bit of dirty grass near the pubs, off-licences and cash machines, while the families and dog walkers were over by the play-park.
This was where suburban-bedroom fashion-magazine daydreams could almost come true. Looking for my friends, with electronic music on my headphones, I walked past lolling groups of Gothic ballerinas and landlocked urban sailors on the grass. Each girl in the park had taken time to consider her outfit: fifties housewives in gingham dresses and headscarves, eighties aerobics teachers in leotards and leggings, aristocratic hippies. The boys looked like mods, skateboarders or underweight lumberjacks. It was hotter than it had ever been in Orkney. I was in a foreign country.
When I moved to London, I threw myself in. I arrived in a flurry, with no certainties apart from some sort of self-belief. Several nights a week I would get on the bus to the Soho and Shoreditch nightclubs that I’d read about in magazines. I would try out colouring in my fair eyebrows with red eyeliner or slashing the back of a dress with scissors, and go down to the bus stop with a bottle. I met a lot of people in that first year, characters I identified from online message-boards and introduced myself to while waiting for the band to come on. ‘I’m a penniless newcomer, can I write for your blog?’; ‘I’ve seen you on Friendster’; ‘I’ve read your online column.’
It was a relief when the first person from our picnicking group suggested going to buy booze. Banknotes were thrust towards them with requests for cider and wine. The rest of us waited, the girls making daisy chains and plaiting each other’s hair, and the boys taking turns on someone’s bike. We were overgrown children, not men and women, searching headlong for a good time. Text messages invited more people to join us, the next party, promising something better or more. Each weekend was more messed up than the last. We were careering around, taking taxis and buying drinks we couldn’t afford.
Next to us a circle of wide-eyed club kids, who hadn’t slept the night before, one in a lion’s headdress, were taking photos of each other and laughing.
Our conversation was about work opportunities, whether the internship might result in some paid work, name-dropping fashion designers, magazine houses or record labels. Someone dressed in leggings, like an eighteenth-century lord, was complaining loudly about how the budget for his project was only ten thousand pounds. I heard a girl asking around for LSD, and it felt like the perpetual last day of a festival. A guy on a phone said, ‘Someone could make a killing here.’
As the afternoon turned into evening, we moved with the sun until all the groups of people were crowded onto one corner of grass covered with cigarette butts and empty cans. Nearby, men drinking cans of strong lager from thin blue plastic bags were selling odd selections of books and ornaments laid out on the footpath: a pink plastic telephone and a book about fondue cookery, a pair of children’s rollerskates and a kettle with no lid. You could get a bag of weed if you asked the right person.
It was Gloria’s birthday and someone had a bottle of poppers. We were dismissive, recalling teenage headaches, but passed it around, sniffing between swigs from bottles of pink fizzy wine.
Meg was wearing tiny shorts, a halter-neck top and Lolita sunglasses, and had one foot hooked around her boyfriend’s thigh, although her body was pointing away. Someone in a full suit too hot for the weather came up and asked if he could take her picture. ‘It’s for a street-style website.’ She gave an exasperated look, then complied, posing expertly.
A group of parents and pushchairs walked by, an alien species, and Meg said to act normal. ‘But I don’t want to be normal,’ said Gloria. She was wearing a bright turquoise jumpsuit. Meg smeared the honey we were using to mix sickly cocktails over her slender ankle, above her cork wedge shoes, and ants began to crawl onto her. We tipsily watched the tiny animals rush to their sugary doom as Gloria blew bubbles from a bottle. Someone said it was cruel but Meg insisted the insects were having fun. She was so beautiful and I wanted to shake her.
The trips to the off-licence grew more frequent, the shrieks louder, and the poppers were passed around. Someone, it might have been me, dropped the bottle and the contents spilled onto the rainbow blanket. We all dashed to the wet spot, heads down, gasping in the fabric, snorting and squealing, like pigs at the trough, breasts down, ankles up. It was stupid and pitiable and fun, as I breathed in the solvent, rolled onto my back and looked at the sky. As the horizon tipped I was covered with warm light and flying with my friends, limbs and sun cream and honey and ants, all sticky and sweet, and the sun was blinding me, and I had never been so high.
The sun lowered. The crowd gathered and tightened; flexed ankles met listless wrists and hands holding cigarettes. There were shaded glances down on the grass and drunken daydreams somewhere up there where the aeroplane vapour trails crossed. My bare toe touched his weekend stubble. I notice his bruised shoulder and felt my pulsing ambition.
Later, at the warehouse party, I’d lost the others but I didn’t mind being alone. Hair twisted high and tight, in my long dress, with my drink and the drum beat, I was so far above. I was becoming more and more myself, white shoulders and red mouth flashing through the crowd, a plume of smoke hand-flicked and rising.
I saw the occasional familiar face and liked the feeling of knowing people. Everyone there had something that they ‘did’ – making music, running a nightclub, designing clothes – but was not yet making a living from it. We all thought we would be running things in five years.
A gang of art-school graduates, nearing thirty, lived in that converted warehouse, sleeping in garden sheds and using the rest of the high-ceilinged space to make music videos and experimental films. Over pre-disco drinks, they were competitively critical. Clubs were over soon after they opened but when they closed down were remembered with glowing nostalgia. Finding fault marked refined taste and superior experience.
The warehouse was used as a ‘cool-party’ location for films, making the landlord feel he could raise the rent, forcing the inhabitants out, meaning it was no longer the place for cool parties. This was a party to celebrate moving out. There were so many celebrations. A visitor from Scandinavia wondered just where he had found himself and why the hell everyone was drinking so much. ‘You can’t be dancing all the time,’ he said, and I didn’t understand.
Then I was out on the pavement alone, walking – with my jacket hooked over my arm and a bottle of beer – enjoying the night air on my bare skin. I was wasted but I wanted more. I wanted to rub the city onto my skin; I wanted to inhale the streets. I was walking faster, in worn-down boots, than the buses were travelling. The drugs I’d swallowed earlier made my breath fast and my cheeks tingle. Biting my mouth, I wanted to eat it all. There was heat in my face and lips and nipples and clitoris. I flicked open my cigarette box and went in again with the flash of the lighter and the quenching mouthful of drink. I could feel it entering, breathing deeply so the bubbles of oxygen processed the alcohol more quickly, sucking the smoke and holding my breath, squeezing each moment.
I had been walking through the city for so long that I didn’t know where I was. I’d walk towards any light, towards the highest point. I wanted to reach up above the buildings, following the part of me that needed cliffs, and the air to be clearer.
* * *
When I made it home I lay on my bed with the window open. There was some wine left and I listened to sad songs and looked at uninhabited Orkney islands on Wikipedia. The night air was still warm, my hair was smoky and my skin dirty. I could hear bins crashing – the late-night takeaway packing up – and drunk people getting off buses.
Outside the flat there were raised train tracks and a smoggy crossroads. When cars with powerful speakers stopped at the red lights, the whole building vibrated in time with the bass. Although the sea was a hundred miles away, and some kids in the area had never seen it, there were seagulls hustling around. I once saw one carrying a segment of Terry’s Chocolate
