‘No!’ I
command, as though he’ll pay the slightest bit of attention.
‘Sorry man,
it’s gotta be done; I’m meant to be going to do sound-check in
about, ooo…twenty minutes ago,’ he calls through the door.
Ching!
goes the lock as it opens. Charlie’s methods of breaking and
entering have become more sophisticated since his days of reaching
through letterboxes. I put the shower on its loudest setting,
hoping that this will drown out the sound of him going about his
disgusting business, but the splash of turd hitting toilet water
still cuts through the whining of the nozzle, and the smell of his
rancid bum-crack intermingles with the warm haze of the steam.
‘God I hate
you, sometimes,’ I shout at the figure silhouetted by the shower
curtain.
‘I’m just
trying to spend more time with you,’ he replies. ‘Oop. There’s
another bit,’ he adds, mostly to himself. I gag.
My phone
starts vibrating in the pocket of my jeans, which are hanging up on
the radiator.
‘Don’t you
dare answer -’
Beep.
‘Hey Liz;
how’s it going?’ Charlie says, in a proud and happy voice. ‘Yeah,
he’s at the other end of the tub. Can he call you back? He’s
underwater at the moment…Yeah, no problem, I’ll tell him.’
Beep.
‘Liz says
she’ll be round in half an hour,’ he tells me. ‘She’s also slightly
concerned by the fact that we’re in the bath together, but I think
what
you
need to be concerned about is that at no point did
it occur to her that I might have been lying.’
‘Why are you
so desperate to convince my girlfriend that the two of us are
having an affair?’ I ask.
‘It gives my
ego a boost that she actually considers me a threat.’
I sigh.
‘Well I hope
it was worth it, because I’m definitely not sacking her off to come
to your gig, now.’
‘I’d find that
more believable if you weren’t making sure you’re ready to go out
the second you’ve scarfed down your dinner,’ he returns. ‘Now, if
you don’t mind, I’ve got to go make sure Sid hasn’t drunk and
snorted away his already pretty meagre talents on guitar. I’ll see
you in a couple of hours.’
‘At least open
the window and spray some air-freshener before you go,’ I plead. He
obliges, and then I hear the door slam shut behind him.
Student
cookery, if I’m honest, is not a complicated business. Sure, you
get the occasional maverick who will attempt to do a full-on,
trimmings ’n’ all Christmas dinner at some point in December, but
that tends to involve less cooking than it does blaring fire
alarms, smoke billowing from ovens and would-be Gordon Ramseys
lying in the foetal position on the kitchen floor. Everyday student
cooking, on the other hand, comes in three basic categories: the
ready-meals bought at the start of a semester, when the maintenance
loan has just arrived and you’re rich enough to justify being lazy,
which require no more in the way of preparation than opening a
microwave door and dumping the results on a plate, or a cut-up
pizza box if all your unwashed crockery is growing mould colonies;
the cheap cuts of meat you haggle for at the market in the middle
weeks, stuck in a frying pan, heated up past the point of
salmonella if you’re feeling patient enough and mixed up with rice
or pasta, along with a jar of sauce if you’ve been sensible with
your money or tinned tomatoes is you haven’t; then, in those
penniless final weeks, the couple slices of toast with baked beans
shovelled over them – enough to fight off scurvy until you make it
home for the holidays, but still keeping every possible penny free
for going out drinking. Of course, there’s always the few who take
it to the extremes: I do – for example - know of a guy who lived
entirely off of plain pasta while he was in his first year. Well,
for a few months of his first year, at least. He had to spend a
week in hospital after that, on a drip and a steady intake of
industrial-grade laxatives. Though I’m currently languishing
between stages two and three of the above-described template,
tonight I’ve thought ‘fuck it’ and gone with the
bung-it-in-the-oven option - a classy, Tesco Finest version of the
bung-it-in-the-oven option, at that – which has left me with plenty
of time to nail the first of the two bottles of cheap wine I bought
this afternoon.
I think I
drank the first few glasses from a lack of anything else to do,
seeing as the actual cooking is taking care of itself and Liz is
happily watching
University Challenge
in the living room,
shouting out ‘Benzene! Benzene!’ to any question that sounds
vaguely science-related, then swearing in French when she gets it
wrong. The more I drink, however, the more convinced I become that
I can get Liz to come along to the gig - or at least get permission
to go by myself - and I’ve started looking at this blurred vision
and overwhelming desire to sing along to the radio as a good
baseline for when I go out to meet Charlie, Fred and Johnny
later.
The cooker
beeps. That means it’s time to get the Bombay potatoes in. I grab
the packet off the counter, but I can’t get any purchase on the
little cellophane tabs at each end. After however long of pinching
at thin air near the edge of the packet, I think ‘fuck it’ again,
and tear the last inch right off the end of the box. Unfortunately,
the packet, not realising that I only wanted the last inch to come
off, responds by splitting right down the middle.
‘Fuck’s sake,’
I mutter, as the sticky mush splatters against the lino. I grab my
latest glass of wine to give me strength and kick the wasted food
towards the back door. Oh well; at least it was only a side
dish.
When I carry
the curries into the living room Liz is bent over the arm of the
sofa with her eyes closed, trapped halfway between breathing and
snoring. I plonk her plate down on the coffee table in front of
her, comb her hair out of her eyes, and say:
‘Dinner’s
served, sleepyhead.’
‘
Meurrghhh
…’ Liz replies.
‘I’ll take
that as “compliments to the chef”,’ I return, switching her full
glass for my half-empty one. She does that
Knahp! Knahp!
thing that Tom and Jerry used to do when they woke up, and
says:
‘Cheers,
Dorian.’
She takes a
couple of forkfuls, and washes them down with a sip of her wine. I
neck half my glass, and follow it up with a gulp of onion
bhaji.
‘Are we going
out tonight, then?’
‘Nah,’ she
answers through a yawn, looking like she’s a few seconds away from
passing out into her curry. I’m getting sleepy just watching her.
Maybe I
should
just stay in tonight, and contentedly fall
asleep on the sofa with Liz. Then again, maybe I should just switch
from wine onto something with caffeine and vodka in it.
‘What do you
fancy doing, then?’ I ask.
‘Dunno; can’t
we just watch, erm…whatever show this is?’ she replies,
blearily.
I look up at
the TV. She must’ve rolled onto the remote control when she fell
asleep.
‘What, the
“Channel not available” screen?’
‘Yeah…’ she
murmurs, reaching out to put her fork back on her plate and falling
over the armrest again. ‘Sorry…I had to spend the last three nights
at the library, doing this…ess…ay…’
The effort
becomes too much, and her eyelids slam shut. I smile at her for a
second, then wolf down my last few bites of dinner. Johnny left his
duvet down here when we were playing Xbox last night, so I cover
her up with that. Then, making sure my wallet is safely crammed in
my back pocket, I give myself a quick once-over in the mirror, give
Liz an affectionate pat on the noodle, and head out into the cold
and unforgiving Tyneside night.
I would like
to stipulate, before I continue, that Liz just happened to fall
asleep of her own accord. I did not, surprisingly enough, follow
Charlie’s advice and slip her some sleeping pills. Would I have
still gone off to the gig if she hadn’t? I don’t know, to be
honest, but I
do
know I was glad that fate intervened and I
didn’t have to make the decision myself.
The Governor’s
Arms is more packed than I’d expected. While I’m standing in the
queue, I’m half cursing Charlie for being good enough to draw a
crowd that queues up to see him, and half telepathically
apologising for expecting the place to be as dead as an Eastern
European at the end of a heist movie. Once I make it inside I
decide that my apology was premature, however, because no-one in a
half-respectable musical outfit would be seen dead in this place.
Broken glass crunches under-foot from the last month-or-so’s bar
fights, and that familiar, terrifying sense of unpredictability
hangs in the air around me - along with, I notice, what smells like
either old men’s farts or gone-off beer. Johnny and Fred are
nowhere to be seen amongst the debris. Amps and guitars are
scattered around the stage, but their players are absent. I’m
starting to wonder whether I’ve missed the gig itself. I check the
time on my phone. Half-ten. Charlie said they’d be starting at half
nine, ten. He’s either pushing the whole rock-star tardiness thing
a bit too far or he got bottled off after a couple of songs.
Neither would surprise me, to be honest. I’m not saying Charlie’s a
bad guitar player, far from it, but he also left himself two hours
to hang around in the pub before he was scheduled to go on, and his
level of impulse control is roughly on par with an old man who
masturbates at the back of a movie theatre.
Deciding that
I’d rather give him the benefit of the doubt for at least one drink
than walk half-an-hour through the sleet back to the house, I go
over to the bar. I intend to order myself a pint, remembering the
old student adage of
Wine then beer, naught to fear
. Or was
it
Beer then wine, and you’ll be fine
? I suppose it doesn’t
really matter, since I’ve got a couple toes over the tipsy/battered
boundary already. Whichever of the rhymes is correct, I doubt I’ll
be fine, and that fills me with fear. When the barman comes over, I
reconsider my plan and order a shandy instead.
Wine then shandy,
you’ll be just dandy.
The barman gives me a disgusted look and
asks me how old I am. I offer him my ID, but I’m not sure that’s
what he meant.
The place is
filling up, and all the seating areas appear to have been claimed a
long while ago, so I wander around looking for an anonymous stretch
of wall to lean on while I wait for the wine-headedness to subside.
No sooner have I parked myself in an acceptable spot than some
goth-looking girl - all dark make-up and piercings and tattoos
that’ll need a burka to cover up when she goes for a job interview
– ambles over and parks herself near me. I crane my neck downwards
and slurp the froth off the top of my drink, and I notice that
she’s tapping her foot impatiently. I want to ask whether this
means that they haven’t been on yet, but I don’t have time to draft
out a list of responses to her potential responses, then more
responses to her potential responses to that, and so on. I also
know that if she made eye contact with me the teleprompter in my
head would suddenly suffer a power-cut. I amuse myself watching the
bubbles in my drink race each other to the surface, but, as I do
so, I gradually develop the unshakeable sensation that I’m being
stared at. I force my pupils upwards and to the side, to the point
where I can make out the goth’s chin. Her mouth is moving.
‘Jesus; I’ve
got half a mind to bottle ‘em even if they’re good, at this rate.’
she says, in an accent that I wasn’t expecting, like a native
Geordie raised on
Only Fools and Horses
reruns. She throws
her empty bottle up and down in her hand slightly, as though she’s
checking the weight of it, and its damage potential.
Though she’s
plainly shorter then me I have to lift my eyes up to meet hers, and
give an obsequious smile. I then let them drop back down to my
shandy, because I can’t think of something to say. I find myself
scowling in frustration. When I’m talking to Charlie or Liz I don’t
have to scrabble like this, like I’m held prisoner inside my own
head, internally drafting and re-drafting sentences enough times
that the conversation outpaces them, checking them for
offensiveness or unintended meaning, analysing whether they’re
funny or not, wondering if I’ve missed the subtext of what the
other participant said.
She’s still
staring at me. I don’t know why I know this, but I know it. I also
know that she won’t stop staring until I reply to her statement. I
pull some ideas together and throw them, half-digested, back over
to her:
‘The amount of
time a band is allowed before people start throwing bottles is
directly proportional to how famous the band is,’ I say.
‘Yeah, ok,’
she replies. I suddenly get the feeling that she’s cocked her head
to one side. ‘If you wanna chat a girl up, at least do your lines
in fucking English.’
My scowl
deepens for a couple of moments, but suddenly a retort hops into my
brain. Perhaps it’s one I’d drafted in a conversation years ago and
spent too long tinkering with to be able to use it. I still spend
two more moments de-and-re-constructing it, and another two working
up the nerve to say it. Almost as though she understands this, the
goth girl waits patiently for me to spit it out.
‘That’s one of
the most arrogant things I’ve ever heard someone say,’ I tell her,
‘and I live with a guy who routinely claims to be the second coming
of Christ.’
She eyes me in
an appraising fashion, and then, finally, a smirk creeps up one
side of her face.
‘Fair enough.
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.’
‘Gracious,’ I
reply, hiding my relief beneath a thick lacquer of sarcasm.
‘You’re
welcome.’ She stops leaning against the wall and turns to face me
properly for the first time. ‘What’s your name, by the way?’