One of those parties.

I heard the story many years later. 'There was this party and there was a sacrifice to the snake goddess, and all these naked women doing satanic rites and sex offered up to Beelzebub. In this little house in Petrie Terrace". That was what identified the whole thing to me. That little house in Petrie Terrace where we used to sun ourselves naked by a pool that was once used for embalming corpses, where we dug a grave to bury a cat and found three cat skeletons already buried there one above the next. That little house where we threw those parties, that particular party. The one offered up to Beelzebub, apparently.

There were drugs. There were lots of drugs, but I only took a little, more than enough it seems. I became fascinated with a painting and then I communed with the viscosity of the hardened landscape of oily colour and then I time shifted into the hand that had created the painting in the first place. That little episode, fascinating as it was, took up several hours at the end of which I was excited and energized and buzzing with the need to tell strangers all about it.

There were balloons tied to the fence and people walking by took it as a sign to wander up the stairs and through the open door. There were people in the bathtub. I loved baths. I remember telling them about the painting and how I had been teleported into the moment when the paint was layed onto the canvass, the very act of painting. I could feel each stroke of the brush in my body.

Then I remember my friend dragging me out of the bath by my naked shoulders, wrapping me in a towel that felt like a big ball of cotton wool.

"Come have a bath" I told her, "There's plenty of room."

She whispered something about junkies and I turned to see that the naked strangers in the bath had a syringe that they were passing between them. I looked down at my arm, grateful to find my flesh un-pierced. I'm not sure what happened to the junkies but there was talk of the men in the house drying them off and throwing them out into the light drizzle of the midnight street.

I made love to a girl on the couch. There were a group of people gathered around us, I am told, but I only remember the colour and smell of her hair, the thick ginger fish fur of her tickling at my lips. The viscosity of her juices, my fingers all crushed together by the miracle of her flesh contracting.

There was the rat fed to the snake. Not a sacrifice in the pagan sense, but the snake needed to be fed and the strangers gasped and acted outraged at the idea of breeding rats for the purpose of food. I remember trawling through my own conflicting emotions. I had been down this ethical path before, stopped short at a dead end. It wasn't my snake. It wasn't my rat. It wasn't my decision to make and I was glad of it.

I leaped into the pool, the pool that had been used to bathe the corpses. Seven foot long, seven foot wide. I started to run in circles shouting "whirlpool".

Bodies falling into water, some of them clothed. "Whirlpool", "whirlpool". And what a hurricane we made with our laughter and our little naked dance.

"...and then there was a kind of Pagan Maypole dance only naked, in the pool."

"Oh, I told her. That party. I know that party. That was our place."

I went back over her description of it, redistributing the events only this time in context. Our party. Our almost Pagan party made legendary in some younger person's eyes. I suddenly felt that perhaps I had grown just a little old.