To read Max's story, 'The Unrequited' which was voted one of the top 10 Online Stories of 2003, click here or for Max's story, 'Running the Gauntlet' on Open Wide Magazine site, click here
MEMORIES OF A MAD WEEKEND IN SHEFFIELD
by MAX DUNBAR
We were sat in this pub just down from the station on Brabyn’s Brow. The place wasn’t normally one I frequented- a classy, varnished-stained bourgeoisie dive half submerged beneath the road. The train had gone, we’d been late for it, and the objective now was to kill a couple of hours till the next one came down. I don’t know how it happened but the conversation turned to birds - women.
‘Don’t worry about it, mate,’ Laker was saying. ‘You’ll find a lady.’
‘Hey! Fuck!’ I shouted, almost spewing battery-acid lager all over the table. ‘I didn’t ask for sympathy here. This is not a John Gray session.’
Jim leaned back in his chair. ‘You just need to sort your confidence out, mate. A crash course in punani wisdom.’
Prognosis: 3 main areas of deficiency. One: The low-grade social terror I got in situations where there were loads a strange women around. The idea of walking up to someone, striking up a conversation and sustaining it for a decent length of time paralysed me from the neck down. The fear was always there, a quiet, subtle throb in the background. Two: Primarily for pleasure but also as a consequence of the social fear, I turn to excessive drink and drugs. My appearance gets shot to hell, all glowing skin and swollen black pupils, my coordination fucks up, I’m ranting and drooling all over the place. Three: and perhaps the most important factor, I was apathetic. I just couldn’t be arsed. As long as the pills were good and the beer flowed fine I was happy to just drift off into my own head. I never even thought about this shit until someone pointed it out to me.
We finished our pints and trekked up the steep incline to the rail station. The train takes around two hours and passes through every one-horse inbred town in the Peak District. Stopping for a token two seconds at Grindleford, Hathersage, Dore, you see rotting wooden structures, crude idols or effigies, mutant natives staring fearfully from the bushes… ‘A carriage not horse-drawn!’ We had the whole two coaches to ourselves and Laker was hiding in the toilet, unnoticed by the weathered train bureaucrat marchin up and down.
‘Guy’ll get caught one of these days,’ Kyle said, when the conductor had gone.
‘Don’t bet on it,’ I say. ‘He’s the world’s greatest blagger. He got back from Nefyn to Marple for two quid.’
Jim conceded the point silently and leant his head on the window, the country blackness outside making it look like we were stationery, save the occasional flash of city light or building outlined against the other shadows.
For me this was about burning off the excess energy I’d accumulated during reading week. Fuck all lectures, and no real reason to stay at uni, so I came back here and spent a quiet eight days doing academic work, reading, and staying in drinking in the evenings. There wasn’t much else to do, since by then our little group had already scattered and fallen apart, blown to the four corners of the North West or just retreated into vegetative monogamy. So it was a quiet week, time to sort your head out, relax, but too much quietness and the walls of the house, of the town, start closing in and you had to get back into the fray. It had been too long. I was starting to get that keen, soulful hunger that I always got after a month off the beans. And these two fuckers had invited themselves along for the ride.
*
I lived in a quiet place in those days, an 800-strong monolith right on the edge of town, where the city meets the grass. At nights the only sounds you can hear are at about 2-3am, when you get the six-nights-a-week exodus of niceboys staggering back from cheesy student nights in the city centre, guys in Lacoste shirts fumbling with swipecards, birds in high heels slipping down the muddy embankments and squealing, random shouts and laughter. The only other sounds are the isolated noises of conversation and snatches of music echoing down the tubes and pipes of a corridor party you will never find.
Modelled on a Swedish women’s prison, Ranmoor is the biggest of all the halls, with a bar, canteen and computer room and students packed into every conceivable nook and crawlspace. The first thing I noticed about my corridor was the low ceilings.Twelve lads on one corridor in rooms the size of toilet cubicles. The only difference between this and prison was in prison you get better food and more sex..
The boys started getting ready, aware that we were running out of time. We had to sort out drugs, plan and facial armoury in less than seven minutes.
‘You got any conditioner, man?’ Laker went. ‘I wanner wash my hair.’
‘Conditioner!’ roared Jim. ‘Ooooh! Con-di-tion-eeer!’ He turned round, having put his tailor-made clubby contacts in. Combined with his abrasive features- the brash Roman nose, the huge shaved head, the shark’s grin- the effect was unsettling. One eye glowed green, the other yellow.
‘Apparently my normal run ay the mill shampoo isn’t quite good enough for His Majesty,’ I said.
‘Give us conditioner now,’ Laker went, jumping over to my bed, ‘or I’ll put a pube on your mattress.’ The guy then thrust his hands down his clubby pants and pulled out a curly dark hair, which he placed on my bed.
‘Get that thing off my sheets now, you whore,’ I said, ‘or you’ll be sleeping in the kitchen tonight.’
Laker simply ran out of the room yodelling. I waited for Jim to set up his huge spiky comet ay hair, then we walked through the three corridors to the bar, all the time firing ourselves up with braggatry and bullshit, stoking the fires of euphoria in our hearts, an essential psychic process for the beginning of the night. For no reason, Laker jumped around halfway through our corridor and executed a John Travolta style pose.
‘I’m gonner get it on wi some lucky bitch tonight,’ Jim said as we were going through 5Q, stepping over a few girls playin cards on the carpet, eliciting amused, nervous chuckles and a call of ‘Good luck’ from one of the birds.
Our bar is about the size of your average Manchester pub. We got there just in time to catch the half-nine swell of people knocking back pints a lager and trendy coloured drinks before hitting the clubs in town. Kyle got the drinks in and came down to our table.
‘Fuckin hell,’ the guy goes. ‘This place is full of fucking pussy.’
The lad’s right- most nights of the week the bar is full of birds from the upper floors crammed into tight, spangly dresses, arse-hugging jeans, flesh waxed and polished till it looks like a second shiny skin, a bronze mould covering the woman inside. First two weeks I was here I just sat in the bar, jaw dropped, a crumbly tower of ash growing on my cigarette.
Red Pete the political activist was walkin past with a couple of boys from our corridor and said hey. I introduced the lads and asked him where he was going.
‘Firkin,’ he said, a couple of attractive straight girls I vaguely knew coming up beside him. ‘Maybe Loveshack. You?’
‘The Unit,’ Jim said.
‘Cool,’ Pete said.
‘See you,’ I said, turning to Laker. ‘That was the guy I went to Mayday with. Fuckin mad one that was- two thousand of us getting chased out of London by riot police with batons and CS gas.’
‘I’d love to here about your Mayday adventures, man,’ Laker said, ‘but we need drugs.’
Kyle took a long slug from his pint and slammed it down on the table, the tepid lager sloshin around in the glass. ‘Yeah. Pills,’ he announced. ‘G?’
‘I’ve no idea, man,’ I said. ‘I’ve got no contacts here. We’ll just get some in the club.’
‘Fuck that,’ said Laker. ‘You just have to go up to the dodgiest looking person in the room. Watch.’
He walked over to the cabal of pillheads and caners sat over at the big circular table near the double doors. I could see him talking to a little guy wi a shaved head and toned-down townie sportswear. Sure enough, when we were in the pool room leaning against the rail the guy comes over to us. The deal was done silently, out of my earshot, I gave Laker a tenner and that was it.
Ten minutes later we were sat on the sofas at Revolution, a place I’d never liked that much, but one I always seemed to end up in. We talked about our ambitions: I said I’d like to buy the Royal Mint and produce my own currency.
‘It would include a coin that was worth literally nothing….it would be called the ‘zero’ and have Dubya’s picture on it,’ I explained. ‘There would be millions of them in circulation, you’d get loads of them every time you paid for something with a note.’
‘Yeah…’ Laker said, ‘That would be a great stunt to irritate people, as well as a comment of the ultimately valueless nature of money.’
‘Right,’ Jim said, a wooden spicerack of flavoured vodkas before him on the table, ‘Laker, you owe me fifteen. And you owe me a tenner.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I said.
‘Money for taxis, drink.’
Me and Laker exchanged looks. The more money people have, the more uptight they seemed to be about it- money corrupts, binds you in chains. As blaggers we were free. But the reason why Jim would be banging on about this all weekend, constantly keeping score, wasn’t to do wi cash but rather his need to have some sort of hold over Laker, who he often said was the spit of himself at nineteen- or rather, what he could have been at nineteen. Maybe that explained the drooling and the homoeroticism too.
Another thing was the guy’s accent. Normally speaking with a London twang, mysterious enough since Jim had never lived down south, his voice now oscillated between this cockney brogue and an exaggerated Yorkshire accent, often switching from one to the other mid syntax.
We got out of Revolution, down Mappin Street which serves as Sheffield’s red light district, walked on to the main tramlines shouting for another black cab. Shit, I thought, I’d be happy to walk everywhere, so would Laker, but no amount of drugs and drink could obscure the scorecard in Jim’s head. We piled into the cab.
‘So where we going then?’ I asked.
‘The Unit. Fuckin hell, this takes me back. I used to come up here all the way when John and that were into Gatecrasher. They’d be there pilling to cheesy manufactured fuckin Eurotrance and I’d be like, right, getting out of here right now, going to NY Sushi. It’s all good…….’
The Unit was this tiny little club in the backstreets a the city centre. Four months later they closed it as some guy got stabbed outside the club, the cops got involved and the place got shut down.
I’d gone to a cheesy school uniform theme night here once. This was clearly a different deal tho, as I could see from the discount flyers passed to us by some guy going up and down our huddled line, where we stood in tight, anticipatory silence instead this brick wall make pinkish by the ranks of flourescent lights. Six hours of insane drum n bass at illegal decibelage vibrating through speakers the size of phone booths to muscled, sweating pillheads in the pit. This was professional hedonism, the deep end.
We got into the place and went to get some drinks before the pills kicked in. Habitually, I ordered a vodka and coke; Laker and Jim were on beer. The infrastructure of the venue was crumbling, you could hear the spiral staircases creak as people charged down them. There wasn’t much talking going on because of the level of the music; you could feel the rail vibrate as you held on it. But Laker was shouting something into Jim’s ear, and Jim had his arm round the little guy’s shoulders.
‘So how is John anyway!’ Laker screams. ‘I heard he got a new girlfriend.’
‘Yeah. Long haul monogamy shit. She’s a real pelvis breaker.’
‘What, she actually broke his pelvis?’
‘Yeah apparently so man, they were having sex in a weird position, she got a bit too feisty and the whole thing just snapped.’
‘I don’t know man, you know what he’s got that we haven’t?’
‘What?’
‘NASA grade lubricant.’
‘Eh?’
‘Yeah, youcan only get it in real fuckoff big tubs, you know, and it’s dead expensive and it’s NASA grade.’
‘Why would astronauts need lubricant?’ I yell. This is the waiting hour. Licking round the cave of your mouth to get rid if the battery-acid taste, waiting for the gentle surge to start, tryna stave off the expectation and paranoia. Positive thinking is essential for these situations. Unfortunately, positive thinking’s never really been my thing, and so I just waited for the surge to reach its apex, breaking through the ceiling and propelling me into the light.
My head rolls back on my neck, my eyes close in total fuckin bliss. I’m aware that I’m smiling because of the slight pressure cutting into my cheeks. I run my fingers through my shaved head, amazed that such a simple, routine physical sensation could cause so much prolonged pleasure. Jim turned round to me.
‘I’m up, la,’ I said.’I’m up.’
‘Sensimilliiiaaa!’ the guy said, grabbing me in a crushing hug. He then turned to Laker and started massaging the back of his neck with euphoria and lechery. I drained my vodka and coke and the spirits set up an ice-cold, jagged rush in my chest n vertebrae.
We went and danced in the pit for a bit. I touched some guy’s chest accidentally and it was like a gelatinous layer, my finger seemed to sink into the guy’s skin. The secret of dancing, for me anyway, is to go back into your own head where all the good stuff is and let the body do all the work. Keep everything understated. I was staring into space, checking out all the women, most of them just completely blissed out, closed eyes and expressions on your faces of pure wonder and delight, all the painful edges and grey areas purged out of their souls. The dehydration started to kick in. It felt like a slow implosion of the chest cavity, cutting off the air.
‘Gonner get water,’I shouted into Jim’s ear. The guy hardly seemed to hear me.
I took a non-transparent bottle from off the shelf running along the wall, less obvious to security. I then went upstairs to a quieter area, relishing the liberation of being able to wander around on my own. It occured to me then that it’s brilliant to be out with your mates, just for the communal vibe, but your actions are constrained by their whims and habits. Good to have at least half an hour of nomad time.
In the bogs I filled up the bottle with stale water, heeding the notice on the wall:
WARNING!
THERE ARE REPORTS OF A BATCH OF
MDMA TABLETS LACED WITH STRYCHNINE.
THESE TABLETS ARE KNOWN AS ‘NIKES’
OR ‘BIN LADENS’ AND ARE PINK WITH
BROWN SPECKLES. INGESTION
WILL CAUSE VOMITING, STOMACH
CRAMPS, DIARRHOEA AND POSSIBLE
DEATH
I walked out of the toilet door then, worried that I couldn’t remember what the pills we’d taken were called or what they looked like. I swayed in the middle of the wooden clearing for a second. A few people were dancing, but the rest seemed to be melting into the red leather sofas, monged out to various degrees, snogging, entranced in some hyperbolic chat with a person who was your true soulmate and lover at this zenith athe night but would seem like just another face-chewing madhead come half four. I wandered around for a period, trying to control the grinding of my teeth or at least make it seem less obvious. In the state I was in, a tunnel would seem like a maze. I couldn’t have counted my head.
Eventually staggering into the other bar parallel to the one I’d been in earlier- symmetrical clubs always fuck my head- I got accosted by this crazy vixen with frizzed-up hair, glasses, and knee-length boots. She seemed to be tryna fuck me on the spot- rubbing her palms down my wasted chest, grinding her hips against my crotch, kissing my face- and all this time I was the passive partner, spun and twirled this way and that, a big, disbelieving grin on my face. All the time we were screaming things in each other’s ears. She was a 32 year old unpublished children’s writer currently training to be a teacher.
‘I wanna read your books,’ she mouthed.
‘Cool,’ I said. ‘I wanner read your books. We’re both unpublished writers. That’s cool.’
‘I wrote this one about a guinea pig and it was bald, so it went on this quest to find a wig. It was called The Guinea Pig’s Wig.’
‘Did it get one in the end?’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘A happy ending, then.’
Over her shoulder, through the fronds of her hair, I could see Laker with his arm round this little mosher chick, grinning at me. I guessed he had told the woman about my writing, as I don’t like to use these things as a currency. The only problem was this guy she was with, this thirty-year-old townie bloke who was just sat there watching us with an expression of pure, concentrated hatred. He kept pulling me aside and shouting snidey comments, which gave way to overt threats. I was torn between the two poles of fear and lust. Eventually lust won out and we got in a long, clandestine snog at the bar, before the burly cunt who was with her marched her out a the door, giving me an evil and a raised eyebrow as the couple disappeared from view.
I went up to the bar and asked for a glass of iced water with ice. I got my hand shaken, my hair ruffled, my back slapped, a kind of orgy of laddish complicity, up there at the bar. I went with my drink and sat down next to Laker and this girl.
‘What the fuck was that about?’ Laker said.
‘God knows,’ I replied. ‘She was pilled, man. I think that was the main basis of our attraction.’
‘This guy’s so cynical,’ Laker laughed, turning to the girl he was with. ‘Ah, Max, this is Sadie.’
‘Hey,’ she said, kissing me on the lips.
‘Where’s Kyle?’ I said.
‘He’s met up with some lads. They’re dancing on the podium.’
I tried to relax, but my head was buzzing from my encounter with the woman.
We we nt to find Jim who was with a group of older guys, and danced for the rest of the night. Later we stood outside the club waiting for them, in the hope of an afterparty. I got pissed off with it soon enough and wanted to head back to Ranmoor and see if anything was going on there, but the other two were adamant that we wait for the guys. Stood there out on the sidestreet, in the midst of a big crowd a people, some of them passing out flyers, holding out arms for taxis, getting this aimless sense you always got stood outside a club at the end of a night, the question dying on everyone’s lips: What next? Soul’s inertia, have to keep moving before the fear and the sweats kick in.
We waited there for half an hour until it seemed that almost everyone had left the club. Even the MC left, a huge black guy wi dreadlocks and a white t shirt, altho I was too far gone to recognise him at the time.
Finally the guys we were waiting for came out and we got two taxis to Sorby Hall, another jailhouse-style building in the middle of nowhere. Once there I found myself packed into a cubicle-sized study bedroom with about fifteen other people. These guys we were with seemed kinda like alternative, public-school pillhead fuckers. At first we got on with them immensely, but as an hour went by I found it harder and harder to keep cool. Everyone was just sitting around smoking dope and talking about clubs and drugs in genteel Somerset accents and the comedown was kicking in. I got immensely claustrophobic in the tiny, smoked-out room, and everything seemed to be pissing me off- the music, the décor, the looks on people’s faces, all filled me with a seamless rage.
Dope is a stupor drug; when you drink a pint or drop a pill it tends to open up possibilities, you realise that when the morning comes you could be dead, deported or in bed with some girl, whereas when you start a night smoking weed in the room you know that’s where you’re gonner be in seven hours: in the same goddamn room, looking out at the world thru monged eyes.
‘I’m leaving, man,’ I said, standing up. Jim looked up from his build, alarmed.
‘You’re going?’
‘Yeah. I need some more cigarettes, mate.’
I realised it was unfair on the other two to be doing this, leaving them stranded in a strange city, but I had to get some air. Kyle lent me his jacket, as it was cold outside and I only had my sleeveless black shirt. We arranged for him to phone my mobile once he got back to Ranmoor, whereupon I would get up and deactivate the complex security systems so that they could get into the building.
The night porter gave me directions in a stoical, cracked Yorkshire accent, but once I was halfway across the car park I realised I’d forgotten them. The goldfish memory phase had started, all the thoughts and information in my head erased every fifteen minutes, producing a weird, unsettling mental effect, like the brain was constantly being reborn. Have a conversation with someone and if it lasts long enough you forget how it started.
I picked a path at random, a narrow muddy track that led to a stile almost hidden between two large leafy bushes. Soon I was on an empty tarmac road running across the park, my only guide being the soothing lights of civilisation to the east. I started feeling a sense of peace walking along this path: I love being drugged up and walking alone at night, insulated against the cold, listening to the birds sing. Somehow I ended up on Fulwood Road and I walked down the way to Alldays for cigarettes an a can a Coke, before headed back to Ranmoor, where I swiped myself in at the side door, unlocked the door to my room, and passed out.
The mobile woke me up half a second later: Kyle and Laker, stood inside the reception area. ‘Bedtime at quarter to eight,’ Jim crowed as we walked back through the corridors. ‘Not a bad night. A good introduction to Sheffield.’
Back in the room, I found it difficult to get to sleep. Me and Laker were laid out top to tail on the bed, while Jim lay on the floor with a towel wedged between his legs. There was a high white drone inside my head like one-note feedback from an amplifier. My body had already died but my head kept screaming at me- showing me a long kaleidoscopic vision of hell behind my eyelids, painful, Zen-like confusion and atrocities, a 24-hour headfuck telecast on fast forward. I always tried to get to sleep straight away, to beat the comedown, but what happened then? Did the comedown poison your dreams? We just lay there grimly grinding our teeth praying for unconsciousness, the curtain pulled across the window to block out that infernal, exposing morning light.
I woke up about twelve, the others were slowly starting to come awake. Laker was sat up, reading the Dilbert book I’d got.
‘That was insane,’ Laker said. ‘I couldn’t get to sleep so I took that Dilbert book and went into the reception area to read it. I had to get out of this room; no offence meant, but the walls were hurtling towards me. I ended up crashing on one of those armchairs in reception. The security guy woke me up and moved me on.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Shit, I’m gonner go get some lunch.’ I knew I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep now, so getting to the canteen for a salad or something was the only option. I left the boys sleeping in the darkened room and went off.
No one I knew was eating; no one I even vaguely recognised. It was hellishly scary, having to interact and negotiate with people while the chemicals were still moving through my system, and once I’d queued up with my tray and got my usual ham salad with rock-hard bread rolls, I found I couldn’t eat. My stomach had shrunk to the size of a grape, but I knew I had to force down the sharp, tasteless bread just to give myself more energy and to prevent me from floating into the void. My mouth was riddled with ulcers and sores, from all the chewing and grinding I did last night.
Back to the room I got some emergency bonjella out a the draw, smeared it liberally over my inner cheeks, gums, lips and tongue, then got some notes for this philosophy essay I had to do. A good night on the biscuits tended to knock me out of commission for a couple of days, and the essay was due in on Monday. Some of it would have to be done today, then on Sunday I could sleep for twelve hours, finish the essay and race down to the Tower of Art by five.
This wasn’t as easy as it sounded. It was a superhuman effort just to lift my fingers to the keyboard, and the environment wasn’t exactly great: loads of international students hammering away intently at the keys, wanting to earn their corporate sponsorships, plus the usual obnoxious fuckers zooming around on wheeled chairs chatting and flirting with birds. Three or four tense, tortuous hours later, I had managed to lash together an piece on Soren Kierkegaard, constructed carefully from my own lecture notes.
When I got back to the room, Jim Kyle and Laker had woken up. ‘Where’ve you been, man?’ Jim asked.
‘Doing this essay,’ I said.
‘My tubes are blocked,’ Kyle moaned. ‘I woke up this morning and it was just pure pain. I need to masturbate or have sex with something.’
‘Could be the water retention,’ said Laker. ‘It’ll probly clear up.’
‘No,’ Jim said. ‘I’ve had it before…..can we get some food? We need food. We should go and eat out.’
‘We can get food here, man,’ I said. ‘The canteen does it for free.’
In reception Laker was tryna get in contact with Sadie, the little nymphette we’d met last night. Myself and Kyle were taking the piss out of him for it because she looked almost exactly like Laker’s old girlfriend. I felt slightly bad about this, because that had been a long, protracted, bloody breakup, and I didn’t want to suggest to the fucker that he was still unconsciously in love with her. But Kyle was giving it loads and I couldn’t help going along with the flow.
The exchange, conducted in one of the glass-winged payphones, involved a hell of a lot of shouting, ringbacks and terse negotiations, and once we were walking into the dinner hall thru the main hall I asked Laker what was going down.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Laker said. ‘She might be in Revolution tonight, she might not. Those phones you got are really bad. Now….shit, what do I have to do to get food?’
‘I’ve got a plan,’ I said, as we entered the mess hall. My words were slightly obscured by the sodden clamour of the huge room- cutlery slashing together, the mesh of a thousand conversations. ‘You have to have Hall ID to get food here, but they normally don’t check them. If they ask fir your card, tell them it’s in your room and you’ll go and get it. Then I’ll just get a really big meal that we can share.’
While me and Laker queued up, Kyle sat down at an empty table for elitist reasons. Standing in line always made me tense, because whenever I went in this room I was always either hungover or coming down or both…..and inevitably there would be two foppish, middle class wankers in front of me. The curse of going to a redbrick uni, the curse of the academic fast lane, is being surrounded by cloistered, untouched Home Counties morons, sports-science suburbanites in garish Gap poloshirts and slight, clear-skinned babes with cardigans wrapped around them, trapped in a tight cocoon of innocence, wandering around dazed wi half a soul. You would have to go to a shitty ex-polytechnic to get a greater concentration of hedonists….but then you’d have to deal with the flipside, the various psychopaths and scallies who had somehow blagged their way into uni. Catch-22. We got food and sat down.
‘I think I got arthritis last night,’ Laker said, worriedly fingering his knuckles. The one on his middle finger was swollen and discoloured. ‘I just kept rubbing my fingers together all night, I didn’t realise I was doing it.’
‘You should see a doctor mate,’ said Jim. ‘Give us a bread roll.’ The guy took a bread roll off my plate and dipped it in his tomato soup.
‘You don’t wanna eat those rolls,’ I advised. ‘Rock hard. You could break windows with them.’
Kyle shrugged and took the other roll. ‘Hey!’ I said. ‘Dyou want the shirt off my back?’
‘That’d be nice,’ the guy said. ‘But I’d like to sort out this tubal pain.’
‘Why don’t we go back to your room and meditate…’ Laker suggested. ‘It would take your mind off physical problems.’
*
We were sat in the bar again, at a table dragged out into the middle of the room- there was a film playing on the big video screen, Toy Story 2. At first the computer animation and the incomprehensible storyline made my eyes ache, but soon I started getting into it. A cheesy house tune came on and I started unconsciously tapping my foot along to it; the pillhead in me responding to the beat. You see people coming out of clubs at six or seven in the morning, nodding along to car alarms or the ring of mobile phones.
‘This Sadie girl,’ Laker said. ‘I’ve met her before. I swear it. On the internet. I think I cybered with her once.’
‘What was her ID?’
‘I don’t remember. But she described herself as a petite bleached blonde from Sheffield.’
‘No mate,’ Jim crowed. ‘That was probably a naked 77-year-old man masturbating in a public library in Massachusetts.’ He laughed uproariously, throwing his head back in a three-note bark.
‘Anyway it was pretty mad. My mum had gone away for the weekend, it was a Sunday afternoon, she wasn’t due back till seven that night. I met this girl in a philosophy chatroom and we just clicked instantly- opened up a room of our own and started typing in all the things we were doing to each other. She had a microphone on her end, and I could hear what she was saying, and it was a damn sexy voice- sort of a cross between Jessica Rabbit and Jo Whiley. She told me to start masturbating with my left hand while typing with my right, and she would be doing the same. She told me to try and sychronise my orgasm with hers. So anyway I’m sat there typing away and wanking with my other hand, really dragging it out, it lasted for about an hour, I swear, just on the verge of coming, and there’s this girl on the other end of the line, describing all these things she’s doing to me. Eventually she said something about her shaven haven, in that horny, husky voice, and I just exploded. I couldn’t help it.
‘There was come splattered all over the table, the console, the keyboard- seriously man, I hadn’t been laid in a while and there were just quarts of it, seeping into the keyboard. Damn thing seized up, I couldn’t type anything, so I just turned the puter off. The keys were fucked, I could tell that. My mum was coming back in three hours. I screamed for a bit and then phoned this tech support hotline, told them I’d split beer on the keys and it was a serious problem. They sent a guy round the house, I told him the beer story, and he just looks at the keyboard, with all these glops of spunk drying on it, then looks at me, and sorta goes ‘Uh huh.’ It was obvious he didn’t believe me for a second. The guy took away the keyboard for repair, and I ended up having to pay for it. £178.04. Absolute bastards.’
‘I wouldn’t like to be the guy who cleaned your love juice out from between the keys,’ I said.
‘No but the point is, I reckon Sadie was that girl. We were chatting in the toilets and that voice…it was unmistakable. I kept thinking it was familiar, then it clicked.’
‘Right,’ I saidThe alcohol was reacting nicely with the drugs in my system, revitalising my veins in a way that almost made me shiver. ‘Are you seeing her tonight?’
‘She said she might be in the Revolution later,’ Laker said.
‘Let’s get down there,’ said Jim.
We got to the Revolution about nine. On the way Jim Kyle had made a load a noise about the money we owed him. He had been going on at us for the last forty minutes, launching into his usual vicious spiel about respect, Social Darwinism, that usual freemarket, eat-the-poor bullshit. Sat on those sofas again I could see Laker scanning around for Sadie, but she didn’t seem to be about; it was a huge bar and a dense crowd, hemming us into our seats like thick forest. We had a couple more pints at the Revolution bar and the next thing I knew I was wandering about near the tarmac junction, stuck on this bank island: HSBC WELCOMES STUDENTS TO SHEFFIELD! Disclaimer: We own you, you fuckers, so enjoy your free vouchers and your grand overdraft while you can, cause in your mid twenties you’ll be constantly sweating and saving and checking over your shoulders for a strange man with a briefcase and a pair of bolt cutters…Unknown to me, Jim and Laker had decided to go back to the Unit, which I found out while we were in a taxi on the way down there. This was alright with me. I had no other plan in mind.
We got into the Unit and realised we had no drugs. The music seemed to be different from last night, more chilled-out upbeat house. Soon as we were in there we got ensconced in a booth with this friendly looking guy and his mates. Laker went off on a mission for drugs and Jim started talking to the guy. His mates, a couple of blond, almost towniefied girls, said nothing, and neither did I- I was just content to sit back, and drink my VK.
I ended up scoring some pills off the guy and went off to look for Laker, but I couldn’t find the guy anywhere. I’d seen him earlier in the night, talking to dodgy strangers in the parts of the club the owners didn’t bother tarting up, the bass throbbing through the walls giving them a weird, cavernous quality. I finally ran into the guy in the toilets, where people were chatting, laughing, filling up bottles of water, waiting in line at the cubicles.
‘Aright man,’ I said. ‘I got some beans.’
‘I don’t need them,’ Laker said. ‘I met a dealer. He told me to go round the club and for every three pills I sold I could have one for myself, that’s what he said.’
‘Cool.’
‘Not really. I just went up to a big lad on his own, bout mid thirties, offered him some, and he said he was the manager.'
‘Jesus. What did you do?’
‘Legged it!’ He laughed.
‘These ones I’ve got aren’t that good,’ I said. ‘You kind of reach a plateau and just level off.’
‘Have one of these mate,’ he said, handing me a pink speckled pill.
The end of the night came quickly. You tend to just lose yourself in the music and the atmosphere; higher than time, you’re amazed when the house lights come up and you lurch blinking into the early sunlight, a sense of triumph mingled with this downslide of disappointment. I always tended to feel isolated from this process, and I was still thinking about the bank thing, about how students, like artists and homosexuals, are naturally apart from the great moneymachine spread across the land, a machine as ignorable and unquestionable as the sky. I thought about a guy I knew who went to Liverpool uni and his loan was so bad that he had to get a job: the guy got a job and then got put through a disciplinary because workin over 15 hours interfered with his academic shit. They don’t make bread or grain, they don’t have no children, they have no valuable economic input whatsoever, fuck all….they just drink and blag and dance and take drugs, so let’s made the fuckers pay, let’s choke them off as much as we can with figures and numbers and complacent niceboy logic, education turned into a commodity. Functionality, order, is the jackboot that crushes the human soul, it is the swampy morass that prevents us from flying. No place for dead ends like beauty or experience. You can’t eat a poem. Enjoy yourselves, but do it our way: we have granted the freedom for you to sell your time for cash or to sweat in the skyscrapers but not to read or write or have sex with what you choose, to do to your body what you like, to act outside the constraints of the machine…. In such harsh times getting drunk and pilled and fucked up was an act of supreme hedonistic defiance, setting yourself apart from the combine, creating space to live in by blotting out the sky. I felt like punching my fist in the air at the sight of these insane, face-chewing, love-crazed maniacs, spilling out into the cold November night.
We were waiting outside the club for Laker. Jim theorised that he’d pulled some bird and been taken back to her place. I thought this was probably true, but I wanted to wait all the same.
Eventually after all the taxis had gone off and the bouncers were still chatting amicably on the four wide steps Laker appeared, looking in visible pain and clutching bottles and glasses of half-finished drinks. ‘Look what she did to me, man,’ he complained, pulling up his posh clubby top. His back and ribs were slashed with long, angry red lines.
‘What happened there?’ I asked.
‘This girl I got off with,’ Laker explained. ‘I got a blowjob off her in the toilets. Dint come cause of the water retention, but all the time she was just dragging her nails down my back. Ripped my spine to shreds.’ He started pouring the various liquids into a pint glass he’d had lodged in his front pocket, then downed the entire concoction.
‘Minesweeping,’ he explained. ‘I went round the club and took all the unfinished drinks.’
‘You dickhead,’ Kyle said, ‘there could be anything in there. Acid, GHB….’
Laker let out a long, rich belch. ‘It’s just a good way to get pissed on a shoestring.’
‘Well, if your head swells up and you start swatting imaginary spiders, don’t blame me,’ Jim said. ‘Let’s a cab. Man! My tubes are killing me.’
Kyle hailed a cab and we got in, Laker all the time going on about this girl. ‘I just needed to have a chat with a woman, man. I feel so much better now.’
‘Let’s go to Ballard Hall,’ Jim said. ‘See if Tom’s party’s still going.’ He turned and started chatting to the cab driver about the Knowledge: apparently in London it takes five years to learn, here it takes only six months. The guy was warning us about black cabs, saying they’d been known to rip people off and ‘interfere with women.’
We pulled up in Ballard Hall, which was a about ten minutes down from Ranmoor. Unlike Ranmoor, this was a small complex of about twenty small flats grouped around a bewildering labyrinth of stairs, walkways and paths. I had the map, which was, amazingly, still in my jacket from last night, but it took a while in the dark and the cold to find Unit 1, even with the numbers painted in clear white on the wooden doors. We hammered on the door for about five minutes; there were small, imperceptible signs of movement, shadows moving behind the curtains, lights going on and off, certainly not the impression of an afterparty in full peak.
‘Fuck,’ Kyle said. ‘What do we do now?’
‘Go to a flat with signs of life and try an extort food and comfort from them,’ Laker said.
We walked across the complex, finding a big double apartment with lights out, laughter, music, voices coming out distorted through the glass: heaven, to three horny nomads out in the searing cold of a Sheffield night. We sat on the stony top by the rail. I lit up and Laker attempted to make a rollup with a battered packet of sawdust tobacco and a crumpled skin. Jim started throwing pebbles up to the window, screaming, ‘Let us in! We’re lost! We need warmth and light and love!’
I started having serious doubts. It was cold out here, sure- Sheffield is palpably worse than back home, Yorkshire winters are hell - and we needed shelter badly. But the halls had been crawling with strange, perverted men comin up from the town and scouting about at the dead of night, hungry for a glimpse of some juicy fresher getting changed at the window. The authorities were cracking down. Three strange and wild-eyed men shouting up at a hall full of young girls was bound to attract suspicion. I hoped this complex didn’t have security: I had a horrible vision of burly guys in overalls coming out of the dark an dragging us to the little shed over the wall that served as a police station. Were we honestly any better than those twisted fuckers that crept around in the early hours? Our intentions were more or less the same.
‘I think I’m getting better at making rollies now,’ Laker said, holding up a tiny, soggy parcel of tobacco.
‘Have one of my cigarettes,’ I said to him, swinging the deck his way.
Jim had struck up some kind of dialogue with a girl looking out of the top window. I couldn’t make her out and there were other, more indistinct girl faces looking out coquettishly, giggling. I may have been a bit hard on the man during this recollection, but the fact was he had the ability to blag his way into any situation through the sheer force of his personality. With enough banter and wit he could get on friendly terms with just about anyone and he had the drive not to bottle it at the crucial moment. Even if he made a bad first impression he forced you into familiarity with him, got you indelibly associated.
The girl came down- a stout but not attractive mosher tart. ‘I’d invite you in,’ she explained, ‘but I’ve pulled.’
‘Cool. Cool.’ said Jim.
‘Listen tho, come round tomorrow day. We’ll have a cup of tea or something.’
‘Wicked.’
We walked out of the grounds, Jim Kyle now moaning about the cold, the fact that he hadn’t pulled since last night, and his aching tubes. Ludicrously, he wanted a call a cab for the ten-minute journey to Ranmoor. I pointed out to him that we’d have to wait over an hour for the fuckin thing to get here. The guy continued to sulk all the way back to the halls.
My tiny room had been completely trashed and desecrated during the weekend stay. Everything was covered by bags, clothes, newspapers, towels and other sleeping paraphernalia. The sink smelt of piss and was clogged up with weird-looking fluids, some of which were peeling the cheap enamel. The whole place stank of accumulated male sweat and wasted testosterone, a thick, formless stench that seemed to emenate from the walls.
I went in the toilet and tried to piss, needing to get rid of the molten ball in my bladder. When it finally happened, it felt like I was pissing gravel. As I was leaving Jim entered the other cubicle.
Laker was outside in the corridor, wanting to go on a hall-wide punani mission.
‘Will anyone be up this time?’ he asked.
‘It’s worth a look, I guess.’
Jim came out of the bog. ‘Fuck, that’s a weight off my mind, man,’ he said. His face was flushed.
‘What’s up?’
‘I’ve sorted out my tubes, once and for all,’ he said. ‘Yes mate! I’ve found masturbation’s only real purpose!’
We went up to 6S, the corridor above mine. The girls on that corridor were still up, sitting on the floor of their kitchen, passing around a coupla bottles of rancid wine. I remember in the first few weeks there were corridor parties up here, dozens a people jammed along the narrow hall passing round wine and spliffs. It was a time when I seemed to be constantly drunk and my memories from this period are hazy with many black spaces. The lads used to come up and steal food. I hoped the women didn’t recognise me by association.
‘Hello,’ one of the birds, Kathryn, said.
‘Heya,’ Laker said. I started getting the fear and hung back, letting the other two do the talkin- that was their strength, their confidence could get me into places I couldn’t. ‘This guy here,’ he indicated me, ‘has lost his key, and we’re just wondering,’ he let his sentence tail off in self-parody, effortlessly slipping into his slow, clear chat up voice, the voice you’d use for job interviews and talking to foreigners, ‘if you could give us warmth and food and shelter.’
‘What’s up with your eyes?’ this girl said, talkin to Jim.
‘What?’ Kyle said.
‘They’re different colours,’ she said.
‘Ah yeah,’ Jim said, ‘they’re coloured contacts.’
‘Aaaah…..you been clubbing.’
‘Yeah. We’re absolutely wrecked. We’ve had five hours sleep in the last two days.’
‘Been pilling?’ the girl called Kathryn said as we moved into the kitchen.
‘Yep.’ We were now sat on the bare tiles of the kitchen. Some girl handed me a bottle of cheap red wine, and I took a swig.
‘You wanna go down see the porter if you’ve lost your key. They’ll love you for that.’
We chatted to the 6S girls for a bit, about courses, unis, shit like that. As they disappeared, Laker shouted out, ‘What you guys doing tomorrow?’
‘Fix and Dahck,’ Kathryn shouted out. ‘Be there.’
We walked back the other way down their empty corridor. Jim grabbed my shoulder.
‘Are you going to get another key?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, before realising. ‘Mate, that was what we technically call a lie.’
‘But why bother lying?’ Jim said as we went down the stairs, our footsteps echoing on the clangy steps.
‘Because we don’t want to look like three horny nomads,’ Laker explained.
We went back to my room and got the lava lamp going. I made some brews, raiding the meagre supply ay congealed milk in the communal fridge, and we massaged each other’s backs listening to the harsh, soulful music of Patti Smith, a nice, soft environment to come down in, the nail scars on Laker’s back showing up bright red in the intermittent blue light.
*
A rude awakening came that afternoon as, for some reason, we’d all set our mobile alarms to go off at top volume at 12:00 exactly. I had a feeling it was something to do with the 6S girls, but I couldn’t say why. I got up first and ate a ham salad before going back to the room. The guys had got up and Jim Kyle wanted to go out on the pull- at half twelve on a Sunday afternoon in Sheffield. I didn’t want to bring the man down by telling him of the anorexic chances of success, so I suggested we went down to Bar One, which was always packed with students. Unfortunately it turned out to be closed on Sundays. Kyle was not amused at making the half hour trek to the university buildings in vain.
We walked back up to Broomhill and went round the pubs. At some point Kyle suggested getting some food from Millennium, the world’s sweatiest takeaway.
‘You don’t want to go there, man,’ I warned him. ‘All you’ll find there is roadkill in a bap, for sixty pence.’
‘You can get a burger for sixty pence?’ Laker said.
‘Yeah, but you wouldn’t want to.’
‘That’s fantastic,’ Laker said. ‘I’m gonner buy loads and take them back to Marple.’
‘You’re gonner get duty free burgers, mate!’ Kyle laughed. ‘I’d like to see you getting on a train with a rucksack full of sopping, rotting meat.’
‘You know they do sixty per cent of their business after midnight?’ I told him. ‘That’s because it’s all pissed up students walking back from the clubs with the munchies, too fucked to know what they’re eating.’
We did the rounds of the pubs in Broomhill, getting nowhere in a circle. Every time we went past the 24-hour shop, Laker would run in there and steal wrapped rolls and cans of a strange green energy drink, from Guatemala. I remember being up near the end of that road, watching Laker hand over sandwiches and cans he’d just liberated from the store to the homeless guy who was always sat outside.
‘Fucks sake,’ Jim said, turning away. ‘He’s gonner get gripped.’
‘Have some faith.’
Jim announced he was leaving when we were in the pub. With Kyle gone, me and Laker finished our drinks and went back to Ranmoor, where we chilled out in the room for a bit, watching stupefying telly until the dilemmas of the night came. Laker went to reception to phone Sadie, while I looked over the listings in the old copy a the Steel Press, coming to the grim conclusion that there is absolutely fuck all going on in Sheffield on a Sunday night. There was a sense of searing desperation between us, like our appetities were too large for this town. When the little guy got back, we went down to the bar and I explained the situation.
‘We’ll just have to get drunk at the Fox and Duck,’ I said. ‘It’ll be full of people.’
Laker was scribbling a poem down on a piece of paper. I watched him, marvelling at how anybody could write in public. We went down to Alldays, bought half a bottle of vodka and some more energy drink and sneaked it into the pub. As I’d predicted, it was truly packed, being the kind of dive that’s hopping even at half-two on a Tuesday afternoon. We got wedged into the corner of a long, wooden table full a students, and I got a couple of pints in.
Laker started conspiratorially pouring vodka and Guatemalian crazy juice into minesweeped spirit glasses, and we played drinking games. The one we ended up on was celebrity word tennis, using only people whose names began with either ‘Ian’ or ‘Dave’. If five seconds of thinking time elapsed, you had to down your glass. After a couple of hours of this we were so drunk and rowdy that the landlord came over and threatened to chuck us out- quite an achievement, in the Fox and Duck.
‘Do we understand each other?’ he said, leaning over us, a wide, sweaty figure in a faded polo shirt.
‘Yeah,’ Laker said, ‘absolutely.’
‘What are all those?’ he said,indicating the vodka and the cans of energy drink.
‘We’re gonna drink those later,’ Laker said.
The guy nodded, satisfied, and went off back to the bar. Laker started askin around the other students if anything was going on tonight, but no joy. We left the pub at midnight, went to Alldays and tried to buy another half bottle of vodka off the tattooed hermaphrodite behind the glass screen. It was obvious she knew how far gone we were and held us in total contempt, and started talking about her children at one point, just to hammer the point home. After haggling with her for a bit we trekked back to Ranmoor, empty handed. I stuck the black and white on, Laker crashed out on the bed, and somehow later I did too.
I woke up on Monday morning about twelve. Laker was gone. I had an ominous, half real memory of lying in the bed, my throat closed up and burning, and him a grey figure moving about in the dark. Shaking his hand, giving him a quid for the bus. I think he said something about a ten-o’clock college lesson he had to get to. Whatever the reason, the guy was gone, and the room was still a fuckin tip.
It took me about an hour to detox the place. I spent the rest of the day hammering out that philosophy essay, pumping up the word count, cleaning up all the typos and factual errors. Walking down to the Tower of Art with it at half hour, with the darkness already sweeping in from the north, I got that weird, desolate feeling I always had after a big bender- a mingled sense of regret and triumph, like something good had gone, and it’d be a long time before I would have it back. The only way to deal with such situations, I feel, is to rest up for a while, and then get somewhere you can drink, somewhere public, so at least you got the illusion of company. I went back to the room and crashed out again for three solid hours then at eight, I woke up, refreshed and haunted, got changed, and went down to the bar.
© Max Dunbar
Reproduced with permission
HUNTER S THOMPSON
WILLIAM BLAKE
