I buy another coffee before heading into the station, where I procure a salad from M&S. I board the train comfortably before it pulls out from the station. I’ve ended up on the shit one; there’s one that takes two hours and fifty minutes, which just stops at York, then goes straight to London, but I’m on the one that takes over three hours and goes to every shitey little town on the East Coast. I start getting a bit pissed off by the time we get to Northallerton, because who the fuck lives in Northallerton. Like, Durham and Darlo I can forgive, but Northallerton feels like it specifically exists to wind up people on this train. I eat my salad, and try to sleep, but two coffees has me buzzy and jittery.
I drop Serotonin an email. I haven’t really spoken to her since I left London, even though we were quite close for a while. There’s a couple of good photos of us together on Facebook. Two from Halloween weekend, 2014. There’s the Friday night where I’m Jessica Rabbit and she’s Holli Would, then the Saturday night where I’m Ginger Spice and she’s Baby. She was almost my replacement Flo – my pet skinny blonde – but she just didn’t have the temperament for it, in the end.
She got a bit pretentious. She started working for Damien Hirst, and changed her name, and suddenly it was all I don’t want to go there! I hate that restaurant! I’ll pick my own outfits, thanks!
I email her, anyway.
Hey Sera,
I get into LDN in a couple of hours. Drinks/dinner tonight, Y/Y?
Irina
Her response comes through when we go through Doncaster.
IRINA STURGES AS I LIVE AND BREATHE.
Sounds amaze. Got in from NYC last night （dont know how much you’ve been keeping up with me but i’m living in brooklyn now #gentrification） and I would suck like 50 dicks for a brick lane curry. Shoreditch HS station for 5??
I missed you u fucking BITCH.
Sera xx
I’m glad she’s still quantifying how much she wants to do stuff by how many dicks she’d suck to do it. I have a very clear memory of her grabbing my face in Heaven and complaining about the fact we were in a gay club with no ‘viable targets’。 I’d suck twenty dicks to suck a dick right now, Irina.
I remember pointing out a guy on a night out and telling her I’d cut off one of my toes to fuck him, and she was like, eww. Like her sucking a hundred dicks isn’t a more visceral image than me cutting off a toe. Just the one.
I agree to meet her for five. My train gets in at two, so it should be fine. I panic for a second that I don’t have my business cards. I got new ones made – I’ve brought a box of about two hundred, just in case. I wobble down to the luggage rack and dig through my suitcase till I find them.
The rest of the journey passes uneventfully. I get texts from Flo, which I ignore, and an email from Jamie at the gallery letting me know all of my prints have arrived.
The hotel is in Islington, so I’m near an Overground, and the tube journey from King’s Cross is painless. The hotel is nice – really nice, in fact. Big room, nice furniture, king-sized bed and a mini bar. The bathroom has heated floors, a good selfie mirror and a fancy bath.
I don’t change. I’m already overdressed for London; the capital’s casual dress code is something I never really adjusted to. People go out clubbing in trainers and jeans, and it’s fine. If you go out in heels and a dress you look provincial, like, oh bless her, it’s her first time out in the big city.
I still fucking hate the Overground. After growing up with the Tyne and Wear Metro, the fact that people complained about the tube used to boggle my mind, but the Overground really is a pile of shit. Like, trash-tier public transport – I’d genuinely rather get a bus. But the buses in London have a threatening aura that I’m not really in the mood for. So, Overground it is, with an eleven-minute wait for the next one, by the time I get there. I remember telling Finch once that he shouldn’t even consider London for his MA, and that living there just makes you aggro as fuck. And he said he thought it was funny I thought like that, because I’m pretty aggro on the best of days. I told him to fuck off.
Sera is late. She tells me she walked, and double-kisses me on the cheeks before I have the chance to dodge it.
She nips her hands around my waist.
‘Sturges, you skinny cunt,’ she says. She never lost that public-schoolgirl habit of calling people by their surnames. Sera has put on weight. Her stomach bigger than her breasts now. It’s not exactly a big belly, but it’s a belly on a body with a tiny pair of tits. She’s not wearing makeup – bar a little mascara. Her hair is back to its natural mousy brown, and her complexion is red, rough and wind-chafed. There are little lines around her mouth, and the skin is beginning to sag around her cheekbones. She’s got that proper posh girl look to her — a turned up nose, and a long philtrum so she always looks like she’s just smelt something that stinks.
‘I hate you,’ she says. Her accent is different – an American twang, now. ‘You haven’t aged a day. Honestly, what the fuck.’ There it is again. It’s fuck with a U through the nose, instead of one that curls, long and soft from the back of her throat. ‘You’re making me want Botox.’
‘I haven’t had Botox.’
‘I fucking know you haven’t. And I used to laugh at your fucking five-billion-step skincare routine,’ she says. It’s just a ten-step routine – one she would have benefitted from. She looks like she could be ten years older than me, even though there are just a few years between us. She’s tall as well, and we used to tell men we were models, and that we lived together in a house with six other models, and maybe if they bought us some more drinks, we could take them back to the afterparty at ours. She’d never get away with that now. She takes my hand. ‘It’s wonderful to see you.’
She drags me to her favourite curry house, hoping it’s still good. The curries in NYC aren’t the same; she doesn’t know if it’s because they’re more authentic, or less. Every curry house has a banner declaring it the definitive Best, or at least the provider of the best curry, in 2018, or 2017, or ‘ten years running’。 Sera is jabbering about moving back.
‘I mean, I know it’s all gone hashtag Pete Tong with Brexit over here, but Trump’s America.’ She looks at me and rolls her eyes. ‘Of course, we all hate Trump in New York, but there’s just such a bad vibe there right now, like, honestly. I went to speak at a uni in one of the flyover states – real Trump country, and it was literally like… ugh, you know?’ I don’t know. I’ve never actually been to America. I tell her so. ‘Oh babe, you have to come over? I’ll… literally, as soon as I get back to my Airbnb I’ll email Carmen? She’ll love your stuff.’ I don’t know who Carmen is. ‘She owns this sick little gallery in Soho – NYC Soho, not Soho Soho. I showed with her, and that’s basically how I got into MoMA; it’s a great little connection. I mean, she showed my work, so she’ll show you, I’m sure.’
We get seated immediately in this curry house where we’re the only customers. Sera assures me this one really is the best.
‘How’s Newcastle?’ she asks. She says Newcastle with a nasal ‘a’ now, too, and that makes me wrinkle my nose. I tell her it’s fine. I take plenty of photos, I make plenty on print sales. ‘I’m so glad you agreed to this show,’ she says. ‘I told Marnie about your work, and she was like, I’ve never heard of her, and once I sent your portfolio over, she was literally like O-M-G, how have I not heard of her, you know?’ I raise my eyebrows. The papadums come. I order a large Cobra, which I take a huge gulp from as soon as it arrives. ‘Marnie owns Hackney Space? I went to school with her brother, so we’re like… We’re not besties, but we have brunch together when she’s in NYC.’