We stood looking out into the Atlantic darkness and shared a joint. Wes sat down at a garden table and fiddled about with the six-inch reflector telescope standing on the porch. God knows what he expected to see.
He'd been quiet for all of two seconds. I couldn't bear it.
'You want a bigger sound system?' I said, just to check.
'Well.' Wes looked thoughtful. 'Not necessarily bigger... just louder.'
'You're mad.'
'Maybe, Weird, maybe... but we're not loud enough. We need more decibels, man.'
'Hearing aids,' I decided. 'You've cornered the market in hearing aids and you're trying to drum up trade, or organ up trade. Well, it won't work. You'll have the Monopolies Commission and the anti trust people onto you. Not to mention the British Medical Association and the Food And Drug Administration. My advice to you is, forget it.'
'Do you know if any other bands are using electrostatic speakers?' Wes said thoughtfully. He looked through the telescope's eyepiece into the pitch-black overcast.
'Jesus, now he wants to electrocute us. You're a sick man, MacKinnon. There's something wrong with your filters; the white noise is coming through. Your brain's envelope is torn. Return To Zenda. Who is number one?'
'Give me that jay, Weird; you're gibbering.'
'God, I feel good. Could we go swimming? I feel like going swimming. Think anybody else would feel like swimming? Where's Inez; have you seen her? You want to come swimming?'
'Na, man. Don't do it anyway, like. You'd probably imagine you could swim to New York and we'd never see you again.'
'A length? No; I was only going to do a couple of widths. Want me to bring back some Guinness from Dublin?' I was jumping up and down by that stage, swinging my arms around in swimming motions.
'Na,' Wes said. He got bored with the telescope and turned to an FM radio lying on the table. He turned it on and it relayed the sounds of the party to us, muffled. He changed the frequency, then stopped when he found some panting noises. 'Hey man; listen. People humpin. Hey!' He looked up at me. I was still jumping up and down.
'You're sick. I told you. You are a sick and crazy man. That must be illegal. You'll get the jile.'
'No, man...' Weston grinned happily, listening to the sounds of a bed creaking and two people breathing heavily. I moved a little closer and stopped jumping up and down. I wondered if I could recognise the heavy breathing. It was getting quicker. 'That's beautiful, man.' He turned the frequency control again. I felt slightly disappointed. My arms and legs were sore but I started jumping up and down again. The radio relayed what sounded like people screwing again.
'Hot damn,' I said between jumps. 'There's a lot of it about tonight.' 'HOT DAMN. THERE'S A LOT OF IT ABOUT TONIGHT.' My own voice bellowed back from the radio and turned into a feedback howl. Wes chortled and switched the radio off again.
'That was you,' Wes grinned. 'There's a mike over the door, just behind you.'
I turned round and looked for it but I couldn't see it. 'You're still a deeply sick and disturbed man, Weston.'
'No, I'm just ahead of my time, Weird.'
'Bull...shit.'
'Suit yourself.'
Weston had bugged his own house. Every room. Totally wired for sound and broadcasting on all channels. He had bugs everywhere; from the old kitchen pantry to the new double garage. No bedroom or bathroom was spared. He'd even bugged the loft. Anybody with a good FM radio could pick up every sound in the house so long as they were within about two hundred feet. We all thought Wes was crazy, but Wes thought it was a great hoot.
'It's the future, man,' he'd tell you. 'In the future everything's going to be bugged. Telephones and offices and televisions and radios and everything, man. There'll be no way to stop it. They can fit bugs anywhere already. You know they can bug a room by shining a laser at the windows now? It's true, man. You'd better believe it. This is the future and you might as well get used to it now. Anyway; what's so wrong about hearing people fuck or crap? Everybody does it; there's nothing shameful about it, man; what does it matter? Why be shy of things most people do every day? It's crazy, man. They just want you to be that way so they can control you; they're getting inside your head, installing censorship circuits, and you're helping them. Just let it all hang out, man.'
Wes, you'll gather, felt he'd been born too late. He was a mid-to-late-sixties man really. Most people had moved on but Wes used his money to move both back to the past and forward to the future at the same time; anything other than stay in the present. Now I knew why his keyboard runs usually went in opposite directions at the same time.
Wes wasn't stopping at audio intrusion only. He had ordered camera equipment, he'd told me. First sound, then vision. Soon he'd have closed circuit TV in every room. Twenty channels in full colour, from cellar to rooftop view.
I sat down heavily on the top step of the porch. Wes handed me back the jay. I looked out into the darkness. The waves crashed beneath us. 'We need more light here,' I said suddenly. 'There's just too much darkness here. More light is required.'
'You want more light?' Wes said, in a strange tone of voice that made me look round suspiciously at him. 'I think we can fix that.' He sniffed in the sea salt smell, lifting his head and seeming to scent the air and listen to the beating waves for a moment, then he was out of the seat and marching down the lawn. 'Follow me, Weird.'
I followed him down to one edge of the lawn, almost out of range of the house lights. He pointed to a low wall which divided lawn from rocks. 'Sit there,' he said. 'Look down there.' I could hardly see where he was pointing, but it seemed to be down to the rocks.
'I'II just be a minute. Okay?' he said.
'Okay.' I sat and watched his shadowy form move back towards the house. I looked out to sea, straining to see anything other than darkness. After a while, using the edges of my eyes, I could just about make out the white surf falling through the night to the rocks, rolling on the unseen ocean.
Then there was a buzz, and the rocks lit up, flashing blue white.
The surf incandesced, brilliantly white. It happened again and again; a machine-gun fire of stuttering light bursting from large film-studio light stands, topped with strobes. They picked out the surging billows of the surf and chopped them up into single frames, staccato images of utter clarity punctuated with a darkness you could almost hear.
Waves rolled in, in stop motion, detonating against the ragged edge of rocks in freeze-frame sequences, spray falling back and the next roller coming in pinpoint percussions of light.
'Oh... wow!' I said, mouth hanging open. I looked to one side of the display, to see how much of the rest of the bay the strobes illuminated, and saw Davey Balfour, almost out of the range of the lights, and almost back into his jeans, which he was pulling on, running away along the rocks and into shadow.
In that shadow, for one instant of light, before she ducked back into the darkness, I saw Inez' face, neck and shoulders.
I shook my head. 'Hell, you could have said something,' I muttered to myself. The light show went on. The joint burned down and singed my fingers. Wes came down the slopes of grass towards me, face appropriately beaming.
'What d'you think, man?'
'Impressive,' I said, getting off the wall and walking up to him. 'Very impressive indeed.' I flicked the roach away into the darkness; it flickered under the strobes like something seen in an acid trip. 'Seen Jasmine?'