‘It’ll just be like a student party,’ I said. ‘Lots of people in a house, someone crying on the stairs, someone being sick in the bedroom, lots of people we don’t know. You know.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Judy. ‘I haven’t been a student. I don’t go around with students. I don’t know enough about student parties to know whether I want to go to one or not. It’s just as well you’re here to help me with it, otherwise I might go out and have some fun or something.’
I don’t pretend to know everything about women. I know they like to go in clothes shops for hours picking up things they don’t like and saying how horrible they are. I once asked Spin about it and he shrugged.
‘That’s a shrug, chief,’ Darren said. ‘Easy one. No one understands women, not even women.’
I didn’t understand them. I understood Historic Peculiarities well enough to pass exams. If there had been an exam for understanding women my paper would have been returned with a cutting comment on it and I’d have been forced to retake it the following September. I knew that Judy was in a mood without needing to know anything else. There were clues. She kept putting things down forcefully. She answered questions with sharper questions. She’d mentioned not being a student. That helped. She thought that I was patronizing her by telling her what the party would be like. Add that to her bad mood – and I was usually careful not to add anything to her bad moods, they seemed to get along well enough by themselves – and that was enough.
‘We could go,’ I said. ‘If Jack’s going. I mean, it’s Friday night. It’s not as if we have to get up tomorrow.’
‘Yeah well, if it’s no trouble for you. I’d hate to put you out.’
Just then I wanted to put her out of the window of a moving train, but these tender moments are what makes a relationship special.
‘I’d love to go with you. When I was a student I didn’t go out with anyone like you.’
‘What, female?’
No, beset by inexplicable mood swings. I mean, come on. If I was stuck with a twenty-eight day cycle that sent me insane one week in four – I’m not a biologist, so I might have got some of the details wrong on this – and it started in early adolescence, then by the time I was twenty I think I might just have got the hang of it. I might think, hold on, he hasn’t stopped loving me after all. I might think, I know, I’ll just tell him what the problem is and that’ll be that. I might think, hold on, it’s three weeks since last time this happened, it’ll be menstruation, just like it was last month and the month before that and every other bloody month, and there’s nothing wrong.
Jack returned from the bar with drinks for himself. He’d got a pint and a short. I wanted a pint and a short, and I had half a pint. Judy was drinking gin and tonic.
That’s another thing. If I was female and heading towards the ovary-popping time of the month, I’d steer clear of gin.
Then again, I’ve had plenty of bad times on whisky, and I’ll still drink that if there’s any going.
‘You coming?’ Jack asked, downing his pint. ‘You’ll get in with me. You stick with me,’ he said, arranging himself around Judy and talking into her face from close range, ‘and we’ll be fine. I don’t know about this miserable git though. We might have to dump him somewhere.’
‘Yeah,’ said Judy. ‘What’s wrong with you tonight?’
She drained her gin and tonic and stood up. I followed her to the party, via the off-licence.
II
We got in with no trouble. The man who opened the door didn’t recognize us, but he didn’t live there and he didn’t give a fuck. I know this because he told me so. He told all three of us, one by one and then all together. He took my shoulder in his hand and told me from very close range.
I don’t know what he’d been drinking, but it wasn’t mouthwash.
I shrugged him onto Jack and went into the hall. Everyone was drunk and talking too loudly. A girl was crying on the stairs and another girl was comforting her by pointing out the pitfalls of all male humans. I seemed to be in a themed evening. Then, looking at the male humans in the immediate area, I saw that she had a point. Girls grow up and become women, boys become men but the growing up part gets left out. Some boys were dancing. Some were singing. Some were involved in competitions involving drinking. No one was winning.
‘They’re not worth it,’ said the girl on the stairs who wasn’t crying. The other one gathered herself and looked around. From where she was, halfway up the stairs, it must have seemed like Dandruff Central. I had thought that the long-haired look had died out with the end of grebo, that short-lived Midland sound that sounded exactly like the Midlands – industrial and stupid. I had been wrong. The hall was packed with leather jackets and straggling unwashed manes, ripped jeans and split boots. It was as though Marilyn Manson had been decanted into a kaleidoscope. From the horde came the smells of cider and patchouli. I didn’t see many tattoos. They weren’t well enough off to have tattoos.
Tattoos arrived, in the form of Jack.
‘Stone me,’ he said, ‘what’s this, fucking Donnington? What’s that fucking music?’
He went in search of it.
‘Are we going to have a drink?’ Judy asked me. I nodded. I had four cans of Supa Brew Ice Special and a bottle of the cheapest red wine. You have to take a bottle of the cheapest red wine to parties. Everyone does. It doesn’t matter whether it’s six hundred bikers in a clapped-out semi or a dinner party with minor royalty, it’s only polite.
I gave Judy a can of Supa and opened one myself. It tasted terrible. If it hadn’t had the alcoholic content of Dean Martin, it would have been undrinkable. It tasted so bad that you could forget what it was doing to your body. Supa comes in packs of four and costs less than either embrocation or lighter fluid, which come in packs of one. It isn’t advertised. It’s gained popularity through word of mouth. Which is strange, because once you’ve had a can or two, you can’t speak.
I’m not very good at drinking. I can drink as much as the next man, but I’ll fall over a long time before he does. I know my limits.
But I can’t stick to them. I recognize them as I see them receding into the distance far behind me. I’ve had one too many, I’ll think. Better have one or two more.
Then I start on the shorts.
We didn’t have any shorts with us, so once the cans were gone I unscrewed the wine bottle and swigged from that. Judy began to move in and out of my field of vision. So did everything else. The red wine stains became more widespread. I had them on my clothes. I had them on everyone else’s clothes. I found myself in the bathroom, with my forehead against the tiles above the bath. Someone had been sick in the bath. It wasn’t me. I had been sick in the sink. Remembering that, I was sick down the wall I was leaning against. I rested on the floor and listened to people knocking on the door. There was some very bad language. I was sick in the bath.
A chunk of the evening vanished.
I was on the stairs. There were more stairs than I remembered. I trod on a stair that wasn’t there and had a rest at the foot of the stairs for a while. A pair of men looking like the bastard offspring of a terrible union between