& party & bullshit

So we were at another house party and I was sitting in the kitchen sink drinking lukewarm Glen’s vodka out of a giant Sports Direct mug and talking to a guy who had a photorealistic portrait of Jack Kerouac tattooed on his right arm and this guy was gorgeous but a total prick (much like Kerouac himself, apparently, so the tatt fit) — like, honestly, this guy looked like a member of the fucking Riot Club, all upper-class-pretending-to-be-middle-class and floppy hair and perma-tan and perfect teeth and skiing holidays and bonkers political opinions, always clubbing in Mayfair with Prince Harry and spending Sunday afternoons running over bunnies in his daddy’s Land Rover, you know the sort — and this gorgeous prick and I were arguing about a popular [i.e. loved by incels] quotation that he said was Bukowski but I knew it was misattributed and he wasn’t listening to me and I had an overwhelming desire to punch him in his beautiful/infuriating face but then he lifted me out of the sink and flung me over his shoulder and slapped my arse and carried me

through to the front room where everyone was rolling spliffs and drinking corked pinot grigio (2 bottles for £5, top quality vino) and swigging shoplifted cans of Fosters and frantically fixing CK lines [for the uninitiated, whose ignorance I actually envy, that’s a shitmix of cocaine and ketamine that goes up your nose that Mad Ashley told me ‘makes a thouuusand tiny holes in your brain’ but actually it feels like one massive black hole right behind your eyes] so we both helped ourselves and it hit too rapid and we began speaking Old and Middle English to each other because we were on the same Medieval Lit course and nobody else at the party knew it and it was like our special little secret way of conversing and we felt sooo superior to The Biology Lot but actually we only knew words like meadhall and shield and riverside and bejewelled so it wasn’t much

of a conversation and then the person whose house it was — Dave? Steve? Pete? — took this huge, ugly urn off the mantelpiece and held it up and said with such solemnity, as if announcing the blessed sacrament at Mass, This… is my nan, and he prised the lid off and poured some of his grandmother’s cremated remains onto the coffee table and got a credit card out of his wallet and made a fat line out of her and loudly, obnoxiously, snorted her ashes, and explained that he wanted to feel close to her, and we all said well, do you? do you feel close to her now? and he said yes, yes I do, and then this crazy

girl — the kind of girl who looks like she isn’t actually alive because there is so little blood flowing in her drugstream, she weighs about the same as a paperback and she sold her soul to a man who rapes and beats her in exchange for a gram of speed, like, if she were a cartoon she’d have black crosses where her eyes should be, that kind of crazy girl — also decided to snort some of the grandmother and then the hot mess French photographer who I had a massive crush on because her name tasted like a poem on my tongue and because I was in awe of her très chic haircut — the type I’d only ever seen in Vogue, the type of haircut I’d have been mercilessly bullied for if I showed up in any North London pub with it on my head, the type of haircut I, devastatingly, didn’t have the bone structure for — licked her slender middle finger and dabbed it in the pile of grandmother and rubbed the old lady’s bone fragments and burnt skin onto her gums and when she smiled her teeth were greyer than they were before but I still wanted to fuck her anyway and then suddenly this bloke was racking up countless lines of his grandmother and so many people were rolling up notes and receipts and snorting her cremains and it was fucked up even by my standards, like, don’t get me wrong, I’ve done some fun/fucked stuff but this

was too far even for me (had I peaked? Was I… boring?), and then I noticed that the blind guy was missing and I hadn’t seen him for a while and I knew he’d dropped a load of acid and drunk three bottles of red wine in less than an hour and had been boring everyone to tears banging on about the Byzantine empire and I know he’s an accident waiting to happen because he lived in my halls and a couple of months ago he drank a bottle of bleach and the campus mental health team asked me to please keep an eye on him because I’m chronically suicidal so we have something in common which was literally like the blind leading the fucking blind but still I felt obliged as a human being to find him, plus I didn’t really want a death on our hands (again… boring???), and besides nobody else cared where he was and I pitied him after the failed death-by-Dettol saga so I looked for him in every room of the house and checked the wildly overgrown snow-covered back garden then noticed the front door

was wide open so I grabbed somebody’s faux fur coat from the pile and nicked a pair of Dr. Martens that were far too big for me and ventured outside feeling like a ridiculously fancy clown and dry-swallowed the unmarked yellow pill I found in the coat pocket and finally spotted The Liability sprawled out in the street, a few doors down, rolling around in the snow in the middle of the road and though I didn’t say anything, didn’t even dare to breathe, he had sensed my presence — he knows my footsteps and my perfume and my… aura because whenever I smoke outside our building I always try to be super quiet so he doesn’t talk to me but somehow he knows I’m there every. single. time. — and he said to me, H, this is what heaven must be like, and I told him to stop being a twat and come back inside but he wouldn’t because he whole-heartedly believed I was Mary Magdalene and he didn’t trust Christian figures so I said, oh my god, fine, fucking freeze to death then, and then I decided that I wanted

no, needed, to fuck the Riot Club guy because fucking him would be the closest thing I’d ever get to fucking Jack Kerouac which was one of my many unachievable dreams and I thought it might make a fun and/or tragic poem one day and the hot mess French girl had disappeared, much to my dismay, so I had to settle for Rich Prick and I found him on the phone to his girlfriend and I threw his phone out the window into the snow and he didn’t even flinch because he’s that rich and I took him upstairs to a mildewed box-room but I had to fuck him with my right hand over his left bicep the whole time because tattooed on his left arm was a portrait of Edgar Allen Poe who, as much as I love that one raven poem, I definitely did not want to fuck because he sort of scares me and not in a risky-kinky way but in a creepy-uncomfortable way because whenever I think of him I think of him as a dead man and I see him as a corpse, exactly like how I see the crazy girl who was downstairs greedily snorting some guy’s grandmother’s ashes and screaming with pure feral energy, I CAN TASTE YOUR NAN AT THE BACK OF MY THROAT!!!

Originally published in The Worst Best Years: A Student Life Anthology (Acid Bath Publishing). Get a copy here.