by, until at last I could escape the emptiness. I left early and walked slowly to cheat it. Delilah’s flat was in a big old building with pretty windows and tall steps leading up to the front door. Every time I climbed them I felt pangs of jealousy. Lilah always told me that from the inside the windows were draughty and there were mice in the basement where the bins went, but as outsiders we can see things only as they seem. Envy was a feeling I collected as a diehard habit so truths like these often fell around me unheard. I pressed the buzzer and shifted the bag with the little bottle of vodka Fitz had bought me from one hand to the other. Molly, Delilah’s flatmate, answered, a blue paisley apron tied around her waist and a pan in one hand, a spoon in the other.
‘Hey, Saf! Come in, come in. You look gorgeous!’
I liked Molly. She was clever and pretty, with round pink cheeks, and she always had nice things to say to everybody. ‘Lilah’s in her room,’ she said, stirring the pot. ‘You want some bolognese?’
I shook my head, touched my stomach. ‘No, thanks, I just ate. Smells amazing.’
She smiled and went back into the kitchen, trailing hot tomato-garlic-wine scent behind her. I walked down the hall, looking at the framed photos on the bright white walls as I went. Lilah’s door was half open, music playing out, so I knocked and opened it at the same time. She was crouched in front of her mirror, straightening her hair and spraying each strand wildly as she went.
‘Hey, gorge,’ she said. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Good,’ I said, sitting down on the end of the bed and taking the bottle out of the bag. ‘How you doing?’ And before she could answer, I added, ‘Glasses?’
We’d sat for a while like that, me with my back against the wall and my legs stretched out on the satin duvet, Lilah kneeling by the mirror, preening and powdering and straightening and shining. She had started seeing a man at work, a client, and she didn’t want her boss to find out.
‘He’s so beautiful, Saf,’ she gushed, her gold eyes widening, her own beauty reflected back in the mirror.
‘I’m happy for you,’ I said, and I was, the vodka warming my heart and making the room pink in the lamplight. I racked up two lines on the cover of a hardback book, but as she turned to look in her huge toolbox of make-up, I snorted one and quickly racked up another.
‘Here,’ I said, as she turned back round. ‘Let’s celebrate.’
I held out the book and the note and she grinned, ‘Little fairy with your pixie dust.’ She scooted forward and knelt at my knees to do the line. I watched the tiny particles zip up her nose as her hair swooshed across the cover. She handed back the note and squeezed my boot. ‘Thanks, baby.’ She went back to the mirror, turning up the music as she passed. She started to sing, humming the beat aloud in her beautiful sparkly voice.
The thing with Lilah was that she started off each night like this. Full of happy, fun and glossy pretty. I’d look at her and feel so ordinary sat on the sides. She was shiny and new and I was growing-out roots and scuffed boots. She looked like the kind of person anything could happen to, like in fairytales and rubbish films, like she might drop her purse in the street and a prince or a footballer would bend to pick it up and fall in love with her. But as the night went on she’d get bored. She’d look around the room and she wouldn’t see anybody she liked or wanted to talk to and she wouldn’t know the music and she’d feel out of place. And her glossy would look too much, too bright in the dark loveliness of the night. And she’d sulk and start to whine, and she’d take her shoes off because her feet hurt, and she’d pull her hair back because it was too hot, and it made me realise that even beautiful people are only beautiful in their own place. Fitz thought that Lilah was a bit up herself, but I knew that she cried herself to sleep sometimes. I knew that she hated her job and I knew that she could never tell her parents about the abortion she had had or the married men she slept with and so I found a bit of her to love.
We did the lines and then we stood up and straightened ourselves out and then we left. Molly was pouring bolognese onto two perfect nests of spaghetti as we passed. There was a man’s shoe poking out from the kitchen table, but the door hid the leg and the body and the face. ‘Who is it?’ I asked Lilah, as we walked down the street, waiting to feel cold through the vodka but staying cosy in its warmth. She shrugged. ‘James, I guess. Someone boring like that.’ To Lilah, anyone without beauty or wealth was boring. It made me cross with her but it also made me feel relieved, because I knew that she couldn’t see the real wonder of Fitz and so he was safely mine.
The streetlights had been starting to come on as the sky turned darker grey, little globes of orange glowing along the long street. I took poppers from my pocket and offered them to Lilah. She shook her head. ‘God, no. What are you – sixteen? You’ll be sick …’ I laughed and put them to my nose anyway. The rest of the road rushed by in a warm lurch, lights brighter and cheeks warm, Lilah chattering away about everything and nothing.
I could feel the bass throbbing through the pavement as we walked up the drive, beating up through my feet and into my heart, leaving me short of breath and anxiously happy. The door was open and we stepped through into the dark. All of the light bulbs had been swapped for the coloured ones you could get in the pound shop, red in the hall. The walls had been covered with giant sheets of plain white paper, which people were already scrawling messages across.
We headed naturally for the kitchen, the place where everybody begins and ends a party. It was bustling busy, people perching on worktops and crowded around talking and reaching for things and filling glasses. The light bulb in the kitchen was green, everything and everybody suddenly seeming as if they were under water. I was already high and happy and didn’t want anything bringing me down, so I floated through without stopping, smiling at people and feeling the music rolling around my head. Alice was at the far end of the kitchen table, crotch glowing in the green light, and she jumped up excitedly and pulled me into her arms, showing me off to the rest of the table, like I was her pet, and then slipped a pill into my hand and danced off.
When we had gone into the lounge the light was dark blue, and people were dancing in a little clot in front of the decks. We danced in the blue dark for a while and I could feel my eyes starting to roll back behind my lids so I took Lilah’s hand and we sat down on the sofa. She was drinking wine slowly from the bottle, watching nobody in particular, and she ran her long fingers through my hair sending shivers over my rushing skin, tight and tiny pearls. My face and my mouth were dry and hot. The beat was pounding in my ears and I couldn’t breathe, like the darkest blue was shrinking in on me and the beat was growing and growing until it would crash down and cover me like a wave. Around me people were changing, shimmering gold glasses appearing over eyes and disappearing again, strange masks looming out of dark corners, faces melting into screams. I closed my eyes but the darkness sent me spinning. I stood, and the carpet lurched underneath me as I hurried out into the angry red of the hall and then into the toilet. I had to peel away a corner of white paper to get into it, and when I shut the door behind me, I could hear squeaky pens scribbling and scrawling messages on the inside of my skull.
The light was a normal greenish yellow in there, and I thought somewhere far inside my head that Alice must have run out of colours. I looked at my face in the mirror. My eyes were black and my skin was greenish yellow too, disappearing into the reflection of the walls and the door. My hair had come loose from its knot and was sticking to my scalp and cheeks like straw, falling limply down on my shoulders, and I pushed it and pulled it, disgusted. The bass pulsed through the door and in my veins, and as I pulled and tugged faster and faster at my hair and face my image blurred in the glass and the light seemed to shiver in its socket. I scraped my hair back and tied it with the band I kept round my wrist, but it was no good. I looked on the shelves and I found a tiny pair of nail scissors and I got hold of the ponytail between my fingers and hacked clean
