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He was tapping on his cellphone with one hand, the other rifling through his satchel; Casca was again wearing skinny jeans so skinny that they looked as though they should be cutting off his circulation with the faded black denim. There were ripped holes for the spurs at his knees, and his arched feet rose out from under them like a surprise: you didn't expect it. He was wearing a zip-up black hoodie covered in equally fading blue argyle, pushed up to his elbows, and a cabbie hat over his ponytail of blue-to-white curls: if his satchel had had a pirate skull on it or had he been wearing Chucks, they both would have won the Hipster Bingo. Of course, Phelly was more there by way of late hippie but the sentiment remained.

"Huh?" he said, and flicked his phone shut. "Oh. Yeah. Last Of The Mohitos are sell-outs. I liked their sound back a few months ago, but they're pretty overplayed now. Damn The Author was better back when it was Gibbon Moon. Their drummer was a**."

Someone in front of them said, "Gibbon Moon was sweet. Their drummer they have now is a**."

"Their bass is a**," said Casca, and thus followed a slightly incoherent conversation for sixty seconds wherein Ophelia learned that what most hipsters tried to work into the conversation was when they had first gotten into a band and what the proof of this was, and that you won if you had known their music while you were still in the womb. This conversation ended, and then the gargoyle boy turned back to Phel as the line crawled towards the doors.

"Haven't heard Seersucker," he remarked casually, when they were third in line to go, "but darlin', if you're so desperate you're naming yourself after a fabric it's time to go. Especially seersucker. Give to me your leather, take from me my lace."

Casca seemed a little unsettled, for Friday night; the moon was high and fat in the sky, very yellow already.

Casca trailed after her; he'd had the x stamped on his hand, but the bodyguard hadn't even bothered to take his ID. One of the perks of being very obviously demihuman, maybe. The lobby before the band area was filled with people milling back and forth, some already going into the concert space, some not. Casca said, "Hold on," and disappeared into the crowd.

When he returned, he dropped an energy drink into her hands. It announced itself as BRAWNDO!, not the comforting familiar label of a Coke or a Sprite. Soda was obviously too pleb for this kind of event. In the background, muffled, somebody started off a drum riff as part of the soundcheck. Someone else was hooting. "Just start off with these," he said, "better than crack, ma petit. Don't drink it too fast. I hear if you chug it you see visions of God."

Before Casca could guess, the lead skinny-jeans boy (the one in the orange day-glo chucks) had taken the microphone, and a group of girls in the front who were plants or desperate had started shrieking. "HI DAVE," they were saying, and "Davy! Davy! Davy!!". Casca didn't see anything remotely about the boy's gel-wet fringe and big, limpid, cocker-spaniel eyes that prompted two or more exclamation marks -- the hair was dyed a damp black -- but whatever.

"Hey," he said. "We're Seersucker Olive Drab."

"Give it up for Seersucker Olive Drab," said the emcee, "the band who pulled their name out of the Starbucks word mix-up."

'Davy' gave one of those dry, three-chuckle laughs that meant your joke was not remotely funny and I may hate you forever, but then he picked up his guitar. He wasn't bad, the gargoyle boy had to admit to himself: and then the rest of Seersucker joined in. Their stylins were, he thought critically, a bit of Morrisey by way of Weezer mixed with a strange dosage of REM. It was listenable.

"Whatever, they're not fantastic," he said into Ophelia's ear, though he (and some of the others) were doing a slight shoulder-twitch that constituted we're not ready to dance yet but we recognise the rhythm. "What do you think."

She had gotten what seemed to be a snigger at the weave comment, but as always Cascati tended to play it so cool that if he played it any cooler the global ice caps would reform. He was still sipping his Brawndo! too, with a cautious expression of you're not coffee but you will do for now, and nodded in agreement . "Five dollars says the name is the only one they agreed on," he said, "because they all came up with one and didn't like the others."

He sounded pretty confident about that. Davy of the drowned-rat weave was carrying on, apparently buoyed up by the fact that teenage girls would dance to anything given enough time and Brawndo!. He was also singing, apparently, about a girlfriend who was very far away, soulfully jawing at the mike as the boppy tonal dissonance of the drums played behind him.

"Amateurs, darlin'," Casca was saying. "You never dance to the first song. That's like putting out on the first date." Another sip of Brawndo!. "As in, you only do it for spectacular reasons, capische?"

There was a halfhearted clapping as the band finally finished the individual journeys that lead them to the end of the song; Casca in particular seemed to know how to clap in the exact way that meant: your song was bad and you should feel bad, his large clawed hands coming together in a slow golf opera. "I think you won that five dollars," he said.

Another band joined the place that Seersucker Olive Drab had vacated, and the emcee announced the next as Last Of The Mohitos. They were, thank God, slightly better, were all on the same wavelength, and seemed to have practiced within the last six months whilst not on the influence of drugs or horse hormones. It had a beat and a tune, which was probably why they had all been denounced as sell-outs. Seersucker Olive Drab couldn't find a tune in a bucket, and they had still gotten enthusiastic whistles and cries for the hapless Davy!!!

Casca downed the rest of his Brawndo!. "All right," he said, over the growing volume of the bass. "Dance or die, darlin'. Your pick."

"That's what she said," said Cascati, but relented -- "Okay. It's not that difficult."

There were a few others starting to drift out to the dance floor, moving in jerky, slightly epileptic ways to the music of Last Of The Mohitos. The bass was actually pretty addictive, to tell the truth, and Casca was forced to admit he liked the music. He took Ophelia by the hand and lead her into the fray -- and then he stood there, shoulders moving to the beat, as though she had to be started out in the nursery class of How To Dance. "Just feel the rhythm," he said. Everyone else was dancing pretty lightly, as though dancing too much would be uncool at this point in time. "Shoulders -- aah, there you go, tesoro mio. Head. Shoulders. Do your hips a little -- no, like this," he said, and guided his hand behind her back. "Try not to pretend you're hitting a quarter with your pelvis."

His hand was very lightly on the small of her back. One would have expected it to be a little like a cat's paw, with the pinprick of his claws very light and noticeable, but she could feel nothing. The room was pretty loud; it was hopeless to try to talk even in yells now unless you leant in and shouted directly into each other's ears. Casca said something diffidently, realised there was no hope to Hell that she would have heard it, then leant in and said in her ear: "They're not bad."

A lot of people were dancing now. Seersucker Olive Drab were probably sulking in a corner. When the Mohitos finally finished their number, there was enough aggression for the emcee to say "Hey, hey, encores only at the end of the night," and introduced Damn The Author. People just started dancing immediately without waiting to see whether they were good or not. Thankfully, again, they had a beat you could dance to (and the drummer was not visibly 'a**') and Casca kept his hand on the small of her back the whole time, in a don'tcarish, not-acknowledging-it-was-there way.