by India Knight
‘And then,’ she says, ‘he kissed me.’
Aargh. Aargh. On the other hand, if there’s one thing I love it’s having a song lyric thrown into the conversation.
‘How did he kiss you?’ I ask.
‘With his mouth,’ Louisa says, grinning. ‘With his lips.’
‘Hmm,’ I say. ‘A normal kiss? Because Frank strikes me as very possibly the kind of person who would wine-kiss you.’
‘What’s a wine-kiss?’
‘You know, when men think it’s incredibly sexy and fwoar-ish to slurp wine into your mouth as part of the kissing. People who think of themselves as sexually sophisticated do it, I’ve noticed.’
‘Oh, God,’ says Louisa. ‘Does anyone really still go for that?’
‘I think so. They think it’s slick. Studly.’
‘I had it done once with pear Thunderbird. When I was at school.’
‘Well, quite. That’s part of the problem – no one ever wine-kisses you with Chateau d’Yquem. I’ve had it with Blue Nun, and of course if the wine is revolting you just end up dribbling down yourself, and then the wine-kisser tries to lick the dribbled wine.’
‘Like a dog.’
‘Exactly. Actually, I’m rather surprised Dr Cooper didn’t wine-kiss.’
‘He’s more of a naked-massage-with-oils type, judging by your description.’
‘Oh, God! Naked massage with oils! And the oils always have a label that says “Sensual”.’
‘Sssenssual,’ Louisa sniggers, sounding like Kenneth Williams.
Both of us are laughing out loud now. ‘Sssenssual naked massage with oils,’ Louisa honks. ‘And the guy’s always really rubbish at it, and keeps telling you to “relax” in a husky voice while he sort of kneads you, like dough. And the oil always goes into your bottom crack and feels horrible.’
‘Bloody oils,’ I say. ‘So then you’re wriggling around with an oily back bottom. And then you have to walk about – slide about – for two days smelling of hippie.’
Louisa nods in agreement. We both continue our makeup reapplications. I really love Louisa for understanding about the crapness of naked massage with oils.
‘With tongues?’ I ask nonchalantly, after a seemly pause. ‘The Frank-kissing. Without wine – which I’m pleased to hear – but with tongues?’
‘No, Stella,’ she laughs. ‘It was a friendly sort of kiss goodbye. On the mouth, though. Well, when I say “he kissed me” – I kissed him, and he kissed me back.’
‘Right.’
‘It was only quick, but he’s a very good kisser.’
‘Really.’
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Experienced.’
‘He’s certainly that,’ I say. ‘Let’s go back through, shall we?’
The woman comes out of the cubicle of shame as we pass by. ‘Disgusting,’ she sniffs. ‘There’s a time and a place for that kind of conversation.’
‘The bean’s a most extraordinary fruit,’ says Louisa.
‘The more you eat, the more you toot,’ I complete.
We stagger out of the loo crippled with laughter at this infantilism. Despite myself, I’m cheering up.
I’ve noticed that people who spend a lot of time in very noisy environments – night clubs, say – are extremely poor conversationalists. Adrian can barely speak in complete sentences, though by pudding time he has become very physically demonstrative (this possibly has something to do with his racing off to the loo a couple of times and coming back unusually animated). He starts off by pushing back a stray hair from my cheek, graduates to feeding me mouthfuls of his pudding (which sounds like a really nasty euphemism – ‘Feed me mouthfuls of your pudding, babe’ – but isn’t) and concludes by engaging in a robust game of footsie, which I try and semi-resist as I worry about his giant trainers scuffing my boots. Frank, who has dropped a napkin, gets a close-up view of this, and re-emerges from under the table looking grumpy, which puts me in an excellent mood.
‘So,’ he says, putting his arm around Louisa so that his left hand is casually resting by her breast. ‘Where to next?’
‘Bangin’,’ says Adrian, trying the same trick with his arm. Unfortunately, my bosoms are considerably bigger than Lou’s, though less pert, so he accidentally ends up with a handful of chest.
‘Fuck! Sorry,’ he says, but for some reason it takes a while for his motor skills to catch up with his thought process, so that, though appalled, he is still clutching, squashing, my entire left breast, holding it as though it were a fruit. Confused, he squeezes it neatly twice, rather too hard for my liking.
‘Um,’ I say, ‘do you mind?’
‘Sorry,’ says Adrian helplessly, still inexplicably attached to my breast.
Frank reaches across and pulls his hand away.
‘Fook’s sake, mon,’ he mutters, sounding more Geordie than he has done for ages. ‘Aa’ll cloot yor jaw.’
‘I didn’t mean …’ says Adrian. ‘Sorry, mate. Dropped an E, yeah?’
‘It’s OK,’ I say, feeling a tremendous urge to laugh. I wink at Frank, my hero, who looks unamused, though Louisa is grinning as though she’d burst.
‘Nice pair, missus,’ she sniggers. She does it for slightly too long, so that her snigger turns into a horrible snort.
‘Oh, my God,’ she blushes. ‘I can’t believe I did that. Like a disgusting pig. I’m so, so sorry.’
‘I thought it was sexy,’ says Frank, giving me a look and slowly unfurling his wickedest smile.
‘Shush, Frank. No one cares,’ I say, but a giggling fit is building up in the pit of my stomach.
‘Anyway,’ I continue, grinning at Adrian like an imbecile who loves nothing more than having her breasts groped over the tarte tatin, ‘you were saying?’
‘Um, yeah. Bangin’. It’s the club I’m at tonight. It’ll be a bit quiet for a while but you can have free drinks.’
‘Where are you from?’ I ask Adrian. ‘Because your accent is, ah, variable.’
‘That would be telling, my love,’ says Adrian, now sounding bizarrely like a West Country farmer. It must be the drugs talking.
‘Let’s go, shall we?’ says Frank impatiently. ‘I need another wee drink.’
He and Louisa walk down the street hand in hand. Not to be outdone, and very possibly crazed by the four glasses of red wine I’ve had with dinner, I squeeze Adrian’s behind forcefully when the four of us are standing in the Great Eastern Road, looking for a cab.
‘All righ,’ says Adrian happily, turning his head so that our lips brush.
‘Mmm,’ I whisper hoarsely. ‘Never better.’
But I still really, really want to laugh, especially when I catch Frank’s face, staring at me impassively in the drizzling rain. Still, considering I was dreading the evening a mere couple of hours ago, this has got to be a turn up for the books.
Bangin’ is the name of a night that happens at a huge gay nightclub called, sweetly, Fist. Yungsta – he most certainly stops being Adrian the second we approach the door – DJs in the big main, ground-floor bit, but there are apparently another couple of floors that play different (and hopefully more sympathique) kinds of music. What I’d really like is a little blast of Charles Aznavour, but never mind: I need to get to grips with the troubling issue of my grotesque musical taste, and what better way of broadening my outlook than a couple of happy hours spent listening to what I gather are technically known as ‘bangin’ choons’?
Yungsta settles us in at the ground-floor bar, orders us drinks and then departs to fiddle about behind his decks, planting a lingering, slightly slack-mouthed kiss on my lips and promising to return soon, yeah? He looks quite cool, now he’s on home ground, and I am pleased I squeezed his bottom earlier. Well, pleased-ish. Hardly delirious with happiness, but, you know.
Louisa, Frank and I sit ourselves down – thigh to thigh, very cosy – and look around: the club is beginning to fill up, and more or less everyone in the room is a good ten years younger than us at the very least. Which is no wonder
: I haven’t been to a nightclub for years, and although Frank looks reasonably at home, I know he doesn’t make a habit of going out clubbing either. Louisa can’t believe her eyes: she is rubbernecking like mad, trying to take it all in, occasionally breaking off to murmur how it all makes something of a change from Happy Bunnies and sitting on your own with your cup of organic tea, trimming a hat, and how she feels really, really old.
‘I don’t even know what those drinks are,’ she says, pointing to a group of young people carrying what look like beer bottles, filled with pastel-coloured liquid. ‘I feel like my own granny.’
‘Vodka and fruit juice,’ says Frank. ‘Or rum and a mixer. Don’t you go to the pub?’
‘Oh,’ says Louisa. ‘Right. No, I don’t go to the pub. Don’t have anyone to go with. Well, I didn’t,’ she simpers at him. ‘Until now.’ She resumes her eyeballing of our fellow clubbers. ‘And why do all these people look so vacant? Are they all on drugs? I can’t even understand what they’re saying.’
‘Some of them are on drugs,’ Frank says. ‘Not all. Most of them just look like that all the time.’
‘People don’t make much of an effort any more, do they?’ she continues. ‘I mean, in my day, when we used to go to a nightclub, we really, really glammed up – took us hours to get ready. Especially when I was a Goth.’
‘What?’ I say.
‘Especially when I was a Goth.’
‘You were a Goth?’ asks Frank.
‘Yes.’ Lou shrugs impatiently. ‘And it took ages to get ready, as I was saying – all that panstick, and then the hair. But all these girls are in jeans and T-shirts.’
‘Glamorous jeans and T-shirts,’ I say. ‘And it’s not like they buy their trainers at Asda. I know what you mean, though. It’s hardly an ocean of beauty and style, is it, that dance floor? Mind you, I wouldn’t call an ocean of Goths a thing of beauty either.’
Frank laughs.
‘I wasn’t a Goth for very long,’ says Louisa. ‘Anyway, all I was saying was that a little sequin here or there wouldn’t go amiss. Oh, but I did used to like dressing up. Nobody’s properly dressed up in here. Except you, Stella.’
‘By mistake,’ I say. ‘It stupidly didn’t occur to me that we’d end up at a club. I’d have worn something more comfortable if I’d known. Like a long black coat and a pair of fangs to make you feel at home, Vampyra.’
Lou makes a face and sticks out her tongue.
I’m still in the belted pink velvet coat, and getting rather hot. But getting up and exposing half an acre of flesh would immediately mark me out as some tragic granny on the pull, I feel, in this environment, so the coat stays firmly on.
More drinks arrive, as does a discreet little paper wrap of cocaine, courtesy of Yungsta, slipped into my hand by an improbably wholesome-looking character in a hat.
‘Gosh,’ I say to Frank and Lou. ‘We seem to have scored.’
Frank looks at my clenched hand in an I-can-take-it-or-leave-it sort of way. ‘What is it?’
‘Charlie,’ I say, quoting the hatted man. ‘Couple of grams, he said, which if I remember rightly is quite a lot. Do you want some?’
‘You don’t know where it’s come from,’ says Louisa. ‘It could be bad stuff, and then you’d be dead or handicapped for life. I’ve never touched it, myself.’
‘Don’t be so melodramatic,’ I tell her. ‘I’m sure it’s not bad. Presumably this is the resident dealer, and he seems to know Adrian. Well, what shall I do with it, if you don’t want it? I don’t take drugs either.’
‘Come off it,’ says Frank. ‘I can’t believe that.’
‘When have you ever known me to take drugs?’
‘Never, but that’s because you’re always at home.’
‘Well, I have a theory about old people taking drugs. I think it sucks, and so I don’t do it.’
‘How long’s it been?’ asks Frank.
‘About ten years. More, I think. Do you want some?’
‘I’ll have a line, yeah,’ says Frank. ‘Pass it over here. God, I can’t believe I’m here with a couple of puritans.’
Louisa sips her champagne. ‘I’m not a puritan,’ she says, giving Frank a very smouldery, dirty look and putting her hand high up on his thigh.
‘No?’ says Frank casually.
‘No,’ I pipe up helpfully, not liking the look on either of their faces. ‘She was a Goth.’
‘No,’ echoes Louisa, and then she grabs his head and kisses him. With tongues. For ages. In front of me. Tongue, tongue, tongue. He kisses her back, too. Lick, probe, lick, slowly, repeatedly, and then she starts sort of eating his face. It amazes me to watch this, but watch I do, gripped, appalled, horrified.
Then I snatch the little white envelope of coke off the table and stand up. Frank has the courtesy to look up and mutter, ‘Where are you going?’
‘To take drugs.’
Frank pulls back from Louisa for a second, to rest his tongue muscles. He has the horrible look on his face of a man with a stiffy. ‘But you’ve just said you never take drugs.’
‘I’ve changed my mind. Total U-turn. See you.’
And I wander off, the envelope in my hand, in search of a loo.
When I’m a safe distance away, I turn back and look at them. Louisa’s head is cradled in Frank’s arm. They’re still at it hammer and, um, tongues.
15
The nightclub is enormous – disorientatingly so – and try as I might, I can’t seem to locate a Ladies on the ground floor, though there must be one: I just go round and round in circles, feeling lost and rather panicky. The place is getting packed and the music is pounding louder than before: heavy insistent beats with no melody, bang bang bang, louder and louder, making your entire body vibrate. Adrian mentioned something called ‘deep Belgian house’ at dinner: perhaps this is it. If so, can’t say I think much of it.
I decide to try upstairs and wind my way up a metal staircase. More crowds of people are on the first floor, leaning over a balcony area, looking down on the dance floor, on which everyone is dancing exactly as though they were monkeys. The number of people present, and the anxiety it provokes, make me wonder whether I am in fact suffering from an advanced form of claustrophobia: I’m not used to feeling like a sardine, and I don’t like it – the Bains Douches, surely, was never this bad. I keep walking, if you can call squeezing past people ‘walking’, up another staircase leading to the second floor, where I find what I overhear being referred to as a ‘chill room’. The music here is certainly kinder to my ears – it’s a sort of poshed-up whale music that reminds me of natural childbirth and thus, unpleasantly, of playgroup – but there are still too many people, all of them seemingly paired off, all of them nearly young enough to be my children, all of them looking a) not entirely on the ball and b) at me as though I were a curiosity. Which I expect I am. And I still can’t find a loo.
There is a third staircase, smaller, leading to the third floor, so I take it. Unfortunately, there’s a bouncer at the top: a blonde drag queen, statuesque in her glittery heels, impossibly long-legged, with enormous, darkly outlined lips, silver false eyelashes and giant pink pointy nails. ‘Yeeeess?’ she growls.
‘I’m looking for the Ladies.’
‘Well, here I am, honey,’ she smiles coldly.
‘The loo, I mean. The lavs. The toilets.’
‘Downstairs. Second floor. This bit’s members only. Sorry, love,’ she drawls, not looking sorry at all and already looking past me.
‘Members?’ I pun cringingly. ‘You could have fooled me, dressed like that.’
She allows me one small, unamused smile.
‘What happens up here, then?’ I persevere. I have this very bad character trait: the minute someone tells me that something is forbidden to me, I want that something more than anything else. It’s very childish.
‘This bit’s for homos,’ she explains. ‘Our tiny refuge. Seeing as your lot overrun the club every Friday night.’
‘Those drongos
? They’re not my lot. Please let me in.’
‘You,’ says the drag queen, ‘are not a homo. Go on,’ she adds, but not unkindly now. She looks as bored as I am. ‘Hop it.’
‘Oh, please. I’m so bored down here. And I hate the music and the crowds. I think I may be claustrophobic. And my friends are snogging each other. At least you look about my age. And anyway,’ I scramble wildly for something appropriate to say, ‘I’m thinking of exploring lesbianism any day now.’
‘You and some pierced bulldyke from Stokey?’ she says, painted-on eyebrow arched, looking me up and down for the first time. ‘I don’t think so, love. Not in that faaabulous coat.’
‘Well, it’s just an idea,’ I concede. ‘But put that way, it doesn’t sound wildly appealing, I must say.’
She actually laughs at this, so I continue, encouraged, ‘Look, I’m telling you so that you feel some sense of gayness coming from me, and so that you let me in, please.’
‘Hmm,’ she says.
‘Go on,’ I say. ‘I love drag. I love cabaret too. My father took me to see drag shows from the age of twelve onwards. In Paris. I loved them. I’ll feel right at home. Please let me in.’
‘Go on, then,’ she sighs, smiling quite warmly. ‘And the lav’s on the left, all the way down.’
I beam happily. ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Thank you so much.’ I walk away, but then walk back to her. ‘Would you like some cocaine?’ I suggest, to show my appreciation. ‘I’ve got heaps of it.’
‘Heaven,’ she says, now all smiles, ‘must have sent down an angel. Don’t mind if I do. I’m Regina Beaver, by the way. And I love your coat, Miss French.’
‘Stella.’
Regina leads the way. The third floor is smaller, more compact than the previous two, and filled with squishy sofas and soft lighting. There aren’t many people up here – not as many as downstairs, anyway – and it is actually, blissfully, possible to walk without bumping into anyone.
‘Why are you in a place that you hate with a load of coke?’ says Regina, gliding regally through the little crowd, issuing greetings left, right and centre.
‘Well, my date is DJing downstairs and, as I was telling you, my other two friends are snogging each other.’
