Sushi Central

by Alasdair Duncan

  ‘It’s in here somewhere,’ she yells. ‘Wait a minute, it’s … Fuck!’ The sound of something heavy falling to the floor. ‘Here it is.’

  Margot dashes back towards me, grinning. There is something small in her hands, and I can’t quite see what until she waves it at me, menacing me with it. It’s a cassette.

  ‘A mix tape?’

  ‘You bet,’ she smiles. ‘Finished it last night.’

  ‘Margot, you fucking rule! You made me a mix tape! Thanks!’

  I am happy, and I mean it. I take it, to have a closer look.

  35

  The cover of the cassette box: It’s a collage of text and photographs, the kind of intricate, obsessive-compulsive artwork at which Margot is totally brilliant. The words ‘dOn’T HAte mE beCAUSE i’m BeAuTIfuL’ are stuck down one side in these tiny black letters that look like newsprint. Photographs ripped from fashion magazines are pasted all over the front at bizarre angles. The head and torso of a smirking Russian-looking boy in a vaguely pornographic pose sits next to a shot of Madonna circa 1986 — she’s holding an infected vagina while a banner screaming Vive La Révolution covers her mouth. The words ‘COCAINE’ and ‘ELECTROCLASH’, both in bright pink letters, are pasted above them. Amongst the other delights are a howling baboon and a model who looks like Kate Moss, although it’s hard to tell because her eyes have been torn out.

  36

  I turn the tape over to look at the track listing. It’s a mixture of spiky, art-punk stuff and 80s pop music, the kind of thing Margot and I are both totally into. Margot and I are both, I don’t know, ‘different’, and so we cultivate a sense of isolation from our peers. Taste in music plays a significant part in this, and mix tapes can be coded messages, fashion statements, love letters … There are certain emotions that are hard to express except in the context of mix tapes.

  This one, I have to say, is pretty fucking cool.

  37

  MARGOT’S MIX TAPE FOR CALVIN

  1. ‘Love My Way’ — Psychedelic Furs

  2. ‘Hand To Phone’ — Adult

  3. ‘Sunglasses At Night’ — Tiga and Zyntherius

  4. ‘Playgirl’ — Ladytron

  5. ‘Glamour Girl’ — Chicks On Speed

  6. ‘Candy Girl’ — Soviet

  7. ‘I Feel Love’ — Depeche Mode

  8. ‘Strung Out’ — Dot Allison

  9. ‘Life On MTV’ — Miss Kittin & The Hacker

  10. ‘Carbon Kid’ — Alpinestars

  38

  Margot: It’s the soundtrack to my own personal hell.

  Me: Life in a gilded cage.

  Margot: Sophisticated misery — that’s where it’s at.

  Me: … Margot, you’re the fucking best!

  I hug her, or she hugs me, or … You know how this works by now.

  Margot: Think nothing of it.

  39

  Margot has pot, just like she promised. She and I sit on her parents’ balcony smoking a joint and watching the rain fall on the city. The city is always more beautiful on rainy days. The buildings, tall and dark, reflecting the clouds and almost disappearing into the fog. The ribbons of rain, cold, beautiful, like dancers. The glass of the buildings. The chill in the air. Happy When It Rains. Like the song. Reducing everything to a pop culture reference makes life so much easier to deal with.

  40

  Margot is playing this Placebo album that we’re both obsessed with at the moment, but she’s made it skip right to the last track. The whole album is so sad. This song in particular. It’s about a boy who dresses in black and cruises the streets of Luxembourg all day, looking for that elusive someone he can fall in love with. He never does. Find them, I mean. He never scores, he just gets an infection, like the song says. Whatever. That’s not the part which really gets to me. This boy, he dreams of a face that is pure perfection. I really wonder about this part of the song. I mean, it makes me think, am I ever going to find that particular person? The one I can fall in love with. Or is it always going to be like this — drifting around in this negative image of a city, going from boy to boy but knowing that really none of them will ever match up to the ultimate boy, the perfect, fictional one in my head?

  Nobody will ever match up with that. Not really. I’m probably going to spend my whole life chasing him. Writing about him. Trying to catch him in my notebooks and stories and wrapping him up in convoluted sentences until I can lose him in the structure of some book, in the structure of that great novel everyone tells me I’m destined to write. Until then he’ll only exist in pop songs like this, and in my head.

  41

  I’m kind of floating at the moment. I mean in a pleasant way. Sometimes smoking weed gets you in a really bad way, totally unexpectedly, makes you feel horrible. Like the world is closing in on you. Sometimes the opposite happens. You feel perfectly balanced, warm and fuzzy, and you keep waiting for the bad part to come but it doesn’t. You feel you can totally drift into anything. You’re prepared for everything. You’re wrapped in cotton wool.

  Margot: What are you thinking about?

  Me: I don’t know.

  I’ve just taken a drag of the joint. I pass it solemnly back to her. She accepts it; holds it between two fingers. Smiles at me.

  Me: I think I’m going to be alone forever.

  Margot: Only extremely neurotic people are afraid of being alone forever at sixteen.

  Me: I am extremely neurotic.

  Margot: Obviously.

  Me: I haven’t been with a boy in a long time. I really need to feel something. I really need to … How to put it — you know, lose myself in someone. Is that bad?

  She coughs; passes the joint back to me.

  Margot: Is what bad, tiger?

  I take a nice long drag; exhale slowly.

  Me: The fact that I need to … You know. I mean, okay. This guy checked me out on the bus this afternoon. He was pretty good-looking. He looked a couple of years older, but that doesn’t matter. I would really have liked to follow him off the bus, or made him follow me. You know. It would have been fucking great to have sex with him. Is that bad?

  Margot: … You shouldn’t.

  Me: … Shouldn’t what?

  Margot: You shouldn’t feel bad about it.

  Me: Oh.

  Margot: Fuck. We’re young and pretty Calvin. We might as well have as much fun as we can before we’re old and gross and nobody wants to touch us any more.

  I take another drag. I like the way it feels in my hand. I like the way I imagine I look when I’m doing it. I know it’s probably not doing good things for me from a health and wellbeing perspective, but, like, do I care? I take a smaller drag. Mainly so I can tell myself, well, I could have taken a bigger one, but I didn’t. Because I’m, you know … responsible.

  Me: I like it better when you put it that way.

  Margot: Of course you do.

  Me: But, I mean … Shouldn’t I? Shouldn’t I be worried that I was fully prepared to have sex with a total stranger?

  Margot: It’s not like you haven’t set a precedent. You’ve done it before. You’ve … Calvin? You okay tiger?

  Me: I am. It’s just … Whatever. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of hot guys there tonight.

  Margot: Maybe we can share one.

  Me: You wish.

  Margot: Even if there is a nice guy there, he’ll probably be more interested in you. You dirty fag. Gay boys are nicer than straight ones anyway.

  Me: No, we’re not.

  Margot: Yes you fucking are. Gay boys are, like, totally porno. You’re nicer than any of the straight boys I know. And cuter.

  Me: Please.

  Margot: And you guys don’t get all … hung up about giving head.

  Me: You dirty bitch.

  Margot: You love it.

  Me: Shut up.

  42

  We’re at this big house somewhere in New Farm, just near the river. A bunch of young guys who Margot knows ‘from around’ have just moved here, and I thi
nk this might be their housewarming or something. I don’t really know any of them, though Margot tells me that a friend of hers used to be going out with Edward, one of the guys who lives here, but the two of them broke up because he was on lots of antidepressants and he tried to stab her once, but apparently he’s better now.

  Edward: Edward, it seems, is not very interesting — all you need to know is he’s some guy who dropped out of school to be a model, who might or might not be a drug dealer, who is cute, who is eighteen. Edward, Margot tells me before we arrive, has been photographed everywhere — ‘like, everywhere,’ she says. I don’t ask her what this means, although she tells me that several months ago he played ‘boy at party’ in one of those ad campaigns that are intended to show the dangers of underage drinking. His agent is trying to get him into a deodorant commercial.

  The front verandah of the house is level with the street, closed in. When we arrive, Edward is shirtless, walking around in a pair of black three-quarter pants and smoking a cigarette. Margot introduces us — he nods, shakes my hand. His eyes are almost closed and he seems to be extremely stoned. I’m not sure what to say so I mumble something and try to look nonchalant. ‘This is my bitch,’ he says of the blonde girl next to him, who laughs nervously and looks away. He leans over to kiss the girl and she goes stiff but lets him do it anyway.

  ‘Edward’s famous,’ she says to me. ‘Have you seen him?’

  43

  It’s early but already the party is crowded, though I don’t recognise anyone, which freaks me out a little bit. Hip-hop beats are blaring from somewhere inside the house, and Eminem is informing us that life would be empty without him, although I am wondering whether this is necessarily true. On the verandah there is an esky with lots of those vodka drinks in it — blueberry and raspberry flavoured — and I’m gulping them down way too fast, talking to some girl called Jessica about how much fun it would be to go backpacking around Europe. Margot brought a joint — ‘for emergencies,’ she said — so we stand and smoke it with Jessica, under a tree in the back yard. A guy in a Che Guevara shirt is eyeing the joint off but we don’t offer him any, and there are noises coming from inside the house. Edward has started a fight with someone. People stop what they’re doing and look towards the sounds, interested; and when a friend pulls him out onto the back verandah, telling him to ‘calm down man, calm down’, Edward, who is still shirtless and looks a lot more animated now, says, ‘Stupid fuck. He knows I only did it because I needed the money, and it was just that once. Fuck him. What does he fucking know?’ and Margot rolls her eyes and passes me the joint.

  44

  It’s much later in the night, and I’m drunk now, like, very drunk, and I don’t quite know what I’m doing, but fuck it, I’m having fun. The party has become extremely crowded, and Margot and I are both standing on the far side of the living room checking out this boy called Liam, who is standing on the other side of the room talking to a bunch of his friends and looking incredibly attractive/together etc. He has an arrogant look, an ‘I’m better than you’ kind of a look. Like the kind of boy you never get to sleep with, ever, which makes him even better looking, in a vaguely fucked-up way.

  Liam. I’ve never seen him before tonight. But he’s cute. I mean, cute cute. Tall. Glasses. Wearing this yellow hoodie. I wonder if he’s a model too. He looks like the kind of guy who’d never fuck you. Who’d never even notice you. Liam. I’m pretty sure that’s his name. Like, ninety-nine percent sure. I think it suits him. Liam. The kind of name you never normally hear outside a novel or a movie or whatever.

  Liam: If you want to know what Liam looks like, get a mental picture of Stefan Oldsal, the bass player from Placebo, the one I’m always obsessing over. Stefan is a tall and vaguely lanky Euro-pseudonym — bleached blond with incredibly high cheekbones. More intelligent than he probably has any right to be, and extremely attractive. Imagine Stefan, only more accessible, with darker hair and glasses and you pretty much have this Liam guy.

  45

  Margot: He wants to have my children.

  Me: Oh yeah …

  Margot: He was checking you out before.

  Me: Really? No he wasn’t.

  Margot: He completely was. I saw him.

  Me: No you fucking didn’t.

  Margot: I did. Swear to god.

  Me: He wasn’t checking me out. He’s not even … Come on. You’re only saying this to make me feel better about myself because I’ll never get to fuck him.

  Margot: You’re being dumb. If you don’t do something about this, if you don’t at least talk to him, I mean, you’ll be whining about it all night.

  Me: He’s not gay, all right? That would be … That would fucking be too easy. When have you ever known anything to be that easy?

  Margot: Well, whatever. He’s really fucking cute.

  Me: Yeah. I can totally picture myself pulling his boxer shorts down with my teeth.

  Margot: Slut.

  46

  Slut: The word resonates for a second, more than it should. I mean, Margot was joking, but it’s true. I probably am a slut. I get this flashing image of myself down on my knees in front of Liam. I want to suck him off. I want him to totally use me. There’s a really vicious thrill in that somewhere. The feeling I get every time I’m with some new boy.

  47

  While Margot and I are talking, I keep looking over at Liam. I sort of try to make it look casual. I’m not really expecting anything to happen. But the thing is, he looks back. I manage to make eye contact with him — he looks at me, and he doesn’t look away. He maintains it for a second, two seconds, I’m not sure. Too long for it to be nothing. Probably not. I don’t know. But it happens that once, then he turns back to his friends. He’s in the middle of making this joke, I guess, because when he reaches what must be the end, he starts making all these expansive gestures and everyone else starts laughing. He laughs with them, then he turns to look at me again, and there’s this whole other look in his eyes.

  He gestures at them, this ‘be right back’ gesture, and starts to move away. I wonder where he’s going, and for an extremely panicked second I think he might be coming over here, but he’s not. He’s walking towards the CD player. When he gets there, he turns, looks at me again. Right in the eyes. I mean, if that isn’t ‘come over here’ I don’t know what is. I’m drawn to him, almost mechanically. As I approach, he’s leaning down, changing the CD. As he’s doing it, I see him clench his teeth once, twice. The muscles in his cheek move a little as he does it. Hard to explain why I’m so fascinated by this minute detail, but anyway. The music starts. He’s put on the Strokes album — five rich pretty boys from New York making fashionable and vaguely contrived new wave music for kids with image/self-esteem problems to take home and keep. I own it.

  ‘This is a pretty good album,’ I say to him.

  He turns around, looks up at me.

  He says: ‘I know.’

  48

  I talk to Liam for a long time. We’re talking about school — he tells me he’s on the rowing team or something, and I remember I’m very impressed by this. Whatever. He tells some stupid joke, and when we’ve both stopped laughing, he looks right at me and asks me — and you have to understand, he’s being really casual about it, as though he’s just the coolest guy on the face of the planet — if I would like to get stoned with him. He tells me that his brother, one of the guys who lives here apparently, has some weed and that he was, y’know, going to have some on his own later, but that I seem like a pretty nice guy and all, so he won’t feel too bad about sharing it with me. I pretend to consider his offer for longer than I actually do, then I nod my head and tell him okay. He seems pleased that I’ve said this, suggests that we go somewhere a little quieter.

  49

  Liam checks to see if anyone is watching, and when he’s satisfied they’re not, he closes the door. I’m swaying — I’m beginning to realise I’m even more drunk than I thought — and I stagger across to this armchair beside
the bed. There are clothes everywhere and I have to push a pile of them out of the way just so there’s enough room to sit down. I pick up this book that’s lying on the arm of the chair, but I’m too drunk to read what’s on the back so I let it drop to the floor.

  Liam moves towards the cupboard, opens the door. ‘This is where he keeps it,’ he says. ‘It’s always on the top shelf. He won’t mind if we smoke in his room. He’s not even here.’

  ‘Cool,’ I say.

  ‘He’s out. He’s down the coast I think. He won’t be back tonight.’

  ‘Cool.’

  Liam grins, walks across the bed carrying this huge Ziplock bag which is totally bulging with pot. I’ve never seen that much weed before. ‘Chris is so predictable,’ Liam says. ‘He always keeps it on the top shelf.’

  50

  He sits down on the bed, under this huge poster for the movie Lost Highway, and begins to chop. A lot of what happens next is a blur. Like I said, I’m very drunk. Eventually he finishes rolling the joint and then looks at me again, gives me this look that’s totally beyond any kind of interpretation. He pats the bed next to him. ‘Come sit next to me so we can smoke this,’ he says, holding up the joint.

  I stand up, taking my time, pretending to be nervous, although maybe I am just a little bit nervous.

  ‘Come on dude,’ he says.

  Still very drunk, I am madly in love with Liam at this point, but I’m trying to cover it because … well … that’s what you do. He lights the joint, takes a nice long drag and then passes it to me. As I’m smoking, he touches my arm, leaves his hand there for a long time. ‘This is weird,’ he says. ‘You’re …’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, and I pass the joint back. My head feels fuzzy and we’re suddenly sitting very close together. Everything in here is warm, especially Liam. I look at him — he’s staring at the ceiling, this blissed expression on his face, and I stare across the room at a stack of CDs sitting on the desk, although I can’t make out what any of them are, though I’m trying really hard, in order to distract myself, in order not to think about what’s happening, and I’m feeling almost embarrassed as, once again, Liam says: ‘This is weird.’ I ask him a question about his rowing, or his parents, or what he wants to do at uni or something. He doesn’t respond. He leans in and sticks his mouth right over mine.