by Eliza Clark
There’s a girl looking at me. She’s wearing those tracksuit bottoms with the buttons up the sides, a cheap satin cami and heavy hoop earrings. I’m still bewildered by this act of appropriation: rich white girls pretending to be poor white girls (who I assume were originally appropriating 2000s hip-hop culture?) pretending to be rich black women. It’s bizarre.
I’m staring at her, and she’s staring at me. Not sure who started it.
‘What?’ I ask. She finishes washing her hands, I start washing mine. ‘What?’
‘You’re beautiful,’ she says. Her pupils are huge.
‘Thanks pet.’
‘Your hair is so nice.’ She blinks at me. ‘Is it… extensions?’
‘Nah, just good hair. Coconut oil and hot rollers, you know,’ I say. She nods, and repeats coconut oil, dreamily, tripping on her gleaming white Nike Airs as she walks out.
I look for the others, giving the dance floor a sweep. Busier than I thought it might be. All students. What did I expect from a Monday night? All students, and mostly boys. Like a school disco, a few small groups of girls are clumped, or coupled off already, while the remaining single men shuffle-dance, clutching warm bottles of Beck’s and scanning the doors to the entryway and the toilets and the smoking area, as if any moment a whole horde of women could pour in and correct this dire ratio. I go to the bar. They’re playing The Smiths, on purpose, in this post-racist-Morrissey economy. I mean, there’s an argument to be made that he’s been racist for fucking ages, and shit for even longer, and I don’t know why we’re all just deciding now that it’s bad.
I watch the young white people dance badly to the bloated old racist’s music while I wait to get served. This is a white-as-fuck club, and I like… I know I’m white, but there’s just a lot of white people White People-ing in a very small area, like it’s just some very, very densely packed mayo, you know? Densely packed mayo, jiggling about, doesn’t know what to do with its arms, doesn’t know what to do with its feet, undulating loosely, barely in time to the rhythm.
‘HI. HI THERE. WHAT YOU DRINKING?’ asks a man. He’s standing more or less eye to eye with me. He has a bun. Buns went out almost as soon as they came in, didn’t they? It’s weird to see one out in the wild in this day and age. He doesn’t even have a beard. Maybe he’s just hot; it’s a reasonable thing to do with long hair if you’re hot. He’s okay looking. Big. Muscular. I try to stick with men I imagine I could physically overpower if push came to shove. ‘DO YOU WANT A SHOT?’
‘I’M GOOD,’ I say. He either mishears me, or wilfully ignores me, and he hands a shot to me, which he watches me drink very, very closely (white sambuca, cheap) and then he indicates that he’d like to high five me when I’m done. I leave him hanging. His pupils are enormous – but aren’t all of our pupils enormous?
‘I’LL FIND YOU LATER. I’LL FIND YOU IN THE SMOKING AREA, OKAY? I’LL GIVE YOU MY NUMBER. IMAGINE HOW TALL THE KIDS WOULD BE! RUGBY PLAYERS, MODELS, THEY’D BE. I LOVE THIS SONG.’ The Cure is playing now. He scampers off, a lightness to his feet despite his size. I watch him swing around to ‘Just Like Heaven’ as if it was techno. Still no sign of my quote-unquote friends, who I assume are in the smoking area. I finally get a drink. A string of texts from Will on my phone, and one from Flo, which simply reads SMOJKING OUTSDIE, and I’m delighted, because they just started playing the Weezer cover of ‘Africa’, like, as if it wasn’t lame enough in here already? As if the vibe couldn’t get any whiter? And like I said, I’m aware I’m adding to this deluge of whiteness, but at least I’m local, and I’m not from the Home Counties, which is the whitest kind of white. Geordie girls are up there with Irish girls and Scottish girls; the black women of white women, you know?
I’m outside. Strange mix of cigarette smoke and fresh air. Quote-unquote friends huddled in a corner, Finch smoking and rolling at the same time, standing awkwardly beside Flo while two studenty-looking blokes chat her up. Beta males, the pair of them, but the alpha betas, the most confident of their jittery, sweaty friends who like Star Wars and think that that’s a personality trait. That’s not even a guess – there are three more lads stood to the side of this interaction, and two of them are wearing Star Wars shirts. A Darth Vader design, and one simply reading ‘Han Shot First’.
‘Hi,’ I say. I point at Flo, ‘She has a boyfriend.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’m with him,’ I say, pointing at Finch. He glares at me. ‘Watch out, he’s very jealous. He’ll kick the shit out of you.’ Finch is 5’6, and skinny, and the idea of him kicking the shit out of any one is laughable. So laughable that I snort, my hand beneath my nose to cover it.
‘Shut up, Irina,’ says Finch. ‘She obviously isn’t my girlfriend, and I’m obviously not going to fight anyone.’
‘Can you believe what I have to put up with?’ I pout and walk over to Finch. I pluck a recently rolled cigarette from his fingers and wrap my arm around his shoulder. ‘Light me up, babe.’ Finch lights the cigarette, still frowning at me. ‘Go on, shoo,’ I say to the Star Wars boys. They scuttle back to the club, their obedience to being shooed like dogs, proving both their weakness and my alpha beta hypothesis. Beta male in any form fucks off when I tell him to. Finch gives me a look. I say, ‘Well, I got them to leave, didn’t I?’
‘You’re so awful on coke. I’m going for a piss.’ He rolls his eyes at me.
‘Don’t fucking roll your eyes at me,’ I snap after him. He just ignores me. ‘Hey!’ And then he spins on his heels, with a clenched jaw and a scowl. He takes a deep breath, then seems to decompress.
‘You know what? Never mind,’ he says. ‘Doesn’t matter. They left. Well done.’
‘That was quite mean, Rini,’ says Flo. ‘You know how insecure he is.’ I roll my eyes at her.
‘Oh, come on, I was complimenting him. It’s not my fault he’s never had a girlfriend, is it? There are some men who’d literally snap their fingers off to pretend to be my boyfriend in front of some other blokes,’ I suck on my beer and my cigarette. ‘He’s so fucking overly sensitive.’
He’ll be back. I down my drink.
I drag Flo back inside, where they hoot and clap, because David Bowie is playing; the DJ knows his audience very well. I scowl.
‘YOU’VE GOT A FACE LIKE A SMACKED ARSE, RINI.’
‘WHAT?’
‘I SAID, YOU’VE GOT A FACE LIKE A SMACKED ARSE.’
‘THERE’S A LOT OF WHITE PEOPLE IN HERE, ACTING LIKE THEY DON’T KNOW THAT THEY’RE WHITE PEOPLE, BUT THEY ARE AND THEY LOOK STUPID.’
‘WHAT?’
‘I’M GOING FOR A PISS.’
Flo follows me. She makes a beeline for her own stall, but I grab her by the wrist.
‘Flo,’ I say. ‘Hey, Flo.’ And I beckon her into the stall. ‘Step into my office.’
‘What?’
‘Step into my office. Business meeting,’ I say. She comes in and I slam the door shut behind her and lock it. ‘You’ll be wanting a line, then?’
It’s a tight squeeze; there’s a lot of woman for such a small space. I’m crouched by the toilet – the floor is a bit wet – and sprinkling coke on the seat, chopping and pushing and fixing it into lines with my National Insurance card, which is always my card of choice. My mam found it once, on the floor of my house, and said, why’s your NI card here? And there’s no explanation for that really, no legitimate reason it could possibly be there. Like, yeah I just leave it on the floor. That’s just where it lives, Mam. On the floor. Put it back. I’ll lose it.
‘Aye, go on,’ says Flo. Flo wants a line of coke. Of fucking course Flo wants a line.
‘Do you have a note?’
She does. She has a fiver. I feel safer with the plastic money, I feel less like I’m going to get hepatitis. Cashing up at work with paper money, you feel like you could shake the notes off and salvage a bump, at least. Plastic money, though, it just bounces off. And if you have a nosebleed, it’s not like you’ve ruined a note; you can just rinse it off. I ma
ke Flo go first, because she has the note, and I watch her hoover up that line like the sesh gremlin I know she really is. Fuck morals. Fuck ethical drug consumption. What’s that fucking bit in Trainspotting from the posters, you know, from everyone’s room when they’re sixteen, Choose Life, Choose A Job, and all that shit. Choose fucking up. Choose to come into my office and take cocaine because I told you to. Choose to follow me back out to the bar, after we’ve had a line, and drink a shot of tequila.
The thing with Flo, with a lot of people our age: she’s so fucking quick to blame everyone else for her shit, you know? And you do choose these things. You choose to make yourself feel like an absolute fucking spineless, easily led pile of shit with a steaming hangover tomorrow morning. Maybe even tomorrow evening. The night is young, and I have so much cocaine in my bra.
When Finch turns back up, I buy another round of shots, and tell him it’s apology tequila and he has to drink it.
I realise I forgot to piss.
Tequila makes my fingers numb, so I keep dropping my phone in the Uber. We’re heading to Will’s presumably squalid house in Heaton. Student Village, Flo calls it, every time, like she doesn’t live three feet away in Sandyford. I sit in the front, because I’m the only adult, and the only person who can handle talking to strangers for extended periods of time. I order drinks, I order cabs, I make men go away, I make drug deals happen, I get us into places. In the land of the borderline autistic, the man who can make eye contact is king. I’ve known Finch for three years and he’s never looked me in the eye once.
‘How’s your night going, then?’ I ask. I can’t bear the silence. Finch has gone quiet, furiously chewing gum, and Flo is creased; she’s absolutely pissing herself back there, stuffing her fingers into her mouth to try and stop herself from laughing.
‘Just students and stuff. Back and forth, town to Heaton, Heaton to town,’ he says. ‘You going home?’
‘Nah, house party.’
‘Is… Is she okay?’ The driver (Iqbal) nods back at Flo.
‘She’s fine. In fact, I’d be more worried about your man there.’ I point at Finch. ‘Gurning like an absolute twat. Forgot to take his magnesium supplements, now look at him. He’s going to lose a tooth, like that. Have you ever seen Bounce by the Ounce? On YouTube, Bounce by the Ounce?’
‘No… What is that, is it a music thing?’
‘Sort of. It’s a video of this tragic club, somewhere shit. Some shitty town. There’s this bald feller, gurning his tits off. Looks like Gollum, Gollum in a really rough extended cut, Gollum in Middle Earth After Dark, like one bump to rule them all, one bump to line them, one bump to… something, and in the sesh we bind them,’ I say. Flo screams with laughter, stomping her feet on the floor of the taxi.
‘God, you fucking love Lord of the Rings, don’t you?’ says Finch. ‘You only ever talk about it when you’re off your tits and that’s how I know you love it.’
‘She still had an Aragorn poster while we were in college,’ says Flo, gasping between giggles. ‘In 2008.’
‘Fuck off.’ I drop my phone again. Flo laughs more. ‘Hey, since we’re sharing fun facts, did you all know that Flo isn’t actually called Flo? Did you all know she was christened Lauren.’ And Flo’s laughter slows. ‘Lauren, and rebranded before she started foundation, and actually named herself after Florence of the Machine fame? Changed it by deed poll and everything.’
‘Well, I think you should be able to choose whatever name you want for yourself. For instance, Irina, if you decided to change your name to Mrs Frodo Baggins, I would support you,’ says Finch.
‘That’s not funny because it wasn’t a fucking Frodo poster, it was an Aragorn poster, so if you wanted your joke to land, Finch, which it didn’t, you’d have said I’d fucking change my name to fucking… Look, he’s not short on aliases, is he? Like, I’d be Irina Telcontar, Queen of Gondor or something, wouldn’t I? Jesus. If you’re going to fucking do this, if you’re going to fucking—’ I sniff. ‘—pull this shit with me, pull something I haven’t heard before, alright? Pull something less basic than Mrs Frodo.’
‘Telcon… what?’
‘It’s the royal house of Gondor,’ I snap. ‘Jesus.’
My loose, powdered lips have dug me a hole deeper than any lingering reference to teenaged posters, or spiteful revelations regarding Flaurence. There’s no real getting out of it. My face feels warm. Not cokey warm, just warm, and I feel squirmy. I shrink in my seat a little. I have accidentally conjured up a shorter, wider, speckier version of myself, hunched over a battered copy of Fellowship.
The feeling is like when someone sees a mark from where you’ve self-harmed, and you slap your hand over the cut, or the burn, or the bruise. You’ve tried to hide it and, in doing so, made it even more obvious that mark is not an accident.
Jesus, self-harm and Lord of the Rings. My tween years crash back to me in waves.
‘Never seen Lord of the Rings. Is it much good?’ asks the cab driver.
‘It’s alright, yeah,’ I tell him.
He drops us off outside a house with an unkempt garden, an overflowing bin, and trip-hop exhaling from the windows in a marijuana-scented fog.
I dig the coke out of my bra and take a generous bump.
‘Is that the right house?’ asks Finch.
‘Yeah just, gimme a second.’ Cocaine replaced in bra, I march up to the door, ring the bell. ‘Don’t you live round here?’
Finch nods. He’s just in the next street over. Good. I can send them home with zero faff when they inevitably become a liability.
Will answers. Nice shirt, unbuttoned, tucked into high-waisted jeans, hair wavy, flower behind left ear, joint behind right. Jewellery. Calculated. Effort clearly made, more than likely on my behalf. He says my name and gives me a kiss on the cheek. I generally wouldn’t let him touch me, but he didn’t give me enough warning, and I can’t feel the lower half of my face anymore, aside from the roof of my mouth, which aches as if all the booze and drugs are building up above my incisors, like they want to burst out of the sockets and take my front teeth with them.
‘These your friends?’ Will asks.
‘In a manner of speaking.’ I push past him. There are people talking in the corridor, mostly men, mostly baristas and bartenders and gallery invigilators and the kind of general, miscellaneous artsy people I see fucking everywhere but have never spoken to. They’re a rotation of background extras in my life, a handful of unnamed NPCs with repeating models populating the playable areas of the city.
Even with my hair askew, and the foundation rubbed off the tip of my nose, and my lipstick slightly smeared, I turn the head of every bloke in that corridor. I make my way through to the kitchen and immediately grab a plastic cup. The kitchen is disgusting, fag ends and spillages and dishes and cups piling up in the sink.
Flo will anxiety-clean at parties if given the chance. She immediately starts collecting cups and putting them in the bin. Finch starts laughing at her.
‘She’s real,’ says a voice. ‘She’s, like, actually real then.’ Scottish, but posh Scottish. A fat man, standing at six foot two, with a well-kept beard and a boyish, handsome face. Blue eyes. He’s sweating profusely, and wearing a top hat, and holding a cane. ‘No offence, I just always thought he was, like… lying. Exaggerating. I mean, look at him. My mam always says he’s a bonny lad, but still.’
‘I’m not a fashion photographer, you know. I’m not, like, shooting him for Vogue,’ I say.
‘Aye. I’ve never seen none of the photos, I just thought… Well, I didn’t think anything, because I thought he was lying.’ He shrugs. ‘I’m Henson. Well, Jack, but. Everyone calls me Henson.’
‘I told you she was fucking real, mate.’ Will removes the enormous spliff from behind his ear, and lights it up. He lost his flower, somewhere, between the kitchen and the door. ‘See?’
‘We gunna get to see some photies, then? Some sexy photies of wee Willy?’ Henson takes a step towards me and nudges me, and winks
unnaturally in a way which screams, I’ve been trying to make winking at lassies my ’hing. I offer to swap a look at Will’s photos for some alcohol, and Will promptly produces a bottle of vodka from a cupboard, removing it from behind a bag of potatoes.
‘I picked you up some vodka before, so there’s no need, babe,’ Will says. He opens the bottle, and tips it into my cup, spilling a decent glug on my hand by way of marking his territory. Might as well have pissed on me. ‘Oopsy.’
‘It’s fine.’ I lick my wrist. I follow their eyes. Finch drags Flo away from her cleaning, and Will offers her the joint with a ‘Smokum peace pipe?’ as if this was ever going to be the group of people to impress with a bit of comedy archaic racism. She doesn’t take it – PC even when wrecked, she says, ‘What the fuck,’ so I introduce Finch before Flo can kick off. Finch plucks the joint from Will’s fingers, and smokes it easily, letting it dangle from the corner of his mouth while pleasantries are made.
‘So, the vibe’s like… all night seshy?’ Flo asks.
‘Oh, it’s totally the vibe, like, that is deff the vibe, yeah, like heavy, like, really seshy.’
‘Aye pal, I think she gets it,’ Henson says. He gives me this look like, look at this fucking idiot, don’t have sex with him. Cute that either of them thinks that’s on the cards. The joint has made its way to Henson’s hands. He blows a smoke ring.
‘Quick poll, as he does this all the time: does anyone find the smoke rings sexually alluring, or do you just think he looks like a tosser?’ Will asks. We ignore him. Flo, I think, is trying to convince Finch to drop another bomb. I go to lift the cup of vodka to my lips. ‘Woah! We have mixers! I have ice and loads of juices. You don’t have to drink it straight!’ Will plucks the cup from my hand. I’d normally fight more, but, alas, tequila fingers.
‘My delicate constitution couldn’t possibly handle a sip of straight vodka,’ I say. ‘I’d have some tonic water, though.’ Will bumbles around the kitchen till he returns with a vodka and tonic, with ice, a scruffy little wedge of lime, and a fucking straw. We watch him. Henson keeps looking at me, elbowing me as if we’ve formed a bond through shared disdain for our mutual idiot. Henson offers me the joint, and when I say I’m on coke, and I’d rather leave the weed till I’m winding down, he offers me a line. I ask if we can all have a line.
