Noughties (9 page)

The music boomed from outside. It was brutal. It was violent. It was hard to concentrate.

“You touch it, you wash it.”

This one is trickier than his other riffs—more experimental in technique, the meaning more opaque. It doesn’t have the easy rhyme or associative imagery of “no splash, no gash,” or the transparent cause and effect of “no tissue, no issue.” For a start, the logic is problematic. Presumably the object of his expression (the “it”) changes—we are being asked to make a referential leap: he isn’t promoting genital cleansing (you touch your cock, you wash your cock). No, just clean hands (you touch your cock, you wash your hands). Yes, he wants us to wash our hands. Then there’s the awkward aural correspondence: the interplay between “touch” and “wash.” The half-rhyme jars, what with its
vowel shift and exchange of the hard “ch” for the wholesome “sh.” It lacks the deliberate barbed-wire knottiness of, say, a Wilfred Owen half-rhyme:

By this stage he’d got me thinking so hard (what with my first ever tutorial just five days away) that his slogans were useless.

“No moo-arny, no poo-narny.”

Essentially no money, no vagina. It folds under analysis.

I avoided washing my hands, and slugged back out into the club.

I entered a sea of hot-pants and high heels, miniskirts and makeup. Unstylish lads, double fisting (a bottle in each hand), cut horrific shapes on the dance floor and around the bars—dancing without due consideration for rhythm, time, or aesthetics. There was zero individualistic self-expression on display. Just confused particles banging about in a cell … a scrambling sickbowl of shifting shapes.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Lucy. She flittered in and out of my head, snagging on my mood and nicking that mysterious void behind the chest. We had cried when we said good-bye that morning, back home. I was heading off into the unknown, and I guess it was doubly unknown for her. “I’ll miss you,” she’d said as Mum and Dad sat waiting in the car (Mum clutching some anticipatory Kleenex), allowing us space to perform our couple’s duties; the momentous send-off like black-and-white lovers during wartime. “I don’t want to leave. This summer, with you,
has been so—” I paused as dewy tears fattened and rolled down her cheeks, clogging my throat. Her shoulders began to dance. “Hey, hey,” I’d said, pulling her in, in an attempt to suffocate the abandon that was threatening to undo us. “I love you, you know that?” “I love you … too.” I kept kissing her head, just above the temple where her fringe lay matted against salty skin. “I’ll see you next week, won’t I?” “Yes,” she said in a whisper that she’d never intended to sound so broken and hush. I think we were both surprised at just how much we cared. Love isn’t realized in its telling though, in its endless repetitions of three words, but in moments of doing, of happening. She was delicate in my arms, and I felt all the weight of an unexpected wish, sudden and instinctive, to gently break her into little bits and pack her up; take her away with me forever.

Trying to block all this out, I joined my new acquaintances at a booth. Most of us had been introduced in college at the welcome cocktails in Lecture Room V earlier that evening. There I had carefully begun to select my team, picking out potential mates, trying them on and designating their roles: Jack (the joker), Ella (the fit one), Abi (the dark horse), Megan (the quiet one), Scott (the butt of the joke), Sanjay (the even keel). Sorted. So many faces, so many hairdos, so many outfits, so many accents, so many stories. My stomach had been empty and my voice wobbly, my head working overtime with each person I met:
Are we going to kiss? Philia or eros?

This was nothing compared to the type of experience Rob claimed to have had during his Freshers Week just a couple of weeks prior to mine:

The music blared with deafening drumbeat and skin-stripping bass, the unfavorable conditions we favor for social engagement. I was trying to talk to Ella. She struck me as intimidatingly luscious (philia or eros?)—

“SO, WHEREABOUTS ARE YOU FROM?” she shouted.

“THE TOILET … YOU?”

“NAH, DON’T NEED IT.”

“WHAT’S YOUR SUBJECT?”

“YEAH.”

We took glugs from our special-offer mixers.

“DO YOU ALREADY KNOW ANYONE HERE, LIKE FROM SCHOOL?”

“NO—IS HE COOL?”

“ME NEITHER.”

My phone rumbled in my pocket. It was Lucy:

Sticking to my script, Jack was establishing himself as the joker of the group, miming lap dance in Megan’s face (eros or philia?) as he fidgeted his way into the booth.

“THE BLOKE IN THE TOILET,” he shouted through jester’s grin, “ ‘NO SOAP, NO GROPE,’ HE SAYS … SO I GIVE HIM 20P, GOT ALL LATHERED UP AND THAT, AND THEN HE WOULDN’T DROP HIS TROUSERS!… WHAT A RIP!” Frowns and polite giggles. “CAN I GET A GROPE OF YOU INSTEAD, ABI? MY HANDS ARE CLEAN AFTER ALL!”

“YOU’LL HAVE TO GET ME ON THE DANCE FLOOR FIRST … SHOW ME YOUR MOVES.”

“AFFIRMATIVE.”

We battled our way into the depths of the heaving mass. By default, everyone in this region was steaming drunk, including us. There was no other way we could bring ourselves to do it. The girls dropped their bags in a pile and we instinctively circled around, as though we had rehearsed the occasion over and again. The formation soon unraveled as we pranced about, sandwiching each other and pairing off. I was lodged tight between Ella and Megan while Jack skipped around us maniacally. Scott was waving a bottle in the air, pointing at imaginary targets; I clicked my fingers every now and then; Jack fondled whoever was nearest. None of us knew what to do with our hands.

Did I think how coarse my hands were, and consider them a very indifferent pair? I had certainly thought of being ashamed of them before (reading led me to it), and it had crossed my mind earlier that day, when my parents took me out for lunch at a café round the corner from college. We had just finished unloading my belongings into my first home away from home (that room so cold and unloving when I opened it, Mum instantly running around with a J-cloth and dustpan, yellow rubber-gloved hands scrubbing last year’s occupant clean from the sink). Dad treated me to a panini, a wedge of chocolate fudge cake and a pint of Coke, struggling to hide his own nerves more than I. As my greasy hands fed the panini into my mouth, I noticed that no other first-day students seemed to be dining with their parents. Perhaps they were all at real restaurants on the High, or maybe they had already left their folks, under way with forming friendship groups and establishing parts.

“The conversations that people must have in here, eh?” said Dad, looking around with reverence. He liked to believe that everyone in the city was associated with the
university in some way—the girl behind the counter a prizewinning poet, the
Big Issue
seller outside a respected philosopher. “And now it’ll be you having those conversations, son.”

Mum dabbed her eyes with a napkin. I was speechless.

Walking back to the car, Mum slipped me a tenner, as she always does, our little secret. We smiled mischievously and I mouthed thanks, Mum winking, code for
don’t tell your dad
. Desperation took hold when it came to the final good-byes, the car doors now open, ready to take my parents back home where I had been comfortable and content. Dad slipped me a twenty after our last embrace and told me not to tell Mum.

“Thanks, Dad.” I was beginning to sob.

And they would cry to me from the car, waving their hands:

—Good-bye, Eliot, good-bye!

—Good-bye, Eliot, good-bye!

But I hadn’t read that yet.

After a few tunes had dropped, our theatricality intensified, rising in confidence as the alcohol climbed to our heads and shook about, mixing my thirty-quid cranium cocktail. We oozed nightclub sewage, dripping with sweat, more and more items coming undone. I was doing the flatulent robot and Jack was performing the paraplegic pogo. It’s easier for girls, just wiggling and grinding, while we have to toil through our best health and safety hazards.

Jack hooked an arm round my neck and patted my chest. “Legend,” he shouted.

“Thanks a lot.” He wrapped me in a front-on hold and lifted me from the ground, the people around cautiously
moving aside. I guessed that we were now best friends.

Lucy was still trying to reach me from her distant night:

(The capital X is significant. Firstly, it’s singular. The standard x x says everything is dandy; all’s peace, love, and harmony. The shift to the single x is momentous: a signal of no small dissatisfaction. Secondly, it came in the capital form. This is really disconcerting. It’s like an aggressive (but wholly unerotic) kiss, or a rough, thin-lipped, push-away kiss.)

Ella backed into me and I found my right hand stealing furtively round her waist. She pressed her bum in and I pulled her tighter. She crushed my phone against my leg, smothering Lucy’s calls. We swayed and writhed, a split second off the beat. Jack grinned away as he swung and swiveled from Abi. The music steam-engined ahead.

“You know,” Ella shouted as I leaned my head in, “this song samples The Clash.”

“Sorry?”

“The Clash!”

“Yeah, I love them.”

Ella smiled over her shoulder, our bodies packed together. “The original is far superior.”

“Totally.”

“They’re such a seminal band, don’t you think?”

I was doing an esoteric form of the headless chicken behind her. “Oh yeah. Seminal. Course.”

“I always think—”

“Huh?”

She reached her hand over her shoulder, grasping me round the back of my head so that our faces were almost touching. “I was saying that Strummer’s voice is too unique to remove it for the sake of a sample. It’s like absenting the soul from the music.”

My moves were now fusing into the constipated otter.

“Absolutely.”

With her warm lips practically attached to my ear she added: “And don’t you reckon they’re so much better than the Pistols?”

“Yeah. It’s like a category error to even compare the two.”

She smiled appreciatively and refocused on her minimal dance routine.

Should I be doing this? Guilt squirms inside my arms, its back against me, slipping and sliding, bumping and grinding, and on and on, pulling along and along, splayed and sweating, heaving and purring, and on and on, our paratactical prance. And then more fluid with sultry swirl of linked hands at hips and goose-bumped ear to lips of cheek neck shoulder as I arc down to hold her: we enjamb.

Jack had pulled Abi. There he was, clinching her arse, her arms draped round his neck. Sloshing about they inspected each other’s gums and fixed one another’s root canals.

Ella turned to face me—we were dancing cheek by jowl.

Oh shit, is she lining me up? Lining me up for a tonguing?

I waved my head in the air Stevie Wonder–style, endeavoring to keep my lips away from her whirlpool mouth: that vortex of wet chamois and nibblers, of soft smells and lubrication. Her low-cut top framed a most grave discussion between my eyes and her breasts. There was a subtle streak of moisture tickling the purgatorial gap at their center—that no-man’s-land of taut skin and bone. Flashbacks of the summer with Lucy strobed through my head: picnics in the sun, hanging at the shopping center, evening trips to the cinema, bedroom snuggles with the door closed, our hotel rendezvous … She had told me to have fun, not to worry about her because she’d be round before I knew it anyway, and that she’d miss me muchly. Enjoy yourself and get settled in, she’d said.

We’re coming closer, the parameters more enabling, more forgiving. You’re drunk … maybe it
is
okay …

The music stopped.

The lights crashed on.

Our eyes dilated, flooded by harsh reality. Game over. We found ourselves in a pit of spilled toxins and enervated hormones, bottles and glasses strewn across its sticky base. Like wood lice exposed by an upturned slab, everyone scuttled away to the cloakroom or the exit. Ella and I pulled apart unawares, standing ruefully askance, peering at each other with dead-end curiosity. Soon we were stepping outside, our sweat clinging tight in sudden surprised coldness as it met the nighttime air.

As a group we had fallen together pretty sharpish, and once these things set they don’t change much. Ella and
Jack were the key players for me, and I identified them as such from the off. During Freshers Week I went for a couple of coffees with Ella and she scared me shitless with her boundless chat about books and my suspicion that she had made her way through Dr. Dylan Fletcher’s reading list at least twice over. She had already met Dylan for a drink and an informal chat about the forthcoming term. We exchanged films and albums, Ella lending me some Miles Davis records and a Fellini collection, politely accepting the first two seasons of
The Sopranos
in return. For some reason, I never told Lucy about any of the time I spent with Ella. As for Jack, well, he had already vomited in my bedroom sink by the end of the first week. We were that tight. I remember hanging with the lads one night and Jack gallantly suggesting that Ella might be the prettiest girl in our circle: “Ella’s blatantly the fittest bird.” Everyone concurred (although it was clear that Sanjay had a hankering for Megan, despite Mike, her boyfriend from Warwick Uni, hanging around all the time), yet I felt too guilty to say anything … as though an admission on my part would be a direct betrayal of Lucy (whom I had been texting nonstop) and would somehow reach her.

The hangover from Freshers Week had just about dissipated when Ella approached me by the memorial bench and the large terra-cotta plant pots at the tip of the quadrangle’s untouchable grass, so that we could walk to our first tutorial together. There was an inquiring slant to her head as she held a clutch of books and a refill pad against her chest. The warm light of tutors’ rooms and first-year dorms glowed all around us. It was late afternoon, already dark, smoky and crisp.