Noughties (20 page)

Do you ever wake in the night, to fetch a glimpse of the abyss?

I’m in one of those clothes shops. You know, the ones where everything is built slightly too small, slightly too tight. It’s called “Other,” or some such nonsense, a hot mess of check, Burberry, tartan, and dayglo. Low-cut tops and
skinny jeans for your metro scenester, simple tees and pumps for the middle-aged tragedy. The male shop assistants have designer stubble diarrheaed all over their pimply mugs and lightning fringes prepped by girlfriend’s/sister’s/mum’s hair straighteners. It’s all rather scene.

So I’m in one of those clothes shops: a teenager with his bag-laden mum (footing the bill) holds a luminous yellow shirt up against himself, the design of a tropical lizard’s guts chundered all over the front; a semi-beefcake winces his way unnaturally toward the mirrors in some testicle-squelching skinny jeans, trying to convince himself that they look
stylish
; runts with fancy scarves and pointy shoes clog the aisles, picking up items and putting them down in the wrong places.

I’m in a changing cubicle, trying on a paisley shirt, going for the retro mod look, though I’m not quite feeling it. I adopt different facial expressions (a smile, a pout, a brood) to see if it makes any difference. I talk to myself, feigning conversation, to see how well I’d socialize in it. Bell-end. I fold my arms. I put my hands in my pockets. I turn and look over my shoulder from behind. I do a little dance to see how it would hold up in a club. Not bad. Tucked or untucked? I opt for the former. I test it buttoned to the top and then buttoned a few down to show off the chest hair. Then I start
really
undoing it to see how well it—

I am confronted by a nightmare myriad of mes. The eight cubicles forming a square around me are all open and empty, baring their glass insides. Each mirror catches a reflection of my reflection, refracting me into disarray, an infinite prism of images. Eliot-to-the-power-of
-n
, but utterly powerless.

The now familiar pram glides in beside me … I watch its approach in the mirror. I can see the baby’s face getting closer, magnifying in front of my very eyes. I want to ignore it … make it go away. I ram my fingers into my
ears as it starts to talk, and go, “La-la-la-la-la. La-la-la-la-la. La— can I get

“Won’t you leave me

alone?

I don’t understand what

I?”

A troubling sense of jubilance comes over me. I feel ecstatic in a profoundly muddling way, captivated by the recurring image. And then I begin to notice more changes in the babe’s appearance. The face is getting fatter, the hair less consistent, and patches of scattered stubble are starting to pierce through the nicked skin. He’s morphing into something altogether other. A hole burns its way through the white blanket that is wrapped around his paunch. Beneath this I catch a glimpse of a deep, complicated purple.

That’s easy for

No. Not all.

What’s happening to you?”

We watch each other in silence, slowly fading into the end credits of awakening.

I think Ella’s pissed.

The girls got well hooked on those shots and kept going back for more. Now they’re dragging us onto the makeshift dance floor for our cardiovascular warm-up.

It’s like Milton’s hell around here, minus the artfulness: groaning limbs and moaning throbs, sliding all over each other in abject toil. It’s as stifling as a morning hug from your grandma. The music has been raised to new heights of senselessness—beyond perception and out of reach. It shuffles and swells, operating on a wavelength hostile to our fuzzy antennae.

There are some bastards in the middle dancing with flair, busting out panache. They’re actually impressive. We turn our backs on them. No one wants to see that.

A reveling clown, all arms and legs, slops some of his J.D. and Coke down my back as our prancing bodies collide. He hasn’t even noticed and continues on with his rhythmic convulsions, those tribal dances of time immemorial. I arch my back and shift fitfully, waiting for the spillage to be neutralized by lashings of spinal sweat. Careening round to locate the root of my discomfort, I spot Ella with that stylish player from before; the one who
was giving her the “oi oi love” when we first got here. She appears trapped, politely dancing but wanting to escape. She’s alone in a crowd of rampant male attention, wriggling for invasive eyes.

Her pursuer puts his hands on her hips and she brushes them away. Ella seems to give me a pleading glimmer. And then he starts kissing her neck. I’m not having this.

“Do you wanna fuck off?” I say to him, squaring up while Ella steps aside.

“Huh?”

“I said, do you wanna fuck off?”

“I can’t hear you, boss.”

This is kind of embarrassing … really takes the wind out of my bravado.

“I said you’re a cunt.” He’ll be glad he can’t hear that one.

“Oh yeah? The fuck you gonna do, pretty boy?” Oh Christ … selective hearing. Good question too, if we’re being honest. I hadn’t really thought that far ahead and, frankly, I’m new at this.

Ella’s looking at me with troubled eyes, so I full-fist the guy in the ear.

Now, I went for the ear because I’m not totally committed. I figured the jaw would be too dangerous (can’t that kill someone if luck isn’t swinging your way?), and the nose would’ve just felt gross—all bony and crunchy. No, the ear was a good place to start: it’s inoffensive but it stings. I can tell it hurt too, because he’s now proceeding to nut me.
Thwack
.

My head is tasting all sorts of colors and special effects … the memory of the only other fight I’ve ever been in rushes to the fore:
“So let me get this straight,” the policeman had said, post-ruckus: “The big yellow banana was
acting as peacemaker when the assailant head-butted the tomato, provoking the giant pineapple to square up to the assailant?”

We nodded
.

“And then the melon throws a punch?”

“That’s correct.”

“Right …”

It all began when we were standing at a kebab van—those ubiquitous chariots of the student-framed nightscape—in the orange crush early hours, binged on booze (again), looking for the illogical conclusion to our night. A banana, a pineapple, a melon, a tomato, and a pair of strawberries. We’d been at a food-themed fancy dress party and constituted a cartoon hamper, dressed in full body suits. I was the banana
.

Beer-bloated bellies yapped “FEED ME” to the dissonant tune of drunken self-certainty
.

Alliances form swiftly in kebab van culture, and we had wasted no time in fully committing to Abdul’s on the High. Fidelity is so evanescent in this day and age, you have to take a stand
.

“How are you, my friend?” asked Abdul. It’s impossible to envy him his task, dealing exclusively as he does with slurring nocturnals
.

“Ten on ten, mate, ten on ten.”

“Chips cheese hummus?”

He had my order by heart—already. It still brings a tear to my eye every time
.

“You know it.”

Abdul plied his trade, trunching about in the corrugated steel trailer, grease and steam sinking into every pore
.

“Salt vinegar?”

Abdul doesn’t have time for grammatical conjunctions, too stretched and awearied
.

“Absolutely.”

I retrieved the polystyrene coffin of bellyache with sincere gratitude
.

“Legend.”

There I was with Sanjay, Jack, Scott, Abi, and Ella. And this is when it all kicked off:

Some razor-edge thug, with his Burberry cap tilted almost vertical and his trackie-bs tucked into white socks like he’d come straight from the AstroTurf, spotted us from the other side of the High Street. He brought a pal with him. Real bike-chain-scrapping, White-Lightning-glued, wood-block-oaf types. The second one was fat, the first one thin. The skinny one gobbed venomously on the road. They walked like they’d got Lilt cans lodged up their arses; they had faces like written-off Vauxhall Novas; they were like broken fridges that have been dumped on the roadside
.

Getting amongst us, they glared and leered, tightening their lips and jerking their heads
.

“Look, Chase,” said the skinny one, his voice inappropriately high pitch, “it’s a Paki pineapple.” This Chase character pulled a badly acted smirk across his brick-wall face
.

“The fuck d’you say?” blasted Sanjay, his spiky green hat almost falling off
.

“Chill, chill,” I pleaded, as I stepped across Sanjay, arms spread out to keep him back
.

“Haha, it’s a Paki fucking pineapple,” repeated the mouthy one. I should point out that multiracialism has never really
arrived at Oxford University. Nor has multiculturalism. Sanjay and Abdul’s kebab van are about as diverse as it gets here on the predictable student scene
.

“Let’s get out of here,” reasoned the bright red tomato. The strawberries looked on
.

“Fancy some cream, love?” said the fatty to Abi, and then the leery one head-butted the tomato
.

It is a common misconception that hardness—brawling flare—is directly proportionate to size. Not true. Hardness is about
70
percent mentality
, 30
percent muscle; more psychology than biology. A disposition, if you will: you’ve got to want to hurt someone and be tuned out from consequence. Just think back to school: the rough kids were the mouthy
little
shits. This chump was a prime example
.

And they say you learn a lot about yourself in a fight, which is halfway true. But you learn even more about your companions in a multiplayer affair. No other occasion will lay their morality and philosophy so unflinchingly bare; no other situation will place their coordinates and factory settings under such cold-eyed scrutiny
.

The pineapple fought around my banana-blockade, flanked by a bruised tomato that could sense a pulping
.

“Fuckin university cunts,” spat the head-butter
.

“I’ll fucking drop you,” retorted the pineapple
.

“Lamp the pineapple out,” suggested the butter’s sidekick
.

A strawberry was crying
.

The pineapple, particularly averse to the last directive, smacked the head-butter with a swinging right hand. Like a foolhardy Jack Russell, the kid still wouldn’t back off; so the tomato twatted him in the ear. This really did drop him, and his mate fled down a side street. Tirelessly, the lippy one continued to mouth off, adorning the chewing gum pavement with his felled body
.

“I’ll cut you, motherfucker. You all dead men. Believe.”

“Shut the fuck up,” shouted an aggravated melon
.

“You best watch your backs. Motherfucking dead motherfuckers. Trust.”

The pineapple and the tomato gave the talking pavement a sharp dose of foot-fire, kicking its hips and ribs with measured fall. Banana and melon pulled tomato and pineapple away and sat down on top of head-butter
.

“Are you gonna shut up?”

“You is fucked. Believe. I is gonna fuck you all up.”

“Well, we’ll just have to sit here a while longer then,” said the melon, perching on him
.

“Fucking fags.”

When the police car came nee-nawing to a halt, the absent sidekick miraculously reappeared: “They was caning my mate. We was minding our business and they kicked off.”

One of the coppers tried to get information from the melon while the other pulled us apart. A second squad car arrived. A cluster of haggard spectators looked on, fresh from nightclubs and bars, bemused by our fruity antics
.

“You started it all,” I protested
.

“Nah blud, it’s a fuckin racist pineapple. He was dissing me innit …”

“Come off it. You called him a Paki … you’re the racist.”

“My mate ain’t no racist … he’s just straight-talking … calls a spade a spade … tells it like he sees it.”

“Let’s get them to the station.”

“The fucking pineapple was cussing me out.”

“I’ll take these two. You take the melon and the banana and the … bloody hell, what am I saying?”