There was a soirée at Kitty's. I'm not drinking in November so I looked with envy at the brandy and cava cocktails that she topped up endlessly. Wendy was there, in that lovely dress she wore at my New Year's Eve party. Her irritating young daughter was there, tugging at both her dress and her attention.
Me and Kitty's daughter, a much older seeming ten-year-old, got on like on a house on fire. I leant against the wall, talking to her, twirling the cranberry juice in my glass and the mdma in my head. I hurdled an irritating moment in which I had to banish thoughts I hadn't even had: how it might look to others. After that we just chatted in a playful, encouraging, occasionally pisstaking way.
Wendy's boyfriend turned up. I was expecting an older man in Gene Vincent leather, a prickly, socially inept rock relic; in fact we got a bejumpered humanities lecturer for whom clothes matter as little as much they do matter to Wendy. He was being polite and generous, but he was too interested, interrogating me about a show I did a few years ago, about which he said "I've heard so much." It was an effort to talk about something I did in the past. I don't know or care whether it was any good or not. It was physically exhilarating to perform it, and there were a couple of people who came up afterwards and told me about metaphors they'd found in it for events in their own lives, in ways I couldn't imagine -- which is all the feedback I ever want.
Wendy's daughter achieved her aim of dragging them away from the party. Wendy, "loved-up", as we used to describe that glossy-eyed wave of empathy that mdma gives you, looked at me as she left. We said nothing. Lovely dress. My splayed wide-fingered open hands would love to slowly stroke down from your shoulders to your waist. You dance really well. I want to dance with you. Hope you can come to my New Year's Eve do. But not your husband, please.
Melissa is getting married next year. She told a funny story about her false eyelashes lifting off as she interviewed someone at the high-heel central where she works, and announced that her hen night is to be at Funny Girls in Blackpool. Kitty wasn't keen at all, expressing it in her face and speech, knowing that she'd have to go. I wanted to kiss her in sympathy for having to spend an evening in the pink-hatted nadir of conservative female solidarity.
Trina's been on for a while about wanting to try some acid, so we planned yesterday daytime for it. She arrived with a bag of coal and I had all the wood offcuts from my neighbours. She had a quarter of a blotter and I had the same small amount myself just in case I had to talk her down from thinking that her eyes had turned into spiders.
We sat watching the fire and got a bit giggly, silly wordplay. She said that she thought often about the word "from" so we looked it up in the SOED, and I read out its etymology. My attempts to get her to watch the whole of the 1981 Eurovision Song Contest, hoping she'd last an hour into it to see the ripping velcro skirts of Bucks Fizz, didn't work, so after a few songs at the beginning we reverted back to a more shared soundtrack of house music. After a bit of dancing I suggested a change of scene, so we went down the pub.
Everything is comic, the man with the moustache who looks trendy by day and ludicrous by acid, (and how silly I must look, with my tweedy Grandad-chic charity shop style?) I talked with some difficulty with a kind bloke who is down there every day with his timid, black-clad son who finds disabled solace in lists and Doctor Who. I'm giddy and want to retire to Trina. Once settled, I am at ease, and set my looks around the pub, returning the looked understandings that are the mark of close pub life. "That woman," I say to Trina, "is seventy years old." She's a foxy woman I've mentioned before on here. The other day, in another pub, she was leaving with her friends. As she left she passed me and looked at me and said "Oh, hello. Why are you sat on your own?" "Because you're still married," I said.
The overhearing man at the next table turns to us and says "it's nice to hear laughter," but from that promising start bores us one-sidedly about his old engineering job in Holland and how he thinks he's over the hill. Here we go, we've got a sympathy seeker. I jump into a gap in his monologue and turn to Trina and talk made-up diary rubbish to her, in order to get rid of him. After what must be an unbearable couple of minutes for him, in which he is not the centre of attraction, he gets up to leave and apologises for butting in. He'd do exactly the same again.
Trina didn't want to go back to her narrowboat, and I said "No, no, no, don't worry, you can sleep here." I couldn't chuck her out at the tail end of a trip. We spooned and my cock got a bit harder for a few minutes, but then I turned the other way to think about Donna and Kim. The other day she suggested by text that in case we didn't meet anyone else we could have sex with each other. I didn't reply. I couldn't possibly do that with her.