I really liked James. Even if I still couldn't figure out how such a good looking guy, twelve years my junior, could be so into me. But he was and I'm not one to turn down a good time. So when he asked me to go to a rave with him I was well up for it. All the way until he said it would be in Malone's, the old warehouse on the derelict Gresham estate. He didn't know, how could he? He didn't know why I was suddenly prevaricating. He didn't know what that name meant to me.
That one word took me back thirteen years, when James was just a kid and I was nineteen. And up for those good times. The scene I was part of was pretty crazy at times, but never more so than in Malone's. It had been empty for fifteen years by then, another byproduct of the destructiveness of the Thatcher years, like so much of our sad little town. But it was easy to get to, well away from prying eyes (and ears) and massively empty. Nothing but the myriad pillars supporting the glass roof to interfere with the huge floorspace that sat between four distant banks of brick.
Somebody, I never knew who, decided this was the perfect place to have bike races. Guys who'd tried to do a bit of street racing, and swiftly found themselves in law trouble, looking for somewhere more discrete to show off their skills and machines. And so the Maloney Wacky Races came to be.
A track around the inner perimeter of the building, delineated by the outermost pillars. In the centre the 'pits', the crowd, the boose, the drugs. The madness. Races were pursuits, each rider starting on opposite sides of the building, trying to do ten, or fifteen, or twenty laps quicker than the other guy. Noise and smells, noise and smells, from bikes and people. Exciting, illicit, addictive. Summer weekends of my youth.
Riders regularly lost control, slid into corners, where mattresses were strategically placed. There was one really nasty accident, a rider losing control, hitting a wall, brick winning out over bone. He was carried, on a makeshift stretcher, out to the main road, with his bike, and an ambulance called. No need to give Malone's unnecessary publicity.
But didn't we all know it wouldn't end there? Or that it would end, but not in the way we wanted? That that one accident had been a warning, but one which was as neglected as the warehouse? We should never have been surprised by the end, but we were.
Denis Johnstone. A name I'll never wipe from my brain. He'd been close to losing it on the turn, but looked like he'd corrected enough. Except his instincts weren't all they should have been. The coke saw to that. He'd overcorrected, lost the back wheel as he returned from brushing the wall, and slid into the partying crowd. Slid two feet from me, my eyes and ears confronted with carnage and screams they tried to reject. A severed leg, a battered head, a bloody mess, a shower of sparks, the sound of metal on stone, the sound of fear, the sound of pain, the sound of dying, imprinted on my senses.
Somebody called 999. Somebody had to. One death, three serious injuries, another fifteen with some kind of physical damage, and I don't know how many of us carrying the mental wounds. I hadn't fogotten. I didn't ant reminding.
James thought I didn't want to go to his rave because I thought I'd feel old there. I let him think that. It was easier on him that way.
