It was Gloria’s birthday and someone had a bottle of poppers. We were dismissive, recalling teenage headaches, but passed it around, sniffing between swigs from bottles of pink fizzy wine.
Meg was wearing tiny shorts, a halter-neck top and Lolita sunglasses, and had one foot hooked around her boyfriend’s thigh, although her body was pointing away. Someone in a full suit too hot for the weather came up and asked if he could take her picture. ‘It’s for a street-style website.’ She gave an exasperated look, then complied, posing expertly.
A group of parents and pushchairs walked by, an alien species, and Meg said to act normal. ‘But I don’t want to be normal,’ said Gloria. She was wearing a bright turquoise jumpsuit. Meg smeared the honey we were using to mix sickly cocktails over her slender ankle, above her cork wedge shoes, and ants began to crawl onto her. We tipsily watched the tiny animals rush to their sugary doom as Gloria blew bubbles from a bottle. Someone said it was cruel but Meg insisted the insects were having fun. She was so beautiful and I wanted to shake her.
The trips to the off-licence grew more frequent, the shrieks louder, and the poppers were passed around. Someone, it might have been me, dropped the bottle and the contents spilled onto the rainbow blanket. We all dashed to the wet spot, heads down, gasping in the fabric, snorting and squealing, like pigs at the trough, breasts down, ankles up. It was stupid and pitiable and fun, as I breathed in the solvent, rolled onto my back and looked at the sky. As the horizon tipped I was covered with warm light and flying with my friends, limbs and sun cream and honey and ants, all sticky and sweet, and the sun was blinding me, and I had never been so high.
The sun lowered. The crowd gathered and tightened; flexed ankles met listless wrists and hands holding cigarettes. There were shaded glances down on the grass and drunken daydreams somewhere up there where the aeroplane vapour trails crossed. My bare toe touched his weekend stubble. I notice his bruised shoulder and felt my pulsing ambition.
Later, at the warehouse party, I’d lost the others but I didn’t mind being alone. Hair twisted high and tight, in my long dress, with my drink and the drum beat, I was so far above. I was becoming more and more myself, white shoulders and red mouth flashing through the crowd, a plume of smoke hand-flicked and rising.
I saw the occasional familiar face and liked the feeling of knowing people. Everyone there had something that they ‘did’ – making music, running a nightclub, designing clothes – but was not yet making a living from it. We all thought we would be running things in five years.
A gang of art-school graduates, nearing thirty, lived in that converted warehouse, sleeping in garden sheds and using the rest of the high-ceilinged space to make music videos and experimental films. Over pre-disco drinks, they were competitively critical. Clubs were over soon after they opened but when they closed down were remembered with glowing nostalgia. Finding fault marked refined taste and superior experience.
The warehouse was used as a ‘cool-party’ location for films, making the landlord feel he could raise the rent, forcing the inhabitants out, meaning it was no longer the place for cool parties. This was a party to celebrate moving out. There were so many celebrations. A visitor from Scandinavia wondered just where he had found himself and why the hell everyone was drinking so much. ‘You can’t be dancing all the time,’ he said, and I didn’t understand.
Then I was out on the pavement alone, walking – with my jacket hooked over my arm and a bottle of beer – enjoying the night air on my bare skin. I was wasted but I wanted more. I wanted to rub the city onto my skin; I wanted to inhale the streets. I was walking faster, in worn-down boots, than the buses were travelling. The drugs I’d swallowed earlier made my breath fast and my cheeks tingle. Biting my mouth, I wanted to eat it all. There was heat in my face and lips and nipples and clitoris. I flicked open my cigarette box and went in again with the flash of the lighter and the quenching mouthful of drink. I could feel it entering, breathing deeply so the bubbles of oxygen processed the alcohol more quickly, sucking the smoke and holding my breath, squeezing each moment.
I had been walking through the city for so long that I didn’t know where I was. I’d walk towards any light, towards the highest point. I wanted to reach up above the buildings, following the part of me that needed cliffs, and the air to be clearer.
* * *
When I made it home I lay on my bed with the window open. There was some wine left and I listened to sad songs and looked at uninhabited Orkney islands on Wikipedia. The night air was still warm, my hair was smoky and my skin dirty. I could hear bins crashing – the late-night takeaway packing up – and drunk people getting off buses.
Outside the flat there were raised train tracks and a smoggy crossroads. When cars with powerful speakers stopped at the red lights, the whole building vibrated in time with the bass. Although the sea was a hundred miles away, and some kids in the area had never seen it, there were seagulls hustling around. I once saw one carrying a segment of Terry’s Chocolate Orange.
My bedroom, at the back of the house, overlooked the beer garden of one of the most notorious pubs in Hackney, which gained its fame by being open late at night after the clubs had closed, sheltering gangsters and alcoholics. Its reputation made it popular with the new waves of twenty-somethings who had moved into the area, into flats – ex-council, above shops – which, first, the Cockney families had left and now some of the Bengalis, too, looking for better things further east where London turns into Essex.
That night the pub held its weekly karaoke, the full-hearted, badly tuned versions of ‘Mustang Sally’ and ‘My Way’ infesting my sleep. Some were doing it mockingly, some seriously, but they were all so drunk that the difference did not matter. The wails drifted up into my room and mixed with the laughter and arguments from the beer garden, which lacked any soil or plant life and offered only ashtrays and umbrellas advertising lager.
The sky blended downwards from black to blue to orange. The neighbours’ fridge must have been broken: they were storing their tonic water and meat on the windowsill. The new offices across the road were fully lit, yet empty. A factory, with a chimney of forgotten purpose, now housed art students, turning out their bedroom lamps and closing their laptops – one hundred wireless networks password protected, one thousand humans in an acre holding their wallets close to their genitals.
In the morning I could tell what time it was by the traffic noise. I could hear the call to prayer from the mosque. When my alarm clock rang for a few seconds I was rootless, without body or mind, but I didn’t panic in those moments before realisation.
The residents of my rented flat kept changing and it was hard to remember who was living there and what jobs they had, if any. Lately, there seemed to be more people around in the daytime, and envelopes from Hackney Revenues & Benefits Service were pushed through the letterbox along with the unpaid bills. London is where you come to meet your match. People who were the coolest at their provincial disco or the cleverest in their school class are out-styled and outsmarted. Given a few titbits, like an internship or a good party weekend, they decide to make the move. We chose uncertainty and overcrowding with a possibility of success and excitement.
One flatmate was a musician who worked in a bar and, on the rare times I bumped into him in the kitchen, shared morsels of good news, like an email from a potential manager, but it was hard to tell the fairy godmothers from the sharks. The goddess on the dance-floor in a Cleopatra wig and a bikini put on her glasses the next morning and sat in Reception at an insurance company, browsing the internet. A stripper ran a techno club on her night off. I was temping in the parking department of a borough council on the other side of the city, writing record reviews on documents hidden under my spreadsheets.
The Afghan shopkeeper downstairs was the only person who had anywhere near an idea how much I drank. As evenings and months progressed, my trips grew more frequent into the shop where the light through the window