Last night...
I'm at a school, again, but it's not really my school, though the theatre - where we are - is similar. There's a fantastic gig happening in this theatre tonight - juju_babe and her band, and Seize (I've been listening to them a lot lately), and the like. I greet juju_babe, who's working out dance routines, and then wander over to say hello to robinbloke and introduce myself to his new girlfriend. She says, "I don't believe I know who you are, and you don't know me." I say, "I'm Emily. You're [her name]." She looks taken aback, and I grin and wander off in the direction of the woman selling ice cream.
The first performance is "concept music for flute and other flute" by a woman who looks oddly like Halle Berry.
When this starts - the woman with her flute dancing around the stage and occasionally stopping to play a few notes - I am just outside the auditorium, on a row of seats that appear to have been put in for people to listen to what's happening but not see anything. Strange, but stranger still is who I'm with - Tom, my first and worst best friend. I don't fully know what he's doing here (I think he works at the school, as, possibly, do I) but we are half-watching the dancing woman, half eyeing each other mistrustfully. No secrets as to our identity; we just can't quite believe it.
A noise from the auditorium calls my attention; the ticking of slightly stressed metal. Careful not to disturb the performance, I slide in to help dennyd clear a space in the front to sit down. I sit next to him, and then Tom comes and sits next to me on my left. I look at him. He looks back, then reaches up to touch my face with one hand. He leans in and whispers, "I...didn't think you were real." I understand completely and then we're kissing, which I don't understand completely, and dennyd is holding my hand and, erm, trying to attract my attention with a gumshield made of raspberry jelly.
No, really.
The performance continues - her first piece with words, now, called "Walk Past The Door" - it's a feminist piece, containing lines like "If you think you're a man, you can walk past the door; if you know you're a pig, you can walk right in" and "If you're on drugs, you can walk past the door, but you'll scream at what you see if you look at me" - all very dull. Tom, in the middle of this, slinks off back to the bit outside the auditorium, because his phone has started ringing. I follow him. He explains that it's his dad, that he has to go now - he's going on holiday to the Caribbean. As if to prove the point, I realise he's attached braids to his hair and is wearing eyeliner à la Captain Jack Sparrow. We hug. There's nothing more we can do - I don't know when I'll see him again.
Suddenly my mum turns up in a silver open-topped Jaguar and whisks me away up the road to the exit of the school - definitely Roedean now, although at the real school there's no need to go underwater in one's open-topped Jaguar as one leaves, which we did this time. In the sky in front of us is a huge silver craft, coming in to land on the twentieth floor of a brown glass building - I ask mum what it is and she tells me it's a merchant banker's new means of transport. Then we park the car in the middle of the road and go shopping for scented candles.
Then I wake up, wondering why I feel so confused. ~s~