by Luke Brown
I got us a four-pack from the local corner shop and we listened to Gilles Peterson’s show while stripping wallpaper and painting.
‘Amy says you work in a bookshop,’ he said.
‘For a few more days.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘I’ve got a new job starting soon.’ I heard the words ‘digital marketing’ come up my throat with thick inverted commas round them.
‘That’s good?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It could be an awful mistake. But you probably have to make some mistakes to stop yourself from making other mistakes.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking recently too.’
By the time we’d finished the beers we’d transformed the long hallway and living room into a clean white space, and revealed wooden floorboards that would look good when sanded and polished. We took a break and he came outside into the garden to talk to me while I smoked.
Later, as the light began to fade and we carried on working, Amy opened the door of the bedroom she had gone to sleep in and pulled her head back in shock at the work we’d managed to get done.
‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
Eighteen
We have gone through tactics of how to avoid interrupting people and, in doing this, accelerating arguments beyond the point of recovery. So I am sorry that I continue to interrupt you sometimes.
‘—Do you really believe in that term?’ I ask. ‘Self-medication?’
Because surely, I say, the desire to go out, lose one’s inhibitions, make new friends, dance around, kiss strangers – surely that’s mostly a desire to enjoy our finite and beautiful lives, rather than the need to replace some sort of absent prescribed pharmaceuticals and therapy that are the correct way of compensating for our mortality?
You shrug. I press my advantage. ‘Don’t you want to do that sometimes?’
‘Of course I do,’ you say.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are you doing on Friday?’
You shake your head. ‘Certainly not the kind of thing you mean. I’m far too old for that kind of thing now.’
‘You’re no older than me.’
‘You know – if you were seeing a Lacanian analyst, that might be the moment she would stop the session.’
Which I thought was a bit below the belt of you.
*
Our second offer for the flat in Downhill was accepted. And so was somebody else’s for the château. We had to be out of there by the start of October. Jonathan’s stuff was still in the house but he had not been home ever since one night when he had gone out to meet Julia, so it appeared his campaign to win her back was progressing. It was quiet in the evenings without him, even when Mary was around. She had quit her job in the bar and was seeing less of Nathan. ‘I’ve no idea where he is,’ she snapped, when I asked if she’d seen Jonathan. She had been reacting strangely to the mention of his name ever since the night they went out together to the summer party. I had offered her the spare room in Downhill for a cheap price, but not so cheap, she said, that it would encourage a woman in her mid-twenties to move from the twenty-first century to the 1930s. She had started going for interviews in small living rooms, with twenty-somethings who asked her what she liked watching on Netflix and what she thought she would bring to their household.
‘Er, rent?’ she said, pouring the last of a bottle of wine we’d been sharing. ‘Seven hundred and fifty pounds a month for that little box room you’ve just shown me. Isn’t that enough? I know, I know: they’re all paying the same. They’re not the ones I should be angry with: they’re just trying to check if I’m tidy and sane; trying to claim some power for themselves and act like the middle managers they aspire to become one day. They’re the same as me, the same as all of us, we’re all fucked. And you and Jonathan have ruined me for normal company. I think there’s something sinister going on if someone isn’t questioning my decisions, or talking in the world-weary voice of a man who’s lived for a thousand years.’
‘Thirty-four thousand next week,’ I reminded her.
*
To celebrate my birthday and commiserate the end of our time living together we blagged our way onto the guest list of a dance music festival in Victoria Park. Sophie was going with her friends, also on freebies. For us fringe members of the media class, this was the closest we could come to feeling like the tax exiles or expense-fiddling MPs we despised and envied, and we took on a certain hauteur as we approached the gates en masse and headed to the guest entrance, looking on with horror at the longer queues for those who had paid to get in.
I did not feel superior for very long. My friends put their heads down and scattered into the festival when a sniffer dog lunged for my trousers.
*
‘Do you have any drugs in your possession, sir?’ asked the owner of the drug dog, and when I denied I did he explained that because the dog could smell what she thought were drugs on me I was going to have to be arrested and strip-searched. The dog was delighted with herself, the little snitch. ‘Have you taken any drugs recently, sir? Could that be it?’
Oh, yes, I said. ‘I spilled a line of coke on these trousers last night, just there where your dog was sniffing. That must be it.’
‘That would explain things,’ he said, reasonably, and he led me away to a curtained-off cubicle inside a tent. Here I consented happily to taking all my clothes off, all the while apologising for putting him out. It is no doubt because I am a white man, university educated, with the polite and helpful manner of a bookseller, that my experiences with the police have been positive, even when the situation has been negative. I admire their sense of purpose and the camaraderie they have with each other, and whenever they are processing me for whatever misdemeanour I have committed I always think how much I might like to join their ranks, if only I hadn’t just been caught doing something that precluded me from ever joining their ranks. ‘It can’t be very pleasant for you, this,’ I said, as he shone his torch up my bum.
‘Oh, you get used to it,’ he said. ‘If the person’s cooperative, it’s a quick process.’
The last thing my man did, now that I was fully dressed again, was to check the contents of my pockets, pulling up a couple of tubes of filter tips from my box, and glancing down inside.
‘Are you working late?’ I asked, as though he was an Uber driver taking me home.
‘Just till teatime,’ he said, and whether he spotted those small bags stuffed at the bottom of the packet or not he behaved just as if he hadn’t.
‘I’ll have to walk you through the gate,’ he said. ‘Or the dogs will go for you again. I’d stick your jeans in the wash when you get home if I were you.’
*
By the time he had escorted me through the dogs, I had long lost Mary and Sophie and the rest of the gang. The next twelve hours went by in what seemed like an hour or two. I began to worry the police officer had seen my drugs after all and had me followed, so that I would lead him to my friends and he could arrest us all, and me for supply rather than possession. He had extracted a code from my phone upon arresting me, so I turned my phone off, locked myself in a Portaloo and destroyed a substantial part of the incriminating evidence, then I went to work to find some subjects for the London Review of Haircuts. The friendly city is at its friendliest in such places. Becky was blonde and slightly taller than me. Annie was smaller but equally dramatic, with big mahogany eyes rimmed with kohl like smudged flames. They helped me destroy some more of the evidence and we became a three-person production team. I had to turn my phone on again to take photos, which they assured me would be fine in flight mode; they had seen a documentary about moped gangs that snatched phones and so long as they had flight mode on they couldn’t be tracked, at least not by normal police. Before I switched to flight mode I checked for messages or missed calls from Sophie or Mary, but there were none; phones were never reliable in such cong
ested places. Then we took more photos, shakier photos, as we continued to dutifully destroy the evidence of my crime, until all traces of guilt had vanished completely, and my new friends and I could knock off for the day and enjoy ourselves.
*
I began to experience time in jump cuts. Sophie appeared, with one hand in the back pocket of a taller man than me, so tall that her arm must have been getting tired. ‘We thought you were in prison!’ she said. ‘This is Jack; Jack, this is the man I was telling you about.’
‘You do have an open relationship,’ said Becky, who earlier had said to me, ‘That’s what all men with girlfriends say when they get you alone in a Portaloo.’
While the tallest members of the group introduced themselves, Sophie went to kiss me and I turned my head. ‘I don’t know where you’ve been,’ I said.
‘If you’re good, I’ll tell you later. Where have you been?’
‘Cubicles. Police cubicles, Portaloo cubicles. A man made me take my clothes off and looked up my bum.’
‘A policeman or a new boyfriend?’
‘A policeman. I didn’t ask him out; he was very professional. Becky and her friend have been helping me get rid of what nearly became police evidence.’
‘How on earth did you get away with it?’
‘I have an influential daddy. I’m going to write a column about the injustice of it as soon as I get home.’
‘Plagiarist.’
Sophie’s new friend was lighting my new friend’s cigarette.
‘He’s handsome.’
‘He is.’
‘Aren’t you going to say, “So are you”?’
‘You’re very handsome. I adore you.’
‘Really?’
‘Come on. Your eyes are like saucers. Let’s get a beer.’
*
I was hugging Rochi. I hadn’t seen her since she’d curtailed my expectations. She was beautiful. She was – where was she? I’d lost her.
*
And whoosh. Mary was on the phone. I was still on my own. ‘Meet me in—’ ‘You’re cutting out!’ ‘Nathan’s not—’ ‘I can’t hear you!’ ‘—you a text!’ ‘I’m not getting texts! Hello! Hello!’
*
Text received 7.04 p.m.: Meet me by the mixing desk opposite main stage at 7.30. I’ll wait for you there. Nathan off with new gf. Jonathan doesn’t reply. I’m on my own, having shit time. Please come!
*
I was dancing on my own by the mixing desk of the main stage, hoping Mary would come along, though I’d arrived twenty-five minutes late. A woman in a vest with I Have No Tits written across it put her finger in a baggie and offered it to me. I sucked it. Disgusting. Thank you very much. Have some of my beer. Let’s get more beer. I like your T-shirt. I like your glasses.
Into the VIP area, where there was no one important, just Stev’n, Macaulay Culkin and Jerry the Deviant. The toilets were magnificent. Kissing. More kissing. Mouths too dry. We needed beer to kiss. Back to the bar for beer. Hello! said Stev’n! Hello! said Becky! Hello! said Sophie! Into the toilets again with her. I Have No Tits disappeared, never to be seen again. Hello! said Sophie’s tall irregular man. He was wearing a hat he was not wearing before. All together now.
*
The music stopped and we were on the streets again, clanking down the road with some of our new friends and enemies, carrier bags full of beer and Prosecco, ice and Irish whiskey. Stev’n’s flat was at the top of an old warehouse on Dalston Lane.
Where are you? said my phone, which had 3 per cent battery left.
Stev’n’s. Want to come? Just round the corner from ours. Flat 8, 2 Dalston Lane.
No answer before the phone died.
No Mary either.
Smoking with the taller man on the long balcony all the length of the big open living room. The rasp of a nitrous oxide machine from the other end of the balcony where a boy and a girl giggled under a blanket.
‘So I just go in buildings and value them up. By space, mostly, times area value. Age. Here, Sophie, she says you two, you’re not, er…?’
‘Something in-between.’
‘What, like…?’
‘I really don’t know what like.’
*
Stev’n and Culkin had set out various plates of drugs in the bedroom and this had taken most of the people out of the living room to ingest them. Becky and Annie were queuing to do lines off a chest of drawers. The walls were covered with blow-ups of White Jesus shoots. A girl in cut-off dungarees and chunky men’s shoes, lying on her front across the seats of a Tube carriage. A woman in a white dress and bright blue eye make-up covered in cockroaches. A woman in a 1950s housedress kneeling in front of an open oven. A sexy female soldier carrying a gun. A photographic tribute to John William Waterhouse, except the woman is carrying a large rock into the water with her. The white legs and broken body of a woman taken from the balcony from which she has jumped. The en-suite bathroom with its door open which Stev’n said women can use only if they don’t close the door. ‘Just joking!’ he said, when Becky and Annie said in which case they were leaving.
‘You better had be. Jesus, what is that? That’s not coke,’ said Annie.
‘You wanted coke?’
‘You told me that was coke,’ she said.
Macaulay Culkin laughed and fell back on the bed. ‘That’s ketamine, baby.’
The walls were painted pale pink. A wardrobe covered one side of the wall, full to the brim with shirts decorated with small skulls, and jewellery made from the small skulls of animals, tortured and killed by Stev’n, and a collection of ankle socks worn by the models on his covers. Annie said she couldn’t stand up any more.
‘Here, this is coke,’ offered Stev’n.
But we didn’t let Annie have any. Becky and I propped her up and walked her back to the sofa in the living room.
‘I can see myself from a camera in the corner of the room,’ she said. ‘I can see I’m the village drunk but can’t do anything about it.’
And then she started to be sick into a carrier bag that I grabbed quickly and Becky held for her while I rubbed her back.
Sophie came in to check on us. ‘Was that an accident?’
‘We don’t know,’ said Becky.
‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘Let’s leave. This is a horrible party. I can’t believe I work for this prick.’
‘He’s totally vile,’ said Sophie. ‘But it’s quite interesting to study him. Perhaps I’ll write about him.’
The surveyor came in and said he had in his possession what he knew one hundred per cent to be coke.
‘Can I have some?’ said Sophie.
‘Sure. I’ll put some out in the other bedroom.’
Sophie left to have a ‘quick line with him’.
I carried on talking to Becky. Stroking Annie’s head. Becky called an Uber for them.
We took an arm each and walked down the stairs together to the taxi.
‘Thanks for all your help.’
‘I’m sorry you met me. You wouldn’t have ended up here otherwise.’
‘It’s not your fault. We often end up in places like this.’
I kissed them both goodbye and made my way back upstairs.
I opened the door of Stev’n’s room and looked in. Everyone horizontal. Plates being passed round. No Sophie.
I tried the other bedroom door. The lights were off. Two shapes were wrapping around each other on the bed.
‘Paul?’ said Sophie.
*
There was one thing I needed to do before I left.
One, two, three plates into the bowl of Stev’n’s en-suite toilet.
‘What the fuck did you do that for?’ asked Culkin, and started to laugh.
‘You fucking mummy’s boy,’ said Stev’n.
Someone else was fishing them out of the toilet. ‘I think some of it’s salvageable,’ he was saying.
‘We’ll just ring some more in, you twat,’ said Stev’n. ‘Fucking mummy’s boy. You’re
finished at the magazine.’
‘I’m finished,’ I agreed, and turned to take down the framed image next to me of the woman’s body broken stylishly. Stev’n stood up and sat back down as I made as if to swing it into his face. I thought about stepping out on to the balcony and hurling it off, but I would probably kill someone, or it would end up on Instagram as an artistic gesture in the magazine’s name, so I tucked it under my arm instead and left the flat.
*
When I got home Mary was lying on the sofa that had until recently been Jonathan’s bed. She was wearing a dress and I found a blanket to put over her legs. There was a mouthful of white wine left in a glass resting on the carpet. She had not taken her trainers off, and they were lightly scuffed with grass stains. I rested the photo I had stolen against a wall.
‘Are you asleep?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, not opening her eyes.
‘Are you playing it cool and pretending you’re not delighted to see me?’
‘I can’t see you. I would have liked to see you a lot earlier.’ She opened her eyes. ‘What the fuck is that thing?’
‘I stole it from Stev’n. It’s a photo of a model posing as a woman committing suicide.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘To die?’
‘No, do you want beautiful women to die? Is that what men secretly long for?’
‘I don’t know: I’m not men, I’m me. I don’t want anyone to die.’
‘Not anyone?’
‘Well, one or two men, but no women who I can think of. Don’t worry, I stole it to destroy it, not to hang it on our wall. What’s up with you, anyway? What happened to Nathan?’
‘We met up. Then he introduced me to his new girlfriend.’
‘New girlfriend? But he’s in love with you.’
She sat up and put her hand on my arm. ‘Do you think he is?’
‘It seemed obvious to me and Jonathan.’
‘Jonathan.’
