Work was grey for Robert Andrews.

The concrete box he worked in was reminiscent of a car park from some bleak 70’s movie about London’s violent underworld. His desk was a cheap Formica island in a sea full of other small cheap Formica islands, each island flanked by a tattered chair with wheels dodgier than your average shopping trolley. The routine of his tedious job, filling in forms mostly, was only interrupted by the occasional trip to the malfunctioning vending machine in the corner of the open-plan office to endure a volcanic cup of coffee and a packet of Quavers.

On his desk was a PC. It was newer than the PC he had at home, but somehow more useless. It was slow and had a tiny monitor. Sometimes it did nothing for endless minutes only to spring into action when Dan the PC man had been called. The computers seemed to like Dan, they burst into life, full of renewed vigour after only a few minutes of his petting, only to pine away into dysfunction when he left. Dan liked computers. He mostly disliked people.

He sort of liked Robert.

When Robert first started with the council he wasn’t grey. He was a kind of a creamy, fawny colour. Not the most exciting colour to be but still not grey and still a more vivid colour than the insipid duds whose lives had been sucked out by this black hole of a job. His new colleagues resented his pallid display of colour. Its glow illuminated their own regrets and they instinctively shrunk away from it. He found it hard to make friends here. Even harder than he had at college. And that was pretty hard!

This kind of pissed him off.

When Robert completed his 4 years at University, surrounded by the vibrant potential of the next generations movers and shakers, he hoped he could slip into a job where people were more like him. This never happened. He slipped into a job where the people were dull, pedantic wankers. So much for that. All except Dan that was.

It seemed as though Dan had always been “The PC Man”. It was 1989 when Robert got his council job not-quite-straight-from-university. Dan was already there, he had already developed his power base. The office couldn’t operate without him. Desktop computing was still a novelty and, far from being grey, Dan was a different colour every day. When he set up a network printer he glowed a proud yellow. The next day, installing a database server, he would be a frustrated green. People avoided him on red days. Combined all of these colours made him a kind of brown mess but still…

He saw the taupe glow from the young Robert and clutched him to his jobby brown bosom. He reckoned they could be friends. Maybe.

That’s not what Robert had thought. Not at first. Not when Dan spent 3 days trying to fix his computer only to give up and exclaim it dead! This cost him valuable time, time which he could have been spending working, helping the public with their housing problems. This was time which meant nothing to his hue challenged colleagues of course. They quite liked Dan, he helped with their decolouration.

Robert couldn’t remember exactly when his aversion to Dan changed to a grudging appreciation via cautious ambivalence. Nor could he quite put his finger on precisely at what point this became a pleasant friendship but that’s certainly what it had become. He and Dan found themselves spending time together outside of the office. Their mutual distaste for the characters they shared their working lives with gave them a platform to develop a friendship that took in more of their shared interests. These interests were few but at least they were shared. They both liked Science Fiction and booze, which served to cement this friendship. Their love of illegal drugs they developed together.

It seemed to Robert that Science Fiction and booze naturally must lead to hard drug use. Much Sci-Fi he had read was concerned with people being out of their head on something or other. And science was always going to come up with new ways of escaping mundane lives. Thinking about this sort of thing whilst engaged in a Tequila Slammer Race only served to make the whole thing seem more plausible.

He shared his views with Dan after crossing the line second due to impaired vision and impending nausea. It was a typically drizzly January Evening in Edinburgh. The freezing wind was biting and the tourists were dressed head to toe in plastic sheeting. You can always tell tourists in Edinburgh, they’re the only ones wearing appropriate clothing for the sub-arctic conditions. Robert and Dan were out of the rain in the Jolly Judge, their preferred venue for putting the world to rights. It was a pub which won this dubious honour by being located just along the road from the office, in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle. Despite it’s tourist-tastic location the Jolly Judge was somewhere where they could find a seat, even at the busiest of times, due to it’s cosy location half way down a close on the Royal Mile. Very useful when your legs can only be relied upon for the early part of the evening. This evening was panning out along the usual lines.

“You know, booze and Science Fiction must naturally lead to hard drugs.”
“How?”
“Well, if we are committed to science, and we are committed to getting off our tits then surely we should be committed to trying out some proper drugs invented by men in white coats,” Robert was surprised he could speak this clearly. The Tequila clearly hadn’t reached his tongue yet.
“Men in white coats is right.”
“And real…..”
“And so is being committed, you’ll end up in jail if you go down that road!”
“No, bu...”
“Anyway, it’s your round.” Dan wasn’t having any of this. In his mind there was no need for drugs. They were used by hippies and junkies. He was happy destroying his brain cells with the more conventional alcoholic methods he’d learned from his father.

Robert didn’t find it too hard to change his mind.

But it did take a while.

In total it took approximately a year. During the course of this year Robert fought valiantly against the departure of his beigeness. In fact, he liked to think that he turned up the brightness and added a few other shades into the mix for contrast. Hanging around with Dan was a great help on this endeavour. Dan, at that time, liked to think that he was a pretty exciting kind of guy. He went out as much as he could, he spent his money on fashionable clothes and he even talked to women. The fact that he looked like he’d got dressed in the dark made no difference to the pie-eyed dogs breakfasts that he chatted up when he was pissed though. They knocked him back because he was a twat.

Robert had a great time with his drunk twat of a friend. They spent a lot of time talking. Mostly about women, occasionally about sport and on one occasion, about London.

London was where Dan’s cousin Penny lived. It was early February and he was recounting to Robert Penny’s tales of excess in the nations capital. She worked in the Film Industry, in what capacity he couldn’t recall, something arty. She had been telling him stories of what she called “wrap parties”.

“When a production comes to an end, there’s always a great big, massive, fuck-off party to celebrate,” She enthused. “All the actors are there, all the crew are there, sometimes even the money men put in an appearance. The drink is free and there’s shit-loads of it and the floors are literally white with coke! Everyone gets totally fucked up and it’s great, it’s the only thing that makes the whole superficial business worth sticking with.”

“Coke. Seriously?” Dan was genuinely taken aback. He had always vaguely assumed that the tabloid frenzy about the drug culture in Britain was something of a fabrication. He also assumed that everyone who took drugs was somehow strung-out and spending their lives nicking car stereos and threatening pensioners.

“Yeah, seriously Dan, it’s all over the fucking place. You daren’t clear your throat at one of these do’s for fear of sending up a dust cloud worth more than your Jimmy Choos.”

“Wow. Have you tried it?”
“Yeah, a few times. I can’t really afford a serious habit like some of the senior guys but I like to have a few lines when I go out. It really gets the party started.”

“So what’s it like then? Is it like being pissed?”

“No, not at all. It’s pretty different. It’s hard to describe. Have you tried speed?”

“No.”

“Hmm, well it’s a bit like speed but, like, 100 times better. You really feel like the most interesting person in the room and you really want to party. When everyone is coked up it can get totally fucking decadent. It’s like a Roman orgy at times I swear. Next time you’re down give me a call and we’ll see if there are any parties we can crash, there’s normally one most weekends. I’ll get you fucked out of your head, I think that’s the only way you’re going to see what it’s like.”

Dan thought that sounded like a good idea.

He recounted this invitation and his new found desire to try some serious drugs to Robert in the Jolly Judge a couple of nights later. Robert was mildly put-out. He had been trying to talk Dan into trying something harder for months but Dan always shot him down. Now his lah-di-dah London cousin shows off with a couple of starry stories and he’s practically packed his bags, ready to go and get high with the glitterati. Still, it did sound better than skinning up in his front room and watching Battlestar Galactica.