We did the lines and then we stood up and straightened ourselves out and then we left. Molly was pouring bolognese onto two perfect nests of spaghetti as we passed. There was a man’s shoe poking out from the kitchen table, but the door hid the leg and the body and the face. ‘Who is it?’ I asked Lilah, as we walked down the street, waiting to feel cold through the vodka but staying cosy in its warmth. She shrugged. ‘James, I guess. Someone boring like that.’ To Lilah, anyone without beauty or wealth was boring. It made me cross with her but it also made me feel relieved, because I knew that she couldn’t see the real wonder of Fitz and so he was safely mine.
The streetlights had been starting to come on as the sky turned darker grey, little globes of orange glowing along the long street. I took poppers from my pocket and offered them to Lilah. She shook her head. ‘God, no. What are you – sixteen? You’ll be sick …’ I laughed and put them to my nose anyway. The rest of the road rushed by in a warm lurch, lights brighter and cheeks warm, Lilah chattering away about everything and nothing.
I could feel the bass throbbing through the pavement as we walked up the drive, beating up through my feet and into my heart, leaving me short of breath and anxiously happy. The door was open and we stepped through into the dark. All of the light bulbs had been swapped for the coloured ones you could get in the pound shop, red in the hall. The walls had been covered with giant sheets of plain white paper, which people were already scrawling messages across.
We headed naturally for the kitchen, the place where everybody begins and ends a party. It was bustling busy, people perching on worktops and crowded around talking and reaching for things and filling glasses. The light bulb in the kitchen was green, everything and everybody suddenly seeming as if they were under water. I was already high and happy and didn’t want anything bringing me down, so I floated through without stopping, smiling at people and feeling the music rolling around my head. Alice was at the far end of the kitchen table, crotch glowing in the green light, and she jumped up excitedly and pulled me into her arms, showing me off to the rest of the table, like I was her pet, and then slipped a pill into my hand and danced off.
When we had gone into the lounge the light was dark blue, and people were dancing in a little clot in front of the decks. We danced in the blue dark for a while and I could feel my eyes starting to roll back behind my lids so I took Lilah’s hand and we sat down on the sofa. She was drinking wine slowly from the bottle, watching nobody in particular, and she ran her long fingers through my hair sending shivers over my rushing skin, tight and tiny pearls. My face and my mouth were dry and hot. The beat was pounding in my ears and I couldn’t breathe, like the darkest blue was shrinking in on me and the beat was growing and growing until it would crash down and cover me like a wave. Around me people were changing, shimmering gold glasses appearing over eyes and disappearing again, strange masks looming out of dark corners, faces melting into screams. I closed my eyes but the darkness sent me spinning. I stood, and the carpet lurched underneath me as I hurried out into the angry red of the hall and then into the toilet. I had to peel away a corner of white paper to get into it, and when I shut the door behind me, I could hear squeaky pens scribbling and scrawling messages on the inside of my skull.
The light was a normal greenish yellow in there, and I thought somewhere far inside my head that Alice must have run out of colours. I looked at my face in the mirror. My eyes were black and my skin was greenish yellow too, disappearing into the reflection of the walls and the door. My hair had come loose from its knot and was sticking to my scalp and cheeks like straw, falling limply down on my shoulders, and I pushed it and pulled it, disgusted. The bass pulsed through the door and in my veins, and as I pulled and tugged faster and faster at my hair and face my image blurred in the glass and the light seemed to shiver in its socket. I scraped my hair back and tied it with the band I kept round my wrist, but it was no good. I looked on the shelves and I found a tiny pair of nail scissors and I got hold of the ponytail between my fingers and hacked clean through it, the soft sound of the scissors snipping echoing around me in the pale light. Bleached clumps of fluffy hair fell into the sink like feathers. The sober me was stirring in the back of my head, panicking and fluttering anxiously, but I ignored her, shoved her back down. I left the hair feathers in the sink and pulled the band out so that my hair splayed around me, rough and uneven, and looked at my face for a long time until it stopped being my own and then I went back into the party. I went upstairs where the light was pink, and silvery strains of techno were spilling out and I did not look back.
I sat at my desk, still pulling at the new short chunks of my hair, the sketchbooks lying forgotten around me. I wondered, for the first time since I’d remembered cutting it, what it looked like but I didn’t get up to check. I sat, and I waited for Fitz to wake up.
There are places and rooms where everything can be taken away from you; words and thoughts and strength, until you are a child again, small and adrift. You feel invisible and caught in the headlights all at once. The things you have tried to build up around yourself, the things people have said you can be, fade away in the shadows of others around you. At school you are instantly comparable, instantly assessable. There are suddenly other players in the game you play with yourself.
I looked around the room but there was nothing to see except the tops of bowed heads as people pored over their work, scribbling notes on sketches and leafing through pages torn from magazines, scraps of fabric and glossy photographs. I rolled a pencil slowly back and forth along the table enjoying the dull clatter it made each way. The tutor, John, sat in a chair by the window playing on his phone. He was young, with blondish curls and an earnest enthusiasm for most things. If he’d had a tail, it would always wag. On the board behind him, he’d cheerfully scrawled the number ‘14’ in scarlet. This was the number of days we had left to work on our final pieces, weekends not included, and it glowed against the bright white of the board. The degree show hadn’t meant anything to me when I’d first begun, not like the others, the serious ones like Millie, who’d tagged along to the show each year even though we didn’t have to, making notes and talking to the students who were graduating. But now, with the red numbers on the wall and the feverish energy around the silent room, I felt the pangs of real panic rise. I looked down at the blank page in front of me, and I wondered how I’d ever thought I could do this.
I’m too old to be a student. I’m miles older than everyone else.
He bounces onto the sofa next to me. Don’t be silly, he says, rubbing my back. Only a couple of years. Bet you nobody even knows if you haven’t told them.
I know, though, don’t I?
He ruffles my hair. You’ve come this far, babe. You’re brilliant, Saf. You’re gonna knock their socks off.
You think so?
I know so. Now give us a cuddle.
With my eyes closed, I could see him so clearly and feel his arms around me. But I knew if I tried to open my eyes and draw, he’d disappear like steam, float away out of reach and be gone. With my eyes closed, everything was in its place in my head, the ground was still and the desk was in front of me. I knew if I opened them the buzzing in my head would get louder and everything would start to spin out of control and away from me.
John had got up and was pacing slowly around the room, offering his services, which seemed primarily to be the aforementioned enthusiasm. He stopped to talk to Grant, two seats away.
‘So how will the videos work in the show? You don’t have masses of space, you know.’
‘I’ve got three little plasmas from Hardy’s downtown, on loan. They’ve said they’ll fit them as well. I want them in a diagonal, you know, left to right.’
‘Great, yes.’
‘And I’m adding in this footage, the CCTV, see?’