‘Most of them are fine! I don’t care about him seeing most of them, Irina. Do you get me? Most of them are fine, but maybe not one or two?’ Will is pleading, and Henson is now scrolling furiously. I give him a look like I have no idea what the fuck he’s on about. I do assume, however, he’s on about the photos I took about a year ago of him wanking.
Again, the lighting is very tasteful. You can only just see the tip of his penis poking out from the top of his fist. He’s on his knees, with his forehead touching the floor. I don’t think I set out to take photos of him out-and-out wanking, but things escalate, don’t they?
‘Woah,’ says Henson. And my phone is locked, and placed face-down on the coffee table.
‘What?’ I feign ignorance, unlock my phone. ‘Oh. Ah, shit. Sorry. I forgot we took those.’
Will is bright red. His mouth is twisted.
‘Forgot,’ he says. ‘You’re a fucking bitch sometimes, do you know that?’ He doesn’t spit it at me. He’s not angry. It’s stated like an unpleasant fact, one he’s already dealt with. Global temperatures are rising, Brexit means Brexit, and Irina is a fucking bitch. I crawl over to him and sling an arm around his neck.
‘Diddums,’ I say, my bottom lip jutting. ‘I can’t remember every single photograph I take, you know?’ He shrugs my arm away and lights a joint. ‘Gimme one.’ He hands me the one he’s lit, and lights another for himself, slinking back to his beanbag, still red. Henson grabs one from the small pile on the coffee table.
‘Well,’ Henson claps his hands. ‘On that note, shall we get a bit ketty? After these?’
‘Go on then,’ says Flo. She’s gone a bit green. She gets up, suddenly, rushing out the living room and through the front door. The living room windows are open, so we can hear her throwing up in the garden.
‘Christ,’ says Finch. ‘That’s home time.’ Once Flo starts vomiting, she’s done. No endurance, no dedication to the sesh. She comes back in a moment later, shaking her head.
‘Ah, babes. You really shouldn’t have started on the coke, should you? Like, morally.’ I say. Flo nods. Finch has already picked up her handbag, and sighs heavily.
‘Let’s go,’ he says. ‘You coming, Irina?’
‘Nah, I’m good,’ I say.
‘Are you sure?’ Flo asks, around a burp.
‘Um… Yeah?’
‘Just… Leaving you by yourself and stuff…’ she says.
‘Aye, I’m sure I’ll get gang-raped the second you leave the house.’ I roll my eyes. She flinches when I say gang-rape. So does Henson.
They leave, and so do a steady trickle of people from the upstairs bedroom. We smoke a couple of joints between us. I don’t normally smoke weed, as it does very little for me; I’m feeling relaxed, but nauseous, less aware of my heart pounding in my chest. The mix of substances has my nervous system confused. Am I relaxed, or wired, or knackered? No idea. Fuzzy, though. Possibly hungry? Haven’t spoken in a while. Just managed to drop the K on the coffee table.
‘We’ve got enough, I reckon, for six small lines, or three rather large lines,’ I say. I flip a coin – heads for little, tails for big.
Tails.
I realise it’s been about four hours since I went to the loo, and I leave Will to rack the lines up, while I spend five minutes in the boxy downstairs toilet staring into the crotch of my underwear and pissing like a racehorse. I feel woozy, nauseous. My entire body is blanketed in a thin film of sweat. I give myself a quick once over with some loo roll, my neck, my tits and my forehead; I take with me a great swipe of makeup I’d forgotten I was wearing. I remove the scarf tacked over the mirror. There she is, the undulating reflection, her eyes bloodshot, her pupils a great black sinkhole in the concrete grey of her irises. Her makeup is crusty around her nostrils and her mouth, lipstick is smeared beyond the outline of her lips, and mascara running down her cheeks. Her red curls are now a mass of knots, at some point stuffed into a raggedy bun.
‘You’re a fucking mess,’ I tell her. ‘Jesus Christ, bitch.’ I tack the scarf back up, and wipe off what remains of my lipstick before stumbling out of the bathroom, back to the living room.
‘We thought you fell in.’
Three fat slugs of ketamine are lying on the vinyl on the coffee table. I ignore the men, pick up my designated drug straw, take my K, and flop onto the sofa.
The slug is where it all went tits-up for me. The last thing I properly remember is Will suggesting we break out the laughing gas, and after that, my vision unfastening like a reel of film slipping off a projector. I recall lying down on the floor, and suddenly being aware that years were passing. Henson’s and Will’s voices were there, and they did not slow or speed up, but years were passing. Decades. And they had no idea, the two of them. I sank down into the carpet, consumed, swaddled, and ascended.
Ascended, in that my vision had not just unfastened from my brain, but this reality itself. I was above time, inside of time, beyond time, the survivor of the passage of millennia.
My memory returns in flashes and echoes. I heard a bell – an incessant, jingling bell. I eventually found myself with my head in the toilet, now a portal into every reality. The bowl of that toilet, the water softly glinting inside; I was Galadriel with her mirror, each and every timeline set before me, inscribed around the bowl. And it was me, in every timeline. Me with my head in the toilet. Thousands upon thousands of me from above, each with my head in the toilet.
I recall Will trying to speak to me, and wrenching my head up, and thus, selecting a timeline. And while I was lifting my head to speak, I was actually diving into one of those timelines, where I would lift my head, and see Will, crouched in the doorway of his downstairs bathroom, trying to check on me.
Of course, the force of shifting away from the high, voyeuristic position above my body and above time itself, made me feel a little queasy, and I would then need to throw up again. Slamming my head back into the toilet bowl would then take me out of time, and back to the place above it.
Sometimes it would be Will in the doorway, sometimes a red cat with the fucking bell. Sometimes, a different boy, younger, with dark hair and scars, choking. I knew him. He coughed, and he spluttered, and he looked so pathetic and lovely that I wanted to fold him into my arms, and squeeze him. I wanted to keep him. But when I reached for him, he flinched, coughed, wriggled away from me. He dissolved around the corner of the small doorway. I couldn’t follow him. I went back into the toilet, where I saw his face in the water, swirling away with the flush.
When Will came back, he seemed angry, and the boy did not return. I believe I recall Will pulling my head back, yanking me by my hair and tipping water down my throat, me almost choking on the water and, a moment later, my own vomit. I remember him scrubbing my face with a baby wipe and, when vomiting had dissolved into dry-heaving, dragging me upstairs （possibly with help from Henson?） and brushing my teeth for me. Brushing them hard, hard enough to make my gums bleed, so hard, in fact, that I remember being in pain when I could feel nothing else. My mouth still feels raw.
I returned from Above when he dropped me on his bed. Unable to even flail by way of protest, completely prone, paralysed. I think I remember him lying on top of me, enraged, grabbing my face and squeezing it. I think he didn’t take his slug. He called me a cunt, I do remember that, because I remember his spit landing on my face. I remember him taking my skirt off, my lace bodysuit. He couldn’t work out my bra, he couldn’t quite get me rolled onto my stomach to get to the clasp, so he gave up, and just sort of scooped my tits out of the cups and fiddled with them for a bit, before proceeding to pull off my knickers and try to jam his completely flaccid cock into me.