Noughties (14 page)

We bumped into Jack and Ella over at the vodka-jelly shot bar. “It’s been so long!” exclaimed Ella, who’d seen Lucy just two weeks ago, grabbing her and kissing every cheek going. What’s the protocol in these situations, because I’m never sure? One kiss; one on each cheek; a cheeky third—what the hell, have four! Me and Jack stood there trading silent complicity.

“You look lovely!”

“Thank you! (hehe) So do you!”

“That’s such a gorgeous dress!”

“Hundred pounds from Mango,” revealed Lucy, briefly jutting a hip and dropping a shoulder in catwalk pose. “I really like your shoes!”

“Eighty quid, House of Fraz!”

“They’re so pretty!”

“Oh” (giving Lucy another kiss; Lucy beaming) “it really is nice to see you again!”

Me and Jack continued to look at each other like mildly aware cows.

“Alright mate.”

“Alright bro.”

“You look hot.”

“Cheers. Fifty quid. Hire … innit.”

“Nice.”

“You look ravishing.”

“Cheers. Hire. Fifty quid.”

“Sexy.”

“Stop it, you’re making me blush.”

We moved farther into the ball. I always felt a surprised sensation to be out and about with Lucy, even though she visited at least every other week. I would spend the days and nights between doing the old imaginative substitution on any girl–guy combo I saw. But now she was really here: not the idea of her, or a representation of her, but the girl-in-herself. It’s a shame that I could never seem to relax and make the most of it.

Inside a flashing, booming marquee (its wooden boards and canvassing having ingested the entire quad) we began our habitual quest for a lower plane of consciousness and ordered a hefty round at the bar. Nerves needed quelling, doubts burying. Lucy had just finished her A levels and uni
was now settled upon as a definite plan, so a sense of celebration animated the night for her, though I didn’t particularly share in this.

We were sat around a table covered in confetti and sequins, some helium balloons in the center anchored by champagne bottles, when Terrence Terrence made a raucous entry with the Decadents (a members-only drinking society), of which he was president at the time. There they were in their thousand-pound uniforms (ludicrous maroon tails), with their floppy hair and ra quiffs, their wet secret handshakes and double-barreled names. There are only eight Decadents at any one time, eligibility depending on family wealth and notoriety and therefore being highly exclusive. Ella and I had always mocked these Archibalds and Maximillians as they swanned about in the quad for pre-dinner drinks at any one of their fortnightly affairs, and we would persistently rekindle our debate over which spot in the higher reaches of the college would best serve a sniper. Admittedly, they invited Ella to all of their events (being widely regarded as the second-hottest girl in college) but she scornfully rejected them each time, too aware that invitations were reserved solely for arm candy.

“Fuck,” I muttered to myself as Terrence clocked us. His pencil-thin lips twisted into a cunning, deprecating smile.

“What’s that?” asked Lucy.

“Terrence,” I replied.

“So?”

“Darling,” he said, now reeling in front of us. “I must ask, have you brushed up on your Shakespeare yet?”

“Oh god, no. What would I go and do a thing like that for?” said Lucy, couching her response in a laugh. As with most things in life, Terrence had no answer. “I always seem to catch you in fancy dress,” she added with charming
innocence. We both passed our eyes over his elaborate tails. “Another play?”

Touchéd by Lucy’s line of inquiry, Terrence opted for a different approach: “We’ve snuck a couple bottles of absinthe in—plus some other more delightful substances—if you care to join us for a tipple in the Ashberry Suite? It’s hired out especially for the Decadents, actually. We go a long way back, sooooo … I bet you would like to see how the real movers and shakers of Oxford indulge themselves for once, wouldn’t you …” He paused, inviting Lucy to remind him of her name.

“We’ll be fine,” I said.

Terrence lodged his tongue between gums and top lip, scrunching and rubbing his nose, arrogantly advertising the mound of cocaine he’d been snorting in the toilets.

“Okay then, Eliot.”

“I can’t stand that dick,” I said bitterly once he had managed to stagger a few meters away. I could see Jack frowning and Ella nodding, halted on their return journey from the bar, as he regaled them with acidic pleasantries. “I mean, he’s such a
dick
. I can’t think of anything worse than sharing a drink with that gang of douches.”

“You’re silly,” said Lucy, the glow of the red wine beginning to spread across her cheeks. “You shouldn’t let things get to you so much.”

“Do you guys want to come over to the Ashberry Suite?” asked Ella, Jack following behind. “Apparently there’s loads of free booze up there, and to be honest I quite like the idea of scrounging stuff off Terrence!”

“Sure,” I replied. “Sounds good.”

“Are you serious?” said Lucy.

“Yeah, why not? Come on, it’ll be a laugh.” Lucy’s surprise was remote and understated, but the trace of disbelief
in her voice turned me defensive. “Lighten up. It’s a summer ball!”

Up in the Ashberry Suite, surrounded by private-school troubleshooters and eager female supplements, I proceeded to get fucked to such a degree that I was incontrovertibly fucked with Lucy and utterly bereft of any chance of getting fucked that night. The more I drank (torrents of emerald green flaming their way down my raspy throat) the soberer Lucy seemed to become.

“Why are you talking like that?” she asked, after I had been showing off to one of the junior lords, trying to act like I belonged in their company, while Lucy looked on, bemused and unsettled.

“Like what?”

“I dunno … like posh I guess. That wasn’t your normal voice just then.”

“Stop being so small-minded,” I spluttered, reaching for a glass of port from a side table. Ella and Jack looked on, like accidental intruders. “You just don’t get me.” Before Lucy could respond (signals of affront winding tight about her lips and cheekbones), Terrence pushed his way between us, wielding a pewter tray laced with lines of powder.

“Check out Guy Fawkes over here,” I said through a mouth that was no longer my own. It felt like there was an alien inside my body, using my eyes and my tongue, steering my limbs irresponsibly.

“Well, do you want in on the plot, liiiiike?” he said, offering Lucy first.

She didn’t even bother to muster a word. The sharp look of disgust was enough.

“Good sir?” he said, turning to me.

“Oh. Are you sure, mate?”

Terrence nodded, holding the tray out on one hand, the
other tucked behind his back like a butler, a demented smile transfixed on his face.

“Wow, thanks. That’s really kind of you.” I wasn’t exactly interested, but I was intensely flattered, the idea of coke being so bound in my head with the socialite scene I knew I’d never be a part of. I pressed one nostril in, like I’d seen in the movies, closed my eyes, and cleaned a line from bottom to top like a sinister Henry Hoover whose smile grows wider as he goes. Straightening up, I vigorously shook my head, desperate to reorganize my collapsing face. “You’re a legend, Terrence. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said, that shit-eating grin truly stuck. “We should all do our bit for charity when we can.”

“What?” Before I knew what had happened I was slumping into Jack and Ella, all the absinthe inside of me unleashing a sudden bout of voodoo. The scene had turned dunce and inane; double, double, toil and trouble. My face went like fag ash, my eyes popping Cheshire Cat balls. I lolled in Jack’s arms, head slopping on his shoulder, a veritable kicking k, as he dragged me like a first-aid practice dummy to the toilets. In the Gents he punted the cubicle door cop-raid drugs-bust style, lifted the seat (all amber bejeweled in splodgy cock nectar) with the end of his foot, and lowered his casualty onto the floor. He was in a war movie, dragging his bloodied best friend back into the trenches and begging him to hang on.

With a china wallop my gut unfolded and I heartily hurled, like there’d been a dead badger decomposing in my stomach all evening. Go on, let it all out. There, there, that’s it. (Infant memories of
keep it in the bowl, Eliot, keep it in the bowl
…) That’s it, let it all—I want to die—let it all out. There’s a good—

After many jolts and experimental maneuvers Jack got
me back into the ball. Things were dying down though—a few kids lying in the bushes and flower beds, pairs heading off hand in hand, the more hardcore still dancing—and I couldn’t find Lucy anywhere. I fell all the way up the stairs to my room and clumsily fed the keys into the lock, but it was already open. Inside I collapsed into a heap trying to remove my clothes, winding up on top of the bed with a shirt halfway over my head and trousers at my knees. A familiar form, neatly tucked in, stirred quietly beside me.

“Lucy?”

She didn’t reply, turning over so that her back was against me. I placed an arm around her, attempting to spoon but ending up more like knife and fork as she nudged me away. “Just go to sleep, Eliot.”

“Wanna get it on?”

“Sleep!”

I tried to protest, arguing that I wasn’t ready for bed yet, but I must’ve passed out mid-sentence.

We get ripped for cocktails and beers.

“She’s doing well for herself … as usual,” says Megan, looking over at Ella and her chat-up assailant.

Sanjay and Scott are laughing away with each other about something.

“Beer garden?” suggests Abi.

“Definitely,” says Jack, returned from the toilet and eager to get away from the spectacle of some chump hitting on Ella.

I wish I could turn to Jack, like I used to. It’s just not possible anymore. But when I broke up with Lucy, he was the first to know. I can still remember putting the phone down. We were no more. That’s what Lucy had become to me by
the time I started my second year: the voice at the end of the phone. Or, to be more accurate, the silence at the end of the phone. Either way I had terminated her with my delayed fingering of the red button. I had terminated us.

The summer itself had been okay, the regrets of the ball at its start so easily absorbed, young lovers trading daggers for roses in days, hours, minutes. It was all classic, in fact, until the very end of the vacation when Lucy was poised to start at the local uni. She assured me of the relative insignificance of this, citing how she was only going to be studying down the road and living at home anyway, yet I still found myself slumped on my bedroom floor with a notepad on my lap and an edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets spread across my knee, like it was about to take off, drafting an unnecessarily momentous letter. I had even borrowed a copy of
The Oxford Book of Love Poems
from the college library at the end of term in morbid anticipation of this difficult transition. It wasn’t a bill of separation or anything. Quite the opposite: I wanted to tell her how much I loved her and how I would do anything to keep us together now we’d both be at university (maybe some potent words of affection would divert her attentions from any prospecting lads during Freshers Week). But I couldn’t find a convincing manner for sublimating all this poetical material into a natural voice. If my degree was meant to provide me with any kind of transferable skills, applicable to everyday life, then surely it was for moments like this. The scrunched-up balls of paper accumulating around me like miniature, undeveloped brains suggested otherwise. Shakespeare just wouldn’t bend to my needs and I couldn’t integrate the anthology’s sentiments with my own feelings. In what was meant to be a spontaneous outpour of lover’s resolve and romantic declaration, I found myself
resenting Lucy more and more, as though my struggles with the pen were directly related to her unliterary mind. How was I ever meant to express my inner thoughts if she couldn’t even understand me? The blank page stared back. With twelve months of lofty knowledge and reading swirling about in my head, I couldn’t find a voice. I was silenced by quotations and styles not my own. Maybe it really was Lucy’s fault. I eventually discovered the answers, however, in the liner notes to a Luther Vandross record. Lucy said I was sweet when I earnestly handed her the letter (with my chick-flick face of bravery and heartache), but that I needn’t have bothered: we would see each other soon and she wasn’t at all worried.

And then this. What wonderful shapes we tug ourselves into when crying, wrested and wrenched from our sane center of gravity. I squirmed and flailed like an emo gymnast after that three-hour phone conversation where we confirmed our incompatibility. I couldn’t even do a traditional fetal position, clawing and grasping after nothing at all: a preposterous proposition; all arse over tit. And then I blew my nose, triggering and firing with full circus frivolity. How unfortunate it is, that moment which makes you want to laugh when all you want to do is cry. But comedy is never too far from tragedy, its awkward accomplice: yellow-stockinged Malvolio, distraught and abused.

I scraped myself up off the desk, surprised not to find a chalk outline of my mangled body, and began the short trip across the quad to Jack’s staircase. A gang of testosterone-troubled rowers was emerging from the college bar, decked in garish boatclub blazers and epilepsy-inducing ties. Insensitive to my private pain, they stumbled about the quad in drunken embraces.

“I fuckin love you, man.”

“You’re the greatest, bro.”

Dodging their assault course, head down, I reached Jack’s stairwell and traipsed the three floors up to his room.

“Errrr, alright mate?” he said, reluctantly opening the door. His cheeks were flushed and he was buttoning his trousers. He peered cautiously over at the bed, as if to ascertain that the coast was clear.

“Ah mate,” I said, stepping within.

His room was a mirror-image duplication of mine. There was the duvet crumpled into a mound on the bed, the dirty dishes and tea-stained mugs rocking about on the floor, and jumble-sale litterings of clothes, as though their irresponsible mannequins had all done runners.