Nowhere People

He goes into the club, Enigmas, having promised the bouncer (Gregório ‘the Grinder’, an old acquaintance from his skateboarding days in the Marinha do Brasil park) that he won’t touch the Domecq that he’s carrying and which is now suitably stored away in the law-trainee rucksack on his back. He’s come here to find Lugosi, the youngest of the place’s resident DJs; though there’s only three years’ difference between them (she is eighteen) and despite his friend’s complete alienation from politics, they have cultivated this friendship for the tough times, as they like to say to each other. The nightclub, an LGBT hangout of no great consequence, has in the last year been attracting rent boys (the rent boys who, thanks to an agreement between the club owners, are not allowed into Peter Pan Seven, Polio Garage or Silhouette Cocktail), models of both sexes who are already starting to lose their looks and their jobs and — this is the decisive factor — employees from other clubs on their nights off. Three factors which, in combination with other trends and rumours, meant that Enigmas had quickly gained a reputation as a place that promised a good time, attracting the attention of all kinds of punks and lovers of The Cure and The Smiths. Lugosi could take a lot of the credit for popularising the place, with her goth muse attitude and her ability to choose just the right tracks to play when everyone’s fed up having made a big difference. A lot of her friends who are regulars at the Taj Mahal, always up for blowing a load of cash on a night out, even if they don’t have all that much cash to blow in the first place, began to show up at Enigmas once she started there.