‘No, it’s … I’m on my period.’ An easy enough lie to stop him feeling bad.
‘Oh, fuck. Sorry. I should have …’
‘No, I should have said.’
‘It’s a really weird game, this whole thing. I just … Can you forget about it?’
‘Yes.’
They stand there. Where do they go from here? Do they go back to the room? They’ll clap. They’ll ask questions. Did she blow him like a champion? Did they do it? They won’t be able to look sad about anything.
‘Do you want to kiss me again?’ she says, in the end, because she can’t think of another way for things to go.
‘Do you want to?’
‘I don’t mind.’ Does he now not want to?
‘This whole thing’s …’
‘Yeah, it’s weird. I mean, it’s a random way to … you know. Get off with someone.’
‘I think,’ says Scott, ‘we probably stopped playing it for pretty good reasons. Not that … I mean, you’re really nice.’
‘So are you.’
‘It’s just that everyone else at this party …’
‘Yeah, I know!’
‘I’m not sure I can face going out there to kiss the rest of them.’
Becky laughs and Scott laughs too, like a new way out of this closet space has just opened up and they’ve both elected to take it.
‘What do we do now?’ asks Becky. ‘Do we just hide in here until they get bored?’
Scott reaches into his jeans pocket and takes out a small brown pill bottle. Unscrews the cap and shakes a pill into his palm. ‘I’m going to go down the rabbit hole to see where it leads me,’ he says.
‘What is it?’ she says.
‘Just a pill.’
‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ Becky smiles. ‘Mary’s meant to be doing one with me later.’
‘I’ve got four. One’s for Brendan. He wanted two more. I’m guessing that was for the two of you. You can have yours, if you want?’
‘How much are they?’
‘Tenner.’
‘What are they like?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll let you know in about an hour! I might go and have a dance. Come up on the dancefloor.’ He smiles at her. ‘Thanks for not being weird about this whole … thing …’ And suddenly she doesn’t want him to go. Can she follow him downstairs?
‘Can I have mine?’ She rummages in her bag for her purse and hands him a ten-pound note.
‘Great. We’ll come up together. Drug buddies.’
He hands her a pill and she takes it quickly, before she can change her mind.
If Mary can break into new areas, then maybe so can she.
She kisses him on the cheek because she wants to let him know that she is going to be a good time when she’s high, and that she’s happy with herself and if anything goes wrong he should be a friend to her.
There is a roar outside. Kiss. Kiss.
‘When we go out there,’ he says to her, ‘we should say we found another Spin the Bottle group and had an orgy with them.’
She laughs. ‘Or we could just stay here for a bit? It’s kind of nice. Kind of Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, you know? We could just push at this bit of wall and see where it goes.’
They both try and push through the wall and when nothing happens they collapse onto the soft carpet in giggles. Soon her head is swimming in ice cream whirls, making shapes like the silken seashell coverlet she saw in the parents’ bedroom. They giggle and they paw at each other’s faces like kittens and talk a language only the other understands.
Her eyelids flicker, like she might be sick but she doesn’t really mind. Her nerves are all tingly.
‘Smacky pills,’ mumbles Scott.
‘What?’
‘I’m just … Jesus. Ketamine or something.’
She rubs her hands together to send ripples through her.
Out in the bedroom, a girl’s voice. ‘All right you lot, out you go. No one should be in here. It’s my mum and dad’s room.’
Becky and Scott giggle quietly, pressing each other’s fingers to their lips. They aren’t going anywhere.
There is a lot of calling out, a kerfuffle, more shouting: ‘Get a move on, Bento!’ Before silence finally falls outside.
The light is too bright and then it’s out. Maybe she is sick after all. She doesn’t know if she is alone. She drinks because she’s thirsty and forgets she’s swallowing down another sickly sweet alcopop. Her head spins and spins and there is a point where she stops being able to remember images, feelings, anything …
Chapter 12
Becky breathes in the smell of her flat. She feels safe here, cocooned in the familiar furniture-polished, washing-powder-marinated mustiness. It is her refuge from the nagging rawness inside about how she crashed clumsily and painfully out of the bar. Her despairing call to Adam. The identity of the woman on Matthew’s floor. She smothers her feelings of discomfort with the business of doing things, like tamping down a plaster on the sting of freshly scraped skin.
She collects the post from the mat. Does Maisie just step over it? Does she even see it there? She goes to hang her coat and notices that the shelf Adam said he would fix is still sliding toward the floor at a precarious angle, held in place by a single rawlplug. It’s unreasonable to feel annoyed – even though he said he’d mend it, Adam isn’t her carpenter – but she feels it anyway as she adds the task to an already over-long list of things to be resolved and fixed. She wishes she could confidently outsource these tasks to buy herself some space. Wishes she could outsource her feelings.
In the background the comforting and domestic sounds of her kitchen filter through: china plates laid down on a wooden table top, the stiff fridge door suctioned open with might, and the springtime bird sound of Adam and Maisie laid over it all.
Maisie laughs. Becky stops to listen, smiling. Forgetting all the tasks that lie ahead.
‘It did, it totally did. I’m not lying,’ she says. ‘Seriously, Lily’s place would have an actual cake stand and someone to dust it. But wow, it’s awkward when her
