Читать книгу Validate Me - Charly Cox - Страница 14

The door opens quickly just as my earring falls out and breaks. Steph catches it and puts it in her pocket, seamlessly, and stares confidently at the man leaning and swaying on the frame. ‘We’re here for the party. Right house?’ She says this with a vague tone of annoyance because it’s bastard-freezing outside. Neither of us have tights on and he’s just stood there gawping, assessing, working out if he’ll get off with one of us by the dregs of the evening. Music crawls in muted tendrils down the tall staircase behind him. No bass.

‘Well, hello girls. Who are you then?’ An over-exaggerated mockney accent dribbles down his polo; when had people started to think that being mindful of your privilege meant performing a class act?

‘This isn’t Mahiki, mate. Let us in, would you?’ It wasn’t, thank God. It was a flat in Denmark Hill, with a door off to the back of a newsagents. Our legs are bare, shaking, and my mind clamours for space as it beats itself into a pulp wondering how I could’ve crammed another cigarette in-between the Uber and this unnecessary faux formality. ‘Robbie invited us,’ I say, meek in Steph’s confidence, staring. I feel shiny. My face feels filled with obvious pores. I feel an intense fraudulence, which I’m sure is about to be exposed. I do not look like my photos. I am catfishing myself, at best. ‘’Course he did,’ he stares at my boobs and Steph’s legs. It feels almost like a compliment that neither of us would ever admit felt like one, we’ve spent enough time slagging off how Robbie always must be seen with the next hot girl and how he always has a line of them waiting, and how horribly disgusting and misogynistic that holds. But to be assumed to be one of them? An ego boost. ‘So can we come in or what? Bloody hell.’ This is boring.

‘Yeah. Yeah, come up.’ He steadies himself on the bannister and the noise of the party engulfs us as he swings open the kitchen door. Everyone stops for a moment.

‘LADS! FOUND THESE TWO LOOKING FOR ROBBIE ON THE DOORSTEP,’ he shouts with smackable smugness. Some roll their eyes whilst others cheer, others pay no attention at all and the girls move in closer to the men they’re sat in front of.

‘Drink?’ Steph glares.

‘Bathroom first. I’ll sort out my face. Pour us one in there. Then let’s give this a go.’

I hadn’t been to a house party in years, the coy butterfly-sizzle of excitement about the hours of pre-game are lost and forgotten. Nothing about being stood in somebody else’s bathroom with a cheap bottle of vodka between our legs felt naughty, it felt a bit grim and regressive. The fists banging on the door outside were not of rowdy teenagers who’d overdone it, not of new-found couples burrowing away for the night for a private snog, but of four thirty-year-olds after the cold, flat porcelain of the toilet to rack up lines of cocaine, which they’d later learn was actually ketamine. We let them bang.

‘Remind me why we’re here again?’ Steph screws back on the cap of the vodka, wrestling with the cheap teeth on the cap that won’t quite align. Impatient.

I ignore her, transfixed in my own reflection. I do not look like my photos and although I have spent countless lost, and wasted, hours studying the planes of my face to an almost scientific degree on my phone, it feels like the first time I’d really seen myself in months. Vulgar. Vile. I do not look like my photos. Of all the places to be incarcerated as a fraud, tonight’s setting couldn’t have been more perfect. As we’d walked flat-palmed, pushing doors in the dark to find the toilet, I had spotted five men I’d at some point matched with on Hinge or Bumble that had later gone on to ignore my witty, well-thought and, through a series of screenshots to friends, well-vetted opening lines. I had arrived at a place of uncloaking.

The banging becomes more incessant and grows to a kick that shoots the brass lock up and off its holder, the four men fall in crying with laughter, pulling each other down to pull themselves up in a twisted rugby scrum. I may not have looked like my pictures but they certainly didn’t look like men. Little boys, still.

In the kitchen, it is much of the same tired scene we had left in the past of our pre-youth, where we were too young to be doing any of this at all but still stabbing at the perceived rituals of fun that we’d learned from films. Scattered plastic shells of shots and stepped-on crisps nestle deeper into the thin cracks of the wooden floor. No one here was having fun. Everyone is desperately ferrying around in a painted distraction, feigning merriment, if only to not feel cheated of the future they thought they’d be living for an hour or so. Thinking they’d have kids by now. A house. A holiday or two a year. A career. But here we were, acting fifteen, feeling forty-five, grappling for an artsy shot by the plugged-in disco lamp, rehashing unread articles that made one of us sound cultured and the other aggressive.

Empty.