The Cut Read online

  *

  The house vibrates to its loudest-ever party. Just at the moment, the soundtrack is ‘Where I Find My Heaven’ by the Gigolo Aunts, and the sound blurs, thumping like fists from the speakers. I slip past the crowds of extras, through a haze of smoke, heading through the patio doors into the fresh air of an exterior.

  I’m fairly well-oiled on several glasses of Australian Riesling (twelve per cent, not bad) and happy that all these people are here because I asked them, here because of me. Imelda helped me to get it all ready, and then disappeared on some secret mission – I think she went off to fetch her latest flame from St Mary’s RC Sixth-Form College. Yeah, I gather she goes for them young these days.

  Damien’s there, stage left in the corner by the doors. He’s got booze on one side and an army of leggy schoolgirls on the other, so he’s happy.

  ‘Some things in life,’ Damien’s saying loudly, to the adoring young floozies, ‘you should never leave too late, you know? Like getting really, paralytically smashed. Like travelling round the world.’

  He catches my eye across the pulsating room, and seems even more pleased that I have joined his audience. I watch the girls’ bright lipsticks floating under the lights like little piranha fish ready to nip Damien’s flesh. Glossy A-lines caress their thighs, shimmery with hues of Ribena purple, jelly green, lemon yellow.

  ‘But there’s one thing,’ says Damien, wagging a finger, ‘that you should never, ever leave too late. Know what that is?’

  The liquid-skirted girls shake their heads and flick their hair back. They watch him, waiting for his wisdom. I watch Damien getting his beer can ready, so that he can go for the slurp straight after the punchline, just like he always does.

  ‘Sleeping with a woman,’ he says, ‘who’s old enough to be your mother.’

  There’s a silence. Then one of the girls giggles, while another snorts her laugh up the wrong way and collapses into an armchair, frantically wiping her nose. The others start to snigger as they get it. Maybe.

  As I squeeze my way through to the doors, Damien starts to tell one of his disgusting jokes – it’s something to do with a nun and a Doberman.

  ‘Ooh,’ says one of the airbrushed babes, ‘I hate fuckin’ dogs.’

  ‘Stop fucking them, then,’ says Damien, and this time, the little group explodes into ribald, screeching laughter straight away.

  I get out – I’ve heard the ‘joke’ before (and also Damien’s disclaimer about it being true and ‘not just a doggy-shag story’).

  The place is buzzing now, full of extras in various states of dress and undress. There’s already a couple playing tonsil-hockey over behind the rubber-plant. I’ve no idea who they are.

  There was never a serious intention, luckily, of scripting a ‘theme’. I had worried, because Imelda mentioned at one point about introducing some camp retro element. As far as I’m concerned, people in the seventies didn’t look cool, they just looked bloody stupid with their Afros or centre partings, their flowered shirts and their sad oval glasses. I don’t think I could have coped with a room full of people looking like newspaper photos of people missing for twenty years whose bodies have just been found. Or a bunch of really crap eighties footballer haircuts, all feathery on top with scraggy long bits over the collar – technically known, I’ve just found out, as a ‘mullet’.

  But here we are, anyway – Imelda seems to have ordered stacks of drink, and Jon’s taken Kate to a show in London, to be followed by a night in a plush hotel. People are here, and it’s all going well.

  I get out on the patio, just in time to see an unfamiliar boy plunge head first into the pool with an enormous splash. He emerges, spluttering but laughing. A blonde girl gets the idea of throwing his drink in after him, which her friends find hilarious.

  There’s a new, small figure coming on set, threading her way through a sea of plastic cups and floating plates and gesticulating hands. Marcie, her eyes thickly-kohled as usual, lifts a hand in greeting and slips over to me.

  ‘Nice do,’ she says, flipping out a cigarette from nowhere and looking around. Not looking at me, you see. Looking everywhere else. No problem with that. I find Marcie’s eyes unsettling enough without having to watch them for too long. Christ, have I admitted that before? Me, frightened of –

  All the same, I can’t hide my surprise – first, that she’s here at all, and then because of how good she looks tonight. She’s had her hair trimmed into a neat bob (tapered at the back) with sculpted blonde bangs, almost albino-white against her dark eyes. (Not exactly come-to-bed eyes, but come-in-the-back-seat, certainly.) Her earrings are a pair of gold dolphins, and she’s wearing a chocolate raw-silk blouse, set off by a leather belt and an oyster tulip-skirt of sleek satin. The ensemble can’t have been cheap, and it gives Marcie’s baby-doll prettiness some unwarranted style. Something’s not quite right with that. So, what’s brought it on, and what’s behind it?

  ‘Damien here?’ she asks casually, with a deep drag of smoke.

  ‘Inside. You’ll have to drag him away from his coven.’

  She smiles. Again, as if she knows something. I don’t like this at all. Just what is Marcie up to?

  ‘You look . . . nice,’ I tell her, to fill a gap in the conversation.

  She blinks in a slow, artificial way, as if to show me that she knows it and she was just waiting for me to say it. ‘I know I can look good when I try. Class, innit?’

  ‘A sub-species of some sort, certainly,’ I mutter into my beer, but luckily Marcie is too busy being noticed to hear, and I’m confident enough that she’d be too stupid to understand anyway.

  ‘I wannid to show my figure off,’ she adds. I’m thinking, I know what she’s going to say, please don’t let her say how tiny she is. ‘It’s to do with being tiny,’ she says, fluttering her eyelashes and blowing smoke up at me. ‘I’m so tiny. I’m a ten.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ I tell her, with bile in every syllable. ‘A ten? Isn’t that just a fat eight?’

  It’s lost on Marcie. Taking the piss is no fun when your target’s someone whose last brain cell is so lonely it’s suffering from solipsistic dementia.

  She slides even closer to me and jabs her cigarette into the air. She lowers her voice, so that I have to strain to hear it above the babble and the thud of the speakers from the lounge.

  ‘I’ll need the next payment by Thursday,’ she says casually.

  I have to stop myself from spitting my drink across the nearest shoulder. ‘You bloody what?’

  ‘Thursday,’ says Marcie coolly. ‘Another hundred, I need.’

  ‘I don’t fucking care what you need, you little whore!’ I hiss at her, grabbing her silken arm as she tries to slip from the scene. Marcie raises her eyebrows at me and very pointedly looks down at my grasping hand. I let go of her, but not without another low expletive.

  My legs have gone weak and my heart’s pounding. I can see what’s coming – clear, ominous, unstoppable.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, in a voice of cold steel. Anything but sorry. ‘But I need to pay off the gas.’ Her eyes narrow, and she calmly blows a jet of smoke past my right ear. ‘I mean, it would be awful if anyone found out you was driving at Ashwell Heights.’

  Fury grips me. I cannot let this go on, not now. This little bitch has walked into a party to which I invited her, simply to carry on her sordid little blackmail enterprise.

  ‘Marcie, you can do what you like. For your information, it bloody well wasn’t me, it was him. It was JJ, right? Fucking JJ!’ I’m aware that my face is flaming with anger, and one or two people are looking over their shoulders.

  Marcie’s eyes are wide, challenging. Hands on hips, she says, ‘You know it was you. We smashed the backwindow, and you drove us there.’

  Shit. In the aftermath of what happened – when she and Damien had gone – I’d forgotten that. And subconsciously, defending myself, I had been talking only about that time after, with Birthmark in the car, with JJ in the quarry.

 
And there’s a twitchy poltergeist of a smile on her pert little face, almost as if she was aware of this.

  ‘See you later,’ Marcie murmurs, and slips into the crowd on the patio.

  *

  In one smooth movement, with a subtle lighting adjustment, I’m back in the lounge. Damien and his admirers have gone, and Marcie’s vanished already. I pan across the room, but I can’t see any of them. I start to panic. Someone turns the music up for ‘Blue Monday’. I start to head across the room, nervously smiling and nodding at people, and trying to ignore the way the beat’s hammering like a pile-driver in my head. The room’s atmosphere seems entirely composed of smoke and sweat.

  I finally make it through and emerge, gasping, into the kitchen, where I grab a much-needed bottle of beer from the fridge. The floor’s already sticky with drink and there’s a bunch of long-haired reprobates huddled round an ashtray under the kitchen table. One of the glossy-skirted tarts is getting it on with a stubbly bloke in the corner by Kate’s precious Aga. Two stupid-looking girls with fiercely-pierced noses – who the hell invited them? – are having an argument next to the fridge.

  ‘Do you hate your own stomach linin’ or what? It’s salt, tequila, lemon, that’s the order.’

  ‘Piss off, you know nothin’. I’m telling you, it’s lemon, salt, tequila.’

  I poke my head between them for a moment. ‘Actually,’ I tell them, ‘it’s salt, lemon, tequila. Right? Lick, suck, drink.’

  I have this mental image of Imelda, raising her eyebrows at the comment, saying, ‘My dear, that’s the way I always do it.’

  Imelda. Where is she tonight?

  *

  I leave the two girls to enjoy their tequila in the correct way – at least, I hope it was theirs, otherwise Jon’s drinks cabinet has already been broken into, and that wasn’t meant to happen until later.

  ‘Darling! I’ve found you!’ The voice is unmistakable, and I turn around in relief for a hug from Imelda. She’s glossy and smooth, her body swathed in some white silk wraparound thing. Above a wood-brown face, her hair’s adorned with a crown of leaves. She smells of sandalwood and pine. ‘How are you?’ she asks.

  ‘Pretty stressed, actually. Thought you weren’t coming,’ I tell her with a half-hearted grin.

  ‘Heavens,’ she says, readjusting her wreath with a wiggle of her eyebrows. ‘Have another beer, love. Start drinking, stop thinking, that’s what I always say in these circumstances.’

  ‘Is . . . JJ here?’

  She’s rolling a cigarette, but she waves a hand into the throng. ‘He’s around, somewhere.’ Her eyes meet mine for a moment as her tongue pauses, mid-Rizla. She looks for a moment like some demented parallel-universe Roman getting a fix before taking her place in the Interactive Colosseum. ‘Do you want to talk to him?’ she says (in the tone of voice normally reserved for questions like ‘Are you sure it’s syphilis?’).

  I shrug. ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind.’

  Imelda nods, gives me a reassuring smile as she peers over my shoulder. ‘All right. I’ll try and find him.’

  *

  Now Imelda’s arrived, I start to lighten up a bit. She gives me something to smoke and I lighten up even more. I’m conscious that I keep pushing my hair back with sweaty hands, so that after a couple of hours it’s become a tangled mess, a forest filled with latent pockets of smoke and alcohol.

  At one point, I push past a queue to get to the nearest bathroom. Leaving my beer can on the top banister – and not really caring whether it stays or falls – I blunder straight in. I have a long, warm, contented piss, and just as I’m putting everything back together again I hear noises behind the shower curtain.

  I frown, and, pulling the flush to hide the sound of my moves, I go over to the bath and jerk the brightly coloured curtain back. A dishevelled Marcie’s blinking at me in the harsh cutting light. There’s a bloke next to her, not bad, with blond, shoulder-length hair and a big nose, but sort of ungainly-looking. He’s embarrassed, frantically tugging at the stuck fly-zip on his jeans.

  I stare at the tableau, and I’m about to go away and let them get on with it, but something just doesn’t feel right.

  The way Marcie’s looking at me, cowering against the tiles in her classy gear, the satin skirt not quite pulled up to her rump, the chocolate blouse half unbuttoned. With a middle button missing, I notice. And her eyes are big and glossy, tuned-out. She was fine a couple of hours ago.

  ‘Am I interrupting anything?’

  ‘Leave it, Bel,’ says Marcie in a small voice.

  ‘Yeah,’ says the bloke, pulling on a check shirt, his embarrassment turning to anger. ‘Why don’t you let us get on, eh?’

  ‘How much, Marcie?’ I ask wryly.

  She shakes her head, rubbing angrily at the satin skirt. I wasn’t wrong. I knew the clothes weren’t Marcie’s style at all. Someone’s dolled her up for the evening. Someone’s got her stitched-up, up and running, hot and runny. Ready for the off. I don’t believe it. So how much is the little bitch taking home these days?

  ‘Look,’ the guy says, half stepping out of the shower. Hands on hips, I look down at his groin in contempt. He pushes his hair from out of his eyes, and jabs a finger at me. ‘Just don’t spoil this. Who the hell are you anyway?’

  I grab the tap and spin it round, soaking the pair of them in scalding water. He swears at me and jumps out of the way, but Marcie just slides down the tiles – scattering soap, shampoo and shower-gel on the way – and slumps there, staring vacantly. I hear the guy storm out behind me.

  When it becomes obvious that Marcie isn’t going to move, despite the water cooking her exposed flesh to a lobster red, I grudgingly twist some cold into the mixture and leave her there to soak. She lifts her head to look at me – hair heavy and lank, that careful fringe destroyed – and there is defeat in her eyes.

  ‘I knew, Marcie,’ I tell her as I turn to leave. ‘I knew you had to be back on the game. All that money you’d be earning. It was just too tempting. You wanted it for your drugs, didn’t you? That’s why you needed all that money from me as well. All your fucking little blackmail payments.’

  She draws her knees up to her chin and doesn’t answer. The blouse is now thick and wet like chocolate mousse, sticky round her little cleavage. I take her silence as assent.

  ‘You’re just a stupid Fally girl, Marcie,’ I tell her. ‘People like you will never come to anything. You’ll always be dragged back by something.’ I see that I never did have anything to fear from Marcie and her little rebellion. This isn’t France in 1789. You can’t cart the moneyed classes off to the guillotines in barrows.

  I fling the door open, confronting a very surprised queue with a wall of steam. I march out like the queen of the battlefield, grabbing my beer can on the way. It has stayed there all this time, balanced on the banister, untouched.

  *

  I corner JJ by the drinks in the vibrating lounge. He yanks the top off a bottle of red wine. He looks very uncomfortable to see me.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say hello?’ I ask him, sipping my beer and surveying the throbbing throng through the mists of smoke.

  ‘Hello,’ he offers grudgingly.

  ‘So, did you bring her, then?’

  He laughs emptily. ‘What do you think?’ The cork comes out of the bottle with a satisfying pop, and he fills a plastic beaker to the brim. (For a brief instant, I see a chalice . . . bread and wine in a desolate church . . .)

  ‘And Imelda’s latest? She here?’

  ‘Possibly.’ He’s not making eye contact with me even. ‘You seem to be friendly enough with her yourself.’

  I’m not quite sure what’s intended by that. Still, at least we have exchanged a few words.

  *

  This all happened hours ago, back in sobriety. The world has mutated since. Raw energy from another universe – its colours bright, cartoon-alien, its sounds demonic and raucous – has permeated this reality.

  I must recall it as it was.

>   *

  We are standing there, on the fringes of the party. At least we are talking. We are leaning against the same bit of wall. People dance, white trousers and blouses looking purple under the strobes (no expense spared here, you know).

  In the corner, Damien’s glossy-skirted harem sit in a tight circle. One of them is slicing a plastic lemonade bottle in two. She hands half the bottle to another of the indistinguishable party-girls, who shoves a makeshift foil tray into the plastic cylinder. Then they make a small hole in the side of the bottle and stick a straw into it at right angles. One of them lights a match, with great, unnecessary ceremony, and they set fire to the contents of the foil tray.

  ‘We haven’t . . . really talked about what happened.’

  ‘No,’ agrees JJ. ‘Is it necessary?’

  The girls in the corner are bubbling with giggles as they ease a plastic bag over the opened lemonade bottle. (Just like putting on a condom, I think ruefully.) I know what happens then – seen it before. The fumes rise up and fill the bag, and as the dope burns it produces hot, raw fumes which are sucked through the straw. The bag squashes and re-inflates, like a lung. A lungful of purest hash.

  I glance up at JJ, and there’s that touch of little-boy naivety again, that innocence which first drew me to him.

  ‘As necessary as anything ever is,’ I mutter into my drink.

  He seems to like the fact that he’s annoyed me again. ‘Now you’re just being petulant,’ he claims.

  ‘Oh, am I?’ I knock back the rest of my drink and sling the can across the room into the melee of dancers. ‘Great. Well, that’s just great. See this?’ I pick up the brimming ashtray, a hideous thing in elephant-grey, shaped like a shell. One of Kate’s little bargains. I tip it up and hurl it to the floor, scattering the fag ash and stubs all over his shoes. ‘Now that’s petulant,’ I tell him with satisfaction.

  The girls are laughing and pointing as they pass the plastic lung between them.

  He sighs, slams his glass down. ‘Come back when you’re feeling more adult,’ he snaps at me. He barges through the wobbling dancers, heading for the hallway and leaving me slumped here by the drinks.