Frances?’ he yelled.
    â€˜Yes. No. I …’
    He couldn’t hear her, anyway. He was only one of a hundred sweaty bodies, pinioning her arms, trampling on her feet. Someone handed her a pint of bitter, frothing down the sides. It wasn’t Ned. He was trapped further down the bar, exchanging jokes with the under-age barman, who was wearing a paper hat and looked as if he had slipped away from playschool.
    â€˜I don’t drink beer.’ No one heard. Her Young’s Bitter benefactor had already turned his back. She had to drink it, anyway, to stop it slopping down her dress. It tasted sharp, strange – almost good. She gulped a little more.
    â€˜Oh, one of the boys now, are we?’ Ned was elbowing his way towards her, a plastic tumbler balanced in either hand. ‘I’ve just broken the bank buying you a glass of Château Southmead 1981, and there you are, knocking back the bitter like a front-row forward! Don’t worry – I’ll drink it myself. This is Les, by the way.’
    â€˜Hi!’ said another pair of faded blue jeans, distinguished, this time, by a studded leather jacket and dark glasses. Staff, student, or Hell’s Angel on a heroin charge? There was no way of telling. She smiled nervously at her own distorted reflection in his lenses. She felt foolish, out of place. So long as the band had kept pounding out that deep-ocean rhythm, she had been engulfed in it, safe in it, but now it had stopped, she was a dead fish beached on a dry strand.
    â€˜Ned, I really ought to go.’
    â€˜Go? Go where? This is the only place it’s at.’ Les’s voice was the scrape of an iron chain on a stone jetty. The accent started North of Manchester and finished East of Liverpool. He was working through a packet of onion-flavoured crisps, spraying Golden Wonder crumbs in her direction. ‘Are you the Principal’s Secretary or sent direct from Rent-a-Bird? We never get tailored skirts and high heels in this dump. Unless perhaps you’re acting President of the Real Female Campaign – the next thing after Real Ale. Pleased to meet you, anyway. I’m Les Davies, Head of Workshop Technology.’
    â€˜Oh, I … see.’ She didn’t. She wished Ned would rescue her, but he was too busy with his one-man-band of fruit pie, sausage roll, and double dose of wine. Her own beer had already reached mid-tumbler. Suddenly, she didn’t care. Her stomach was gently swelling and distending like a plump hot water bottle; hops were skipping through her bloodstream, all her limbs turning into froth. If she missed Charles’ phone call, well, he’d simply have to try again. Why should she always rush back home, ready to do obeisance to that prim grey receiver at its very first whimper? Charles was dwindling, anyway, crumbling into a broken crisp. There was only her glass, looming large and insistent in front of her, eighteen-carat gold spun into booze.
    Les was joined by Gareth, Gareth by Dylan, as Manchester and Liverpool gave place to South Wales. She was somehow in the middle of a magic circle, and Ned was transforming her into a deep sea diver, a racing driver, a cat-charmer, a fisherwoman. Everyone was laughing and admiring. Why should she contradict him and turn herself back into a dreary tax consultant’s wife, or a telephone answering machine? It was really rather delightful to hear how she’d caught her second ten-pound turbot, or won Le Mans by a nail-biting