Noughties (29 page)

“Yeah,” I say, my forced smile coming free from its holds and beginning to sag.

“Oh dear oh dear oh dear,” he says in descending tones, like a deflating balloon. “Another,” he concludes, almost aggressively.

“No, Jack.”

“Oh come on, you pussy.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes you can, you boring old shit.”

“Jack—”

“You’re having another, cunt.”

We drink.

This one finally gets him. He squirms like a man trapped in a snare. Butchered. And this time it is me who watches, utterly desensitized to the spirit’s snap and bite. Recovered, Jack gives a near-imperceptible nod and peels off. I stay back and watch him fighting his way toward the exit. It’s for the best. He’ll need some time for it to sink in.

I stand on the fringes of the dance pit. It leaks spews bleeds. Hades is four steps down and hugely tempting. At the foot of the descent, virtually in front of me, a scrum of lads is
brightsiding
(shirts off, aloft, windmilling). There’s a lot of fancy dress on display, mostly intentional: boys in drag (rugby/rowing types); a few bedraggled superheroes (sweating by the gallon in their full body-kits); and any number of girls, basically nude, bar some choice accessories to signal their theme (wings, horns, hard hats).

I’m isolated. Everywhere I look I see Lucy, but there is
no Lucy. All the couples compressing and kissing are Lucy and the Other; all the girls shamelessly checked out by meat-hungry lads are showcase Lucys; even the voice booming from the speakers is Lucy. I’m drowning in artificial presence. But I’m isolated.

I spy a bloke desperately protecting his girlfriend. She’s dancing about, a hell of a time, while he forms barriers around her, granting her exclusive space. It’s her private party as he fends off all those alien bodies. But she’s oblivious. He’s torturously aware, her personal bodyguard, glaring and sending signals, wound tight as a wrung flannel.

Memories of nights out with Lucy. Her proud boyfriend. Her paranoid boyfriend. Every bloke (some nonexistent) would eye her up and apply the imaginary feelers. Then they would see me and retract or vindictively turn the knife. What’s it like when I’m not around? What happens then? As all guys will tell you,
it’s different for girls
. Men approach
them
. That’s how it works. It’s inevitable. Girls don’t accost boys (ask any poor sod in a rut of sexual deprivation). We have to do the work and accept that some other dickhead will put in the hours in our absence. It’s just different.

Lucy, as I recall, is one of those dancers who doesn’t realize what she’s doing. By this I mean to say that she has zero spatial awareness and a most compromised peripheral vision. She swings her hips wildly and undulates her back as though gesturing to people in her rearview mirror; only she has no rearview mirror. Countless lads get drawn into her vicinity, thinking they’ve been chosen, called, beckoned. A real nightmare for the acutely observant boyfriend. But this is all by the by, being of minor relevance to me now.

“Where’s Laura?” asks Scott, emerging from the mob, struggling to keep his surveillance subtle.

“Haven’t seen her, mate.”

“I think I’ll head to the toilet and do a recce,” he says. He’s shortly followed by Abi and Megan, who have spotted some netball friends, with Sanjay straggling alongside in pursuit of Megan.

I’m a boy apart.

This music is doing my nut. Dirty great club tunes gyrating in my face. Feels like I’m trapped in an ad for a techno compilation CD.
Thummmp thummmp, hummmp hummmp, dzzz dzzz, ’AVE IT LARGE …

“It’s rammed in here,” notes Ella, more as something to say than a pressing observation.

“Mate, I’m sweating buckets already,” I reply, contorting my body as yet another drink (JD and Coke) express-routes it down my gullet. Those sambucas are still sitting miserable and resigned in my stomach, waiting for the inexorable top-up.

Her eyes are thoughtful, her mouth delicately strained. “Eliot—”

The babe is looking directly into my eyes, searching for something inscrutable. He isn’t saying anything anymore; just a blank canvas waiting for my traces—

“Eliot? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Okay,” she says, looking at me doubtfully. “Do—”

I’ve got him in one of those baby holders, like a rucksack you wear on your front. He faces me and I face him,
up close, my aged reflection, snug as one body. Where I go, he goes. But he isn’t saying anything.

He has started getting nosebleeds. They trickle like a showerhead left slightly on. The babe never makes a peep about it, so I don’t realize until I feel the liquid licking my chest. Every now and then he simply wipes his nose on me, which I like, because if you look hard enough, I swear, a subtle hint of his mischievous smile begins to dance and flicker across his face again. He’s sleeping a lot too, I’ve noticed, and quite fitfully, his harmless balls of fist hammering at the sides of my arms.

I’ve taken him for a stroll in the University Parks. I thought he’d like that. Maples, birches, horse chestnuts, sycamores, cedars—they loom about us in polychromatic swarms—orange, red, purple, green, brown, gold—flush, flutter, blush. We weave through the elephantine trunks, gruff bark, dappled light pirouetting all about us, mysterious dusts floating across occasional sunbeams. The lush grass cuddles my feet and I wish he could feel it too, but I’m too frightened to put him down: I don’t want him to fall or get lost. And besides, I’m pretty sure he can’t walk—

“Eliot!” shouts Ella. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing!” I yell back, beginning to resent the feeling of being tested so—

Some apples drop about my head, bullied by an unexpected gust of wind, so I place a protective hand over the babe’s crown. He is still looking at me with milky gaze, my little bundle of damage. A green thought in a green shade, I marvel to myself. Bending down I scoop a handful of the fruit, chucking the bruised ones away and selecting the fittest. I take a bite to test it and see that it is good.

“Here, matey, have some of this.”

I hold it to his lips. He watches, locking me in his impossible stare. He gouges a hunk out of the shiny red ball, finally showing some life. His eyes close as he explores the rich, juicy fullness of his mouth.

And then I notice that the park is empty.

Even the sun has abandoned us of a sudden. An alien charge of agoraphobia rushes over me. We are alone in boundless solitude. I feel as though I’m unspooling, pulled in all directions, clinging desperately to the babe. You can’t tear us apart.

I kiss him gently on the forehead. He’s saying nothing, just watching me and waiting for my next move—

“Eliot? Are you okay?”

The room’s spinning. I’m trying to yawn the nausea away but it isn’t working. I can feel myself doing a color change.

“I’m gonna be sick …”

I’m off, swimming an angry breaststroke through the muddlesome pissheads, fighting my way to the toilets.
Fuck this
, screams my dissident stomach.
Let me out
, yelps my pounding brain. I explode into the Men’s and line up a vacant cubicle, pawing after lock and seat.

Shut in, I survey the scene, down on my lousy knees. Some of the blokes in this club have hopeless aim: there’s piss all over the broken toilet seat and in pools on the floor where I kneel, also splattered up the wall. This gets me choking and heaving. It goes something like this: cough, retch, cough, retch, cough, retch, belch (with a gulping noise at the end that swoops from high to low). My Adam’s apple is palpitating like a frog’s groggy throat … a toad’s saggy sack … It’s sick.

The first few splodges get their comeuppance, scatter-gunned
about the pan. The sight and smell conspire to warmly invite more gut rot to the party, so I continue on with comic sound effects.

It’s rather a supportive atmosphere they cultivate here in Filth; here in the Filth toilets. Not only is there the Nigerian vendor caring for my hygiene (“no spray, no lay”), but there’s empathy in the adjoining cubicles. I can hear at least two other pukers around me. I feel their pain.

“No splash, no gash.”

“Oh fuck,” says the cubicle next to me, following a hefty hurl.

“Sanjay?”

“Freshen up for the pussy.”

“Eliot?”

“Ah mate, you too?”

“Guys?” says the cubicle to the other side of me.

“Scott?”

“Yeah, it’s …” (he pauses to retch) “me.”

“Wash your finger for the minger.”

“Ah” (
brrrrp
) “mmm” (
prfmff
) “mate” (long extended chunder).

“This is” (
hwock
) “bullshit.”

Our staccato conversation is punctuated by vomming pyrotechnics. We’ve drunk beyond excess, and you can bet that we share formidable pride in this overt display of legendariness. (This must be the most I’ve drunk since the night I got so pissed that I woke the next morning to find, inexplicably, that I had purchased Seal’s entire back-catalogue on iTunes.) We synchronize one final chuck: “
Blooorrrreeaaaww
.”

“Ah mate.”

And there in the multicolored pan is all my money—a
full chunky refund. It’s a fizzy remuneration, for sure, but you have to take what you can get when you’re a student.

“Let’s just have a good night” (
hurrumm
), “yeah?”

Blundering back into the field of play I’m overcome by an ecstatic post-vomit buzz; a strange euphoria of relief and renewal.

Welcome back to Filth, where it’s getting harder and harder to run from the past … harder to disassociate myself from myself … harder to defer completion …

Glad I got that sick out of the way. Wooooooo, did I need that. I mean, sick is sick, but it has to be done. I feel so refreshed; a new man. I sink a Jägerbomb and grab a plastic bottle of the cheapest, nastiest beer to celebrate the fact. Things are looking up.

The music has progressed to hip-hop. A definite improvement (only when the right examples of the genre are chosen, of course). Oxford’s private-school brethren act all urban in dance and attitude. It’s unsurpassable entertainment. Savor it while it lasts, because the dreaded cheese hour looms.

Ella has spotted me. There are so many intervening bodies, zigzagging and colliding, American-smoothing and Argentine-tangoing, blocking her way. It’s like one of those clichéd moments in a film when two lovers are separated on a bustling city street or at a busy airport, and one is desperate to get to the unaware other. Only I
am
aware, so I turn to escape. I can’t handle all this. I’m not ready to tell her anything.

What have I done to Jack? I have to find him.

On my way out of the club I get my hand stamped by the semifit girl at the door to ensure reentry. She must get so much abuse from bladdered lads straining to be romantic.
The blotchy black mark she impresses on my hand will still be there tomorrow morning, a confused bar code, unsure of what exactly it encodes.

The music deadens into a dull thud and the cold air gives my face a bitter, chap-lipped kiss. There’s still a queue out here, though it has thinned and shortened. Packs of compulsive smokers scruff the place up. My sweat becomes tinglingly apparent. I’m worried about my best mate. Where’s he gone? What’s he doing? I follow the railings and bend off round the corner, swiveling my head in concerned search. I flick my collar and bury my hands in my pockets.

This is bullshit. So much for rebuilding our friendship.

We only became close again recently. It was just before Finals. I was sat in my room hunched over some scribbled lecture notes, revising, when there came a beep on my laptop. Mugshot.com:
instant message
.

We had barely talked all year. I couldn’t face him now that he was with Ella, and he must have noticed the difference, though he never raised it. He wouldn’t confront me and say, “You’ve changed,” or “Is everything okay between the two of us?” Lads just can’t pull off those kinds of conversations. The sudden distance made him awkward in turn, as though my frigidity was infectious. Maybe he put it down to the fact that we had been the only witnesses on that drastic night in Ella’s room, like I wasn’t able to factor it all in and return to normal. But as exams lurked nearer it became easier to justify detachment and insularity anyhow,
what with revision to take care of and paranoia to nurture. Everyone was focusing their energies on work, so social drifts and adjustments were pretty standard. Jack definitely realized something was up though. I remember walking toward him in the main quad one afternoon, not knowing whether to say hi or duck my head and shiftily pass on by. I contemplated feigning a phone call, or pulling off a blinding sneeze. Once we had locked eyes, still thirty meters apart, I had no choice but to make a sheepish acknowledgment. When though? The distance toward our meeting point seemed interminable, and the quad was silent, making a long-range greeting a feasible option. And how? A quick “hey mate,” or a token “alright” (no—that could be mistaken for a genuine question, in which case he would reply, and then I would be forced to respond to his reply, and so on), or maybe just a nod … In the end I peaked too soon, opting for a premature “hello” which he then echoed, with another ten meters of pained silence and self-consciousness until we actually passed.

So this request was sharply unexpected. It certainly set me on edge as I blasted around my room, sorting my personalized mess into depersonalized piles, changing iTunes to something subtle and cool. I felt like I was preparing for a date. I was nervous.

Bang. Jack was at the door. What could he want? A fight?

“Hey mate,” I said, rather optimistically, as I opened up.

“Alright?” He took in the scene as he entered: pile upon pile of books (I had emptied the college library of all its lit crit) and furling A2 sheets plastered with messy brainstorms and quotations, spread over the wooden floor.

“Working hard then?” he said with that trembling yet accusatory tone indigenous to the frazzled Finalist. Ordinarily I would give the standard “Oh my god, I’ve done
fuck all” sob story, but this was evidently impossible, busted amongst my intricate den of notes and folders.