The rain grows confident, slicing at the night like scratches on film print. Nevertheless, I’m overdressed, judging from the rest of Hell’s queue. A Goth girl in front of us wears black hotpants and those big Herman Munster shoes. Two queens behind expose a collective four nipples and ten inches of underpants.
‘I’m not sure it’s my kind of place,’ Mariana confesses.
‘No?’ It hardly looks like my kind of place either.
It’s just the two of us at the moment. Aaron’s meeting his contact, Big Ralph, in the pool hall under Centre Point and will join us once he’s scored some ecstasy made with ninety-eight percent talcum powder. He’ll then spend the next two hours telling me he loves me and chewing his tongue into new shapes.
‘I don’t know. Look, Lucas, I’m in New York next week so I won’t see you at Syngestia but maybe we could do something this weekend? A coffee? How about it?’ Mariana’s near-permanent look of satirical disinterest has slackened from her features, replaced by something unreadable, expectant.
My phone bleeps another voicemail reminder. I haven’t listened to the backlog of messages yet, but I can imagine the gist. My father’s still dead.
‘Who keeps calling you?’
‘It might be my mother, wanting to know when I’m going down to Becksmouth.’
She takes my arm and pulls herself against me with unladylike strength. ‘Why don’t you go see her tomorrow? We can have that coffee another time.’
The queue jerks forward as Hell’s doors digest another reveller. A pair of self-conscious bouncers, incongruously attired with toy tridents and little red horns atop bald pates, still manage to be intimidating and look upon us all as potential terrorists.
‘Honey,’ she says, ‘why didn’t you tell me your father died?’
I don my griever’s hat. ‘I don’t like to talk about it.’
‘I don’t wish to pry Lucas, but…’ Her hands rest on my hips. ‘Look, everyone has their ways of coping, I understand that, it’s just … maybe your mom needs some comforting. She obviously wants you to go back home. Why on earth did you come into work today?’
When I fail to come up with an answer she cups my chin – for a moment I think she’s about to kiss me – before asking, ‘Are you alright, Lucas?’
‘Of course.’
Her mouth hardens. Such indifference over familial death, Mariana’s thinking, can’t be real. Such shameless apathy. It must be a front.
She just asks me, straight off. ‘How did he die?’
I tell her the truth.
Even under the glare of Hell’s neon lettering, I see her face blanch. She stumbles slightly, stepping back from me, and her stilettos lose the kerb. A taxi slices past, fractionally missing her faltering frame, and the driver hollers an expletive through his yawning window. ‘Right, well, I’ll, um, see you Sunday then. Maybe?’ Over her shoulder, Aaron splashes towards us.
‘Hey! You can’t go!’ he tells Mariana. ‘It’s gonna be an awesome night!’
She stiffly puts out her hand. ‘It was nice to meet you,’ she says.
Aaron adopts the stoop of an Edwardian gent, plucks up her fingers with his right hand, his left hooked behind his back, and gives her hand a valedictory lick from fingertip to wrist, cackling roguishly. Mariana doesn’t even pretend to be charmed.
‘Look after Lucas,’ she whispers, within my earshot.
She waves a flustered adieu to the pair of us and evaporates into the night as our queue moves forward. Aaron and I both try to pick her out amongst the tumbling, wankered strides of Soho’s fashionistas, but she’s gone.
‘You alright?’ he asks.
I really wish people would stop asking me that.
The underworld’s not so bad once you’re in. Hell’s owners have realised that the gimmicky, Dante-esque theme can only be stretched so far and, apart from the red, oesophageal entrance corridor and the trident-bearing bouncers, the nightclub’s relatively pretension-free. More than a few clubbers have come, perhaps naturally enough, in fetish gear and are standing with their backs to the wall, looking at the rest of us as though we’re the ones in the wrong place.
Aaron weaves back from the bar with two bottles of water. He claps an arm around my neck to support himself and I can almost see the possessive entity that is MDMA threatening to bulge out through his eyes, his hungry hands, his clenching jaw.
‘Great, aren’t they?’ he gurns.
I nod, stick my thumbs up, and when he palms me another pill I conceal it in my back pocket with the others.
In his defence, he thinks he’s taking care of me, that he’s lightening my night. He assumes going chemically and loudly off the rails would be anyone’s normal reaction to the death of a parent. I swim with him to the toilets.
Another rush hits Aaron and he retches in the sink before presenting his parboiled face to the mirror. He laughs when he sees his reflection, which takes some doing now his eyes no longer follow a conventional, united trajectory. He sports the pinpricked pupils of a bilious crack-whore.
‘God, I’m beautiful,’ Aaron humbly announces.
I find nothing so entertaining about my countenance: it’s exactly the same mug I see each time I look, showing more stubble than usual, looking slightly less fresh. My hair’s as blonde as it was when I last looked, my irises as green. Few laughter lines are evident at the squint of my eyes; I haven’t laughed this evening.
Aaron lunges at me. ‘My bestest, bestest friend… Who’d have thought it, eh? How far we’ve come since those old days.’ Hands cup the back of my head, Mafioso-style. ‘You and me have been through some crazy shit, haven’t we? I still remember that night, like it was yesterday, mopping up the blood as your dad waited for the ambulance, helping him to…’
‘You’re wasted,’ I tell him.
Some bloke with flinted eyes and sliced brows enters the toilet. He’s balding, wears a Ben Sherman he probably bought a decade ago and has an overloaded parsnip of cannabis clamped in his crooked sneer. I wish the government would hurry up and introduce this smoking ban they’ve been talking about for years.
I take my cue to duck into a cubicle and drop the three pills Aaron’s now given me down the toilet then, just to confirm my mother’s number, access my missed calls list. She’s there, but she’s not the most recent caller.
Maybe it’s Mariana. She did look extraordinarily flustered when she left. Maybe I shouldn’t have told her the truth: that I’ve absolutely no idea how my own father died. Perhaps that is a bit odd.
Suddenly I’m curious. How did my father – hardly an old man and, it would seem, in rude health – come to breathe his last? My mother, her usual non-communicative self, didn’t even mention a cause of death. And I was too fazed to ask.
I ring the number. It tolls once then an automated response kicks in.
‘Welcome to Sinton Hospital. Our offices are open between nine am and eight pm, seven days a week. Please call back during those times and quote the extension you require.’
None the wiser, I hang up.
I find Aaron on the dance floor, wetting a teenage girl’s tongue with his own. Presumably she gave him permission. Here we are again. Another Friday night.
When I was Aaron’s girl’s age, dancing like I hadn’t yet worked out the jut of my own elbows, I assumed older people were jealous of my youth. Only recently, having discovered everybody looks down on those younger than themselves, have I been able to regard my own spotty adolescence as one might watch the growth of an unremarkable biological specimen. I developed as expected, the usual spurts and inflammations of commonplace experience. A confidence the older generation knew as arrogance, a fast-honed sarcasm masquerading as intellect, an indolence borne out of having the rest of time itself in which to graze.
From time to time I wonder about those acquaintances from my college years. Do they spend their weekends like this? Is Marcus in The Two Sawyers, still trying to drink that yard of ale? Does Sarah trawl summer seafronts in search of French exchange students for her ‘snogathon’? It’s possible. Two generations ago, almost everybody had children by the time they were my age, but this hedonism seems to be how people are expected to spend their extra years of teenagehood.
Staring at the forest of spasmodically bobbing dancers, it occurs to me that I used to enjoy nights like this. Tonight, my bones swell with something that might be longing, or grief, or both. Shot through with fatigue, the vision of an innocent Petri slide-cum-pint of bitter floats back to me. My hands shake. My eyes feel dry. The autonomic defence mechanism we’ve labelled pain, without which no species on Earth could survive, is trying to tell me something.
Will this Cold Turkey never leave me?
Pressing through the smoking jailbaits and gimps, the slurred and swinging lights, I wonder about Mariana. By my estimation, she’s only a year or two older than me. Where is she? In the bath with a book? At a sensible friend’s house, watching a movie?
As I make to head for the exit, someone tugs at my sleeve.
‘My jaw hurts and my throat tastes like an ashtray.’ Aaron’s wobbling, staring at me as though I might be someone he knows. I watch him fish a receipt out of his back pocket, Hell the headline, for an undetermined sum that causes him to wince. He stows it in his wallet and wanders off to join the cloakroom crocodile for the jacket he’s still wearing.
I steer him towards street level, arm firmly around lean and leathered shoulders.
‘Come on, Casanova. I’m putting you on the night bus.’
‘Where are you going?’
Outside, it no longer rains, but neon is reflected in deep and shuddering puddles as we squelch our way to the nearest stop.
‘A place I used to call home.’