Short stories of East London life.
‘Midway through my life, I found myself in a dark forest — for the straight path forward had been lost… ‘
‘Mal, what are you talking about?’
I turned to face them, walking backwards. ‘It’s Dante! The Divine Comedy!’
‘Only you could manage to think of something like that while on LSD,’ chuckled Theo.
‘Someone as — brilliantly intelligent as me?’
‘I was gonna say pretentious… ‘
‘But why are you going home with me?’ he asked in his nasal Greek accent. ‘You don’t know me. You don’t know if maybe I am going to kill you?’
‘Yeah, well. You probably won’t.’
The morning was cold, clear and white. We’d left the club and walked to the Old Street roundabout. He kept asking me questions. I was taciturn, blissed-out and exhausted. Numb, no, dazed is the word. I still felt things. I stopped to kiss him again. Not really horny, but wanting to touch and taste and feel. Someone else, alive and warm. A homeless woman accosted us. I gave her a pound that had been rattling loose in the pocket of my sports shorts.
We caught the bus to Bow. We asked each other what we’d been on. Both MDMA. We asked each other what we were doing in London. He said ‘research.’ Maybe he really is a serial killer, I thought.
I must have had one drink too many, because that morning I slept through my alarm, if you can call switching off your alarm and going back to sleep for an hour ‘sleeping through’ it. When I reawoke, I looked at the time, scrambled into the shower, microwaved a cup of coffee from Aoife’s cafetière, drank it with some of her almond milk and left, already making up an excuse in my head to explain being over an hour late.
Zesty Design was a moderately successful agency located on the second floor of a building down a leafy side street in Camden. On their website, they claimed to be ‘experienced purveyors of world-class content’, but what this really boiled down to was short ads for dishwasher tablets or sanitary pads, sometimes an internal reel for a car manufacturer or a supermarket chain, congratulating itself on how eco-friendly its practices were.
In 2014, six months after moving to London, when she felt she was starting to get her bearings, Aoife found a queer book club online called the Orchid Tree Readers. Catering to ‘anyone LGBTQI-identifying of any gender expression’, but clearly more on the femme side judging by its members’ profile pics, it seemed as good a place as any to make friends in this new and overwhelming city.
It was not. Aoife sensed this almost immediately upon entering the upstairs room of the small vegan café in Kentish Town. She was late and sweaty, her black hair — so carefully arranged in the office bathroom — plastered to her forehead from the oppressive Tube journey. The eight women around the table were all poised and thin and pretty, mostly white, in their mid-to-late-twenties and dressed in an oddly uniform fashion of muted denim shirts over white t-shirts, often with a little gold or silver chain running under the collar. Aoife had, for reasons now unknown to her, worn a childishly bright pink-and-yellow tie-dye tee. Which, she could tell from the group’s frowns, probably revealed the massive patches of sweat underneath.
‘I’m sorry,’ said the woman who’d been in the middle of an introductory spiel as she looked up at Aoife with a pitying smile. Her white t-shirt read simply: LENA DUNHAM. ‘This is booked for a meeting?’
And then there was Dario, tall and hunky and dressed like it was the 70’s, vintage shirt half-unbuttoned to show a small silver medallion on a hairy chest, dancing on a half-empty dancefloor early in the night, moving like he was wholly unafraid of bumping into anyone, like they were the ones who’d better move out of his way.
I didn’t move out of his way. In fact, I deliberately got in it and started talking to him and very soon kissing him. It was the type of first encounter that seems to happen more in your twenties, not so much in your thirties, when doubts and reservations crowd in.
‘This guy on Grindr wants me to come over and Netflix and chill with him,’ I told Aoife with a grimace as she padded back with crisps. ‘Do people still say that?’
‘Nooo, don’t go!’ Aoife protested, slumping down beside me. ‘Stay here and Netflix and chill with us… ‘
‘Did I say I was gonna go? I mean, look at him.’
Aoife cocked her head at my phone. ‘Oh, but he’s not bad! In a kind of… Vin Diesel… bald tough guy way.’
I cackled. ‘Vin Diesel! Whatever happened to her… ‘
‘Okay, what are we gonna watch?’ Aoife lunged forward and grabbed the remote.
‘I’m cool with whatever, as long as we actually choose something,’ said Theo from the armchair, rolling a joint. ‘… and don’t sit here scrolling for three hours like last time.’
‘Oooh, the LGBTQ+ Collection,’ said Aoife, over-enunciating each letter. ‘We get a whole collection. Look at that, fellas.’
‘You’re very handsome!’ I told the tall, sleepy-eyed guy with dark curly hair who I had subtly stalked from the front hall onto the crowded dancefloor.
‘And you’re very drunk!’ he replied.
I extended the hand not holding my cup in a gesture of ‘eh, what can you do.’
‘No.’ Rodrigo paused after peeling my trousers off. He sat back on his haunches, both of us down to our underwear, and looked over my body with sadness, like a doctor preparing to deliver tough news. ‘You are not hot enough.’
I propped myself up. ‘What?’
‘I cannot — continue with this.’ He gestured with his sculptural arm at my soft, pale torso. ‘You are not hot enough.’
I’m not really a party animal. It’s usually others who drag me along. Like the night when my date with dull, but nice-enough Phil got turned into something very different.
Okay, I shouldn’t be mean; he wasn’t that dull. We just weren’t on the same wavelength. That much quickly became clear as conversation stalled and sputtered over rapidly gulped-down pints. Phil was telling me about his gym routine, how he’d recently found that the triceps dips really helped with his obliques for the side planks. Oblique is the right word, I thought, smiling and nodding.
‘But I never skip leg day.’ He steadied our table as someone bumped it. ‘It’s so important that you do an equal amount of leg exercises, and you don’t even need equipment for that… ‘
‘Totally. Yeah.’ I put my beer down, wiping my stubble with my forearm. ‘But so, er, do you do other things? For fun?’
‘I just can’t believe you missed it,’ said Caroline as she cut into her avocado toast. ‘It was my wedding, you know? And I really wanted all my friends to be there.’
‘I’m sure it was still a special day without me,’ I offered, sipping my cappuccino. I’d ordered nothing else, knowing how overpriced this place was and deciding to have breakfast at home (something else which had annoyed Caroline — ‘now you’re just going to sit there and watch me stuff myself, like the fatty pig I am,’ she’d moaned, stick-thin as ever.) ‘It looked great in the pictures?’
‘I know, but… ‘ She glanced at the bustling Dalston street with a sigh. ‘Well, you know!’
‘No, I don’t!’ I took a breath. ‘Look, I may not know much about weddings and romance and… healthy relationships, but… surely the day was about you and Matt. Right?’