Page 4 of Glitterland
In the past, the universe is a glitterball I hold in the palm of my hand. I am the axis of the world.
In the past, I am soaring, and falling, and breaking, and lost.
Then there are grey walls all around, a sullen haze of medication where minutes and months lose all their meaning.
Afterwards, I performed the halting ceremony of betterness in a crawl of grey days.
Somehow, I started writing again, laying words out like cutlery. Niall moved in. And then out again.
And now there was this. And yesterday.
2
Yesterday
It was Max’s stag night, and I’d fully intended to get out of it. Because, when it came to letting my friends down, I had practice. Stratagems developed over year of missed weddings, skipped birthdays, and ducked parties. My usual technique involved accepting invitations with a convincing display of pleasure and gratitude, then demonstrating my commitment to attend by buying tickets, confirming bookings, and pretending to read all the emails (I didn’t see this as a waste of time and money, so much as an investment in my future comfort), only to cancel—with great regret—at the very last minute. Everyone always understood. I gave them no other choice.
On this occasion, I’d executed it flawlessly, explaining to Niall by the coward’s preferred medium of voice message about half an hour after I should have departed for Brighton that I didn’t feel up to going out tonight. It wasn’t even a lie. The only thing I’d misrepresented was the likelihood of me feeling up to doing anything ever again.
Unfortunately, Niall knew me too well. He turned up at the flat, let himself in with the key he still had, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. He called it a last hurrah. For who, or what, I wasn’t sure. The people we used to be, perhaps.
And that was how, against my wishes and my better judgement, I ended up in Brighton. In a gay bar. At a stag party. Arranged for the groom by his best friend. Who was in love with him. And I thought I knew hell.
It was a Friday night, so the whole place was packed. Dancers had over-spilled the dance floor, their pressed-together bodies pulsating into all the empty spaces of the club, and the LEDs on the ceiling streamed overhead like a million multicoloured stars, falling and dying and shattering in fleeting, stained glass fragments on the bodies below. A twist of electric blue glinted on an upraised wrist. A smear of wild green across a throat. Cracks of pink and purple spilled with a glitter of perspiration down someone’s bare chest. Synaesthetic chiaroscuro. An impossible entangling of space and skin, light and shadow.
They were playing the sort of deep, delirious electro-house I hadn’t sought out in years. A thumping heartbeat of sex and sound, the drug to unite all drugs, the music of my mania. Even now, watching the grace of strangers from an endless distance, I felt a faint and faraway echo of something like pleasure, as though some long-lost, once-loved visitor was knocking on a door that no longer opened.
“Do I know you?” A voice from beside me broke through the music.
I didn’t even turn. “No, I don’t think so.”
We had the VIP area upstairs, away from the crush, and in easy reach of the cocktail bar. Niall had assembled us all here for drinks and drunken jokes, but by now, most of the party had dispersed into the crowd like waves lost in the sea. I was standing half in the shadows, my elbows folded on the railing, watching without interest what was happening below. I could just about make out Max and Niall dancing together and, in another corner, a couple of Max’s merchant banker friends enthusiastically getting off.
“Are you sure? You look familiar. How do you know Max?”
Hints, it seemed, were not going to be taken any time soon. I cast a quick, grudging glance at my relentless interlocutor. Brown hair, brown eyes, a whimsical bracket to his wide mouth. Good arms. My type, once upon a time. And now? Nothing.
“We were at university together,” I said.
“So was I.” He sounded genuinely thrilled about it. “Oh, I’m Hugh, by the way, Hugh Hastings.”
I performed a sort of half-arsed wave to discourage any handshaking and volunteered nothing further. Conversations were like fires; they tended to sputter out if you deprived them of air.
“Sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” he said.
“Ash. Winters.”
“Wait,” he cried, “I do remember! I read your book. What was it called? The smoke and the something?”
He gazed at me expectantly.
“The Smoke Is Briars.”
“Yes! It was wonderful. I loved it. It was quite weird though, no offence. Is that what they call magic realism? Like that Spanish bloke.” Columbian. Gabriel García Márquez—if that’s who he meant—was Columbian. “Yes,” I said, unable to care. “Just like that.”
I felt unspeakably tired, but he was still talking, his interest flattening me like a cartoon steamroller.
“What else have you written? Won the Booker yet? Hah.”
