by Ben Brooks
Jenna lies back and a wide band of skin is exposed across her stomach from where her t-shirt has pulled up. I light a Richmond and leave it burning in the corner of my mouth while I pluck the petals off a poppy and lie them flat over Jenna’s belly button. This is called flirting. Flirting is a door with sex behind it. Sex is a door with babies behind it. Fucking doors. People should keep them locked.
‘We should probably move. Polly will be waiting,’ Jonah says.
Jenna stands up and the petals tumble off of her stomach and we all get up and shoulder our rucksacks.
There are only a few metres up to where the field meets the wood. Once we pass between the first trees the light is reduced to pale colours that have slipped between high branches. Jonah says that we need to keep following the path until we reach the pool.
It is half an hour before we find the waterfall and its adjoining pool in the sticky gloom of the wood. Polly is perched on a boulder, cigarette between his lips, waiting. I throw down my rucksack. Jonah walks over and talks briefly with Polly. Polly rarely smiles. He walks back over to us.
‘Let’s swim,’ he says, a grin across his face.
We all stand and watch the waterfall. It is high and slim, the width of a Labrador laid on its side, falling down and converging with a long pool hemmed at random intervals by mossy rocks. As it falls the water looks a jumbled, fuzzy white, but settled in the pool it takes on a sad hue of green.
‘Really?’ Susan says.
‘Yes, really. Why not?’
‘Doesn’t it look a bit green?’ Jenna says.
‘No,’ Jonah explains. ‘You need to think of it more as an emerald.’
In order to turn the sad green into emerald, we all have lines of mephedrone racked up on Susan’s compact mirror. Jenna is hesitant but I explain that it is a legal drug and you can buy it off the Internet. This convinces her. Easy.
It does not take long for the water to start appearing more attractive. The unwell green transforms into a green the hue of freshly mown summer grass. I look Jenna over. She has changed from being a passable target into a Grecian bronze. I am captivated by the way her slight body sinks effortlessly into soft arched hips, down into sculpted thighs and salmon shins, right to her perfect hand-sized feet and faint peach toenails.
Next, the smiles come. One by one they spear our cheeks. We make a Mexican wave of wonky grins. We all undress while our limbs happily jerk and our mouths motor.
‘I love all of you,’ Jonah says.
‘People love war and money,’ I say.
‘People should love each other. I love you.’
Jenna turns and hugs me hard. I push my tongue inside her mouth and move it about.
‘War and money can suck my dick.’
‘Let’s all get married.’
‘Confetti!’
I feel the tickle of earth on my head. Jenna is throwing handfuls of it into the air.
‘I love Polly, too.’
‘I love Pollyolly, too.’
‘We should tell him!’
‘Marry him!’
More earth on my head, down my neck.
‘Swim, he should swim with us.’
‘Or we should swim with him.’
Everything blurs into a smudge of sound and colour. I am a supernova explosion of goodwill.
We form a circle around Polly, who is still perched on his boulder, smoking. We are loving lions surrounding an injured gazelle. He looks resigned and faintly amused. Maybe it is mild fear, I can’t tell. Everything looks wonderful.
‘Polly, you are excellent,’ Susan says.
‘Please swim.’
‘Swim.’
‘With us.’
‘Really sorry about everything.’
‘You are a super human.’
‘Superhuman.’
‘Uh, thanks,’ Polly says, shifting on his rock.
‘I will have sex with you, I want to.’
I see a hand reach out for Polly’s crotch. We all swoop to enclose him in a fierce five-way bear hug that causes him to make an odd noise and then run off into the trees. We howl with laughter and throw ourselves into the emerald pool of cool water.
The water feels like winning a large cash prize. It seeps beneath our skins and makes us candles. Everything is bright and good.
‘We are not the Internet Generation!’
‘Fuck that.’
‘Fuck them!’
‘Fuck televisions!’
‘And Twitter.’
‘And Formspring.’
‘What’s Formspring?’
‘Nevermind.’
‘I love you, Jonah.’
‘I love you, Jasper.’
‘I love you, Jenna.’
‘I love you, Susan.’
The water is shallow enough for us to keep on our feet but we kick in somersaults through it. Walls of water grow up and fall away, turning through my hair and filling my mouth. Our tongues stain green. We laugh and laugh.
I stand pressed against Jenna. Her eyes climb inside mine. Her breasts held against my chest make me feel aware that they are the only parts of her body that will not fit into mine. I wish I had large dents in my chest for her breasts to press into so that we could be closer.
We touch noses.
‘Eskimos,’ she whispers.
I scream.
She laughs.
We fall backwards through the water, me on top, until she is lying on the pool bed squirming. When we break back through the surface our cheeks swell with still more laughter. Jenna looks beautiful. Her hair is flat and dark from the dirty water. It looks like melted chocolate.
Jonah and Susan are fitting their bodies together on the other side of the pool. She is making grunting sounds like a dying horse and his eyes are so wide it looks as though he has just seen his dead grandfather dressed as a woman giving the Queen a lapdance in the trees.
I place a hand either side of Jenna’s waist and let my pelvis advance through the water like Jaws. She tucks her face into the crook of my neck and then slides it up to my earlobe, where she bites. Blood. I scream and pull away.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I can’t.’
I paddle my way back to our landscape of discarded clothes and pull my boxer shorts back on. This is how Ping must feel. Crouched on Polly’s boulder, I light the joint that Jonah has forgotten. I watch them have sex. The mephedrone is still painting my insides pink so I see it as beautiful. It makes me think how what people want most is to penetrate each other. Not just being around other humans, but being inside other humans. Submitting to other humans. Giving yourself up, naked and honest, to another human. Letting your mouth speak animal sounds in that other human’s face. Listening to that other human speak sounds back at you.
Five minutes later Polly emerges from the trees and stands beside me, a cigarette limp in his lips. He runs a hand of fingers through his hair.
‘It done near?’ he says.
‘Yea, almost.’
‘Sovee?’
‘Yea.’
‘Yea?’
‘Yea.’
I know it is wearing off because his accent is starting to piss me off.
Polly flicks his cigarette butt into the pool and crosses his arms.
‘Now we go,’ he says, loud but not shouting.
Jenna has been splashing herself, and Jonah and Susan are just cuddling now, so they all just giggle the last of the drugs up then climb out. While they re-dress and fumble with cigarettes, I try to quiz the Pole about who is at the party.
‘So what girls are up there, then?’ I ask, nodding into the trees.
‘Sovee?’
‘Girls?’
He points at Jenna’s bare ass, the colour of cooked chi
cken.
‘Yea.’
‘Hmmm.’ He looks around as though for answers. ‘Pakpak. Bac . . . bac . . . buc.’
‘What?’
‘Buc . . . bacrrrr . . . ’
I give up and walk over to steal a cigarette from Jonah. Mine have run out. I am hopeful of lots of females, it doesn’t matter about Jenna. She wasn’t that pretty, anyhow. She was strange and happy and dull.
‘Comecome,’ Krasicki orders, setting off at a march into the wood. And we follow.
30
The cottage owned by Amanda Forthwart’s parents is called Chinkapin Farm. It is large and squat and painted a colour somewhere between pink and orange. The front is covered with trellises of ivy.
People are stood in circles smoking and drinking from cans of beer. The doors and windows of the house are wide open. I do not recognise many people. I cannot see Georgia Treely.
Inside, the carpets have already been marbled with mud and splashes of beer and cigarette butts. There are people on the sofas and crosslegged on the floor.
‘Let’s go upstairs,’ I say to Jonah. I pull him away from Susan and Jenna. If I cannot have sex with her then I do not want to be near her.
Upstairs, we find a guest bedroom with floral wallpaper. The only person in it is a blonde girl passed out on the bed. We sit on the carpet and start up the small gas stove for cooking ket on.
Once the liquid is powder, we rack up lines on a Danielle Steel paperback that was on a shelf in the room. We take two up each nostril then lie back. The drips run like slug wakes down my throat.
‘Jasper?’ Jonah says.
‘Yea.’
‘Earlier, I was feeling funny because I was thinking.’
‘Yea.’
I can hear his voice but I don’t really understand the words. I light a cigarette and look at the lines through my hands.
‘I was just thinking how next year is our last year, right? And after that, we leave this town. And, I mean, I fucking hate this place but we’ve been here for, like, for ever.’
‘Jonah?’
He pushes his hands against his eyes.
‘Yea.’
‘Are you scared?’
‘No,’ he says, looking at the girl on the bed. ‘Fuck off.’
‘Yes, you are,’ I assure him. Everyone is scared.
‘Don’t be a queer.’
‘I’m scared,’ I say. I am being honest.
‘You are?’
‘Yea.’ I light a cigarette. ‘Fuck the army, let’s move to France. We can steal food and fuck girls from villages. Or we can go to Canada and find a log cabin by a lake and fill it with wine and sluts.’
‘Jasper,’ he says, ‘I’m going to join the army. Now is for fucking about, later is for doing something. You can’t fuck around for ever.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because if you try, you’ll end up like Tenaya’s parents.’
I look at my hands. All the lines swim.
‘Okay,’ I say.
‘You want another line?’
‘Sure.’
‘Then we should go back down.’
‘Okay. I am going to seduce Georgia Treely.’
Jonah laughs.
After more lines, we do not go downstairs. We lie on our backs and stare at the ceiling. The plaster has been scraped into small waves. A modest chandelier hangs over our heads, kicking at the last of the light running in through a single window.
The blonde girl wakes up and ruffles her hair and flops of the bed. She stares at us with glassy, far away eyes with nothing in them.
‘You want a line?’ Jonah says.
She nods.
I wonder who she is. I wonder if she ever lies in bed slapping her own face just to make sure she still can. I wonder what she sees in her head when she tries to think of what comes next.
I make a line up for her and she snorts it. She passes out again, this time over Jonah’s lap. He pushes her off his trousers and onto the floor.
‘Let’s go back down,’ Jonah says.
Ping, Tenaya and Ana have arrived. Ping is sat by the television with Tenaya, Ana and six or seven other kids sat around him. He is holding a black metal cream-charger and cracking silver bullet-shaped canisters into brightly coloured glitter balloons.
Nos balloons are religious experiences. They pull you right out your place on Earth and put you right into nowhere. You stop having hands or feet or a head. Everything echoes. Everything echoes. Everything happens extremely slowly and jerkily, as though you’re watching a video on YouTube using a dial-up connection. They only last half a minute or something.
You can buy a nos charger and whippits off the Internet for not very much. It is called ‘hippie crack’ sometimes.
I sit myself next to Tenaya. Her eyes are wet again. Maybe someone else has died. Maybe someone else has run off the edge of the planet. Tenaya is a very emotional human being. All human beings are very emotional. I am very emotional but I do not show it because if I do then people will think I am weak and they will mug me, emotionally.
‘Hi,’ Tenaya says.
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.
‘I haven’t had nos in a long time.’
‘What’s wrong?’ I repeat.
Tenaya points over her shoulder. Through the open door I can see Tom smoking outside next to a girl in a purple dress. They are holding hands. The girl is not wearing any shoes.
‘That’s my dress,’ Tenaya says.
‘Prick,’ I say.
‘Yea.’
I put my hand in Tenaya’s hair and ruffle it affectionately. I am making her feel better.
‘Get off, Jasper.’
‘Okay.’
Ping passes us both balloons. Someone plays the song ‘Grow Up and Blow Away’ by Metric. Music is a very important part of nos. It gives you a ledge to watch things from. The song plays loud.
If this is the life
Why does it feel so good to die today?
Blue to gray
Grow up and blow away...
Ping counts up to three. On three, we all blow out then put the balloon necks into our mouths and begin inhaling and exhaling the pleasant-tasting gas. I can see Tenaya to my left. Her eyes are shut. Soon I can’t see anything.
Everything I see and hear is reduced to a serious of blurred circles, rotating over and over. The song slows into heavy ambience. Other sounds sway and replicate and jump apart.
The words of the song slow until they are still and sat in the air in front of me. Grow Up and Blow Away. I’m sat in the o of Grow. I’m swinging my legs. I climb through all the words in the chorus.
Tenaya’s laughing but her eyes are still red. Things are focusing. There is laughter everywhere. Everyone has jumped up and is hugging and cheering like we have just fought a war and won.
31
Feeling fine. 1:30 a.m. I am stood in the kitchen talking to a girl who believes in angels. She tells me that my aura is blue. I tell her that she doesn’t appear to have one. Ping appears. He grabs my arm and tells me to come with him into the cupboard under the stairs. He tells me I will need a beer.
The cupboard smells of damp. It is totally dark because Ping shut the door. I hold down buttons on my phone in order to extract light from it.
‘Are you going to try and kiss me?’ I say.
‘Fuck off.’
‘What then?’
‘It’s about Abby Hall,’ Ping says. He sips from his beer. ‘About her baby.’
I spit out the beer in my mouth like a bad actor.
‘How the fuck do you know about that?
‘Abby told Ana.’
‘What the fuck did she tell Ana for?’
‘Girl’s don’t seem to
like Ana. She has to take all the friends she can get. Anyway, do you want the news or what?’
Something small dies in my stomach. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You do.’
I down the beer. ‘Okay.’
‘It’s Ben McKay’s.’
I scream with laughter. Confetti. This is brilliant. This is the best possible way things could ever have turned out. I compose myself.
‘What? When?’
‘At Carrie Waterman’s.’
‘But Abbie’s grounded,’ I say. ‘How did she go?’
‘Right,’ Ping says. ‘But Ben McKay told her that he loved her so she sneaked out to see him.’
I laugh loudly, again.
‘Why did he say that?’
‘He heard she was easy.’
‘She is.’
‘Jasper?’
‘Yea.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t want to think about it.’
‘Okay.’
‘Did you fuck Ana yet?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’m starting not to mind.’
‘Really?’
‘Yea.’
‘Weird.’
‘Yea.’
‘Let’s go back out.’
‘Okay.’
32
I am starting to feel sick. Where is Georgia Treely? I am a very drunk human being. The Georgia Plan. I am not going to be a Dad. 2:35 a.m. I have not seen Tenaya in one or two hours. I decide to look for her.
She is not in the kitchen, the kitchen cupboards, the sofa cushions, the television, or any of the upstairs bedrooms. People are not slumped and sleeping in heaps and on floors yet. People are still drinking and doing sex with each other. The house is still full of loud.
Tenaya is probably outside.
I go to sit in the bathroom. I sit on the toilet seat and stare at my hands. The lines dance. The creases across my fingers spasm.
A sound from across the room.
The boiler cupboard.
I pull open the doors and find Tenaya crouched in amongst the insulation by the boiler. There is just enough space for me to fit in beside her. It feels like we are in a box of jungle air. She has her iPod in. I take the headphone out of her right ear and put it into my left. Bon Iver. Her eyes are estuaries. At least she is not attacking herself.